I will be in Brazil from Saturday to Friday (16-22 May) to present at Annual Meeting of the Brazilian Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. I will also spend a few days in São Paulo afterwards to visit the University. Feel free to get in touch if you’d like to meet/chat!

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• Calibrating for absolute microbiome abundances without spike-ins by de Wit et al. I mostly want to highlight this calculation: “[If you] sequence 50 million paired-end reads of 150 bp, you would end up sequencing 15 Gbp weighing 16.2 pg.” Somehow, it had never occurred to me to ask how much mass of DNA a typical metagenome represents. 15 Gbp is pretty typical and roughly 1pg/Gbp is a good number to remember.

• Day job link: The elusive resistome: a global comparison reveals large discrepancies among detection pipelines has been a long time in the making, but we have a preprint now: different antibiotic resistance gene pipelines return results so different that we can craft conflicting biological stories out of them!

• This earlier Rabbit Thought is was motivated by AMP detection, but also applicable to the problem of antibiotic resistance gene identification: Why are bioinformatics results so full of false positives? There is a market failure in our attention/citation economy where false positives are rewarded rather than punished.

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• Research has customers: “Researchers (and generally people marinating in mainstream culture) are awash with the idea that good research ‘deserves’ funding.” I think this often comes from the Busy Town1 model of the world, where there is a role called researcher (and butcher and taxi driver and …) and a good society will have someone filling each of those roles.

• This World of Ours: “Security people need to get their priorities straight. The “threat model” section of a security paper resembles the script for a telenovela that was written by a paranoid schizophrenic. In the real world, threat models are much simpler. Basically, you’re either dealing with Mossad or not-Mossad.”

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^I fear this may be very true. Average agency is over

^The culture loves the quirky accidental discovery, but most discoveries are the product of an industrial process that produces them.

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• Television and live sports. I liked these paragraphs:

  • Bars were critical to television’s early success. ‘More people see television sets in bars than would ordinarily see them in showrooms’, said the director of a Chicago station. ‘The bars are helping sell sets to private homes’. Although some bartenders complained that sports fans contented themselves with a single beer rather than multiple cocktails, most reported that television brought in more customers, ultimately raising sales. Sometimes a bar would place a large magnifying glass in front of the screen to make the broadcast more visible at a distance.

  • Amid widespread fears of ‘juvenile delinquency’, television promised to keep kids out of trouble. ‘There’s no juvenile delinquency here’, proclaimed an ad for TV sets, portraying a family seated around their living room console. [it seems kids were touching too much grass back then — Luis]

• Update on the new eLife model. Submissions seem to be down by a lot: “We received a total of 2,853 submissions in 2025 (compared with 6,396 in 2024 and 5,590 for Feb–Dec 2023).” I will eventually write my thoughts on the current publication system, but I just do not see the point of eLife’s model at all.

• Why is the sky blue?

• Day job link: We put out our quarterly update newsletter for March 2026. Focus was on Yiqian’s new preprint on urban soils.

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Spain blocking docker when there is football being played it too Spanish of a concept:

One of the best things you can do right now is train your intuition for what are LLM-shaped tasks. That is mostly just trying to throw more LLMs at more things

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• This reads like a reductio ad absurdum of the naturalistic fallacy: most teens seem to think that cigarettes are healthier than vaping because of “chemicals”. /ht on Twitter

• Very interesting on bank tellers and automation. Like JD Vance, I only knew the first half of the story.

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Very interesting math fact:

And this is a nice addendum

• A mushroom that reliably makes people hallucinate little people.

• The mundanity of excellence. I read this every few years, very good!

• School is worse than social media. Note that this is mostly about high school being bad. My general opinion is that primary school is good, grad school is good; in between, it’s dubious. Also, the social media moral panic is completely unjustified by the evidence.

• On that classical cookbook, Microwave Cooking for One: “[ T]he true frontier for microwave-only cooking [is] the Maillard Reaction.Around 150°C, amino acids and sugars combine to form dark-colored tasty compounds, also known as browning. For a good browning, you must rapidly reach temperatures well above the boiling point of water. This is particularly difficult to do in a microwave – which is why people tend to use the microwave specifically for things that don’t require the Maillard reaction. But this is because people are weak. True radicals, like Marie T. Smith and myself, are able to obtain a perfectly fine Maillard reaction in their microwave ovens.”

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Happy Year of the Horse, a story in three parts!

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• The uncertain origins of aspirin. I myself thought that willow bark tea was a traditional remedy in Europe and then someone at Bayer had figured out how to synthesize the same molecule. Turns out this is a very simplified view of what happened.

• Pessimistic results on involuntary hospitalization (including a very understated conclusion sentence). Mental health disabilities are one really hard problem in policy.

• Day job link: We posted our quarterly update newsletter earlier this month!

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I will be in Luxembourg through year’s end and in Lisbon in early January before returning to Brisbane. Feel free to reach out if you’ll be at any of these locations!

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• “Even in the medically well-equipped United States, Sin Nombre virus has maintained an astonishing 40% mortality rate.” [Eukaryote writes blog] — One can hope that this is an over-estimate from milder infections not being diagnosed

• If you hear fake watches, you probably think “fake thousand-dollar Swiss watches”, but apparently, there are also fake 15 dollar watches [H/T Tom Whitwell]. Related, see this history of the Swiss watch post-Japanese competition (interesting how new it all is).

• From the Psychology has always been fake archives: Oliver Sacks mostly made it up (h/t literal banana).

• Canada lost its measles elimination status. A big reason is that Mennonite communities have low vaccination rates. Part may be general religious distrust of secular authorities, but a big part seems to be a genuine language barrier: not enough medical professionals speak Low German.1

• I will fail on my 2025 goal of publishing 30 substacks! I started a market for 2026.

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