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We can try again 😂

Welcome! One of my favorite meetings 😊

Fellow northeastern organismal types, I hadn't heard of this conference before but it's really great. Seems especially friendly for students, and lots of conservation/non profit folks are here for networking, etc. Also a big teaching/pedagogy representation!

NEBS is in Burlington, VT at the Northeast Natural History Conference! The wildflowers are in bloom outside and the presentations and posters inside are fantastic. If you're here, come stop by and visit our table!

Honestly I would love a whole 30 uninterrupted minutes

Grad school: to be successful in a future career you're going to need to focus on THIS ONE THING for the next 5 years.

The actual career in question: you can't focus on one thing for more than 30 minutes at a time and you have to keep switching between 1000 things endlessly

"I. This is not a game.
II. Here and now, you are alive."
- Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

The Moon: oh wow you guys decided to come back

Artemis II crew: earth’s haunted

Hey y'all. Love all the love for the program (we're pretty proud of it too). But the fact that the solicitation is archived does NOT mean that the program is shutting down. We're hanging in there, struggling through the uncertainty with everyone else.

Fiscal Year 2027 Budget Request to Congress

I am shocked to see this language from the NSF.

“The U.S. National Science Foundation's Fiscal Year 2027 Budget Request reflects a strategic alignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment while eliminating woke and weaponized grant programs that previously funded radical DEI projects.”

Every term without a fault an undergrad tells me "I spent 2 hours on this problem and you identified it in under a minute", and every term without a fault I answer "it took me over a decade to identify it in under a minute"

This is exactly what happens when you work in natural history collections. That one weird specimen you find after hours of sorting specimens stands out because you have amassed info from previous specimens, compare it, and you put it aside. cont'd
#biodiversity #SPNHC #archives #museum

This is so, so well-articulated.

Ink drawing of four ravens in a trench coat. "RAG is an add-on to the underlying LLM model. Commercial LLMs are more like many models in a trench coat than a single AI"

Working on a lesson about the perils of LLM-based scientific search.

Oh nothing, just a peer reviewed paper my colleagues found...
doi.org/10.1016/j.ma...
"1 mL of the mass killing of an ethnic group was opposed to 20 mL of the skin sample and unprotected to light for 7 min."

Even AI knows what's wrong here, but @elsevierconnect.bsky.social doesn't.

Discworld QOTD, from Feet of Clay

Student: "so what is a species then?"
Me: You're not allowed to ask me that for two more weeks

Ew

The danger to my job from AI isn't that AI can do my job, it's that my job is made even more precarious by the way AI is shaping ideas of the value of work. It can't do my job, but it can be part of convincing people (incorrectly) that my job isn't necessary.

increasingly believing much of the communication gap between LLM Enthusiasts and LLM Skeptics on this website boils down to “are you someone who has largely experienced a *reasonable* amount of job security in tech, or are you someone who has not experienced job security and likely aren’t in tech”

I think a lot of people who are well-intentioned LLM boosters who have been able to fairly reliably find well-paid work in tech really do struggle with putting themselves in the shoes of people working in other sectors that have been feeling precarious for a long time and now feel WAY more so

This gives me an opportunity to yell about one of the coolest museum studies I've ever seen: using BIRDS to quantify pollution

Bird specimens from the early-mid 20th century are literally more grey from the sheer level of pollution!!

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

This is Fine: Studying Intersectional US Environmental History While it Burns Around Us It is really hard to focus on the work in front of you when your field is burning around you.

This week on EHN: Adrienne Brown reflects on doing #envhist #envhum in 2026

Bugs in a box-an analogy We can make a physical analogy (if a somewhat fanciful one) by considering a box containing hyperactive, indiscriminate, voracious, and insatiable bugs. We put k bugs into the box. They run about without paying any attention to where they are going. Occasionally two bugs collide. When they do, one instantly eats the other. Being insatiable, it then resumes running as quickly as before. It is obvious what will happen. The number of bugs in the box gradually falls from k to k - 1, to k-2, as the bugs coalesce, until finally only one bug is left. The analogy is actually fairly precise. The number of pairs of bugs that can collide is k(k - 1) /2. If there are 2N "places" in the box that can be occupied, the probability of a collision will be proportional to k(k - 1)/4N. The size of the population corresponds to the size of the box. A box with twice as many "places" will slow the coalescence process down by a factor of two. So a simpleminded physical analysis of the bugs-in-a-box process will have the Kingman coalescent distribution as the probability distribution of its outcomes.

Thought I would share this famous analogy from Felsentein’s book I just re-stumbled on. Just in case you’re bug in a box and missed it 😜

Barry Commoner on the cover of Time magazine Feb. 2, 1970

13/ Today's environmental movement largely understands the crisis as rooted in political economy, not population.

But Ehrlich's instinct didn't disappear. It resurfaces in eco-fascism, green anti-immigration politics, the persistent urge to blame the poor.

Commoner's work isn't done.

We are experiencing an extremely rare maintenance issue at BUILDING REDACTED. Basically, the building thermostat is not working properly. It is set to 216 degrees F. To give everyone an idea of how hot it is, the cold water in the kitchen lounge on the second floor is hot to the touch and the metal door hardware is hot to the touch as well.

Holy shit y’all I just got an email I’d like to nominate for the "Wildest All-Faculty Email" Hall of Fame

BUTTERFLIES AND PLANTS: A STUDY IN COEVOLUTION Click on the article title to read more.

Paul Ehrlich has died. Most will remember him for "The Population Bomb." But for many of us, Ehrlich and Raven 1964 was a foundational read that influenced our careers. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

One reason many people hate ‘AI’ is because they instinctively understand that this is how it will be used. (And you should read the whole 🧵)

It's the funding of taxonomic research & training that's dying out. Without an ability to identify life forms, we can't recognize/quantify invasions & extinctions and their impacts on ecosystems. Imagine trying to repair a complex steel structure if you can't distinguish different types of bearings.