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Saturday football open thread
Happy Saturday, folks! There’s a lot of football today that I will not watch, including the (live) Tottenham Hotspur vs. Everton match. Why? Because I will be with my family attending my first ever Renaissance fair. That’s right, instead of going insane watching Spurs, I’ll be watching people in period costumes try and sell me […]
Game 148 Game Day Thread – Texas Rangers @ Arizona Diamondbacks
It’s been 1045 calendar days since Nov 1, 2023
Game Thread: White Sox (75-71) at Cardinals (72-75)
Close your eyes, kids, the South Siders are back in action
Orioles @ Blue Jays Game Thread
We are starting a series with the Blue Jays tonight. The team says Dylan Cease won’t be starting tomorrow, they will hold him back until Sunday. It will be some sort of bullpen day with Arrighetti being the bulk guy or starter. The recap is likely to be late tonight, we are going out for […]
Friday Night College Football Game Thread (9/11/26)
Welcome back to another fun filled Friday night of college football! Did everyone have fun watching the volleyball team annihilate New Mexico last night? Yeah, that was fun. Tonight we have a slate of football. I say a “slate” as there really isn’t much here. I mean, Villanova is a good FCS squad who will […]
Jays Call Up Rudy Martin
I figured I wasn’t going to post anything more until the Game Thread, but everyone is reporting that the Jays are calling up 30-year-old outfielder Rudy Martin. They picked up Martin off waivers from the Royals, back in July. He was drafted by the Royals in the 25th round of the 2014 draft and he’s […]
DAILY THREAD
The Daily Merengue is a place where you can feel free to discuss all things football. Do not be alarmed by the overt RMCF bias. It’s in the name! Shoutout to the mods who do a fantastic job Kung_Fu_Zizou, Juninho, NeRObutBlanco, Felipejack, Ezek Ix and yours truly, Valyrian Steel. Well better get used to it. […]
Arsenal at Napoli match thread: Champions League Opener
Arsenal kick off their Champions League League Phase (ew) campaign with a trip to Napoli. The Gunners finished first in the table last season with a perfect 8-0-0 record and rode home-field advantage all the way to the CL final before losing to Paris St. Germain. Napoli finished 30th in the table and did not […]
Barcelona vs Feyenoord, Champions League: TV & Streaming, Live Thread
Join us for the first Barcelona European adventure of the season!
They Don’t Sell Whimsy On Amazon: The Politics Behind The Threads
Writer Anna DeBord encourages a closer look into the politics behind clothing.
66-75: Chart
Mariners Pitchers 2023-2024: Lazaro Montes, +0.20Mariners Pitchers The Other Five Years This Decade: Eduard Bazardo -0.31 WPA, Bryce Miller -0.12 WPA, José Ferrer -0.12 Game Thread Comment(s) of the Day
Six decades of politics (but little government)
The first aired episode of “Star Trek,” entitled “The Man Trap,” premiered on September 8, 1966 — 60 years ago today. I’m actually editing a political science fiction issue of The Forum right now, and it’s prompted to me think a lot about the ways that Trek deals with politics and government and what it’s offered us as commentary. The @smotus report is a reader-supported publication. To support this work, please become a paid subscriber. Subscribe The original TV series ran from 1966 to 1969. It had a loyal but modest following, but the audience grew substantially with the series in syndication for years after that. The franchise developed its first motion picture in 1979, followed by five sequels, and then a whole other series of films built around the “Next Generation” series that first aired in 1987. In recent decades, several more TV series have built up around it, including the current “Strange New Worlds,” now in its fourth season. Throughout the past six decades, the franchise has offered us a good many insights into US politics and international relations, although often disguised as science fiction yarns. The original series was largely a Cold War fable, with the United Federation of Planets (a stand-in for the US) perpetually at odds with the Klingon Empire (a stand-in for the USSR). The “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” episode (1969) posited a planet divided into two races, largely indistinguishable to outsiders, but nonetheless constituting a brutal racial hierarchy. “Patterns of Force” (1968) showed a struggling planet where the leader had attempted to construct a benevolent dictatorship — literally Nazism without bigotry — and found that authoritarianism could not exist apart from hierarchy and oppression. (Relatedly, I’d put “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country,” high