iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Yesterday I participated in my first (possibly last?😅) Hyrox, in the men’s open doubles. Hardest physical activity I’ve ever done. Really thankful for my Dad Bod Squad for motivating me to do hard things.

Selfie of me holding my Hyrox Boston patch

My Hyrox times:

Eric Perkins
Daniel Eldridge
1000M SKI-ERG
00: 04: 37
50M SLED PUSH
00: 02: 36
50M SLED PULL
00: 04: 56
80M BURPEE BROAD JUMP
00: 06: 20
1000M ROW
00: 04: 56
200M FARMERS CARRY
00: 02: 19
100M SANDBAG LUNGES
00: 05: 55
WALL BALLS
00: 09:10
TOTAL TIME
01: 46: 34
TOTAL RUN-TIME
00: 55: 49

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Now that I’m 50 it’s so hard to resist a Werther’s sale!

Multiple shelves of Werther’s Original candies on sale at the grocery store.

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

An AI cautionary tale told through some Claude screen shots and a few Slack messages, with some political editorializing on my part.

Me asking Claude how to spell "seventeen" and Claude getting it wrong.

Claude explaining why it couldn't spell "seventeen", with the closing line: "The fix, basically, is forcing myself to do the boring mechanical thing (spell it out, tag each letter) rather than trusting an intuitive-feeling answer."

My saying that based on the previous answer, AIs are Republicans.

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

I hope my donation is part of a bajillion dollars donated to the Imagination Library in her memory today.

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

The most important skill I will teach Claude today.

Screen shot of a Claude "saved skill" that says: "Got it--Oxford comma from here on. I saved it as a standing skill, so it'll automatically apply whenever I create or edit any document, deck, spreadsheet, or other written content for you going forward, not just for the rest of this conversation.

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Enjoying seeing some familiar faces while representing @addgene.bsky.social at the 2026 United States Culture Collection Network! #USCCN

Me standing next to a banner that reads: UNITED STATES
CULTURE
COLLECTION
NETWORK
A Central
RESOURCE
For Microbial Culture Collections and their
Users
ion Network O
addgene

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

Whether Argentina wins or not, at least Messi got a LEGO kit out of it.

A LEGO kit for assembling a large Lionel Messi

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

The most entertaining urinal I’ve ever used. GOOOOAAAAL!!!!

A urinal with a green mat, a small white soccer goal, and a little plastic soccer ball you can pee in to score a goal.

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

This year’s sand sculpture in Sankt Peter-Ording. Real crab on top for scale.

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

Yesterday, a group of fellow middle-aged friends (aka The Dad Bod Squad) and I finished a Spartan Super 10K. I ended up running well over 10K due to a few penalty loops for obstacles I couldn't quite finish. This is how my mid-life crisis is manifesting, and I'm okay with that😅

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

You may have to zoom in a bit to see it, but on my morning walk to work I discovered a scenario that perfectly embodies a pessimist’s view on life.

Photo of a street with two signs on each sidewalk. The sign on the left sidewalk reads “Sidewalk closed, use other side” with an arrow pointing across the street. The sign on the sidewalk across the street simply reads “Sidewalk closed”.

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

Who can guess what science concept I was trying to convey to my daughter with this hastily drawn sketch?

A hand drawing of a circle with some lines in the perimeter with a column of rectangles curving towards it, with some circles at the top of the column.

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

All of my work notebooks for the last several years have been science-themed (from Cognitive Surplus), but only this one has caused a kerfuffle with a few arachnophobic colleagues 😬.

Cover a notebook that says “The Biology of Spiders”, featuring several photorealistic images of different spider species.

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

Read the intro to @chanda.blacksky.app’s new book while waiting for her to speak at Harvard last night, and these two paragraphs alone should convince you that this is a book you need to read.

Cover of Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s book The Edge of Space-Time

Excerpt from intro:

When it's at its best, physics is a kind of poetry, a story about the cosmos that is made from metaphors-and a producer of metaphors in its own right. I believe that seeing the universe through the perspective offered by physics strengthens our ability to understand what work metaphors are doing on us and how we might wield them. It is in this sense that physics works on us like poetry: a way of understanding the world that provides insights not available to us elsewhere.
This helps us see why we should bother with it. We should bother with physics because it is, in part, how we as a species learn to use our minds. We should learn and teach poetry, physics, algebra, and other abstract ideas because they train us to think in symbolic and figurative terms. The same goes for calculus and quantum mechan-ics. And if we cannot learn to think in and through the abstract and the symbolic, then we are pliable. We are sitting ducks for the fascists and authoritarians who will use us for their ends, and their ends are ultimately catastrophe for the rest of us. That's always been true, and it always will be.

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 25/04/2026

My 13yo is currently at a Model UN summit at the actual UN in NYC with other 6th-8th graders and these are the subtopics for discussion in one session 😲. If she understands what all (or any?) of these things mean, she is way more politically savvy than I am.

