NASA and Mamdani are proving that Americans are desperate to see their money spent in ways they feel good about.
This, however, is not the same thing as simply spending the money on things we would feel good about but never know happened. People need to be able to see it.
Huge congrats to my student Elle, who won an award for Outstanding Presentation at UAA's student showcase today for her poster "Accuracy, Bias, and Confidence in Two LLM Models When Queried on the Topic of Evolution"! So excited for her to get some well-earned recognition!
Again: for any big liberal donor who wants to funnel millions into fixing this country's politics, the ROI on buying any struggling paper and simply tasking it with doing real reporting on local news is vastly higher than the same $$ given to some group that does mass ad buys every election year.
Maybe now with Swalwell resigning California can gain a member of Congress who actually shows up to vote.
An excellent statement and what leadership looks like.
A powerful man sexually pursuing a young woman who works for him is oppressive. It immediately limits and reshapes her future to her detriment, whether she is physically forced into it or not. It’s coercion either way, and that is why it’s so wrong. It’s an abuse of power.
Close up with a beautiful nudibranch on a rocky reef. The lower half of the image is a palette of swatches made from the nudi's vibrant colours.
Once upon a time I just admired nudis and sea slugs.
But it was not enough. Now apparently I'm creating an R package to celebrate their colour palettes? 😅
First up, my Sydney fave, Hypselodoris bennetti.
#rstats #nudibranch #dataviz 🦑🐙🧪 #marinelife #invertebrates
Oh no. NSF Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) program shuttered.
This one leaves me winded. A good story from 2025 by @seattletimes-rss.bsky.social offers insight into what we are losing: www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...
Actually we should just give citizenship to every undocumented person in the United States who wants it. Walking over an imaginary line isn't some great moral atrocity. Making people live in the shadows as a permanent underclass absolutely IS.
What will happen to the 82 USFS experimental forests around the country? Many sites have decades-long experiments that are tracking how forests are changed by timber harvesting practices and climate change. As I say here, “you can't just pick up an experimental forest site and move it to SLC.”
Gas is San Francisco has been over $6 for at least two weeks.
"Mass immigration is good, socially and economically; is the single most significant factor in America’s current position as the global locus of commerce and culture; we’ve been lucky to have it; and we should want more," writes @felipedlh.bsky.social. newrepublic.com/article/2080...
And diverse!
It was my time in Berkeley after a suburban upbringing that made it so I can never live outside of a city or college town that is walkable
ICE ivan! "I understand there's a problem you need made a million times worse?"
Today's New Yorker cartoon, by Ivan Ehlers
I just got your book from the library today! So excited!
$2.45 billion NIH grant cuts and ~2300 terminated active research grants were DOGE'd in early 2025
Who were most affected?
www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....
Early career and women researchers
“Leave her alone! What are you doing?!”
ICE snatching a mom from her daughter in San Francisco’s airport (not a normal TSA function)
Post: www.instagram.com/reel/DWOaZoo...
San Francisco! Help me get the word out to your friends/coworkers.
I am hosting a screening of my PBS nature series LIFE UNEARTHED the day before it premieres. Tardigrades and bison and fireflies on the big screen!
March 31 at 7pm.
Get free tickets here: tickets.arielwaldman.com/events/order...
Chris Murphy: "We're gonna give Iran $14b to fund this war with the US? We're gonna give Russia billions to fund their war with Ukraine? We're literally putting money into the pockets of the nations we're fighting. We've never seen this level of incompetence in war-making in this country's history"
Anna's hummingbird hovering. Facing to the right. With a small ant on the tip of its bill.
Sometimes you just get that shot. Anna's hummingbird with a little friend, in my yard. Davis, CA. #birds #ants
OMG!
Also, I learned about the Yurok Tribe's live condor webcam, as part of their program to restore condors to the region. Great views of these huge birds!
(Condors are carrion eaters. The cams are focused on feeding locations.)
www.yuroktribe.org/yurok-condor...
🤮
Important: Rep Adam Smith, top Democrat on Armed Services committee, says every single Dem should be against appropriating even another dime for Trump's war.
"Hell no," Smith tells me. "No Dem should vote for this."
On the pod, he lays out his red lines:
newrepublic.com/article/2080...
The conservative Cato Institute is accusing the Trump admin of carrying out the largest fraud in the history of the immigration system — totaling $1 billion dollars.
The scheme allegedly involves taking processing fees from immigrants, then never providing the promised services.
City goals
Trend in transit ridership, Paris region, 2019–2026
Trend in car traffic on the Paris ring highway (in blue) and within the center city (in red), 2020–2026
Transit ridership in the Paris region is now 5% higher than it was in the pre-Covid period, as car traffic along the Paris ring highway & within the center city is 15 to 20% lower than pre-Covid. www.institutparisregion.fr/mobilite-et-...
This is astonishing—a rhetoric steeped so deeply in New York's ethnic history, in grass-roots urban progressivism, in the immigrant experience in the United States.
It's not "you should be in solidarity with others," it's "you always have been, we all always have been."