on a list of dad films about the end of the Cold War, near “The Hunt for Red October.”) Get 20% off for 1 year Indeed, the original series itself was something of a political statement, with a multi-racial crew running the Enterprise, a diverse and largely peaceful Federation mostly free from want and oppression, and protected by Starfleet, an armed force whose scientific mission was at least as important as its military one. Famously, when Nichelle Nichols wanted to walk away from the role of Uhura on the original series, none other than Martin Luther King, Jr. met with her and urged her to remain on the show, discussing the importance of viewers seeing an intelligent Black woman as part of the command team three centuries hence. Later series in the Trek franchise offered a good deal of political commentary on their own, but probably none as explicitly and incisively as “Deep Space Nine,” which ran from 1993 to 1999. The episodes surrounding the Dominion War, especially the “In The Pale Moonlight” (1998), showed the compromises, sacrifices, and moral rot associated with winning even a just war — probably better than any series would until “Andor” (2022-25). In “Far Beyond The Stars” (1998), Captain Benjamin Sisko is somehow transplanted to the role of a science fiction writer in 1950s New York. The writer is frequently sidelined and his ideas stolen because publishers don’t want to credit a Black writer. Several series have depicted the secretive Section 31 — an unacknowledged black ops security force operating within Starfleet. These episodes often end up using Section 31 as a foil to show the dangers of a lawless group within a lawful society, even (especially) when that group posits itself as essential for everyone else’s freedom to continue. The current “Strange New Worlds” has played with a few political themes. I found the first two seasons of this show among the best that the Trek franchise has produced in decades, but this season and the last have really been struggling for ideas. Yet one interesting thread is the idea that the diplomatic and enlightened leadership style of Captain Christopher Pike will not work in all situations. “A Quality of Mercy” (2022), which I wrote about here, puts Pike in the middle of a battle with a Romulan vessel in an alternate timeline, and finds that Pike’s conciliatory style would actually make a lengthy and deadly war more likely, while a quick and more violent approach might have prevented the war. This season’s opener, “Valles Marineris,” shows a pre-lightspeed civilization locked in a war to the death with a neighboring planet. The idea of an alliance or a federation hasn’t even occurred to them — their ship’s commander is curious but doesn’t see it as an option. For a franchise as political as “Star Trek,” one thing we almost never see is the government. We get occasional glimpses of Starfleet’s council — mostly uniformed people at a rectangular table — but almost no sense of how the Federation is governed. Are there elections? Who is in the legislature? How much power does the president have? What kind of factional divisions do they wrestle with and how? The shows and films are pretty silent on this. We’ve seen a few military tribunals within Starfleet, but little about how civilians deal with crime and injustice. With recent years seeing some of the franchise’s more interesting plot lines and casts, it seems clear that Star Trek is still full of energy and ideas. Given the erosion of American democracy and the reshuffling of the international order, there’s no shortage of material for future shows to comment on. I’m not sure we should toast to 60 more years, but cheers to a show that continues to teach us about ourselves. Share
Labor Day afternoon game thread: vs. Guardians, 1:35 ET
The Orioles try to salvage their postseason chances on the back of Trevor Rogers.
China's Nvidia rival Moore Threads plunges 20% after share unlock
The selloff is a sharp reversal for one of the biggest winners from China's AI frenzy.
Nebraska Volleyball at Wrigley Field Game Thread
Are you watching?
Open Thread: Louisville vs. Ole Miss
Let’s go ahead and pull off the biggest week one win in program history. Go Cards.
GameThread: Detroit Tigers vs. Cleveland Guardians, 1:40 p.m.
Detroit Tigers (65-77) vs. Cleveland Guardians (72-71) Time/Place: 1:40 p.m., Progressive Field SB Nation Site: Covering the CornerMedia: Detroit SportsNet, MLB.TV, Tigers Radio NetworkPitching Matchup: RHP Jackson Jobe (1-2, 4.63 ERA) vs. RHP Gavin Williams (13-7, 3.81 ERA)
Game Time Thread: Juventus vs. AC Milan
It’s Juventus’ first big game of the season. What will they have store for us? There’s only one way to find out.
