Top recent posts by Computational Cognitive Scientists on Bluesky

It’s eight people. Eight men whose personal net worth tallies more than $1 trillion. Median US resident net worth is less than $125,000.

For the first time ever at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, a critically endangered Socorro dove has hatched 🕊️

Red-eared sliders lined up on a log, heads up, looking alert #Herps

A Sandhill Crane colt (a baby crane), less than 24 hours old, takes a snooze in the sunshine next to mama crane.

A talkative Sulphur-rumped Flycatcher at @tapirvalley.bsky.social #CostaRica #birds #nature

Warblers on Ice! Orange-Crowned Warbler #birds

Resplendent Quetzal at Paraiso Quetzal Lodge #CostaRica #birds #nature

A stunning Blackbird in full song! 😍🎶 Taken yesterday evening at Combwich in Somerset. 😊🐦 #Birds 🪶

I remember, in grad school, Chuck Bosk telling us, re: ethnography--if you haven't pissed someone off with your research, you probably haven't done enough to interrogate systems of power.

Again I ask: why was the president, the vice-president, and "almost the entirety" of the president's cabinet attending what amounts to a celebrity roast in the first place

Great Blue Heron Bringing it in...

NEW: An @ij.org review of media reports has identified at least 14 recent cases of police officers allegedly using Flock and other automated license plate reader systems to stalk wives, girlfriends, exes, and even strangers who caught their eye in public. ij.org/police-have-...

I don’t know how anyone makes it anywhere in life without learning how to pretend you’ve read something when you haven’t or pretend you’ve understood something if you didn’t. These are invaluable skills most of us picked up in college

RIP Gerry Conway, who was co-creator of the Punisher and absolutely *hated* how law enforcement and other groups co-opted the character's skull logo. www.denofgeek.com/comics/punis...

A Pileated Woodpecker with a few woodchips on his beak from carving out a cavity while looking for ants.

5 years, LFG

Northern Emerald-Toucanet #CostaRica #birds #nature #toucanoftheday

Delicate new leaves on the trees above the carpet of #bluebells. This week's #ShareMondays2026 entry :)

A couple of Fish Crows for #CrowAndRavenAppreciationDay #birds 🌿

National Science Board eviscerated; Trump admin fires all 22 members arstechnica.com/science/2026...

It is an emotional day for me. Two years ago tonight, I had a brush with death when I found myself in the center of a borderline EF4 tornado while in my car as it ravaged Sulphur, OK during an outbreak of >30 tornadoes. ICYMI: this long read is my story of what happened and what I experienced.

Here is an AI trained just using text from 1931 or earlier, which leads to a lot of interesting experiments: can the model independently develop later inventions? Can it learn to code from examples alone? You can talk to the model here: talkie-lm.com/chat Details here: talkie-lm.com/introducing-...

Maybe it's Maybelline? Two Icelandic #horses looking fabulous.

This is an actual line that was added to the official system prompt for Codex for GPT-5.5 by OpenAI. Usually the system prompt is as minimal as possible, so I assume it would otherwise mention goblins a lot. AIs are weird.

Academic Freedom Index has slipped in 50 countries, but taken a nosedive in the United States. "‘This academic freedom erosion is part of broader democratic backslide that we’re seeing in the US"

One of three short-eared owls I managed to find last night while gallivanting around the marshes and fields south of me. Probably the best photo I've managed of this species. #birds 🌿

Good morning from this bunny

This year we're celebrating the 50th anniversary of the California Coastal Act, a law that protects coastal and ocean resources, and the public’s access to the coast. Learn how you can advocate for the ocean this Earth Month at the link below! mbayaq.co/42zxbA4

Loch Ericht

Love this so much (Also definitive proof that humans are so much better than machines)

One of the cooler looking birds out there, the Eared Grebe. #wildlife #birds

every TV cartoon and most video games in the '90s had one character that looked like a slimy booger and sounded like Bobcat Goldthwait on cocaine, and that's why it was the golden age.

Bullfrog of the day!* Monday, 27 April 2026 *Small frog in a vast duckweed filled world ...

Goose In a reflective mood...

Highlights from a riverbank walk: the avalanche of spring migrants is so thrilling to see. Red-Breasted Mergansers (best hair ‘do), Buffleheads, Eared Grebe, Black-necked Stilt #birds

A little side-eye from Eddie the tortoise 🐢👀

This was one month after I started working at NASA in the Kepler Science Office. At this point I'd been looking for planets for AWHILE: 2 PhD projects and a postdoc, tens of thousands of stars, with nothing to show except stubbornness and a highly trained eye. This thumb drive had SO MANY PLANETS.

