Dr. Katharine Dickson
LightNews LightNews
banner
metaomicsnerd.bsky.social
Dr. Katharine Dickson
@metaomicsnerd.bsky.social
16K followers 7.1K following 6.6K posts
Microbiome engineer and biomethane scientist by training; climate, agriculture, science, and biotech policy and politics wonk by calling. I 分かる some 日本語.

Bluesky’s first Anaerobic Fungi Guru.

Opinions my own. She/her. ☸️ (Jōdo Shinshū)
Posts Replies Media Videos
metaomicsnerd.bsky.social
Tokugawa Yoshinobu for sonno joi!
November 10, 2025 at 3:19 AM
metaomicsnerd.bsky.social
徳川慶喜 for 尊王攘夷
November 9, 2025 at 2:46 AM
metaomicsnerd.bsky.social
ゾウラン for ニュウヨーク市
November 9, 2025 at 2:37 AM
metaomicsnerd.bsky.social
Amazingly, it works for Japanese!
ゴジラ for 東京 (Godzilla for Tokyo) in Zohran style
November 9, 2025 at 2:34 AM
metaomicsnerd.bsky.social
your belated mayoral campaign sign
"Friedman for Bluesky" in Zohran Mamdani text style
November 8, 2025 at 9:02 PM
metaomicsnerd.bsky.social
Naha is also the location of my favorite chaotic Christmas display, which was at a Shinto shrine
An inflatable Grinch, Minnie Mouse, Stitch and Santa on a “North Pole” motorcycle, and Grogu holding a candy cane behind a row of poinsettias
November 3, 2025 at 4:54 AM
metaomicsnerd.bsky.social
In Buddhism news I am bringing EcoSangha to Sacramento Betsuin!
Buddha sitting on top of a globe showing the Indian subcontinent, with the words EcoSangha at the bottom.
November 2, 2025 at 9:44 PM
metaomicsnerd.bsky.social
Huh, Brianna Wu was having a dysfunctional people-pleasing appeaser fawn response all along and could not properly detect danger from the people she was interacting with.

