Hunger games? Nah, more like Deutsches Jungvolk. Wtaf…

Top: Sunset on Mars (Curiosity rover, April 2015) Bottom: Sunset on LV-426 (Alien, 1979)

Today is experimental dessert day. I am making persimmon pie from a recipe & a mincemeat pie from a jar. Before any Brits come for me, I’m lucky to even have jarred mincemeat. I’ve always been so curious what it tastes like. Sadly no clotted cream. Only vanilla ice cream.

From a different site: “I (34M) lost my best friend 14 years ago.… He and I had been best friends since we were 7. He was the kindest guy i had ever met, and to this day have ever met. I had a deep love (plutonic [sic]) for him…” Plutonic love, tee hee!

I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. Look, I’m 98% certain I’m not qualified (let them weed me out). But having to write 5 short essays, one on how I would advance the President’s Executive Orders & policy priorities, while govt is shutdown & more layoffs at revered depts, why would I apply?

A cry for help: my degree I just finished won’t get me a PG (not sure if I can test for GIT) & with… everything, I think that might be my best path now. I didn’t take an optical mineralogy class. Does anyone know of an online one?

Watching the Hulu show “Paradise” with my partner right now and I’m very impatiently trying to let the story unfold. I could be wrong, but it feels like they only very surficially consulted experts in certain fields. I could be wrong, I am by no means an expert, but I am full of questions.

Why do I feel like we (the US) are on the precipice of our very own night of the long knives? Tell me I’m wrong and mean it.

Aka: Is it pretty? Is it interesting? Is it pretty interesting? Oh look! Serpentinite!

My local humane society naming convention seems a bit… unhinged. There’s Donut Cop, Gumball, Tootsie Roll, and Crawfish, among other more conventionally named pets. I love it. I can’t wait to be able to open my home to one of them.

That slight deflection in the wavefront from the Hawaiian-Emperor Seamount Chain (you can *just* see it as a lighter gray running north-south about 1/3 of image from the right) is interesting. Something like a 3-ish km difference in bathymetry between the seamounts and adjacent seafloor.

Geologic Periods xkcd.com/3120/

Holy shit. This guy saved a PNG to a bird. (he drew a bird into a spectrogram, played that sound to a starling, and the starling reproduced it back to him with enough accuracy he got his bird drawing back in their call's spectrogram) www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCQC...

Does this sight ever get old?? No. No, it does not.

I thought The Onion posted satire! Are y’all really going about your day without a gastrolith?? No wonder digestion issues are prevalent… 🤣🤣🤣

A couple days ago I finished Everybody Wants to Rule the World Except Me by @djangowexler.bsky.social. Great book! 10/10 recommend. And now I’m in that liminal space where I haven’t found my next read. Oh I have plenty I *could* read but am not sure what I *want* to read. What’s a person to do?

If you put googly eyes on the Pillars of Creation you get muppets 😄😄

Went camping at the Channel Islands NP. Saw so many curious dolphins and some whales on the crossing! Stay got cut short due to the predicted roughness of the seas the day of our reserved return trip. Could have stayed longer, but we didn’t anticipate The Wind.

This is a solar eclipse. Seen from the surface of Mars by the Perseverance rover in 2022. That moon is the little space potato Phobos. And you can even see sunspots!

How do we not turn off the lights at times like this??

Watching Andor season 2, I keep marveling at the attention to detail; the costuming, the score, the architecture, the world building is absolutely breathtaking! Props to everyone working behind and in front of the cameras! #andorseason2

There's a binary supermassive black hole system (one is ~18B x solar mass, other is 150M x solar mass) located ~4 billion light-years away called OJ 287. The smaller one plunges into the accretion disc of the bigger one twice every 12 years that sets off a huge flash. Cool animation showing this 👇

It’s Mary Anning’s birthday, so time to share @katebeaton.bsky.social’s brilliant cartoon again.

I will be moving soon—destination: unknown—so am perusing apartment/house listings and daydreaming about getting a pup (or five). Can someone tell me why there is such a thing as pet rent? What is its purpose?? grumble grumble grumble

I listened to someone describe riding a motorcycle: listening, to the engine and the traffic, to everything; smelling the world around you, for better and worse; but still doing your best to anticipate things; being so very present almost to a point of mindfulness. Gods I miss it.

Wow. These are aurorae, dancing high in the atmosphere. Of Jupiter. From #JWST

I don’t recall having heard about this before seeing this post (or maybe I did and it didn’t resonate [haha] with me) so the paper to back it up: pubs.geoscienceworld.org/ssa/tsr/arti... so cool!

So many odd assumptions getting challenged recently: -Don Hertzfeldt is a real human being. “Rejected” made me think… otherwise. -“The Grass Dancer” by Susan Power, a book I love, is not the only book she’s written. Surprise! *Mona* Susan Power has written more!

A friend included this anti-acknowledgement section on her PhD thesis. She also added the proposition: “Systematic bullying and undermining of girls and women in STEM starts early on and is the reason why they do not stay in science and related fields.” Absurd we still need to go through this 🧪👩‍🔬

New Set Out in 30 mins Friends

I laughed way too hard at this! Geology jokes are the best!!!

Not me reading this as “Beach Gnomes for the Future” and getting excited about finding garden gnomes sunbathing on the local beaches as an art installation. Thanks, brain, keep up the good work!

Watched Heretic (2024) on 3/14 while having pizza pi & fruit pi (not blueberry, thank the gods) w/my partner. I have complex feelings & no one has come up with my idea of what I think the ending means & I want to explode ahhhhhh!!! 🤐 cuz if you haven’t seen it, it would be super spoilery.

Pi Day is coming! I am currently unglued in time so didn’t realize how soon it is. Now I need to figure out what to do/make. Banoffee? Pudding? Or some version of a fruit? Why limit myself to sweet, I could go savory, too. Hmmm…

this is *INCREDIBLE* It's what landing on the Moon looks like, 2025 edition

It me.

Wherever possible please buy your books directly from authors and/or publishers. Even ebooks (then Amazon can't delete them either). We make a better cut and you get the same thing or better, plus Bezos and ilk don't get richer. Win win win.

I made this Pride flag using only NASA images and our team thought it would be cool to share on social (I work on the NASA heliophysics communications team), but it's getting all sorts of hate on the bird app and Fbook. Thought y'all might be more appreciative of it here. ☺️🏳️‍🌈💖

The only logical conclusion from this table is that the moon *is* made of [different sorts of] cheese! Which leads me to wonder, if the moon was formed by giant impact, does that mean early Earth was cheese, too?? So the Big Bang could really be a Pasteurizing Process?

Elephant calf update: very baby

This strangely looking object in space is protoplanetary disc HH30. Combining data from Webb, Hubble and ALMA has given astronomers an insight into the object’s distinct structures and drifting dust grains. Read more 👉 www.esa.int/Science_Expl... 🔭🧪

In praise of a group pushing back: 5calls.org and their app makes calling one’s political reps a snap and have provided some scripts to use when leaving a message. Which can then also be used as email scripts, but they recommend calling over emailing (see website for details).

Don't mind me, I'm just watching the video of the slug on the hamster wheel, from the study's supplementary materials.

I keep walking into my bedroom and being confronted by my stack-o cross-stitch WIPs, that I asked my amazing partner to pull the tub down from the closet to work on. Except I didn’t pack the WIPs away very well and now it’s just random floss and tens of started Aida.

Being vertically challenged sucks when your Clino is primed, but the *good* bedding is juuuust out of reach and the only other thing in the way is a weathered incline loaded with shale clasts. Pants are fine, knee is… on watch, sigh.