On Saturday when I got my CT scan I had a cute little outfit on because I was out looking cute when all hell broke loose. Part of that cute little outfit was control-top tights. Listen to me. Never get a CT scan in shapewear. The scan you get back is something out of a body horror film.

BABY 🖤 Dusky pygmy rattlesnakes are already small, and this is a tiny child at that. She could comfortably curl up on my watch face. Pretty chill, though I did not test this thoroughly.

Just shot a little sunset time lapse of the storms over Dallas! (video of back of camera image scroll) #txwx

Hearts aglow...

Red-breasted Nuthatch looking very serious on its mossy branch. Hanwell, #NewBrunswick, Canada April 2025 📸 #birds #nuthatch #RBNU #nature #wildlife #photography #Nikon #Z9 #Nikkor800pf

Academic Freedom* *Warranty void if product is used to challenge systems of privilege and power.

Today is annual Appreciation Day of Ravens and Crows. In order: Raven, Crow, Crow, Raven. All hail the genius birds. #Corvids 🌿🪶

can’t even describe the satisfaction I had blocking this guy

This is perhaps my favorite American Robin portrait that I have taken. I love Robins! I found him on a Sumac seed pod from last year. Sumac seeds are quite tasty! I think it's a male, but not 100% sure. I should have some additional views. #birds #AmericanRobin

This doesn’t even make sense on its face! How does a supposedly more secure White House help when the president leaves the White House? When was the White House *not* safe? Is every event from now until forever going to be in this building? I am getting a stomachache here.

Just once I wanna see a research paper say, the tokens we pretrained on were not high-quality or diverse, they were absolute trash we scraped from AMA subreddit longtail submissions combined with everyone's public Venmo transaction messages

This week's fur factory haul (brushing an entire dog out of my malamute/husky/wolf). Been doing this for 7 years and I still don't understand how this happens every week. I wish my hair grew like that. 🙄

Should I write emails while loopy from painkillers (prescribed to deal with this kidney stone) while hopped up on caffeine? I don't see why not. Sure why not? I don't see any problem with that. I feel like wiggly squidward right now, this is all fine.

Now this is a cool mineral I've never heard of before. Tubulite is named for its weird morphology (Image thumbnail shows two crystals of tubulite which look like very shiny metal tubes, on boulangerite wires. The tubes are about 0.4mm long) #minerals #MineralMonday www.mindat.org/photo-120162...

Our Squirrel of the Day for April 27, 2026 is Emma, the queen of Rose Park #sqrlpix

Zoom in to see the terrifyingly sharp teeth on the jaws of this 2mm long Strumigenys ant. Found a little nest of these yesterday under a rock in central Austin.

scuba diving is one of the few sports I enjoy that necessitates Indy going to a sitter (he only goes in the water up to his tummy). He loves daycare but comes home exhausted and needing a bath from all the wrestling. But man does that make him even more snuggly

Microsoft's MIT licensed VibeVoice speech-to-text model (think Whisper with speaker diarization) is really good - my notes on running the 5.71GB 4bit MLX conversion on an M5 MacBook, using about 60GB of RAM at peak and transcribing 1hr of audio in ~9 mins simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/27/...

Who else loves the night sky?

Look, I'm sorry, but green herons are the dorkiest a** birds. Their proportions are just so off to me for some reason. 🤓☝️ #Birds #Photography

“I’ve been waiting for papers like this for a long time now.”

Cake season in the Calarco house is off to a sweet start: a triple decker carrot cake with cream cheese frosting for a special birthday guy.

A water strider for #InverteFest. I have spent an absurd amount of time watching them skate around on the water at my local streams. They move so effortlessly #InverteFest #invertebrates 🌿

Red-tailed Hawk Clear-eyed and ready...

That spooky sensation likely due to rumbling pipes, not spirits. Study finds that low-frequency infrasound (below 20 Hz) can raise cortisol levels in saliva and increase irritability. arstechnica.com/science/2026...

