What Would Baba Yaga Do?
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babayagaacolyte.bsky.social
What Would Baba Yaga Do?
@babayagaacolyte.bsky.social
450 followers 830 following 800 posts
PhD scientist, former academic, educator, poet/writer. Politics, gender, science, birds. They/them
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Only bc I've read other ppls descriptions of it. I think it's pretty common! I am lucky to never have had these kinds of dreams. And I grind my teeth in my sleep, too.
Big thing I noticed in students in 2010s was an allergy to hyphenated or compound words. Man-made becomes 'man made'. Worldwide becomes 'world wide'. Drives me nuts, I have to read it 4 times to understand
I would accept 'per say' as an alternate / modern spelling of 'per se'. We all know what you mean and we aren't all fluent in Latin. Spelling can evolve, we won't all die, it's fine

If you say 'for all intensive purposes' to me, though, I will judge you
These are such wildly different levels of wrong!

'Butt naked' may have arisen as a mishearing or deliberate mangling of 'buck naked' but it is now its own idiom alongside (not replacing) 'buck naked'

Whereas 'doggy-dog world' is unhinged nonsense
Not to be THAT dictionary, but…

It’s ‘per se,’ not ‘per say.’
It’s ‘dog-eat-dog world,’ not ‘doggy-dog world.’
It’s ‘hunger pangs,’ not ‘hunger pains.’
It’s ‘one and the same,’ not ‘one in the same.’
It's 'buck naked,' not 'butt naked.'
Reposted by What Would Baba Yaga Do?
Political parties must shift immediately and dramatically to the left to avoid alienating these frustrated and abandoned young women. Am I doing this right?
Our recent poll found that women 28 and younger skew substantially more left than the national average. Nearly 80 percent of Gen Z women want abortion to be legal and seven in 10 want gender-affirming care to be accessible for trans adults.
Gen Z women are the most liberal group in the country
On issues like abortion and gender-affirming care, women 28 and younger skew substantially more left than the national average.
19thnews.org
Reposted by What Would Baba Yaga Do?
Y’all here is a fun fact: Portland has a brand new volunteer organization called “operation inflation” that allows people to borrow inflatable costumes for protests. They just started a couple weeks ago and have like a 160 costume library (and counting because people keep donating).
OPERATION INFLATION
www.operationinflation.com
It's interesting to see the responses on this. Lots of people making good points.
interesting exercise, where do you land on this?
Yep. It's been more and more of a shitshow for like 30 years. By late 2010s I started counseling undergrads strongly against going to grad school, unless they had a firm nonacademic career plan.
...And all this was in a relatively less exploitative department, I would argue. Grad students were well paid and represented by a strong union.

There are endless horror stories from other places, like where I worked as faculty where it was generally worse.
I knew another woman who was some young hotshot's 1st grad student. He berated her endlessly for not working hard enough, complained about her to other faculty. She won a major award for her dissertation, did a postdoc w someone famous, landed a TT somewhere prestigious w $1M startup.
Every woman who rotated through that lab was taken aside and explained that to work there, they couldn't be the kind of women who got offended easily by sexist jokes and comments, if they were they should find another lab.

The PI was known for dating grad students, had a newish much younger wife
I knew a woman who learned a research method from a male postdoc in her lab & her advisor required her to put the postdoc as a co-author on her paper using that method. She also taught the postdoc a different method and asked to be a co-author on his paper & was told no..
Yeah. I knew women grad students who were full time lab managers and basically secretaries for their advisors, on top of their own research/studies, while male students in the same lab didn't have those duties and just focused on their own projects.
Yikes. Fits with my experience in US PhD program in the early 2000s - everyone is knew was on SSRIs. Mainly new prescriptions started in grad school.

In the US, PhD students are very exploited by their advisors and departments. Got to be a big factor.
Thread! Super important for all of us who are working on building muscle (esp us vegetarians!)

I've been drinking Orgain shakes and other protein supplements for years. Have to think twice now.
my latest investigation for @consumerreports.org is based on months of reporting and 60+ lab tests of leading protein supplements

we found that most protein powders and shakes have more lead in one serving than our experts say is safe to have in a day (🧵)

www.consumerreports.org/lead/protein...
Protein Powders and Shakes Contain High Levels of Lead - Consumer Reports
CR tests of 23 popular protein powders and shakes found that most contain high levels of lead.
www.consumerreports.org
I don't know, I am only seeing Bluesky people argue against them is the only way I know these thinkpieces exist. I have no idea what the problem is with protesters having some fun with it.
Portland thread. Because apparently thinkpieces are dissing the inflatable frog protester, for some reason.
What The Hell Is Going On, a thread:

I’ve seen some thinkpieces and posts about Portland protests that fail to understand the long-term hyperspecificity of Portland culture/humor, and frame it as a sort of shitposting meme-pilled ironic thing. Which is wrong.

So I’m gonna give you my breakdown.
Reposted by What Would Baba Yaga Do?
Sigh. Guess it's that one day a year we have to utter that assholes name.
Some friends and I discussed this after seeing the inflatable frog costume video. I think a big barrier is those fursuits are so expensive, no furry wants to risk it getting damaged or full of tear gas.

Inflatable animal costume army, though. ICE already seems pretty scared of those.
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ICE kidnapped a 7th-grader with a pending asylum claim and spirited him out of state without notifying his parents, seemingly with the cooperation of the local police in Everett, MA.

www.bostonglobe.com/2025/10/12/m...
Not me the ex academic who can't get a retail or admin asst job going down a statistician-Bluesky rabbit hole on a Monday night
This post is so interesting and helpful to explain that whole YouGov "Americans think 21% of the country is trans" thing that was going around. Spoiler: survey respondents were actually more accurate than expected.
A great post from @djnavarro.net, providing an accessible explanation of why statistics that can appear to reveal our ignorance may actually do the opposite. Makes excellent use of #datavis to provide visual support for the argument.

blog.djnavarro.net/posts/2025-0...
Some notes on probability judgement – Notes from a data witch
For the love of fuck, literally nobody thinks that 20% of the population is transgender. Please stop sharing that ridiculous YouGov statistic
blog.djnavarro.net