birds: they will never email you. and that’s a promise.

A recommended read by Hiranya Peiris:

"[we] had a quality problem long before LLMs...publish or perish, citation metrics as proxy for impact, volume as proxy for productivity... have been producing incremental, poorly checked, & sometimes wrong papers for decades"🧪🔭⚛️

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Same! When I lived in Calgary there was a random pharmacy that sold two-packs of KN95s in a bunch of fun colors. It was great if I had a special outfit (like for Halloween) that didn't work with my bulk-purchased black, white, or navy. I miss that place!

bsky.app/profile/cele...

I wish I had known how great it was even before 2020! The gross airport colds were mostly optional the whole time, but I just thought "well that's life, what can you do." 🫠

And if you'd like to join me in opting out of many sicknesses, my favorite masks are 3M Auras for long wear or major crowds (like air travel), and Kind or WellBefore for common use (like the grocery store). Even inconsistent use can let you skip a cold now and then, which rules!

This rather creepy photo is Artemis II’s heat shield underwater, as taken by the U.S. Navy. This is the first photo we have of the heat shield, and upon initial examination it doesn’t seem to have the char loss that Artemis I’s had.

Sometimes when I talk about how much masks improve my life, people mistakenly think I still want to be living in mid-2020.

No! That sucked! It was stressful and sad!

A main reason I wear & love N95s in crowded places is that I get to opt out getting sick while skipping the bad parts of that time!

💯

So much this 👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽

Can I recommend/plug “Between Two Rivers” by @moudhy.bsky.social to really highlight this point — we humans, connecting to humans in our deep past, who in turn were also connecting to humans in their deep past — through storytelling.

The machines can *never* do this.

How did we get seafloor emplacement/uplift in the Mid-Atlantic? Well, you can thank the Taconic-Appalachian-Alleghenian orogenic sequence that started during the Ordovician for that.

The closure of the Iapetus ocean fundamentally controlled the formation of what we now know as the US East coast.

We know how to get rid of congestion, and it requires you to do the exact opposite of this.

To the Moon and Back (Reese's Book Club): A Novel A Novel

If anyone is looking for a place for leftover Moon Feelings to go after Artemis II, I highly recommend the novel To The Moon And Back by Eliana Ramage. I just finished reading it and it was amazing!
bookshop.org/p/books/to-t...

The novel follows a character growing up on a reservation in Oklahoma who is determined to become an astronaut, while her relationships with the women around her interact with that ambition in a range of ways.

I started reading it a few weeks ago, and it was a great parallel to watching Artemis II!

To the Moon and Back (Reese's Book Club): A Novel A Novel

If anyone is looking for a place for leftover Moon Feelings to go after Artemis II, I highly recommend the novel To The Moon And Back by Eliana Ramage. I just finished reading it and it was amazing!
bookshop.org/p/books/to-t...

Super cool article about a possible correlation between Cascadia quakes and San Andreas quakes.

My favorite weird factoid about the 1906 quake is that it broke a teenage Ansel Adams’ nose!

Help, the calving front of my face is rapidly retreating!

Firing and jailing RFK is the moderate position

"Age at the speed of a glacier"... how can the name of an entire field of science have been trademarked by a skincare brand?!

www.boots.com/no7/no7-skin...

This actually kind of works if it's sunscreen: a staple in regular skincare and top of the packing list for glaciology field work.

naming your biology plagiarism machine after the most famous case of biology plagiarism is a very funny bit I must admit

do I know anyone who works in glacier calving? 🧪

Having lost the battle of ideas, their failures discarded by an evidence-based academia, white supremacists and other bigots resort to buying legitimacy.

Unfortunately, legitimacy cannot be bought, and the stench of cheating and corruption will follow these new positions.

Viewpoint diversity would be hiring someone at Associate Professor rabk from a small nonelite teaching school in the Plains. It'd be an actually diversity of view point, rather than political leanings within the same white elite upper coastal class. But cool, yo, hire some Nazis I guess.

Also, it's not every day that a science comes along, threatens to kill God (as the Victorians saw it), and took a society that only thought in terms of at most 6,000 years and made it think in the terms of 6,000,000,000 (and at the time, hypothetically *infinite*) years.

The Great Quake Debate: The Crusader, the Skeptic, and the Rise of Modern Seismology The Crusader, the Skeptic, and the Rise of Modern Seismology

If you like the history of high-stakes celebrity geology, you're going to love the absolute THROWDOWN between Bailey Willis and Robert T. Hill about the level of seismic hazard in LA. Modern rock star Sue Hough wrote a whole book on it:

bookshop.org/p/books/the-...

one of the hardest science topics is explaining to a modern person that in the 1800s geologists were more popular than streamers are today books exploring topics like the history of a rock were doing multimillion print runs, & guys giving talks on igneous vs metamorphic were filling sports stadiums

Hampshire College to close permanently after fall 2026 semester Emma McCorkindale

While Hampshire’s case is in some ways unique, it is amazing to think that in a single lifetime - about 70 years - the US founded the greatest public and liberal arts college system in the world and then destroyed it, to build prisons, give tax cuts to the rich, and own the libs

The acceleration of the closure of small liberal arts colleges is such a gut punch. These are often the kinds of places that are life-changing experiences for students, providing opportunities for exploration, connection, and learning outcomes that aren't possible at larger universities.

We need to think deeply about our responsibilities to future generations — globally — with respect to the night sky. Who gets to decide what they will see when they look through a telescope at the moon? Right now there are no democratic processes for that. 🌔🧪🔭

I am once again asking

Lockheed Martin built most of the Orion spaceship that just did the lunar flyby