Steve Dodge

@vicgrinberg
I visited Torres del Paine many years ago and it was an incredible experience. Enjoy!

An illustration of a green Christmas tree, featuring circular images of various individuals, mostly mathematicians and physicists, arranged in layers.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

@FediTree

@FediTree

Two candles aflame, decorated with a pine cone, against a backdrop of fir and blurry lights

💙 Season’s greetings to all the Fediverse moderators, admins, and community builders.

Thank you for the time, care, and emotional labour you give to keeping online spaces safer, fairer, and more humane.

Your work often goes unseen, but it truly matters […]

[Original post on mastodon.iftas.org]

@MartinEscardo
This is a great reason to avoid updating my photo as I age

Individual photos of 14 women with their names printed on each photo. They are the 14 women who were killed by a misogynist gunman at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal on this date in 1989. They were Helene Colgan, Anne Marie Lemay, Barbara Daigneault, Nathalie Croteau, Sonia Pelletier, Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz, Maryse Leclaire, Anne-Marie Edwards, Maud Haviernick, Annie Turcotte, Genevieve Begeron, Maryse Laganiere, Annie St-Arneault, and Michele Richard.

36 years ago today, I lived in Calgary. My daughter was 2, with every bit of potential to do whatever she wanted with her life. My partner was a woman working in a non-traditional job -- one which occasionally found her pissing off some misogynist wingnut […]

[Original post on thecanadian.social]

As holiday season approaches, consider giving one of the “saucy tees, totes, and tea towels” made by Genevieve Fuji Johnson (my spouse). All profits go to individuals and organizations involved in advancing the rights of sex workers.

#SexWorkIsWork
#FuckThePatriarchy […]

"LGBTQ+STEM Day" on a background that shows the visible spectrum from violet at the left to red at the right. A schematic atom with rainbow colours fills the orbitals. Text below shows "18 November" and the "#LGBTQSTEMDAY" hashtag.

Happy Pride in STEM Day!
🏳️‍🌈

https://prideinstem.org/lgbtstemday/

Hey, #admins!

Along with a grad student, I am working on a paper the surveys Mastodon (and forks -- Hometown, Glitch) servers that have some connection to #Canada.

We have done a lot of digging and have found ~40 instances that have some connection to Canada. We presented our work recently […]

After reading about the new “Text with Jesus” app, I received an unexpectedly funny response when I asked ChatGPT to adopt the persona of J. R. “Bob” Dobbs (Figurehead of the Church of the Sub-Genius) and say whether the current US President is the Second Coming of Bob.

“HA! Trump? The second […]

@steve
I missed this when you responded, but that's a useful distinction. The monopole experiment was before my time, and all I know is that people joked about it afterwards. Maybe "famously irreproducible" would be a better term for this sort of thing. The Fairbanks free quark experiment also […]

Poster entitled "LGBTQ+ STEM Spotlight" with an image of Timnit Gebru, describing her as "A pioneering computer scientist whose work exposed bias in large-scale AI systems. As a queer Black researcher and founder of the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), she champions transparency, accountability, and justice in technology, reshaping how the world thinks about ethical AI."

Our department is preparing to celebrate the International Day of 2SLGBTQIA+ People in STEM on November 18, and one of our students made a great set of posters. I was pleasantly surprised to see that one of the posters highlights @timnitGebru and her work at DAIR! 👏

Question in my university’s “Service Effectiveness Survey”:

“A fully functional workplace (furnishings, plumbing, electrical, heating, air conditioning, lifts and other building services)”

WTF????

Options are “Less important” to “Critical,” with an N/A option indicating “Not enough experience […]

Gift link to André Picard’s rightfully outraged piece criticizing Canada’s House of Commons Committee on Science and Research for trying to launch “a McCarthyesque witch hunt of researchers they deem to be beneficiaries of diversity, inclusion and equity policies.”

