I wrote a little thing about how we orient ourselves toward the moon, thinking with the work of @blmckean.bsky.social on neoliberalism
"Who gets to decide what future generations will see when they look at the moon through a telescope? Will there be a democratic process for deciding?" 🧪🌒🔭
Come join us! The University of Western Australia has two openings for Lecturers at Level B - one position is in Marine Biology, the other is for a Lecturer in Zoology. Both are teaching/research positions.
Position descriptions are here:
external.jobs.uwa.edu.au/en/listing/
Please repost 🙏
Should be challenged in court
I got the rejection email today. I didn't have any luck with the Australian Geographic photo comp this year. No need for sympathy. I'm used to it. It's very competitive. Here's one of my unsuccessful entries. A yellow-tailed rock wallaby at Boolcoomatta Reserve.
An Open Letter to Georgetown Students, In Response to Recent Announcements about "Generative AI" medium.com/center-on-pr... 🧪
This open letter to students at Georgetown university is extremely good
medium.com/center-on-pr...
Forecast synoptic charts showing ex-tropical cyclone Narelle abruptly turning left and potentially delivering >100mm of rain to southwest Australia, over the next 3 or 4 days
With no cold offshore upwelling system, the so-called mediterranean climate of southwestern Australia can just be broken by a whimsical tropical cyclone. It's almost as if ex-TC Narelle will track the warm Leeuwin Current down the WA coast 🧪
Better suited for a specalized journal
Tonight I'm reading a colleague's draft that is so fun and so creative and so subversive that it offers me some measure of reassurance that we will always be able to distinguish between the work of great scientists and the incremental-at-best output that large language models might someday produce.
those *are* perfect birds
In cold glacial climates, less water vapour evaporated from colder ocean surfaces. Thus the hydrological cycle (transfer of water from oceans to atmosphere to land) was indeed slower than today. But precipitation was not limited by a global lack of water. @tetzoo.bsky.social, @drgilbz.bsky.social
Something like 52 million cubic km more ice was stored on land than today, at the Last Glacial Maximum. But that's a small fraction of the ocean volume, which still held roughly 95% of all the world's water. There was no shortage of water "available for precipitation" because of large ice sheets. 🧪
In the Deserts episode of #BBC's new #Prehistoric #Planet Ice Age season, Ella Gilbert tells us that so much water was locked up as ice, and because “there’s only a finite amount of water on the planet”, so that less water was available for precipitation. This confuses a flux with a stock 🧪
Guardian headline: “Bob Carr, ‘a masterpiece’ and a hornet queer fantasy”
And this, kids, is why we need Oxford commas…
I'm not sure there is a functional difference between hallucinate/fabricate/err, in this context. Regardless what you call their errors, LLMs no longer fabricate scholarly references so routinely as they did earlier. But that improvement hasn't sufficed to make them dependable research assistants
I'm not sure if this is the kind of data you're thinking of, but this 1992 paper concluded, "Overall, light environments are similar to those found in other forests, both in New Zealand and elsewhere." newzealandecology.org/nzje/1912. Why do you think it unlikely to be a response to Moa browse?
Is it valid to ask what is the 'right' price for an energy-intensive, wealthy commodity-capitalist society to *pay* for cultural burning, given the currently perceived benefits (mostly maintenance of culture + fire safety + biodiversity/carbon)? It may be very good value for money. 2/2
I'm sure you're right about HS's cynical motives, but isn't there a real question: cultural burning was developed as an integral part of a non-commodity, non-wage labour, low-resource-use society. 'Payment' for CB was participation/maintenance of culture & safe, food-yielding landscapes. ... 1/2
Probably yes on one or two (if sooty mold is so pervasive, does that suggest that Pseudowintera colorata's spotty leaves are moldy mimics?) but the pattern I refer to is the dark veins, pale intervein areas, or more diffuse mottling, with areas of apparently reduced chlorophyll
Yes, one of them might be: but if so, does that imply that Pseudowintera colorata has evolved to mimic sooty mold?
www.inaturalist.org/photos/1181706
Lara Shepherd's wonderful paper on Alseuosmia mimicry just makes it weirder: "I'll just imitate several unrelated species, each of which has made itself hard for Moas to see". Large birds as apex browsers impose very powerful selective pressures on leaves.
academic.oup.com/evolinnean/a...
I guess visually-guided browsing during daytime by Moa, rather than aroma-guided night-time browsing by mammals, is the obvious evolutionary driver. But there's hardly a paper speculating on this.
More mottled leaves in New Zealand forests. This is a flora that pretends to be suffering from lime chlorosis
Why the conspiracy of silence about mottled leaves in the New Zealand flora
it's easy to see why it was confused with Licuala
A photo of an ice cream machine with a sign reading, "Anything is possible with ice cream." Beneath that is a hand lettered sign reading, "No ice cream".
2026 basically
correct, but no problem if you provide a citation