Valencia vs Barcelona, La Liga: TV & Streaming, Live Thread
Join us for another Barcelona La Liga adventure!
Islanders News: Labor Day pause
No real news as the U.S. celebrates a three-day Labor Day weekend, but here are a few recent links to pause and get a fresh thread up amid our preseason questions series. Islanders News Elsewhere
Washington vs. Washington State – Game Thread and How to Watch
It’s not Thanksgiving and it’s not the Apple Cup of old. The Dawgs and Cougs will kick off the ‘26 season by renewing their rivalry at Husky Stadium. WSU is part of the new-look Pac-12 with a new-look roster and a new-looking coaching staff. Kirby Moore arrives for his first head coaching job after serving […]
LSU Tigers vs. Clemson Tigers: Week 1 Open Thread
The Lane Kiffin Era begins today as LSU opens their 2026 season at home against Clemson. Come discuss the game here!
Game Thread: No. 16 Michigan Football vs Western Michigan
Michigan Football opens the 2026 season against Western Michigan under the lights of The Big House. Join the live conversation in our Week 1 Game Thread:
Braves vs Phillies Game Thread: 9/5/2026
Join us and discuss tonight’s game in the comments below! Game Info Game Time: Saturday, September 5th, 6:05 p.m. ET Location: Citizens Bank Park, Philadelphia, Pa. Watch: BravesVision Radio/Audio: 680 AM / 93.7 FM The Fan
Gamethread: Boston College Football vs Cincinnati
Join us in the comments below! And check out the SBN app to follow along with ease. Who: Boston College Eagles (0-0) @ Cincinnati Bearcats (0-0) Where: Nippert Stadium, Cincinnati, OH When: Saturday September 5th, 2026 Kickoff Time: 3:30pm ET How to Watch: This game will be broadcast live on FOX Our staff has spent […]
Week 1 college football open thread
We are back, baby. No amount of bad NC State football could possibly ruin the first full college football Saturday, which is today, and here and now. This is always a long wait, and it’s just nice to be able to sit back and take in an entire day of sports nonsense. Now we get […]
Game thread: Indiana Hoosiers football vs North Texas Mean Green
Indiana football is set to welcome North Texas to Memorial Stadium for the 2026 season opener. Follow along!
GAME THREAD: Miami Hurricanes vs Stanford Cardinal
YOUR MIAMI HURRICANES TAKE THE FIELD TO BEGIN THE 2026 SEASON TONIGHT!!!!!!
Game 142 Game Day Thread – Tampa Bay Rays @ Texas Rangers
Maybe Nick Martinez will do us a big solid
Aqara Debuts Five Matter Smart Lights With Apple Home Support
Aqara today introduced five new Matter-enabled smart lights compatible with Apple Home. The lights support Thread and Zigbee as well, and can be paired with Aqara sensors and switches. The Floor Lamp T1 is a tall, rod-shaped light with a wall-wash effect. It has 18 controllable zones that can be set to different colors, and it supports 2000K to 9000K white light at up to 1,000 lumens. Aqara's LED Downlight T2 has a thin profile for low ceilings or retrofitting.
AMD Introduces Threadripper Halo Station at IFA 2026
The opening keynote at IFA 2026 was held by AMD and our team on the ground was there to see it. During the event, AMD announced the Threadripper Halo Station, a liquid-cooled workstation built around the 96-core Threadripper PRO 9995WX CPU codenamed "Shimada Peak" and up to four AMD Instinct...
AMD Threadripper Halo Station packs 96-core CPU and Instinct MI350P GPUs, up to 576GB GPU memory and 2TB system memory
AMD has shown its Threadripper Halo Station with a 96-core CPU, two Instinct MI350P GPUs and 2TB of system memory. The design is planned to support four GPUs with 576GB HBM3E.
Aqara goes all in on smart lighting
A new floor lamp, outdoor smart lighting, and LED strip from Aqara support Zigbee and Thread.
