We had a memorial service when they reclassified Spartina to Sporobolus.

I can't explain how, but I am absolutely convinced a Chalamet is also some kind of weird vegetable.

Labor Secretary is Lori Chavez-DeRemer is out. He really is going to speed run firing all the women while Hegseth, Patel, and Kennedy just keep swimming.

Like the olde AV Club, but heartfelt features about that snail I just saw.

Ok, hear me out: Bring me on to write just completely earnest natural history articles about neat ocean things.

Avengers: Endgame was such a unique theatre experience that Marvel has been failing to recapture for 8 years.

Big leadership changes today for Tim Apple *and* Tim Onion.

This is the most accurate use of Smalltimore in the history of Smalltimore.

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.

With the help of the Sandy Hook families, The Onion has reached a long-awaited deal to take over InfoWars.

We've enlisted the help of @timheidecker.bsky.social, who will be InfoWars' Creative Director.

Please stand by for more.

The Smallest-timore.

Casual FYI that the Tyson family's chromium processing plant in Baltimore gave a lot of people lung cancer, and Dr Anna Baetjer's discovery & proof of this causation basically established the field of environmental toxicology

At the time, Tyson had a near monopoly on chromium production, was the world's largest chrome pigment supplier, and had expanded his operations to England. It would be pretty noteworthy if Van Gogh's yellow pigments hadn't originated from the Baltimore Ultramafic Complex.

It's going to be almost impossible to make a direct connection between Van Gogh and Baltimore Chrome Works and specific paintings, but we do have extensive documentation of where Van Gogh bought his Chrome Yellow pigments, from a vendor in France.

WHAT!!

How presidential elections are impacted by a 100 million year old coastline | Deep Sea News Hale County in west central Alabama and Bamberg County in southern South Carolina are 450 miles apart. Both counties have a population of 16,000 of which around 60% are African American. The median ho...

Yup! @drcraigmc.bsky.social has the all-time best write-up of this phenomenon: deepseanews.com/2012/06/how-...

That house turned out, after years of exhaustive records searching, to be the original Tyson estate. That civil engineer was my dad.

Friends, the moment I learned that I had grown up in the house where this whole wild story begins, in the middle of researching it. What?

And here's the wild, wild coda:

In the late 1960s, a young civil engineer was contracted to demolish an old, run down county house on the edge of Baltimore City and build townhomes. But the house looked older than the records and he decided instead to buy and repair it.

Van Gogh's The Starry Night

So yes, there's a little bit of Baltimore and a little bit of half-billion-year old hydrothermal vent in The Starry Night.

That chromium would become coveted among artists for it's vibrant yellow oil paints. Including a certain Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who painted sunflowers and star-filled skies.

The Tyson family built their estate atop this chromite deposit. By complete chance he only two people who could identify it lived on top of it.

Tyson would found the Baltimore Chrome Works and become the world's leading producer of chromium.

Isaac Tyson Jr. was the first university trained chemist in America, his gardener had previously worked in a Russian chromite mine. Together, they were the only two people in the entire country who could identify this relatively unknown mineral.

A wild thread:

490 million years ago, the seafloor which would become the city of Baltimore was a serpentinite-hosted hydrothermal vent complex.

Those vents laid the ultramafic structures that would, in 1812, be discovered as America's first chromite mine.

This take totally erases us absolute degenerates who enjoy chilling at the airport for a few hours before a trip.

Very lumpy looking sample of a dark mineral or rock about 3 inches across.

Some people special to me donated their lifelong collection of rock and fossils to the department. One item stood out... I've never held one and rarely seen one for sale. Can any of my geology friends identify it, and explain why it's important in our science?

My car can do a half marathon way faster than that.

I mean, yeah. It's piracy when it's a non-state actor. Otherwise, it's War. Which is... worse.

I am enjoying the Dungeon Crawler Carl books.

The Hopkins family also kept naming people Johns. There were like three Johnses Hopkins who were entirely separate people.

You'd think I'd play Deepkin or Carcharodon, but I contain multitudes.