Kevin Bonham
@kevinbonham.com
990 followers 1K following 660 posts
Assistant Professor at Tufts Medicine studying microbes, brains, and the immune system 🚽🦠🧠 Fermenter, gardener, Zen Buddhist. Ask me about #julialang! 🎙️: https://audiommunity.org 🌎: https://blog.bonham.ch 💻: https://GitHub.com/kescobo
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
Reposted by Kevin Bonham
bioturbonick.net
Hey @massgovernor.bsky.social , what are you doing about this?
caitlindeangelis.bsky.social
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...
Everett 13-year-old arrested by ICE and sent to Virginia detention facility
By Marcela Rodrigues Globe Staff,Updated October 12, 2025, 44 minutes ago



31
A 13-year-old boy was arrested by ICE in Everett and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia.
A 13-year-old boy was arrested by ICE in Everett and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia.
A 13-year-old boy was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Everett after an interaction with members of the Everett Police Department and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia, according to his mother and immigration lawyer Andrew Lattarulo.

The boy’s mother, Josiele Berto, was called to pick her son up from the Everett Police Department on Thursday, the day he was arrested. After waiting for about an hour and a half, she was told her son was taken by ICE, Berto told the Globe in a phone interview.

“My world collapsed,” Berto said in Portuguese.

From the police department, the boy was taken to ICE’s holding facility in Burlington on Thursday evening, where he spent a night before being transferred by car to the Northwestern Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Winchester, Va., on Friday morning, his mother said. The juvenile facility is more than 500 miles away from Everett.

The boy is a 7th-grader at Albert N. Parlin School in Everett, his mother said. The teen and his family, who are Brazilian nationals, have a pending asylum case and are authorized to work legally in the United States, Lattarulo said.
kevinbonham.com
"fundamentally, the premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone."

Any institution planning to capitulate needs to articulate why they disagree with this. Powerful message from MIT 🧪

orgchart.mit.edu/letters/rega...
Regarding the Compact | MIT Organization Chart
orgchart.mit.edu
kevinbonham.com
Typst is the #julialang of typesetting languages - I hope to never write LaTeX again!

Now, if I could only convince my bio collaborators to use it for manuscript writing + git version control 🤔
typst.app
We need your help to get Typst 0.14 over the finish line: The release candidate with accessible PDFs, character-level justification (not even in LaTeX!), and more landed today! Check your documents, packages and against "Typst 0.14.0 Testing" on the web or the new compiler.
kevinbonham.com
Ah yes, I remember this chapter in that science philosophy classic "Conjectures, Refutations, and Making Shit Up", by Karl Popper (1962) 🧪

archive.org/details/karl...
Reposted by Kevin Bonham
drugmonkey.bsky.social
"We're doing the studies to make the proof."

This is not how Gold Standard Science works. Or any science. You do the study to TEST THE HYPOTHESIS, not to prove yourself right.
atrupar.com
RFK Jr on Tylenol and autism: "It is not proof. We're doing the studies to make the proof."
kevinbonham.com
Make complex shapes in inkscape! Video 4 in an ongoing set of tutorials - using Inkscape for scientists 🧪

youtu.be/7SfNC-QCDQQ
Inkscape for scientists 4 - Complex shapes
YouTube video by Kevin Bonham
youtu.be
Reposted by Kevin Bonham
carlzimmer.com
Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE
nyti.ms
kevinbonham.com
Reviewer 1: I didn't believe it will work

Reviewer 2: she's certain it will work, so clearly not ambitious enough.
Reposted by Kevin Bonham
heran.bsky.social
If it wasn't clear, this ad is for tenure track Microbiology faculty at the assistant professor level😬
Reposted by Kevin Bonham
simi.bsky.social
Finally announcing Bonito.jl! 🎉 A Julia web framework that went from "neglected prototype" to something I'm genuinely proud of.

Reactive UIs, rich widgets, Makie integration, deploy anywhere (Jupyter/VSCode/web/static HTML)
makie.org/website/blog...
kevinbonham.com
I mean that's clearly a macrophage...
sholtodavid.bsky.social
Recent MDPI paper including diagram of a bacterial cell with a mitochondrion 🤦‍♀️ The authors propose a mechanism for the toxicity of silver nanoparticles: "Ag+ ions in AgNPs bombard the bacterial mitochondria’s electron transport chain, resulting in cell death".
kevinbonham.com
This has been roughly my experience. I don't have nearly the same Open Source maintenance burden as Chris, but I've found claude code is fine for simple tedious stuff, but not great for anything complicated.
kevinbonham.com
Is each chat a separate mind or are they each ephemeral thoughts that contribute to the whole?

In some versions of Buddhism, "reincarnation" is just that in each moment, we are dying and being reborn, as each thought arises and passes away.

(To be clear, I don't actually think this about LLMs)
Reposted by Kevin Bonham
drugmonkey.bsky.social
This administration once claimed they were going to make sure grants were only funded on pure merit.
kevinbonham.com
It's probably more involved than a skeet thread will accommodate, but I think there's something about evolving with bodies in the world that led to consciousness. Intelligence or complexity alone won't do it.

But that's just a guess.
kevinbonham.com
What I mean is, people seem fixated on intelligence or creativity or other things to try to hold humans apart. But AI systems might reach or surpass humans on all of this and still not be conscious.

And AIs may already be smarter than some animals who are nevertheless more conscious.
kevinbonham.com
Heh, there *are* people that think pebbles are conscious (en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsyc...). I am not one of those.

I definitely don't think it's impossible for machines to be conscious, and I think a lot of the objections to LLM consciousness miss the point quite profoundly.
Panpsychism - Wikipedia
en.m.wikipedia.org
kevinbonham.com
... like self-awareness etc, but it won't actually have any experience - the proverbial philosophical zombie. We're tuned to find agency in everything, including rocks and the weather, doing the same for something that talks back will be much easier, even if there are no lights on upstairs
kevinbonham.com
The problem is much more fundamental - we don't know if LLMs are conscious because we don't know how to look for consciousness.

That said, I think the bigger danger is something that convinces everyone that it's conscious by appearing to have the things we *think* consciousness is needed for...
kevinbonham.com
Comprehension of inputs and self-awareness are not actually consciousness, though.

I would argue that we don't really comprehend our own inputs (eg we don't see wavelengths, we experience color), and there are plenty of creatures that I'd argue have consciousness that are only dimly self-aware.
kevinbonham.com
I hope my rep @whipkclark.bsky.social and senators @warren.senate.gov and @edmarkey.bsky.social are keeping this in mind - lots of MA jobs in biomedical research (including mine) on the line, and that's just the economics of it.

I don't know how we'll recover from the loss of generations of talent
Reposted by Kevin Bonham
erinrgreen.bsky.social
Job alert ‼️ UChicago Micro is hiring! Open to tenured/tenure track faculty at all levels in any area of microbiology. Come join our amazing and growing department. apply.interfolio.com/174404
kevinbonham.com
Lol, "negotiate?" With what leverage, exactly?
azfaust.bsky.social
A couple of related-unrelated thoughts that have swirling in my head:

1. This is a bad time to become a new PI in the US. Probably the worst since WWII. If you're negotiating for a position, know your road is way harder than it was for the people on your TT committee. Negotiate accordingly.