Roger Bohn
Roger Bohn
@rogerbohn.bsky.social
Professor Emeritus, University of California San Diego
Moving technologies from art toward science.
Learning by experimentation.
Pro democracy, against fascism
I’m betting on the octopuses.

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/29/w...
Octopuses Invade the English Coast, ‘Eating Anything in Their Path’
www.nytimes.com
September 29, 2025 at 6:18 PM
I inserted myself into a conversation at a bar about Covid and vaccines. Here’s what happened www.statnews.com/2025/09/06/c... via @statnews.com
I inserted myself into a conversation at a bar about Covid and vaccines. Here’s what happened
What happened when a public health scientist overheard four men sharing misinformation about Covid — and decided to talk to them about it.
www.statnews.com
September 9, 2025 at 2:18 AM
Lake Tahoe Boaters Died Without Life Jackets, Review Finds
No matter how well you can swim, life jackets improve chance of survival!
www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/u...
Lake Tahoe Boaters Died Without Life Jackets, Review Finds
www.nytimes.com
July 25, 2025 at 9:12 AM
I’ve long been skeptical about the business case for LLMs and generative AI. But Ed Zitron says AI companies inherent money losers.
And absent some improbable breakthroughs including solving the hallucination problem, that won’t improve.

www.wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-m...
There Is No AI Revolution
Soundtrack: Mack Glocky - Chasing Cars Last week, I spent a great deal of time and words framing the generative AI industry as a cynical con where OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei hav...
www.wheresyoured.at
July 24, 2025 at 7:55 PM
Government word search is killing my cutting-edge research www.statnews.com/2025/04/23/u... via @statnews.com
Government word search is killing my cutting-edge research
The Trump administration seems to believe that some words and ideas fail an ill-posed and completely nonscientific test of orthodoxy.
www.statnews.com
April 23, 2025 at 9:38 PM
The very high market share ofone search engine(Google) and apparently still high mind share in some circles of Twitter/X have created new methods of information warfare. Musk creates/redirects UK political scandals. It’s at least plausible open.substack.com/pub/broligar...
Total information collapse
It's started. And it's only going to accelerate from here.
open.substack.com
January 22, 2025 at 6:47 AM
January 5, 2025 at 9:55 PM
Reposted by Roger Bohn
Sadly, it’s a good time to once again share this amazing infographic that we ran at @science.org more than 7 years ago
🧪 #IDsky
www.science.org/content/arti...
Here's the visual proof of why vaccines do more good than harm
See year by year how vaccines beat back nine dangerous infectious diseases
www.science.org
December 14, 2024 at 9:10 PM
Just received $48 settlement check in "Peters v Apple" class action case. My experience with minor class actions is that few people apply, and the $ payout is therefore larger than anticipated. (We got $300 from a minor Pet Smart #classaction Most much less.) Not always worth your time of course.
December 9, 2024 at 5:35 AM
This is wild. Using LLM + a structural equation approach to both define and execute social science experiments. Theoretically it could work, but it depends how much knowledge about human behavior is in the LLM.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.11794.pdf
April 21, 2024 at 12:47 AM
Gary Marcus: The explosive improvement in LLMs may already be ending. And so far, we have little idea how to fix their errors, except brute force.
Another case where empirical tech improvement wo. theory foundation = limited. Sad but plausible.
Evidence that LLMs are reaching a point of diminishing returns - and what that might mean
The conventional wisdom, well captured recently by Ethan Mollick, is that LLMs are advancing exponentially. A few days ago, in very popular blog post, Mollick claimed that “the current best estimates ...
open.substack.com
April 13, 2024 at 10:55 PM
Interesting argument that strategic air power, the subject of heated debate for decades, is active in Ukraine war — even though few aircraft are involved. Cruise missiles + drones do the same thing, at least for short ranges from Ukraine -Russia.

open.substack.com/pub/phillips...
Weekend Update #73: Strategic Airpower Becomes the Focus of the War
Washington is a Hot Mess, the Crocus attack shows more about how Russia controls certain US voices
open.substack.com
March 24, 2024 at 4:37 PM
open.substack.com/pub/erictopo...

Plastic micro particles in human atherosclerosis. Yikes.
March 7, 2024 at 10:21 AM
Incredible, as in hard to believe. #brain
Sensory Stimulation Detoxifies the Alzheimer’s Brain https://spectrum.ieee.org/gamma-light-therapy-alzheimers
(My first post using @graysky.app )
Brain Stimulation Detoxifies the Alzheimer’s Brain
40-Hz sound and light oscillations activate the brain’s waste-disposal function
spectrum.ieee.org
February 29, 2024 at 8:38 PM