Our lab (w/ @patrickgbissett) is hiring a full-time research coordinator to work with us on cognitive control, dense fMRI, computational modeling, and human-AI interaction. Designed for post-bacs looking to start a Ph. D in ~2 years. Please repost. phxc1b.rfer.us/STANFORDNLbWAG

IT’S OVER, ANAKIN, I HAVE THE HIGH GROUND

I think about tulip mania multiple times per day, typically when I'm reading about AI economics in the news. It's the first recorded speculative bubble, driving prices for tulips so high that all of this was (supposedly!) exchanged for a single bulb. And most of the tulips were diseased!

The new LLM trained only on pre-1931 text is small enough that it can potentially run on device, so, with the right tools, you can get a fully vintage version of Siri, but from the era of Downton Abbey (also a small model). Here, I asked for it to arrange for sushi delivery in Philadelphia. Hmmm...

If only someone could have seen this coming. Like Hollywood comedy writers. Ten years ago: www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0b_...

Good Monday morning Wishing you a day of positive vibes and subtle contentment...

When spirit gently opens to a greater light...

Another phone shot from this evening’s after-work walk. Love this view 🥰 #iphone15pro #berko #berkhamsted

When the AI bubble bursts, people are going to suffer from how it hits the economy. Unless OpenAI can somehow pull a Tesla. @karlbode.com spoke to @parismarx.com about coverage of tech and how the industry uses narratives for financial engineering. Full ep: techwontsave.us/episode/325_...

Mr & Ms Maevia (an undescribed species) from Big Bend National Park, one of the main reasons for our trip. They will have a proper name someday thanks to our efforts (which involved trying to collect these extremely skittish creatures in an extremely spiny setting, sotol plants) 🖤 #InverteFest 🧪

Very cool analysis of the submissions to a major management journal that shows how much the system of science, built for humans, is under strain as a result of AI. AI can be used to do better science or it can be used to just do more stuff. The danger is that "more" is winning due to incentives.

Scotty’s cactus flowers blooming now 🌿

#GoodMorningFromSaskatoon where I apologize in advance for all the morning meetings I will be late for in the next few weeks because migration 😂

In 2030 we can print out the pdf of the full Mission Concept Review and launch it into space.

Anna’s hummingbird glowing. 🪶

This whole "I need a ballroom so I don't get shot like the rest of you peasants" is giving SUCH a Masque of the Red Death vibe

Gentle purity...

😭😭😭

Song Sparrow Tune time...

I gather Kit was on Start the Week today discussing his new book on alchemy, which seems a good reason to give it a shout out. It's hugely enjoyable as well as deeply researched. profilebooks.com/work/the-age...

A lovely little frog-faced Brachydeutera fly (Ephydridae), hanging out on some standing water. Texas.

Another new paper for the reading pile: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... They find that the partisan shift in support for higher ed “began at the national level and was instigated by nationally oriented ideological activists rather than mass-level demands…“

Couldn't agree more, Jackie 🔭 🧪

As the bluebells die off, some of them have orange husks around them that provide some lovely colour for doing these blurry dreamy shots. #bluebells #ChilternHills #CanonR5markii

Sunset at Ashridge the other night - so lovely :) #Ashridge #Berkhamsted #CanonR5markii

Today I learned about a sham supplement company, started by a chiropractor, run by the FLDS in Utah, and trained/overseen by the Church of Scientology who sell powdered fruit and vegetable pills. I.....think that's enough internet for today.

WTF? It's so, so awful what's happening to the NSF. 🧪 ⚛️ #AcademicSky

On the one hand I’m glad I’ve managed to mostly beat my lifelong car sickness but on the other hand I now spend road trips doing way too much Posting Online and I should probably start trying to read a book or something

found these combos at a corner store next to the prophylactics. it wasn’t a mistake

I'm kind of obsessed with the Bluey-themed birthday card my 11-year-old made for her dad, in honor of his love of corny jokes.

Nugget (in red) ❤️ Metaphycus wasp, being the most adorable Hymenopteran ever today #InverteFest

“They’re just saying, ‘We’re getting rid of all the science.’” How the Trump Administration Ended Independent Science at the E.P.A. Gift link: nyti.ms/4ugMo59

Stop the slop. GARtificial Intelligence > Artificial Intelligence

So nice to see the fields changing this year - where they were wild last year now have crops and vice versa. Lots of nice wildflowers :) discovered purple tansy (1st photo). #iphone15pro #berkhamsted

Lichens on rock today 🌿

good evening #Dublin #nofilters

wow this person must really hate mediocre bird photography

Male Cardinal Feasting on the honeysuckle...