66-75: Chart
Mariners 4, Athletics 7 September 1-2 Mariners: Julio Rodríguez, +0.14 WPASeptember 3 Mariners: Kade Anderson, -0.27 WPA Game Thread Comment(s) of the Day
Cardinals Legend Sends Warning Over Michael Wilson Extension Talks
The Michael Wilson contract extension talks have been one of the biggest player storylines for the Arizona Cardinals this offseason. Cardinals legend Adrian Wilson decided to share his two cents on the topic.The legendary safety and 2015 Ring of Honor inductee published a nine-post thread on X on the Michael Wilson extension talks. He cautions […] The post Cardinals Legend Sends Warning Over Michael Wilson Extension Talks appeared first on HEAVY.
66-74: Chart
Mariners 8, Red Sox 3 September Mariners: Bryce Miller, +0.15 WPAAugust Mariners: Nobody could possibly be that bad on the September Mariners Game Thread Comment(s) of the Day
Galaxy Z Fold 8 owner shows corners of the inner display are flexing inward
In the thread, the original poster asked other owners to check their phones and compare.
Daily Thread: 31 August 2026
The Daily Merengue is a place where you can feel free to d all things football. Do not be alarmed by the overt RMCF bias. It’s in the name! Shoutout to the mods who do a fantastic job, Ezek, Valyrian Steel, Kung_Fu_Zizou, Juninho, NeRObutBlanco and yours truly, Felipejack. 3 games, 3 wins It’s a very good start for Mourinho. As I […]
Game 137 Game Day Thread – Texas Rangers @ Milwaukee Brewers
W..what are you doing with that broom, Milwaukee?
Game 2 Gamethread: Giants vs. Diamondbacks
Yunior Marte vs. Mitch Bratt.
Saints vs. Cowboys: Preseason Week 3 Open Thread
The Saints close out the 2026 preseason against the Cowboys. Join us here for the game!
Steelers vs. Bills: Preseason Week 3 open thread
Come join us for the Steelers’ preseason finale.
Democrats want to draw more safe House seats. It could cost Black lawmakers.
Republicans have added more than a dozen conservative-leaning House districts, giving them a shot at keeping their threadbare majority.
Instagram’s 'First Draft' feature aims to make editing Reels less tedious
Instagram is making one of the most tedious parts of creating Reels easier. The company announced Tuesday in a Threads post that it’s rolling out “First
Apple Unveils New Mac Studio With M5 Max and M5 Ultra Chips
Apple today announced new Mac Studio models with the M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips, the latter of which is the company's most powerful chip ever. The M5 Ultra chip includes an up to 36-core CPU that contains 12 super cores and 24 performance cores. It delivers up to 1.25x higher single-threaded performance and up to 1.3x higher multithreaded performance than the M3 Ultra from the previous generation Mac Studio.
Purple Clothes Using Nobel-Prize Winning Chemistry Could Keep You Cool With The Power Of Outer Space
Usually you want lighter clothes to stay cool in summer weather, but these purple threads have even more cooling power despite their color.
Scientists overturned hundreds of rocks in Barbados and finally found the world's smallest snake after 20 years
After nearly 20 years without a confirmed sighting, scientists in Barbados have finally rediscovered the world’s smallest-known snake. According to the Associated Press, the tiny Barbados threadsnake was found beneath a rock during an ecological survey in central Barbados, bringing an end to a search that had seen researchers turn over hundreds of rocks in the hope of finding the elusive reptile.
Titans vs. Seahawks open game thread
Discuss Titans vs. Seahawks with us tonight!
Saturday Night Open Thread: Who should Jet off?
Come and join this merry band of Steelers’ faithful for some lively debate about our Steelers, good food, music, and the merits of the odd cold beverage.
‘Reading Rainbow’ Host Mychal Threets Shares Health Update After ‘5-Day Psychiatric Hold,’ Says Doctors ‘Saved My Life’
Mychal Threets revealed in a video on Threads on Aug. 22 that he was hospitalized for five days on a ‘psychiatric hold’ and thanked medical staff for saving his life.
