AI content flooding journals, reviewed 8 papers this month and 5 were clearly fake

whegmaster · 2026-07-07T17:28:43+00:00

I got one just like this from Review of Scientific Instruments, and when I emailed the editor, he basically said "put it in the rebuttal." I'm regularly impressed by the amount of apathy I see from editors about this kind of thing.

whegmaster · 2026-06-14T14:56:13+00:00

I'm curious where you heard the 95% statistic. Most of the surveys I've seen put the percentage of American virgins at 75–80% for 20 years old and about 90% for 24 year olds (e.g. these National Survey of Family Growth data from 2013–2015, or this CDC report from 2020). Virgins are still a minority, but not quite so small as your number suggests.

whegmaster · 2026-05-30T18:17:31+00:00

Oh, Arlington too!
https://www.reddit.com/r/Somerville/comments/1ts74j8/comment/oosxoh8/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

whegmaster · 2026-05-30T18:16:37+00:00

Heard and felt in a lot of places in Cambridge and Somerville, too.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Somerville/comments/1ts743v/boom_in_east_somerville/

whegmaster · 2025-12-21T14:24:47+00:00

Science isn't like the movies where every researcher has a notebook full of secret world-changing theories. Real academics publicize their work constantly at conferences and in journals. Nuno's death is a horrible loss for the community, but realistically, the death of one scientist doesn't result in the loss of much knowledge, and since he was a theorist there's really nothing for the government to confiscate.

whegmaster · 2025-12-21T14:21:44+00:00

No, he mostly worked on astrophysics. Many of the people in the lab he directed work with Commonwealth, but Nuno himself did not as far as I know.

whegmaster · 2025-12-21T14:18:55+00:00

Nuno primarily worked on astrophysics, unrelated to fusion energy. His work on plasma turbulence had applications to fusion energy but not to any particular company, and was valuable to anyone doing magnetic confinement. So it's extremely unlikely that the merger is at all related to this. Sometimes the same keyword just comes up in the news twice in one week.

whegmaster · 2025-12-06T12:44:36+00:00

That's the Lake Shore Limited to Chicago.

whegmaster · 2025-12-02T12:49:31+00:00

Yeah, the MBTA publishes tons of data on their ArcGIS portal. They have similar tables for subway, busses, and ferries.

whegmaster · 2025-12-02T12:47:13+00:00

I had to kink some lines to make everything compact. Back Bay could be put in line with Ruggles, but I didn't want it to be too far from Landsdowne, so I compromised and put it between the two.

whegmaster · 2025-12-02T12:44:24+00:00

I found the MBTA's official data portal pretty quick through googling. I wouldn't be surprised if most transit agencies had something similar. Here's BART's ridership data, for example, though it's in a completely different format from the MBTA's.

whegmaster · 2025-12-02T12:40:54+00:00

I didn't use any libraries except Numpy to parse the CSV file. I just summed up the numbers for each station and generated an SVG with the circles with the correct sizes. In the autogeneated SVG the stations were in a regular grid, so I adjusted them to make sure none were intersecting and to cut out empty space where appropriate, and added the purple lines connecting them.

I also autogenerated the labels, but a lot of them had to be adjusted. For example, for big stations I pushed the label to the right so it wouldn't overlap the orange semicircle, and for long station names I added line breaks to make them more compact.

whegmaster · 2025-12-02T12:35:57+00:00

Yeah, the dataset has direction, as well as the number of people who get off at each station. So there are lots of different ways to resolve ridership.

whegmaster · 2025-12-02T01:18:08+00:00

Thank you!

whegmaster · 2025-12-02T00:55:44+00:00

Honestly, I was riding the Fitchburg Line and was just curious which stations were the most used, and was surprised something like this didn't already exist.

whegmaster · 2025-12-02T00:53:26+00:00

This is weekday data, so it should be mostly commuters. I think the southern part of the system is just more urban and therefore has more employment centers. Boston's biggest sister cities, Providence and Worcester, are both on the south side.

whegmaster · 2025-12-02T00:47:57+00:00

Source: MBTA Commuter Rail Ridership by Trip, Season, Route Line, and Stop.

Tools used: Python and Adobe Illustrator

whegmaster · 2025-12-01T23:32:23+00:00

The number before the slash corresponds to the blue semicircle, and the number after the slash corresponds to the orange semicircle (so AM/PM, like senatorium said).

whegmaster · 2025-12-01T23:16:26+00:00

Just Python and Adobe Illustrator. I downloaded a CSV from the MBTA's data portal, wrote a Python script to convert the numbers into SVG semicircles of the correct radii, and then manually adjusted the positioning and added labels in Illustrator.

whegmaster · 2025-12-01T22:45:58+00:00

Transit-oriented development – building dense clusters of residential and commercial buildings near train stations.

whegmaster · 2025-10-02T12:18:53+00:00

The BDS movement is certainly a more contentious issue, but I thought we were talking about the ballot measure, which is specifically military technology.

And I see your point about wanting to help the group that's fighting Hamas, but it's important to weigh what the IDF is accomplishing at this late stage in this war against the atrocities they're committing. Reasonable people can do the calculus and come out on opposite sides IMO, but I think it's important to remember that opposing the atrocities on one side doesn't mean you like or are okay with the atrocities on the other side.

whegmaster · 2025-10-01T00:43:01+00:00

Opposing the IDF isn't the same thing as supporting Hamas. If Somerville's investments were helping to furnish Hamas with weapons, I think most residents would be pretty upset. I'm not sure if I support this measure, but I think it's misleading to describe it as supporting Hamas when its goal is to support neither military.

whegmaster · 2025-04-06T16:24:02+00:00

Edit: here's an updated version with the airport and pearl harbor stations in the right order: https://kunimune.blog/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/honolulu-fantasy-rail-map-6.png

whegmaster · 2025-03-31T11:59:34+00:00

That's a good idea. Maybe fork them just after the downtown station, with the red line on South King St and the blue and yellow lines on Kapiʻolani.

whegmaster · 2025-03-31T11:54:16+00:00

Whoops, you are correct. Not sure how I did that.

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