Let's do this. www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9...

we’re right about ai too

What a dreadful year it has been.

they're executing moms and nurses in the street. they're using preschoolers as bait. they're stealing people's dads and grandmas and children. they're tear gassing babies. they're staking out schools. there is no remedy but abolition. any proposal that doesn't start there is an act of violence.

a foot of snow in flagstaff was barely a news item, but my friends and colleagues around villanova seem to imply that a foot of snow hitting philly would induce donner party like behavior within hours. if I stop posting, make sure the parks service's plaque says that I was *not* one of the cannibals

"Liam’s teacher, Ella Sullivan, teared up when thinking about Liam. 'He’s a bright young student,' she said, 'and he’s so kind and loving. His classmates miss him.'" www.startribune.com/preschooler-...

ICE are abducting 5 year olds, using them as bait to get to their family, and shipping them to a Texas concentration camp all in a single day. We need a Nuremberg for everyone involved. Abolish ICE isn't enough.

it only took two classes for most of my students to figure out I'm an unserious goofball. that's record time. last semester it took three classes.

Our paper on the mysterious Devonian organism Prototaxites has now finally been published! See the paper here (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) and our explainer thread below! Prototaxites reconstruction by Matt Humpage

The NYT reports that Air Force One has turned around due to a situation officials are describing as “creature on the wing”

neolithic guys get pissed if you tell them their cultures are organized by the type of pots and jewelry they made. "we called ourselves the blood hunters" "we conquered villages far beyond this horizon" sorry bud you're the western linear pottery culture now

total solar inevitability 🔜

a few thoughts youtu.be/lERS4kJIQR8

saw Marty Supreme on New Years Day and loved it -- now I'm waiting on the similarly zany coming of age movies about other niche sports. where's the movie about being annoying good at curling, or darts, or speed-walking?

Literally a publication for eight-year olds 40 years ago

Tonight, the President of the United States has launched an unconstitutional war of aggression, dooming another generation to spill their blood for oil, and lay waste to a sovereign nation. I demand that Congress exercise its power, halt this conflict, and impeach this war criminal president.

Triton, moon of Neptune, seen in front of Neptune from the receding Voyager 2 in 1989.

not very current with my reading of late, but two books I loved this year were "House of Rain" by Craig Childs (2007) and Kurt Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle" (1963)

happy holidays to @amtrak.com and @amtrak.com only

garbage day

now that the schedule is out, happy to say I'm giving an invited talk about mini-moons and Moon-derived NEOs at the next NASA Small Bodies Assessment Group meeting in January: www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/sba...

tonight the government killed a story on cbs about the slave labor camp in a foreign country theyre illegally sending people to

shout out to the dude playing his harmonica wistfully and quietly in the line to board the northeast regional. really adding a kind of tumbleweeds-and-campfires ambiance that our national railroad has always needed.

the future I want has plentiful glaciers and happy trans kids. that's really it.

Muting a Black woman to claim the vote was unanimous is so incredibly on the nose

At an @agu.org Town Hall today, @ncar-ucar.bsky.social President Antonio Busalacchi spoke to #AGU25 attendees about what's at stake if NCAR is dismantled. One attendee asked anyone who uses NCAR research to stand up. Almost everyone in the room stood. Read more here: eos.org/research-and...

apropos of nothing, two photos from a hike I took in 2019 next to one of the most stunning buildings I've ever seen

always a treat to open up a paper draft that's been lingering for a month or two only to find that even the last time I was working on it I was already losing track of what I'd already done and why

In @nytopinion.nytimes.com “I had just let the whole thing wash over me. I marveled at what a good story the truth could make in the right hands,” the author Stephen King writes about seeing “Stand by Me,” Rob Reiner’s adaptation of King's novella “The Body.”

Nature research paper: Earliest evidence of making fire go.nature.com/4s8Sqof

HARD BOILED DETECTIVE: another cruel sunrise over the city of the damned. another corpse. another widow. another cup of black coffee to drag my sorry ass back to life- *sputtering* ME: do you like it? it's an ethiopian washed process single origin DETECTIVE: ME: are you getting apricot notes

New paper out 🥳 Using data from #NASA #Lucy mission and a series of numerical simulations, we show that #Selam, the moon of #Dinkinesh, likely formed through a series of at least four low-velocity collisions between similarly sized moonlets. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

thanks to this, just got an interview request from -- get this -- a ninth grader doing a class project. hell yeah. best job in the world. the kids are alright.

The ejection velocities of interstellar objects signpost their progenitor system architectures (by Albrow et al., submitted) arxiv.org/abs/2512.04700

There is a fifth wave of ska, beyond that which is known to rude boys

growing up riding the d-line to highschool in boston, taking the philly regional rail to work feels right: - the trains catch on fire several times annually, very convenient in colder months - it only runs on time if you don't need it to, very useful to stay humble - I dunno trains are nice

You can catch yours truly waxing poetic about 3I/ATLAS (and bemoaning 1I/`Oumuamua getting discovered too early for me to have done my Ph.D. on it) alongside John Tonry talking about its discovery in this episode of NPR's Short Wave: www.npr.org/2025/12/02/n...

Megalithic monuments in the Orkney Islands “may not have been intended to last millennia, but, now that they have, they are stone doors through which the living try to touch the dead,” Alex Ross writes. https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/TFPGiZ

here's a picture of the extremely dangerous habanero-cranberry hot sauce that my fiancée and I just made. if this is the last post I make from this account, please remember me and my awful posts fondly.

archie from cw riverdale having a tony clifton but it’s midnite vultures era beck is i believe the thing where i finally become too old for the culture

every couple of years I bump into a new movie with a relatively small udo kier part and am blown away again -- first "blade", then "my own private idaho", most recently "suspiria". what a talented guy he was, and what a bummer.

rare bit of good news on this dreary Sunday morning plumassun.org/2025/11/22/w...

62 Years Ago Today:

🧪 ✏️ Apply for the 2026 Diverse Voices in Science Journalism Internship with @science.org! 🧪 ✏️ This could be for you if you're a student from a community historically underrepresented in #journalism who's interested in in covering science for general audiences: recruiting.ultipro.com/AME1123ASEM/...

asked my students about how they thought astronomers should search for aliens & after the discussion subsided I said "let me prove there's life outside this classroom" and turned on this radio I built that I had hidden under the podium as an intro to SETI. a stupid gag that went off really well.

An article from Science about the changes LPSC has made to its abstract submission process. As my colleague @theplanetaryguy.bsky.social states, "This is censorship". www.science.org/content/arti...