I knew having kids would change my life, but I wasn’t ready for Spotify to pack my recommendations with 98% white noise and nature sounds

📊New research published in #ERCL - in the 'Focus on #ClimateChange Informed Catastrophe Modeling to Support #ClimateRisk Management' 🌧️Bayesian spatiotemporal nonstationary model quantifies robust increases in daily extreme rainfall across the Western Gulf Coast: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

Broke: I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing Woke: I want AI to fill out when2meet / doodle / calendly polls so that I can complain about bad papers on social media

Controversial take: every statistical analysis you do doesn’t need to be an R package. Packages should be infrastructure and set a very high bar of software engineering for them. To disseminate your analysis, just make some well documented templates and tutorials

What a clear, concise summary of the state and potential of renewable energy technologies. I particularly like how @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social includes the fact that nearly two-thirds of primary energy gets wasted today. Burning fossil fuels is a very inefficient way to provide useful services.

How exciting is research according to...

Grumpy take: you cannot just write in your methods section "we used X software", you should cite and note the software but you still need to explain what the software is doing and why it's a good choice

Talk about a profoundly shredded moral fabric

This country won't get serious about climate change until we're honest about flood and fire risk and insurance to match. Imagine if Camp Mystic had been required to carry liability insurance in the event that its campers were flood victims. Those cabins would have been moved years ago.

I understand everyone wants to cover the tragedy, but I would MUCH PREFER to be part of a public discussion of flood warning systems and safety BEFORE the next horrific disaster happens than AFTER. As long we remain uncomfortable with proactive safety measures, people will keep dying.

Early warning systems work. Early warning systems are crucial. This camp lost no one. See next skeet for quote. apnews.com/article/texa...

But this does illustrate a few tragic and uncomfortable truths. The first is that even quite good weather forecasts do not automatically translate into life-saving predictions--there's a lot of other work that has to take place to contextualize the forecast and ensure it gets to right people.

#Flood modelers: lots of chatter RE soil profiles in "flash flood alley". Do we really think floods would have been meaningfully different if you dropped that much rain on those hills, but they had more/deeper topsoils? Of course the effect is not zero, but not convinced it's big.

Based on some of the reactions and comments I am absorbing by average people and elected officials, I think there needs to be a serious explanation and lesson on what the limits of predictability are for floods like the one in Texas.

And don’t remove observational capacities and cut funding to weather forecasting agencies and then blame them for “faulty” forecasts!

Horrific things are happening along the Guadalupe River right now. Absolutely devastating for the families of everyone missing. I'm skeptical that we're going to build our way out of experiencing major flooding with 15+" rain on hilly terrain. Instead, we need...

I feel like I'm losing my mind. Here is the transcript of what Zohran Mamdani actually said about the phrase "globalize the intifada." This is his "refusal to disavow it." This is what has people terrified. Just fucking read it. Source: podscripts.co/podcasts/the...

My latest feature is out: As the world has warmed, the regional flaws of climate models have grown apparent. Meanwhile, methods to localize the results of models have proliferated. It all leads to lots of uncertainty -- within a very certain global trend. And cities need answers now.

🔴⚠️⛈🇦🇺Unprecedented rains, almost 500mm in three days for some towns, have hit #NewSouthWales with floods that involved 50000 people. #Australia declared the natural disaster for the state.⬇️#Sentinel1 animation of the flooded area covering 160km2.

We are living in one of the few times in human history where you can buy a loaf of bread and if it says it’s made with wheat flour and salt and yeast and water and nothing else, it’s probably made from just those ingredients, and some people want to END this.

“Hey Meta, give me the shallow illusion of a personality” is my favorite ad campaign right now

NSF cancelled our flood justice network today. I’m of course devastated. But the work will continue. We were already creating a network and we won’t stop now! @socialpixel.bsky.social P.S. there’s nothing woke about creating solutions for communities that flood. And saves the govt money!!!!