Trees are connected by fungal threads beneath the soil, trading carbon and chemical signals in ways scientists are still arguing over — including whether a dying tree can pass part of itself into the forest before it goes
Beneath the forest floor, trees may be trading resources and secrets through fungal networks—but scientists are still feuding over how the system actually works.
Game Thread: Mets (58-70) at White Sox (66-61)
South Siders look to build on slim division lead against the Metropolitans tonight
New York Jets vs Pittsburgh Steelers Game Thread
The Jets take on the Steelers tonight in preseason action
Steelers vs. Jets: Preseason Week 2 open thread
Come join us for Pittsburgh’s second preseason game.
New wing at Museum of Science set for October opening - Boston News, Weather, Sports
BOSTON (WHDH) - A new wing at Boston’s Museum of Science is almost complete.The William and Charlotte Bloomberg Public Science Common will host conversations withRead More
Wednesday night Orioles game thread: vs. Yankees, 6:35pm ET
Samuel Basallo returns to the Baltimore lineup as they look to tie the series with New York
GameThread: Detroit Tigers vs. Pittsburgh Pirates, 12:35 p.m.
Detroit Tigers (61-64) vs. Pittsburgh Pirates (61-66) Time/Place: 12:35 p.m., PNC ParkSB Nation Site: Bucs DugoutMedia: Detroit SportsNet, MLB.TV, Tigers Radio NetworkPitching Matchup: RHP Jackson Jobe (1-1, 6.23 ERA) vs. RHP Paul Skenes (9-11, 3.88 ERA)
Wednesday open thread
Head to the comments section to share your thoughts and join the conversation. You can sign up for a commenting account below and we have full-time moderators to enforce the Community Guidelines.
59-66: Chart
Mariners 3, Astros 2 On fire (complimentary): Andrés Muñoz 0.20 WPA, Bryan Woo 0.13 WPAOn fire (emergency!): Josh Naylor -0.19 WPA Game Thread Comment of the Day
Arsenal vs. Manchester City Community Shield match thread
We’ve made it, folks! Arsenal start their 2026-27 season in earnest today with the Community Shield against Manchester City. For those of you unaware, the Community Shield is the annual match played the week before the season between the Premier League Champions and the FA Cup winner. The Gunners have won the Shield the second-most […]
Saints vs. Jaguars: Preseason Week 1 Open Thread
The Saints 2026 preseason begins at home against the Jaguars. Join us here for the game!
Scientists thought Titan was hiding a global ocean beneath its frozen crust. But a 2025 reanalysis of Cassini data points to something stranger instead — a roughly 380-kilometre-thick layer of slushy ice, close to melting and likely threaded with pockets of liquid water that could reach 20°C near the rocky interior.
A 2025 Cassini reanalysis measures a tidal lag that favors a warm, partly melted high-pressure ice layer over Titan's long-assumed global ocean.
Data centers are good business but bad politics. Josh Shapiro tries to thread the needle.
Plus: Challengers line up to take on Councilmember Jeffery “Jay” Young Jr., and SEPTA police officers get ready for their close-up.
49ers-Titans preseason game thread: It’s Kurtis Rourke time
Our first game thread of the 2026 season
Steelers vs. Packers: Preseason Week 1 open thread
The Steelers take the field for the first time in the 2026 season. Come join us!
