Bsky is a sports app now!

I just woke up from a nap and somehow while I was asleep, everyone on the bus has figured out we are not going to the right place

If you’re not following @musicologyduck.bsky.social you’re missing the wildest live thread I’ve seen in ages

it is -10 here today. I was supposed to go do a volunteer shift standing outside loading groceries into people’s cars to deliver to families stuck at home. just got a call not to come in because they have too many volunteers already. if you were wondering if the cold would stop us.

Respectfully, I am going to whisper to some of our white comrades a truth that should be more widely known: You definitely have some ancestors to be proud of, ancestors who refused white supremacy, and poured out their lives in many of these struggles over time. Time to claim your true history.

Query! In my class, I assign this Stephenson paper on planet diversity to start a conversation we continue through the semester. However, it's old (2004) and that field has progressed. Does anyone know a good, more recent paper in this vein? physicstoday.aip.org/features/spe... #planetaryscience

A thing that is just a constant annoyance to me is that a huge theme of The Western Canon is welcoming strangers into your home. Like, the entire Odyssey is just a series of dudes telling Odysseus and Telemachus "I am obligated to feed and shelter you for three days before you tell me who you are."

This dude is intense and correct

Can I quote this in my Teaching Statement for faculty applications?

boy that gyre sure keeps getting wider

I go back and forth on "In My Life" (makes me cry), "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" (good while crying), and "Across the Universe" (peace after crying). But also like 20 others.

I think I have a new favorite teaching eval comment: "holy christ this is the best course ever i love remote sensing" This might actually make me cry, wtf.

Job application complaint: Why do you have a specific upload link for a PDF of my professional references and then, on the next page, also ask me to type in their contact information? What are we even doing here? (this feels more egregious to me than requiring a CV *and* typing a job/edu history)

Got to hold Greenland as a bottleneck to prevent invasion from Europe! /s Of course, Iceland provides the same bottleneck and prevents the opponent from getting the European command bonus... ///s

Imagine if others advertised like Copilot... Bank: Your balance may be wrong & money lost Doctor: My care might injure or kill you Car Co.: This car might just stop working or explode

Martin Peterson's creative response to being banned from teaching Plato (shared with his permission).

Spectacular footage of pyroclastic flows at Semeru Volcano in Indonesia in November: ⚒️ youtu.be/rybUgYtvVFM?...

The “prosecute the former regime at every level” candidate has my vote in 2028.

EXTREME FOG in Chicago. As long as this doesn't lead to me sleeping in O'Hare again, it'll be okay.

Another Onion article going directly on my corkboard at work.

And sorry, I’m not tryna throw darts at you in particular Dan. Just, I see threads like this annually from faculty; 99% are some version of “why didn’t applicants follow the unwritten rules we never told them about their CVs, letters, emails, publication hist, etc.” I think about this stat, a lot:

forget the long arc of history bending towards justice, I need the rube goldberg machine of inexorable consequence to endgame the kind of profoundly ironic yet blackly hilarious karmic downfall that would’ve had ancient greek theatergoers hollering at the chorus

I’ve been thinking lately about how all children learn how good and wise America’s constitutional structure is: three branches of government, checks and balances, etc. And then in the real world, they just roll over to whatever Trump does. The idea feels almost quaint at this point.

...Now seems like a good time to draft impeachment charges.

For the past ~5 years, my friends and I have done a book bingo. You can try for just a bingo or, like me, for a cover-all. This year, we added an additional challenge of every book being written (or translated, in my case) by a woman.

If you make your job application due on January 1st.... ....Why?

2025 Year in Review! -falcon hearing worse than ever -center losing 50 to 100% of holding capacity -blood-dimmed tide containment failure -the Worst with record high passionate intensity

I met with my former middle school's robotics team* to talk about use of robots in earth and planetary geology and pursuing higher education in STEM. They were a bright group of kids, and it was a lot of fun! *my former middle school has a robotics team???

I am hip to the memes of modern youth. (In the time it took me to post this, this is no longer the score.)

You can tell that LotR was written by an academic because Gandalf disappears for like 20 years doing research to answer a single question.

Kīlauea volcano erupting during the holidays is all the festivity I need. O come, lava fountains, effusive and triumphant, O come see the volcano eeeee-ruuuuu-uuuup-ting! 🌋

I'm not a Swiftie, but based on this preview, I'm gonna cry so much if I watch the full thing.

Shared on behalf of the USGS: YVO Yellowstone Caldera Chronicles for December 22, 2025 #volcano #earthscience #geology #science The story of the Gallatin Range—magnificent mountains northwest of Yellowstone Caldera www.usgs.gov/observatorie...

Doing my final grading of the semester. The coffeeshop is playing "Linus and Lucy." We're grooving.

A related issue is LLMs take the enjoyable work of discovery and learning an turn it into administrative work of verifying everything. The characteristics of the work change into something many of us tolerate more than enjoy. If I wanted to be a fact checker I would have become a fact checker.

This is blasphemous.

From Dr. Sebastian Voltmer @SeVoSpace www.instagram.com/sebastianvol... 3I/ATLAS with its two tails, captured during its closest approach to Earth. In the distant background, galaxies in the constellation Leo are visible.

The fifth specimen is rhodochrosite---the famed "meat rock" of #MinCup 2023.

That awkward feeling of having to tell an interested prospective student that you're visiting professor in their last year (and, implied, that you don't know if you'll have a job next fall).

"An academic discovers a paper attributed to him that does not exist has been cited 42 times" is a sentence with an actual referent in 2025.

Picking this back up after a bit, here is the fourth specimen: tangerine quartz! AKA, just quartz stained with some iron oxides.

It was bad enough dealing with student papers that cited fake papers from genAI.

"The introductory plaque also presumes that Trump’s addition will stay intact once he is no longer president: 'The Presidential Walk of Fame will long live as a testament and tribute to the Greatness of America.'" It sure as hell better not.

3/3 Good things come in threes, so here is a third flyover of our DTM from our 100,000th observation of Mars. https://uahirise.org/ESP_089986_1980

As it turns out, the institution for which I was filling out an app was where I'd eventually earn my Ph.D. (This was the Sunday morning after AGU because my flight to Newark the day before had been cancelled due to a winter storm in the northeast.

we can kill them all if we just work together and ✨believe💫

"A candle does not negotiate with darkness" is such a good fucking sentence, god damn.

Muppets Christmas Carol is the best Christmas movie bc it includes a song with the lyrics, "your future is a horror story written by your crimes" & nothing says Christmas cheer more than that. Also Michael Caine deserved all the awards for that performance. Perfection. No notes.

I genuinely don't know if this is a "Minnesotan" thing or an "old guy of a certain age" thing but in case it's Minnesotan and people need an anger translator: this guy is so angry he could just about set something on fire with his mind.