He adds: “what are the […]

Nicholas Grossman (@ngrossman81) on Threads I made signs expressing some points where I disagree with the current government

Good messaging here. As we all know, everyone hates Illinois Nazis.

From: @ngrossman81
https://www.threads.com/@ngrossman81/post/DP9VFMYDgsn

20251018_No Kings Day 2 Protests Unofficial Attendance Crowdsourcing

If you attend a No Kings Day event, please record the number of people in attendance in our crowdsourced crowd-counting sheet. We prefer official estimates above ad-hoc counts — if you count yourself, pls be conservative (people are bad at estimating crowd sizes). docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

@steve
No slight to Cabrera’s overall contributions, but on the irreproducible monopole paper, don’t you mean “infamous?”

Poll Finds Most Desirable Quality In   Romantic Partner Is Being Jacked Centaur WEST LONG BRANCH, NJ—With the attribute far outpacing characteristics such as humor, kindness, or wealth, a poll released Monday by Monmouth University found that the most desirable quality in a romantic partner was being a jacked centaur. “Among our sample of over 40,000 respondents, by far the most coveted trait in a potential significant other was […] The post Poll Finds Most Desirable Quality In Romantic Partner Is Being Jacked Centaur appeared first on The Onion.

I think The Onion must have a Cory Doctorow fan on staff

@pluralistic

https://theonion.com/poll-finds-most-desirable-quality-in-romantic-partner-is-being-jacked-centaur/

@vicgrinberg
Time to get back to that unpublished paper from my postdoc in the late 90s

Welcome back, @tzimmer_history !

From: @tzimmer_history
https://mastodon.social/@tzimmer_history/115191229604585509

Some personal news: @jesse and I just won the Nancy Baym Book Award, granted annually by The Association of Internet Researchers (@AoIR ), for our @mitpress book The Secret Life of Data. I am honored, chuffed, and oh so grateful.

https://aoir.org/2025nb_bookaward/

@brembs

Sorry to butt in, but your summary completely misrepresents what @hweimer said. He explicitly noted that most APS articles cost the taxpayer nothing to publish and that the peer review process typically improves the submitted version, and I agree. He also didn’t say that he didn’t know […]

I'm having a virtual book event with the @fediforum folks next week!

https://fediforum.org/news/2025-09-04-robert-gehl-move-slowly-and-build-gridges-special-event/

I will talk about my new book, Move Slowly and Build Bridges: Mastodon, the Fediverse, and the Struggle for Democratic Social […]

I was really grumpy today but then a bus driver was nice to me and I was in a much better mood for the rest of the day and also nice to other people.

Niceness matters, folks. You never know how much a small word or gesture may change the trajectory of someone's day.

The pyOpenSci community is great—I recommend them to anyone with an interest in developing their scientific Python skills

From: @pyOpenSci
https://fosstodon.org/@pyOpenSci/115102214951141149

@johncarlosbaez
I’m guessing that this is best understood as a dynamical instability, not as a phase transition? Superficially, it looks like a first-order transition, but the system is out of equilibrium, it’s not clear how luminosity would map onto a state variable, and there’s no obvious […]

Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) Attached: 1 image Today's threads (a thread) Inside: Bluesky creates the world's weirdest, hardest-to-understand binding arbitration clause; and more! Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/15/dogs-breakfast/ #Pluralistic 1/

Related to @pluralistic thread: the largest (by far) not-Bluesky ATproto stack is #BridgyFed. But, because of toxic attitudes on Fedi, Bridgy users are cut off from seeing most Bluesky users, even if those users follow their accounts.
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/115034644536017304

The Launch Sequence | Institute for Progress A collection of essays describing concrete but ambitious AI projects to accelerate progress in science and security

This compilation of “ambitious AI projects to accelerate progress in science and security” is completely unhinged.

https://ifp.org/the-launch-sequence/

I’m shocked, but not surprised, that this paper needed to be written

From: @bpaassen
https://bildung.social/@bpaassen/115016419670940235