Piece of paper taped to a board with the following hand written on it:

SUBTOPICS:
Technological Unemployment and Labor Disruption.
3 Bridging the Digital Divide for SME Inclusivity.
3 Blockchain and FinTech for Trade Financing.
4 Cybersecurity, Data Sovercignty, and Geopolitical Tensions.

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

This piece by David William Silva sums up a lot of my thoughts about AI much better than I ever could have. substack.com/home/post/p-... This section in particular articulates my biggest fear when people tell me they used AI for "creative thinking". It's not brainstorming. It's pattern recognition.

The Brainstorming Test
I have used AI many times as a brainstorming mechanism, a sounding board for early-stage ideas.

And here is what I’ve found: every time I had an idea that was genuinely outside the box, AI discouraged me from pursuing it. When I persisted, it didn’t just push back, it practically begged me to stop. To not continue. To not insist.

Think about what that means. The tool that everyone tells you is “creative” and “revolutionary” is architecturally incapable of doing anything other than averaging what already exists. It is a statistical summary of the past masquerading as a window into the future.

When it tells you your unconventional idea is bad, it’s not evaluating your idea. It’s telling you that your idea doesn’t resemble the data it was trained on.

That’s not intelligence. That’s pattern-matching with a confidence problem.

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

I left my lunch bag in the lunch room and a co-worker brought it to me, saying “I figured you were the only person here who wouldn’t be too embarrassed to bring this to work.” Hell yeah—I’m hungry like the wolf.

A pink and blue hued lunch bag featuring two howling wolves on a star field

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

My sister dropped a bunch of stickers in my Xmas stocking and I confess I had not looked at all of them very closely until now. Anyway, my sister is the best😂

A sparkly sticker with roses that says “Thou may ingest a satchel of richards”

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 14/02/2026

I can’t stop thinking about this paragraph from Kaveh Akbar’s “Martyr!”, and saddened by the fact that the government can’t even get the “don’t be shitty” part right.

WHEN ASKED ABOUT THE DIFFICULTIES OF SCULPTURE, MICHELAN-gelo said, "It is easy. You just chip away all the stone that isn't David." It's simple to cut things out of a life. You break up with a shitty partner, quit eating bread, delete the Twitter app. You cut it out, and the shape of what's actually killing you clarifies a little. The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: Don't lie, don't cheat, don't fuck or steal or kill, and you'll be a good person.
Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not.
But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That's the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands. A rich man goes a whole day without killing a single homeless person and so goes to sleep content in his goodness. In another world, he's buying crates of socks and Clif bars and tents, distributing them in city centers. But for him, abstinence reigns.

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

My sister works in HVAC and just sent me this text. I’d be a big proponent of any and all public buildings having a Wiggle Room. Or, for the oldsters like me, a Nap Room.

Screen shot of a text that reads “A library we're working on has a little room off the children's section called "Wiggle Room". I presume for the nuggets who can't sit still through story time.” Followed by a blue print of a library with the designated Wiggle Room.

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

Behold the half ass sidewalk clearing I experienced today in Watertown, MA. It was a very tight squeeze, and I’m not a big dude. Do better New Englanders.

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

My daughter is only 16, but she already possesses a lifetime supply of lip balm (this pic just shows the top of layer of three).

A plastic drawer filled with 40-50 lip balm tubes f various colors and flavors.

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

Could I give a talk about CRISPR benefits and risks? Sure. Could I give such a talk in *German* like my 16yo tomorrow? Absolutely not.

Poster with the title “Genmanipulation mit CRISPR: Weltrevolution oder unabsehbares Risiko“

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 08/01/2026

Though I have very mixed feelings about AI images, my co-worker's very rapid rendering of my Slack rant this morning is frighteningly accurate.

An AI comic book-style rendering of my Slack message this morning of my looking at at an Apple laptop and saying "OMG, that OS update erased all my Chrome windows and hundreds of tabs AND the history, so I can't restore them! I had a system...I HAD A SYSTEM!"

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 28/11/2025

My Thanksgiving to-do list vs. my friend’s. Outcome was the same—we both fed a bunch of people. But whoo-doggy did we use different tactics (and, okay, his probably tasted better)😆

A messy hand written list of Thanksgiving staples

A detailed spreadsheet breaking down Thanksgiving meal prep into 5-10 minute increments.

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

My wife, in Germany for a landmark birthday, has never used emojis in her text messages before. I guess she just needed the right occasion 😏

A text exchange with the words “Thanks! I hope you’re enjoying your last day of being in your forties!”

Followed by nothing but a crying face emoji.

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 23/11/2025

Five pounds of butter is probably enough for Thanksgiving, right?🧈🧈🧈🧈🧈

Several packages of butter in a freezer door

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

Just a few days in to our building’s food drive. I’m sorry for the necessity, but grateful for the generosity of my colleagues.

A food drive poster next to shelves full of non-perishable foods.

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

I wasn’t sure what to draw for today’s #inktober2025 prompt, “Skeletal”. Then I saw how long last night’s World Series game lasted and the answer was obvious.