AI needs science’s search history
“Actually, that’s where the gold is,” said Alasdair Russell, my graduate school friend who leads a pre-clinical genome editing group at Cambridge. He was talking about the winding road of science that is omitted from published papers. “When you’re discussing how to do the experiment, and why this way is better than another way, and what does the data really mean? I know what it shows, but what does it mean?” At RAAIS 2026, he described how his group has begun logging the twisting path of discovery as it happens, recording the verbal and written exchanges that normally disappear. Ideas become nodes in a living graph: they branch when a meeting produces two plausible experiments, merge when separate lines of evidence converge, and go dark when someone quietly stops pursuing them. In his implementation, one agent scores novelty, while another tries to learn “how scientists think and how they navigate through a complex world of data,” so that high-potential nodes can trigger deeper investigation. As frontier AI labs deploy agents toward scientific discovery, giving AI authentic scientific taste remains a trillion-dollar dilemma. The bottleneck is that the record we have kept for centuries of science might be insufficient to get us there. The experiments that never make the paper Peter Medawar, 1960 Nobel laureate and “father of transplantation,” asked in 1963 whether the scientific paper was a fraud, and answered yes: the form of the paper misrepresents the thinking that produced it. Sixty years on, the diagnosis is unchanged. A paper presents a clean progression from hypothesis to result to conclusion. Lost along the way are the unconventional theories, the abandoned or unaffordable methods, and the underwhelming and inconclusive data. It reads like a browser history with every dead end deleted: the ten open tabs, the four rephrased queries, the wrong turn down a subforum. All scrubbed, leaving one clean path from question to answer as the canonical path. What has changed since then is that the discarded material is now worth something. No high-impact journal wants these artifacts, but raw trial and error is the most likely source of the training data required to develop scientific intuition, or what researchers call taste. Earlier attempts to capture the discards were motivated by scientific integrity. The Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine launched in 2002 to publish rigorous studies that disputed established models or exposed ineffective treatments. Its archive preserved negative conclusions after they had become papers, rather than the live alternatives and arguments that produced them. BioMed Central closed it in 2017, saying the mission had been served now that other journals publish null results. A less generous reading is that in fifteen years it published around 200 papers because almost nobody wants to read a negative result, let alone write one up when it will not count toward academic tenure. AI models are different. Even an uninteresting negative result can be useful, provided it is labeled. Earlier this year, Anthropic put a version of this to the test. The company pulled 129 decision points from real Claude Code sessions between January and March 2026, showed models the work up to a human detour, and asked what should happen next. Claude Mythos Preview beat the human choice 64% of the time, while Opus 4.5 managed 51%. The comparison was tilted toward the models because Anthropic deliberately chose moments where the human decision had room for improvement. On 127 further scenarios where the human action was already strong, the models improved on it only about 20% of the time. The study was possible because Anthropic’s researchers work inside a tool that logs by default. The reasoning, detours and outcome are produced in the same working environment. Biology has no equivalent. Its reasoning happens in hallways, at benches, in Slack threads and on whiteboards, while the outcome arrives weeks later somewhere else. The record has to emerge from the work itself. Ask scientists to reconstruct it afterwards and we’ll create another polished account. Subscribe A log is not a label Before any of this becomes training data, a negative result has to say what failed. The first paper published in the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine examined 234 negative studies across five leading medical journals. Only 30% discussed statistical power, and half clearly defined a primary outcome. Tell a model an experiment failed, without telling it whether the assay was underpowered, a reagent had degraded, or the hypothesis was simply wrong, and it will learn noise with confidence. Decision histories have a second missing label too. When a lab considers five experiments and runs one, only the chosen branch returns an outcome. The other four are experimental counterfactuals. Researchers call this the selective labels problem: the data reveal results only for the actions someone chose to take. Such a record can teach a model to imitate a lab’s taste, but it cannot establish that the taste was good. It also smuggles local constraints into general lessons. A lab that never ran cryo-EM because it did not own a microscope teaches a model that cryo-EM is rarely the right call. Alasdair’s nodes preserve the candidate set, which is the necessary first step. To be useful, each decision record needs six fields: The evidence available at that moment, and nothing that arrived later. The candidates considered, including the ones dismissed in a sentence. For each candidate: the expected result, the confidence attached to it, and the cost in time and money. The route chosen, and the reason. What happened next. How the evidence changed the scientist’s view. These