Titus Brown
titus.idyll.org
Titus Brown
@titus.idyll.org
I am not a deep man, but I have many shallows. ctbrown@ucdavis.edu, http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/.
Reposted by Titus Brown
Simply Julia (Julia Turshen) is possibly one of the best cookbooks out there - for folks who want to eat vegetables, get enough protein, eat an interesting variety of flavors, and still make food their kids will eat. MULTIPLE recipes on repeat in our home.
November 24, 2025 at 2:33 PM
Reposted by Titus Brown
Twitter accounts are based in Russia. BlueSky accounts are based in homes with, frankly, too many books, plants, obsolete cables, and pieces of rustic pottery, that could do with a bit of a tidying up, to be honest.
November 23, 2025 at 8:29 PM
Reposted by Titus Brown
Exciting day at London’s Science Museum for the #InnovationforGrowth meeting where we’re showing off AirSeq technology from @earlhaminst.bsky.social and @nhm.org

Meeting organised by @ukri.org to highlight the importance of research and innovation for economic growth.
November 24, 2025 at 1:29 PM
Reposted by Titus Brown
I posted a buy link here to "A Magical Inheritance" a few days ago, and 24 of you immediately went to Anna's Archives and fucking stole it from me.

Yes, stole it.

I do not get paid for your download there because YOU ARE STEALING FROM ME.

🖕
November 24, 2025 at 4:04 AM
Reposted by Titus Brown
There is no way you can guess how the thread that ends in this instant classic begins.
The damned in hell are not more powerful for the fact that the fires do not consume them; it is part and parcel of their torment.
November 23, 2025 at 6:54 PM
Reposted by Titus Brown
Cities moving away from streeteries is one of the stupidest policy trends of late. Harms qualify of life, the feasibility of restaurants, and reduces city revenue. All to make a very small handful of drivers happier (a group that will never be happy).
DC is enforcing a “crackdown” on streeteries—outdoor seating for cafes—charging the cafes huge amounts of money to keep the facilities in place, and forcing them to use seating that doesn’t work in the winter. It’s a huge self-own, likely to end up hurting businesses, reducing street vibrancy.
Exclusive: Le Dip streetery to come down as D.C. crackdown reshapes outdoor dining
It's over for many D.C. streeteries, as the city starts to charge what you might call "road rent" and other fees.
www.axios.com
November 23, 2025 at 2:58 PM
This is a super cool story - congrats!!!
November 23, 2025 at 7:38 PM
Reposted by Titus Brown
New paper out: An archaeal genetic code with all TAG codons as pyrrolysine: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
An archaeal genetic code with all TAG codons as pyrrolysine
Multiple genetic codes developed during the evolution of eukaryotes and bacteria, yet no alternative genetic code is known for archaea. We used proteomics to confirm our prediction that certain archae...
www.science.org
November 23, 2025 at 7:22 PM
Reposted by Titus Brown
Really important to stress that the Crown Jewels of the US higher education system were never the Ivies or elite SLACs (other countries have equivalents of these) but the well-funded, large, cheap, and excellently staffed public state university systems bringing high quality education to the masses.
One of the bragging rights that the US ed system had in the 20th century is that we didn't have education tracks. Essentially, any kid could go to a CC or state school & major in whatever they wanted to (obviously an oversimplification). I fear this aspect of the American dream is dying.
November 23, 2025 at 5:18 PM
Reposted by Titus Brown
Friendly reminder that dishwashers made after 1995 or so are so water and energy efficient that even if you ran them twice fully loaded it would still use less water than handwashing the same load.

So many "green" things feel like sacrifices. Dishwashers are not one of them.
November 12, 2025 at 5:03 AM
Reposted by Titus Brown
This starts at Noon! Join us for the seminar "Weaving Science into Philly Neighborhoods" with @sarahmackattack.bsky.social and/or the Science Zine Making Workshop at 1:30!

See you soon!
We are excited to host Philly's own doyenne of community science communication, Dr. Sarah McAnulty!

Friday, Nov 21, 1:30-3PM
Hands-On Science Zine Making Workshop

Registration for the workshop is limited by room size. Sign up here: www.eventbrite.com/e/hands-on-s...