A crude pen rendering of a Dodgers fan and Blue Jays fan as skeletons.

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 25/10/2025

I picked up racing bibs for another family who will have to miss the 5K tomorrow, and one of the daughters is missing out on being the most popular runner there. IFYKYK

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

Just letting the AI know I don't need it for a dopamine release, thanks.

Screenshot of AI exchange:
In the future, you do. not need to preface responses with statements like "You're absolutely right". I don't need that kind of validation from AI.

Response: Understood. I'll skip those kinds of prefatory statements.

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

So glad my son is eating responsibly in college🤨

A plate with orange colored chicken wings and some mashed potatoes. A text that reads: Today 23:01
This is the type of thing they only pull out at the dining commons after 9 PM. Like any sane person my first time eating Nashville hot chicken wings will be at 11 PM

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 10/10/2025

My thanks to the @bostonglobe.com for reporting on this story and giving me a new life goal.

Picture shows an older couple sitting next to each other at the base of the John Harvard stature. Headline reads: A couple was booted from a Boston concert after they couldn't prove they were of legal drinking age. They are 64 and 70.

Further text reads:
A late summer evening concert at Bowery Presents was supposed to be the culmination of their weeklong vacation in Boston.

But the couple, aged 64 and 70, were kicked out of the venue for drinking without ID proving they were over 21.

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 09/10/2025

I pointed out to our product designer that I thought it was kind of crazy that Claude (an AI tool) has a logo that basically looks like a butthole. He said I was certainly not the first person to notice: velvetshark.com/ai-company-l...

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

I like the Slack Donut app that schedules short chats with co-workers you don't normally spend a lot of time with, but I do NOT like it proposing to have coffee at 5 on a Friday. It might as well say "Let's make sure your colleague gets to talk with the absolute worst, most tired version of you."

Screen shot of a Slackbot that says "To help make this meeting happen, a calendar event was created for Friday, October 10th at 5:00PM"

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

I’ve been doing #inktober2025 (despite my lack of drawing skillz), and I just want to point out that in today’s sketch (prompt: starfish), I made sure Patrick’s torn appendage included a section of his central disk. You know, for biological accuracy.

Patrick Star with an arm torn off. The arm has its own face. Caption reads “Patrick makes a new friend…the hard way.”

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

I’ve been casually enjoying John O’Connor’s “The Secret History of Bigfoot”, but today I read the sentence “Dudes, let it be said that the joys of human fellowship can seriously harsh my mellow.” And now I feel very seen.

Cover of the book The Secret History of Bigfoot, by John O’Connor.

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

With an administration that apparently hates both science and women, my drinking glasses feel pretty friggin’ punk rock right now.

Four pint glasses featuring the women scientists Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Marie Curie, Alice Ball, and Mary Anning.

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

My late mom would sometimes speak to my sister and me in a made-up language of her youth called “Ob”, which consisted of putting “ob” in front of every syllable in a word. This is how my sister addressed her birthday card to me this year. I’m 49, and my Ob name still makes me smile.

The hand-written name “Oberobic Poberkobins”

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 24/08/2025

Spotted a new collector’s item at the grocery store😏

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 22/08/2025

I’ve been trying out @hankgreen.bsky.social’s Focus Friend app this week, and so far I really like the following: - My little bean guy has a butt crack. - Having to press a button to “Stop Focusing” disincentivizes not focusing. - My phone screen time legit went down this week. Progress!

A carton bean knitting, a timer, and a “Stop Focusing” button.

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 09/08/2025

One of the features at the fundraising event we attended today was simply “Dirt Pile”. Very New Hampshire. And hey, I can tell you as a NH native, I had a lot of FUN playing in dirt piles as a kid.

A list of booths and small attractions, with the following circled: DIRT PILE/ Kids Dig & Slide/ Have FUN in the dirt!

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 07/08/2025

How many situations can I apply this Andrea Gibson quote to this year…I would have lost count by March.

OUR INSANITY ISN'T THAT WE SEE PEOPLE WHO AREN'T REALLY THERE.
IT'S THAT WE IGNORE THE ONES
WHO ARE.

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 06/08/2025

One of these five things is not a giant zucchini that was foisted on me.

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

Mmm, nothing says “beach food” like a bucket of greasy, sugary donut holes.

Sign for a 50 ct bucket of Dunkin munchkins, in a pile of sand with the label “beach ready”

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 07/07/2025

My family of five brings home a LOT of chocolate from Germany when we visit my wife’s family there. When we arrived home last night to find our AC broken and the house a chocolate melting 98F (36C), we decided the fridge didn’t really need any *real* food in it for a while😆

A full size refrigerator filled with various German chocolate and marzipan

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Eric J. Perkins, PhD (he/him) @allostericsite.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

At long last, I’ve solved the mystery of what happened to Mayor McCheese—he left politics and moved to Germany. Smart move, really.

A poster for a children’s performance in Germany featuring several whimsical characters, including some of with a hamburger for a head.

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