QEPD

Lots of other things going on and geopolitics is way beyond my expertise but glad to see some mainstream folks pushing back on the disturbingly widespread desire for another Cold War overcast.fm/+ABLShO7PaNM

The plan “…eliminates NOAA's Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) Office and its 10 research laboratories and 16 affiliated Cooperative Institutes…one only needs to see what NOAA research has provided to the U.S. taxpayer and imagine where we would be without…” www.ametsoc.org/ams/about-am...

Cancelling an excellent scientific program because their findings are displeasing is NOT a good sign

An extraordinary separate dissent from Justice Jackson accuses the majority of trying to pass off its dirty work under the cover of the shadow docket and explicitly invokes Korematsu, the Japanese internment case. Wow. www.documentcloud.org/documents/25...

If I have no representation do I still have to file taxes?

The story of this man's abduction and deportation to a brutal El Salvador prison, without any due process—and apparently by mistake!—is the stuff of nightmares, literally ripped from some dystopian fiction. Kafka or Orwell. Or Stalin's Russia. Hitler's Germany. Or apparently, Donald Trump's America.

The frustration when you agree to review a paper because the abstract seems relevant and exciting, but then you download it and it's more 😬

Yes, I am aware that AI is often incredibly inaccurate, and that these powerful assholes knowingly use it as an unaccountable and inscrutable force to validate whatever they wanted to do anyway, that is *literally the point I’m making*

If you are visiting the United States, having a negative view of Trump is enough to get you denied entry. If this was coming out of Russia or China, we would deplore such an authoritarian attack on freedom of expression.

Scientists have just cured pancreatic cancer in some patients with personalized mRNA vaccines. Pancreatic cancer. And this Trump administration wants to throw it all away. They’re throwing away a cure for cancer.

I'm a researcher primarily in adaptation. We are not even adapted to where the climate is today. If you think you can seawall your way through a 4°C planet, you are straight up dreaming. Mitigation AND adaptation, or you end up with way more of option 3 for dealing with climate change: suffering.

Instead of listing my publications, as the year draws to an end, I want to shine the spotlight on the commonplace assumption that productivity must always increase. Good research is disruptive and thinking time is central to high quality scholarship and necessary for disruptive research.

No one writes uglier LaTeX than a team of brilliant computer science professors 😆😆😆

If that’s a 11th minute red in a European knockout match it’s time to stop watching sports on TV and focus on our rec leagues

This should terrify every person in this country. The use of machine learning systems to approximate an individuals views on war and then, if they are here lawfully on a visa, tag them for deportation is about as sci-fi dystopian as it gets. www.axios.com/2025/03/06/s...

Over half of US forestry imports (lumber, plywood, etc) currently come from Canada. Cutting off that supply leads to increased housing costs (more expensive to build), increased insurance costs (more expensive to repair) and felling protected forests in the US to try to make up for it, apparently.

Unchecked discretion in spending money appropriated by Congress transforms the Executive into a pipeline of patronage: Drastic cuts in services, then exceptions in exchange for loyalty. Which is precisely why the framers, with care and vision, guarded the power of the purse for Congress.

This nails down well my unease with (what my academic friends tell me is) the ubiquity of AI cheating in schools. It's not just that lots of students don't have a problem cheating, but that they've apparently bought into a very sad, anemic idea of what education is for. thewalrus.ca/i-used-to-te...

“Hey, let’s lock other countries into an infrastructure that’s so inferior to modern alternatives that my own, rich country with huge political support for coal hasn’t built a new coal plant in over a decade”

Romanismo >>>

Is Ivan Juric the first ever to be worst coach in two different leagues in a single season?

The now-confirmed and rumored additional cuts to come at NOAA/NWS are spectacularly short-sighted, and ultimately will deal a major self-inflicted wound to the public safety of Americans and the resiliency of the American economy to weather and climate-related disasters. 11/11