@sarahmackattack.bsky.social
November 21, 2025 at 4:07 PM
Reposted by Titus Brown
Pope Leo XIV understands technology and its relationship to art better any executive or AI-pilled techbro running the conference circuit.
November 17, 2025 at 3:50 PM
Reposted by Titus Brown
Some of the most important problems in network science, it turns out, are equivalent to problems in descriptive set theory, a field dedicated to sorting through infinity. Joseph Howlett reports: www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-bridge...
A New Bridge Links the Strange Math of Infinity to Computer Science | Quanta Magazine
Descriptive set theorists study the niche mathematics of infinity. Now, they’ve shown that their problems can be rewritten in the concrete language of algorithms.
www.quantamagazine.org
November 21, 2025 at 3:58 PM
Reposted by Titus Brown
I’m howling.
November 20, 2025 at 2:16 PM
Reposted by Titus Brown
This is the problem with trying to inspire hope using the message "we have the solutions": such a message may inspire the kind of techno-optimism that actually fosters political *dis*engagement.

1/n
⚠️ When “technology will save us” becomes a climate risk!

A new paper from great colleagues takes a careful look at techno-optimism — the belief that technology will largely solve climate change — and what it means for real-world climate action.
(1/4)👇
osf.io/preprints/ps...
November 19, 2025 at 7:32 PM
Reposted by Titus Brown
I recently discovered Conventional Comments (conventionalcomments.org) for providing a pseudo-standard set of labels for feedback and just tried it for an article review and it was really helpful to specify issues vs. thoughts vs. suggestions, etc. Hopefully it's helpful for the authors too!
November 17, 2025 at 3:52 PM
Reposted by Titus Brown
Happy to share our new AMR resource which has phenotypic AMR (usually MIC data) collected from publications and databases. This is paired with assemblies and annotations

We're excited for users who might train new models, find phenotype/genotype mismatches, or any other use
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a growing health threat, making infections harder to treat and complicating routine medical care.

EMBL-EBI’s new AMR portal brings together laboratory resistance data and bacterial genomes in one open platform.

#WAAW2025 #ActOnAMR

www.ebi.ac.uk/about/news/t...
🧬💻
A new gateway to global antimicrobial resistance data
New online portal connects bacterial genomes with experimental resistance data to support antimicrobial resistance research.
www.ebi.ac.uk
November 19, 2025 at 12:27 PM
Reposted by Titus Brown
Our latest paper is out with @adiop.bsky.social and @gmdouglas.bsky.social. We analyzed the extent of homologous recombination between bacterial species (introgression) and how it affects species borders (it can vary a lot depending on the approach used to classify species!). rdcu.be/eQAMf
Introgression impacts the evolution of bacteria, but species borders are rarely fuzzy
Nature Communications - It is commonly thought that bacterial species borders tend to be fuzzy, due to frequent exchange of DNA. Here, Diop et al. quantify the patterns of gene flow between core...
rdcu.be
November 18, 2025 at 9:01 PM
Reposted by Titus Brown
“We are in the middle of a scandal of elites palling around with one of the most infamous child sex traffickers in the world, and this is our political press? No wonder Epstein got away with it all so long: many of the men tasked with being the watchdogs were almost as gross as he was with women.”
November 18, 2025 at 8:51 PM
Reposted by Titus Brown
I’m good in the hood.
November 18, 2025 at 7:35 PM
Reposted by Titus Brown
One like = one scene from "AI, Claudius", the epic story of a stammering Markov model who survived corruption, lies, and intrigue to become LLM-peror of Ancient Rome
November 17, 2025 at 6:05 PM
Reposted by Titus Brown
OK, #bioinformatics folk. We have some (many many) reads from a metagenome. They have been binned into a bacterial genome. They have no matches to any known genome in any database. They code for "bacterial" genes. What are good triple-checks to do to argue that they are not, in fact, euk sequence?
November 18, 2025 at 5:29 PM
Reposted by Titus Brown
Wonderful humanitarian. Her name should be remembered.
What a contrast in humans: she does such good in the world while her ex continues to pillage the planet and the people
November 17, 2025 at 5:35 AM
Reposted by Titus Brown
TRIGGER WARNING

Every woman i know, and every woman i have trained has been sexually assaulted.

Every. Single. One.

It is a very good plan to learn new behaviors that lessen the trauma for women....men can learn how to be less...awful.
Many men need to learn new ways.

So many stuck men
a man in a brown coat says " old man " in white letters
Alt: a man in a brown coat says " old man " in white letters
media.tenor.com
November 17, 2025 at 2:24 PM