must be timestamped before the outcome, because hindsight turns uncertainty into inevitability. Disagreement also has to survive. Averaging three scientists into one clean rationale reproduces exactly the information loss we are trying to fix. But there is an obvious failure mode here. Once decisions are logged and scored, people log for the record post-facto. Anyone who has watched an electronic lab notebook fill up with retrospective tidying knows how quickly a research tool becomes a compliance exercise. A record that costs a scientist ten minutes of honest reflection per decision is worth far more than one that costs an hour of performance. A publication initiative called Registered Reports offers a useful starting point. Here, researchers submit their rationale, methods and analysis plan for peer review before the data exist, and the journal commits in principle to publish if they follow the approved plan. Nature has now expanded the format across every field it covers. This approach to paper writing timestamps intent before the outcome, but it freezes one plan. A useful search history must also preserve how the plan changed, which alternatives were rejected, when, and on what evidence. Subscribe Run the runner-up Autonomous labs show what happens when decisions and outcomes are connected in a loop. Liverpool’s mobile robotic chemist ran 688 experiments over eight days in a ten-variable formulation space. A batched Bayesian search used each result to choose the next experiments and found photocatalyst mixtures six times more active than the starting formulations. Every completed experiment changed what the system did next. The robot optimized within a goal and search space that humans had already chosen. It did not decide which scientific question mattered. So what this work demonstrates is narrower, but still useful: a search history pays off when the options return standardized outcomes quickly. Open-ended biology is harder because branches can take weeks and the discarded alternatives may never be run. Some exploration therefore has to be bought. Where two branches are plausible and the stakes justify the cost, a lab should sometimes run the runner-up. Otherwise the record captures what today’s scientists usually chose and stays silent on what they systematically overlooked. A funder could ring-fence a small fraction of a grant for the branch not taken, provided that the decision record and the outcome are both deposited. That costs money, but so does having every lab rediscover the same abandoned path. Test whether taste transfers When it comes time to evaluate if our new AI system exhibits taste, the comparison should run across laboratories and fields. At selected decision points in a live research campaign, we should freeze the six fields: the evidence, the candidates, expected results, confidence, costs and the choice made. Experts then rank the options before the outcomes are known, and those outcomes are checked independently later. We could give models one of two diets - papers alone, or papers plus decision histories - and ask them to rank the next experiment on unfamiliar projects. Then, we score information gained per dollar and week, calibration, and how quickly weak branches are abandoned. If histories improve choices only inside the lab that produced them, they amount to useful organizational memory. If they improve choices on unfamiliar problems elsewhere, Alasdair’s group will have captured something science has never managed to write down: a transferable record of taste. Until that happens, a scientific search history is a promising record, not yet a training set.
Game Thread: Reds (56-61) at White Sox (61-56)
Sean Burke and the South Siders host Cincinnati for a three-game series, kicking it off with Pope Night at the park.
Bluesky now lets you hide reposts from that annoying person you follow
You can also turn on post numbers for threads.
Are Madison's vintage shops Gen Z's new small-business boom?
These entrepreneurs in their 20s are selling old-school threads in physical stores, proving that online isn't the only way.
Monday open thread
Head to the comments section to share your thoughts and join the conversation. You can sign up for a commenting account below and we have full-time moderators to enforce the Community Guidelines.
Barcelona vs Nottingham Forest, Preseason: Live Thread
Join us for Barça’s next preseason adventure!
Drew Brees Pro Football Hall of Fame Induction Open Thread
Drew Brees takes his rightful place in Pro Football immortality today.
Shatema Threadcraft Receives the 2026 Victoria Schuck Award for "The Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy, and Morrisonian" -
The Victoria Schuck Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor the best book published on women and politics. Citation from the Award Committee: The committee found Shatema Threadcraft’s The Labors of Resurrection: [...]
Retirement doesn’t make your health benefits simpler. It makes them more complicated
On this episode of Fed Thread, we look at how federal employees can better prepare themselves for FEHB after retirement.
Shatema Threadcraft Receives the 2026 Ralph J. Bunche Award for "The Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy, and Morrisonian Democracy" -
The Ralph J. Bunche Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor the best scholarly work in political science that explores the phenomenon of ethnic and cultural pluralism. Citation from the Award [...]
Brewers 2026 Trade Deadline Discussion Thread
What will the Crew do at the deadline?
GameThread: Detroit Tigers vs. Athletics, 4:05 p.m.
Detroit Tigers vs. Athletics Time/Place: 4:05 p.m., Sutter Health ParkSB Nation Site: Athletics NationMedia: Detroit SportsNet, MLB.TV, Tigers Radio Network