Don't trust people who are bad judges of character and who make decisions that compromise their own rights.
A post from Brianna Wu on Twitter: "Trans sisters. I'm pretty sure I was wrong. I am sorry. I genuinely thought that as a trans woman, if ceded some points with the gender critical crowd we could have a healthier conversation and arrive at better public policy. The problem is, they are getting crazier and more extreme. If you admit "trans women don't belong in women's sports" they agree, but call you a man the whole time. If you admit, "I understand I am a biological man, but this is how I want to live my life and talking about me like this is degrading" they scream about free speech. If you admit that hurtful language is part of free speech but you don't have to associate with people that degrade you, they act like the victim and call you a man and then say you should be thrown in an insane asylum. It's like this on everything. They are incapable of looking for a middle ground on bathrooms. They want maximalist policies on everything. They'd throw a fully transitioned, fully passing trans woman in male prison genpop and laugh as she got AIDS from being raped. Continuation of post from Brianna Wu. "I want a middle ground on so many of these policies. BUT THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM IS THEY DO NOT. They enjoy degrading us, it's fun for them. So, sisters. I genuinely don't know what to do. I think many of our most extreme ideas are bad. But theirs are worse. So if I have to pick, I choose us. I wish there were a political vehicle for compromise and medical safeguarding. But that just simply does not exist.
November 1, 2025 at 5:42 PM
metaomicsnerd.bsky.social
Childhood punishment and authoritarianism also have an impact on men's attitudes toward sex and women's sexuality. Over the past decade, we have conducted a number of studies on conservatives' attitudes toward sex and women's sexuality. When asked about contraception (e.g. "Abstinence is the only acceptable form of contraception"). women's sexuality (e.g. "Teenage girls should not receive sex education because it encourages promiscuity"), belief in rape myths (e.g. "If a girl engages in necking or petting, and she lets things get out of hand, it is her own fault if her partner forces sex on her"), and abortion, our research documents that these attitudes are highly related. Not surprisingly, conservatives who believe in rape myths also tend to oppose contraception and abortion. In addition, however, conservatives tend to oppose women breast-feeding in public, sexualizing what is a natural and important part of the human experience.
October 22, 2025 at 5:08 PM
metaomicsnerd.bsky.social
While clinical psychologists have long observed that emotion from childhood experiences can be carried into adulthood, and then complicate adult behavior and emotional experience, social psychologists have given this hypothesized process little attention. Nevertheless, a number of studies have demonstrated this effect, often discussed in the context of "scapegoating." Carl Hovland and Robert Sears (1940) found that lynching of Blacks in the South increased when the price of cotton decreased, suggesting that poor economic conditions resulted in whites taking out their frustrations on Blacks. Experimental studies have also demonstrated the process of affect displacement. Donald Weatherley (1961) found that after being insulted, highly anti-Semitic subjects were more likely to include more fantasy aggression in a projective Thematic Apperception Test story toward characters with stereotypically Jewish names. Ronald Rogers and Steven Prentice-Dunn (1981) discovered that white students at the University of Alabama behaved more aggressively after being shocked by a Black confederate, compared to less aggression if the same shocks were given by a white confederate, expressing what they called "repressive racism." James Meindl and Melvin Lerner (1984) found that after lowering subjects' self-esteem by inducing them to believe they had caused an accident, the Anglo-Canadian subjects expressed public policy preferences less favorable to French-speaking Canadians. More recently, Fredy Aviles and his colleagues (2005) demonstrated that alcohol exacerbates the process of aggression displacement.
October 22, 2025 at 5:08 PM
metaomicsnerd.bsky.social
Alice Miller (1983, p. 7), in exploring the ramification of harsh childhood punishment, has written that a child experiencing harsh physical punishment has "no possibility of reacting appropriately to hurt, humiliation, and coercion", continuing, "These experiences cannot be integrated into the personality; the feeligns they evoke are repressed, and the need to articulate them remains unsatisfied, without any hope of being fulfilled." She argues that repressed anger that is not expressed toward the parents is unconsciously displaced onto other objects later in life. Under various conditions, it can be directed toward the self or others, and may be the source of a variety of destructive or self-harming behaviors, or it can be channeled into political ideology. Conservative attitudes, personality features, and cognitions act as "an ideological response with psychological motives to reduce high levels of perceived threat and anxiety" (Lavine, Lodge, and Freitas 2005, p. 220). John Jost and his colleagues (2003) found that many psychological variables are significantly predictive of political conservatism. These variables include higher anxiety, more dogmatism, intolerance of ambiguity, less openness to experience, decreased tolerance for uncertainty, increased fear of threat, decreased integrative complexity, and a greater need for structure, order, and closure.
October 22, 2025 at 5:08 PM
metaomicsnerd.bsky.social
that abstract
Abstract: Recent self-reported and cross-sectional survey evidence documents high levels of mental health problems among PhD students. We study the relationship between PhD studies and mental health care utilization using Swedish administrative records of prescriptions for psychiatric medication for the full population of PhD students. We find that prior to starting their PhD studies, prospective students use psychiatric medication at a rate similar to a matched sample of individuals with a master’s degree. However, following the start of their PhD studies, psychiatric medication use among PhD students increases substantially. This upward trend continues throughout the course of PhD studies, and by the fifth year medication use has increased by 40 percent compared to pre-PhD levels. After the fifth year, when most students in our sample graduate, the psychiatric medication use declines notably. Heterogeneity analyses indicate that the increase in medication use occurs broadly across different student subgroups and academic disciplines, with the exception of students in the medical and health sciences.
October 16, 2025 at 8:20 PM
metaomicsnerd.bsky.social
have a meme
screencap of Utena Tenjou from the Revolutionary Girl Utena opening lunging forward in the arena with the Sword of Dios. superimposed on this is a tumblr post by user visit-ba-sing-se that says "hate how most of my problems are abstract or systematic i wanna fight more of them with a sword"
October 12, 2025 at 7:36 PM
metaomicsnerd.bsky.social
We got some more Gaucho Nobels! #UCSB
UC Santa Barbara celebrates new Nobel Prize winners! UCSB professors John Martinis and Michel Devoret have been awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics
October 7, 2025 at 5:28 PM
metaomicsnerd.bsky.social
Courtesy of Rev. Jeff Wilson at Toronto Buddhist Church, my new favorite Silly Little Guy
An example of "oni no nembutsu" - an oni in a Buddhist monk's robe with a gong on his chest and a mallet in his hand. He looks silly.
October 6, 2025 at 3:06 AM
metaomicsnerd.bsky.social
Gru has a presentation: "We raise a fund. We find a Stanford dropout. We give him 5 million bucks. He gets arrested for fraud."
October 5, 2025 at 9:09 PM
metaomicsnerd.bsky.social
The science policy moral of Shin Godzilla:

In a crisis, science without policy is data on a shelf, policy without science is paperwork, and politics is the lubricant that facilitates a smooth deployment.

The monster won’t wait for your committee meeting.
Godzilla shoots his purple laser
October 3, 2025 at 4:25 AM
metaomicsnerd.bsky.social
Yaguchi and the JSDF come up with a name for their coagulant deployment: Operation Yashiori.

The name refers to a legendary sake used by the Shinto kami Susanoo-no-mikoto to defeat the eight-headed, eight-tailed serpent Yamata no Orochi.
An eighteenth century depiction of Susanoo slaying the eight-headed dragon, Yamata no Orochi. Woodblock print by Torii Kiyomasu II.
October 3, 2025 at 4:25 AM
metaomicsnerd.bsky.social
Godzilla’s most spectacular assault on Tokyo showcases his nuclear power as he unleashes fire and brilliant beams of purple nuclear light, enveloping Tokyo in flames.
Amid the fires of Tokyo stands Godzilla, glowing purple.
October 3, 2025 at 4:25 AM
metaomicsnerd.bsky.social
Kayoko also has critical intel recovered from Goro Maki, and shares it freely with Yaguchi’s team, including a mysterious diagram that the interdisciplinary team must decode.
The mysterious diagram of... something about Godzilla?
October 3, 2025 at 4:25 AM
metaomicsnerd.bsky.social
The US sends an envoy, Kayoko Patterson (a talented, ambitious, politically savvy Japanese American woman looking to run for President one day), to collaborate with Yaguchi. Kayoko brings critical intel from the USA to collaborate.
our girl Kayoko
October 3, 2025 at 4:25 AM
metaomicsnerd.bsky.social
“Although I’m nominally in charge, we’re a crack team of lone wolves, nerds, troublemakers, dropouts, outcasts, academic heretics, and general pains in the bureaucracy. So do your thing and whatever you like. Here are the basic specs. Each department find out whatever you can.”
The crack team of nerds, rebel professors, and weirdos tasked with saving Japan.
October 3, 2025 at 4:25 AM
metaomicsnerd.bsky.social
Finally, the long-awaited Shin Godzilla science policy thread!

Shin Godzilla (2016) is a film about crisis management and science policy with a side of kaiju.

Spoilers ahead.

#scipol #sciencepolicy
The American Shin Godzilla movie poster.
October 3, 2025 at 4:25 AM
metaomicsnerd.bsky.social
My first adventure in donabe cooking
A Japanese style hot pot in a donabe (Japanese clay pot cooker).
September 28, 2025 at 2:13 AM
metaomicsnerd.bsky.social
hm
A news article from April 6, 2023 with a picture of Charlie Kirk speaking and the headline “Charlie Kirk Says Gun Deaths ‘Unfortunately’ Worth It to Keep Second Amendment”
September 10, 2025 at 9:24 PM