The crescent moon rises in a blue sky above the Ho Science Center building whose windows are illuminated in the dark.
Experiencing a little #moonjoy outside of the Ho Science Center @colgate.edu. A late evening on campus helping students put the finishing touches on their senior thesis presentations.
Kind of weird to have an LPSC2027 save the date with no location. Is it in Texas again? Will abstracts that suggest broadening participation in planetary science is a good thing be discouraged again? If the answer to both is yes, I think my response might be, "When is DPS again?"
This is why I cancelled my subscription to WaPo and sent that money to The Atlantic and The Economist. So far, they have not been as thoroughly enshitified.
Parody image of the proposed DC triumphal arch featuring a white stone arch with large golden figures on it. The text reads National Participation Trophy.
Parody image of the proposed DC triumphal arch featuring a white stone arch with large golden figures on it. The frieze has a large blank area for writing your preferred message on the proposed arch.
New Commission on Fine Arts renderings just dropped for the National Participation Trophy, er, #DCarch.
Blank on left has a nice big frieze you can write whatever you like on. I recommend Times New Roman (the boringest font) and the Photoshop bevel effect. #monuments #DC #Architecture
A brown latticework of small mudcracks mades of irregular polygons with dark lines between the polygons.
Happy little mud cracks from the Alvord Desert playa at the end of a cracked-up week. #drones
Spring is coming, change is coming. Audio on for peepers! 🐸
As Ben Franklin said, “Those who would give up the liberty of not having masked thugs terrorizing their cities, to purchase a faster trip through PreCheck, deserve neither respite from masked thugs terrorizing their cities nor a fast trip through PreCheck. And definitely not CLEAR.”
It’s an abdication of reporting responsibility when @NPR reported yesterday that Americans “most affected by the shutdown” are people stuck in line at airports. I think it might be the dead, wounded, terrified folks in cities targeted by ICE & CPB who were are at the front end of the shutdown.
It feels like the subtext of recent reporting on long TSA lines is that it’s the Dem’s fault for holding firm on unmasking ICE agents and requiring judicial warrants for searches before agreeing to fund DHS. That reporting slant is just gross.
A photograph of a bicycle's inner frame with a wrapped burrito in the water bottle holder.
I thought most bikes already came with a burrito-holder as standard equipment.
I have a joke about winter conditions in Antarctica, but it's kind of dark.
The best laugh from #LPSC yesterday came from a grad student, who, when asked during Q&A why they used a simple apparatus instead of a complex one said, "Well, in-line gas humidifiers are *really* expensive" but then explained how their simple solution produced new opportunties for 🧪 measurements.
For my money, I think they'll find both more jokes and more receptive audiences when they head to AGU. #Geoscientists are a funny bunch and are usually a pretty receptive audience. A great talk is like an IgNobel prize winner: "first [it] makes you laugh, then [it] makes you think.”
Hot new paper with cool results—using apparent thermal inertia to study permafrost and landforms in Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys. Come for the bedrock mapping, stay for the discovery of a possible new paleo-lake basin and channel spillway! ⚒️🧪❄️
doi.org/10.1080/1523...
Central NY folks, DST got you down? Then mark your calendars to spring forward into science with the inaugural Science Pub at Lower Lake Brewery - April 2 at 7 pm. I'll be talking about road salt contamination of local water supplies & ecosystems. Come for a beverage, stay for science discussion! 🍺🧪
Looks like an incipient "puzzle rock" with those joints slowly failing and the chunks ready to fall.
If your idea of abundance is a robot to make you a sandwich, you might not have a very clear idea of how many hands it takes and how many resources are involved in getting that food into your fridge in the first place.
It seems like many of the industries that produce the most life support (farming, mining, caregiving) are also some of the most labor intensive and lowest margin. There's RoI if you automate a chip-fab or a iPhone plant. But is there the capital or the technology to automate real arduous labor?
So, the great contribution of LLMs to human civilization is going to be ... more science fiction writing?
I thought the only choices were still, sparkling, or scrumpy.
1585 days is a long trip, but you can't beat the gas mileage.
Well played!
I guess they fired the graphics team at the Washington Post, too. That first icon is freestyle snowboard, right? Then cross country-skiing while angry, and Star Trek transporter accident.
How far does the glitter plume extend out into the gulf? And will it serve as a major marker bed for future stratigraphers?
Cold deserts are dominated by physical weathering, not chemical weathering, you say? Check out new work in @geosociety.bsky.social Bulletin showing evidence for aluminosilicate weathering in Antarctic #wetlands & #groundwater. doi.org/10.1130/B386... ⚒️🧪❄️🧪💧🧪 Starring @colgate.edu student scientists!
I've got 3 great undergrads presenting their work at LPSC before they graduate in May, but I won't be presenting myself. I'm there to support them & promote their work. If you've got a student going to the meeting who needs a supportive audience to help their science grow, hit me up!
On the other hand, it is good to resist atomization, to get together to organize, to talk great science, and to support our students.
I shared this yesterday without comment because, on the one hand, it's good to resist censorship, to resist complying in advance, and to resist forces making our country and its states unwelcoming (and even dangerous) for visitors and for members of our own scientific community.
There's going to be so few people at LPSC57 that they may have to rename it LPSC28.5.
It looks like ~1,000 accepted abstracts for #LPSC2026, down from >2,000 in 2023 (typical range seems to be ~2,000 ± 300 or so).
www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lps...
