Yep. That's how I do it. I don't mark them off for coming up with wrong answers. It's purely them being there and engaging.

Pup has a name!

Another consequence of the snow days:

I've had more students withdraw from my class than ever. Like 15% of the class or something like that.

I usually have very low DFW rates so this is very sad.

After consulting with my students, I chose to fill these points with multiple-choice and short-answer questions that cover the entire semester...which led me to realize that I'm extremely out of practice with writing multiple choice questions.

Thanks to the eight (!!!) snow days we had this semester, there were a couple of topics that we didn't get to, which meant that there are 25 points' worth of material on the final exam that we never covered.

Microplastic fiber from a soil sample in Granville OH.

Microplastics in local soils on our SEM.

Wow.

Chatgpt is the opposite of a disability aid. It induces the very problems it claims to help.

It doesn't help autistic people communicate, it makes it *significantly harder* to understand text due to badly and sloppily altering its meaning because it has none.

I give people full attendance credit if they show up to 80% of the classes.

It used to be 100% attendance = 100% points, but I had students who were too sick to be there (and infecting other students) just to maximize points and... yeah, not good.

If you are asked
(and you will be asked)
why you are still masked
tell them someone told you:
“it helps keep you
and your community safe
from COVID19, flu
and other respiratory illnesses,”
and if they ask:
“who told you that?”
calmly reply with;
“yes, the WHO told me that.”

I kind of think this is an important point to reiterate. It's never "rockets vs science." And sometimes (like with the Artemis II mission), there is science that can piggy-back on missions where enabling human spaceflight is the primary goal. The proposed science cuts are just about cutting science.

Those things are horribly addictive.

Aerial photo of a river.

In honor of #EarthDay2026, we are showcasing three Community Science articles that feature #participatoryscience efforts to address environmental concerns.

Each paper below focuses on the lifeblood of Earth: the #water around us. 🌊

(🧵1/4)

#OurPowerOurPlanet #AGUPubs #OpenAccess #OpenScience

Me: "Hey, snow is mostly gone, and it's a beautiful evening; time to get the ebike out of storage and go for a ride."

Ebike: "Guess who has two flat tires?" *wink wink*

Or, hear me out, you can ask the help feature to show you how its done in the same natural language and evade the kinds of errors produced by spicy autocomplete.

The meaningful innovation is being able to query the program in natural language, not having the error prone machine do it for you.

Relatable

This is why Vought didn't want to tell Congress how much the war is costing us last week. We're going bomb broke.

The only problem higher education has are the reactionary cowards who are overrepresented at the highest levels of university leadership.

Advice for @erc.europa.eu :

Prohibit the use of LLMs for grant writing. Let applicants sign a declaration that they have not used such systems and that the text is written by them and them alone.

OK, we are having interference and/or reagent prep problems today, kinda wish I'd just cancelled class.

Will I do that for my afternoon class? Not sure.

I was just realizing that after we are done working with chemicals for the semester, I can wear a dress or skirt to work if I so desire!

Today is not the last lab period of the semester, but it is the last period in which we do actual chemistry.

This brings with it both a sense of relief and a tinge of sadness.

Fake Daily mail headline. We blame migrants so you don’t blame billionaires

Your regular reminder that cops don't actually justify their existence or enormous budgets by solving much crime.

Approximately 11% of all serious crimes result in an arrest, and about 2% end in a conviction.

And then there's this...

SAVE Act Fails, Millions of Voters Retain Their Right to Vote for Now MONTGOMERY, Ala. – The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) applauds the U.S. Senate’s rejection of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act, a sweeping anti-voter legislation pushed ...

Good. I'm glad it failed.

Now, who voted to stop it? Those Republicans maybe deserve to keep their jobs.

Ahahahaha OMG *sob* it's true.

This Is Just To Say

I have turned off
the AI features
that were in
the update

and which
you were probably
hoping
to monetize

Fuck you
they were stupid
so unnecessary
and so annoying

I am still torn as to whether it is incompetence or malice or a mixture of both

I definitely remember faculty meetings where a particular science faculty member (not naming them here) were saying faculty should have more institutional data....just sayin'!

FAA Chief Dumps Millions in Airline Stock Months After His Ethics Agreement Deadline Bryan Bedford held a multimillion-dollar stake in an airline company his agency oversees.

Not enough people are talking about this.

The head of the FAA, the person whose job is to oversee the airline industry, failed to divest his MULTIMILLION-DOLLAR stake in an airline company his agency regulates.