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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

We are somehow approaching a political system where: 1) Every person who can tell true from false is united on one side. 2) That side still loses about one out of two elections.

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

I use a classic water-boiling humidifier (a Vicks). It's very cheap, needs no special water, and puts no particulates into the air. It acts as a small steamy heater, which would be bad if I lived in a hot dry place, but in my climate I only need it in winter anyway.

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

As a kid I wondered why Republican politicians didn't sound like the conservative Fox-watching New Yorkers I knew. Well, now they sound exactly like them.

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

Closer to home, Saturn's moon Titan has lakes of natural gas on the surface like water. Some people I've mentioned this to have been amazed that we don't just go get it.

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

> every Anglosphere user still on X airplane_with_red_dots.jpg

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

When a conservative has truly messed something up beyond recovery, he either says that thinking about it is unpatriotic, or that thinking about it is womanly.

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

Not necessarily magic. Sometimes the bad guys get lucky.

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

It could also be cowardice: waiting until he was fairly sure Trump was too weak to retaliate.

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

"Monarchies with endless time horizons" is a sentiment unworthy of a free mind.

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Bill @bill-of-lefts.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

This result is crazy. You finetune a teacher model to love owls. Then you have the teacher model generate a string of numbers, and finetune the student model on those numbers. The student model will then also love owls. alignment.anthropic.com/2025/sublimi...

alignment.anthropic.com

Subliminal Learning: Language Models Transmit Behavioral Traits via Hidden Signals in Data

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

Can confirm. My dad would bake these on Sundays with a crunchy browned butter top made of corn flake crumbs.

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David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

The US is the world's largest oil and gas producer. Yet, "China is now making more money from exporting green technology than America makes from exporting fossil fuels."

economist.com

China’s clean-energy revolution will reshape markets and politics

The world’s biggest manufacturer now has an interest in the world decarbonising

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

It makes sense if you assume there's no link between what politicians will do and what the marginal voter expects.

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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 29/10/2025

"A critical mass of people who decided the election were bamboozled by America’s horrendously broken information environment, and don’t like the results of their own choices." prospect.org/2025/10/29/v...

prospect.org

Voters Did Not Understand the Stakes in 2024 - The American Prospect

A large majority of American voters are greatly dissatisfied with the state of things, most especially the economy. It turns out that median voters were catastrophically misled about the stakes of the...

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 27/10/2025

More academic source describing Ford's wages from the perspective of his labor retention problems:

nber.org

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Super Shoe @shoe.bsky.social · 26/10/2025

The Fred Trump treatment. Give him a fake job while Miller draws up missile strike plans on fishermen.

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 26/10/2025

There's one way: hostile billionaires own most of the news and social media.

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 25/10/2025

I mean, it's understandable, wherever you see big buildings you also see high rents. It's like how wet streets cause rain.

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 24/10/2025

"Reviewing its legal options" aka "asking its shabby Supreme Court pals if they're ready to ban political speech yet."

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 21/10/2025

Come join me as a CBRN Research Engineer at Google DeepMind! NYC and Bay Area positions both available.

job-boards.greenhouse.io

Research Engineer, CBRN

New York City, New York, US

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David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 18/10/2025

Good news: carbon intensity has declined Bad news: carbon emissions increased, due to the rapid rise in world GDP Also bad news: the chance of staying below 2°C remained low, at 17% Better news: chance of going above 3°C has gone down substantially, from 26% to 9%

nature.com

Mitigation efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and meet the Paris Agreement have been offset by economic growth - Communications Earth & Environment

Global carbon dioxide intensity declined from 2015 to 2024 following the Paris Agreement, but total emissions still increased due to economic growth, according to a global analysis of population, gros...

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Marwin Segler @marwinsegler.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

Do you want to invent the future of Chemistry with us? We‘re looking for a "Digital Native” Organic Chemist to join our team at Microsoft Research AI for Science. We offer an amazing environment where you can do deep research with passionate and talented colleagues to solve problems that matter! 1/2

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 17/10/2025

Don't laugh, innumeracy is a real problem that affects trillions of Americans.

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

I think the median voter scorns Congress (with reason) and doesn't feel represented in the spending process either way.

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 12/10/2025

It has to be intentional. Looking stupider than you are is a major asset in US presidential politics.

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 10/10/2025

It would be nice if there really were a third rail of American politics, as opposed to some things that cost maybe 2-5% each in a polarized environment.

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

It's an absolutely cursed incentive structure for sure, but maybe we can get the doctors on board. For instance, a law that subsidizes all doctors' pay and also stops the AMA from limiting the doctor supply. There's no law of nature that says doctors' pay has to be set by supply and demand only.

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

I think you're right. If we paid doctors 50% more and got rid of the AMA, before long we would have a cheaper healthcare system overall.

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

The AMA causes a lot of problems, but isn't all doctor compensation in the US around $0.5 trillion? Whereas the healthcare system as a whole is ten times that. If doctors were paid half what they are now, the savings would be enough to offset healthcare inflation for about one year.

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

You're right. Total compensation for all doctors in the US is around 0.5 trillion dollars, compared to about 6 trillion for the healthcare system in total. If all doctors were paid half what they are now, insurance premiums shrink less than 4%.

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 05/10/2025

It reminds me of physicists saying that chemistry is solved since we know the Dirac equation, or a kid thinking they can open any combination lock once they know how to spin the dials.

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

Yes, exactly. And nobody but specialists seems to know about it yet. If we posted the price of solar cells by the side of the road like we do the price of gas, maybe politicians would notice that they have some rethinking to do.

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

I still recommend the book, partly because it's interesting to see what an intelligent person thought of these technologies not long ago. The world really has changed. www.withouthotair.com

withouthotair.com

David MacKay FRS: : Contents

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

I remember MacKay in his Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air (generally a great book!) say that the best way to use solar energy in Britain was to use the sun to grow grass and use the grass to graze sheep.

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

I found a strange match between periodic cubic splines and a certain integer series: instead of solving a linear system of size N, you would just use N terms. I suspect the number theory is known but the application is novel. Never published because the benefit is small for ordinary values of N.

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Marie Le Conte @youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com · 29/09/2025

regrettably if you try to point this out online you'll get yelled out by 79208 journalists going OH SO YOU WANT JOURNALISTS TO STARVE??? even if you're, say, a journalist yourself, and point out that while there are clearly no easy answers, the status quo isn't exactly working for society

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

The only problem with this is that it doesn't work. Conservative pseudo-Christianity is well aware of this line of attack and carefully prepares its members to defy the direct commands of Christ.

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

I agree, but it's important to note that this is easy to mess up. How often has the NY Times interviewed a "swing voter" who turned out to be a local Republican bigwig? It's easy for one's model of the marginal voter to be confused by prejudice and accessibility bias.

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

There are lots of persuadable Trump voters, but you can't tell who they are just by asking.

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 26/08/2025

"At long last, we have created the Chesterton's Fence Remover from the classic conservative allegory Don't Remove Chesterton's Fence."

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 26/08/2025

The strangest thing about these times is watching self-described conservatives trying to figure out which parts of the world are load-bearing using the sledgehammer method.

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Mark D. Levine @marklevinenyc.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

It’s much harder to build housing in Blue states than it is in Red states. So yes people are moving away from Blue states. One more reason that addressing the housing shortage in NY and elsewhere must be an urgent priority.

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James Stevenson @allaboutchemist.bsky.social · 24/08/2025

I felt rather betrayed when I learned that mineral sunscreens often work by means of "SPF booster" compounds like butyloctyl salicylate which are basically repackaged chemical sunscreens.

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