A fun Friday brain cleanse thread. Don’t think anyone has mentioned The Blues Brothers yet.

The Economist Says We Need to Invent Phrenology Again.

Honestly one of the worst, most disturbing paragraphs — on the basis of process, substance, and effect — I’ve read in a Supreme Court order or opinion in a very long time.

Global Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions rise again in 2024, up 2.3%. This is our collective progress, 10 years after the Paris Agreement. www.unep.org/resources/em... 1/

👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼 And before the “purity test“ people come out to play, this is not about policy differences. It’s about seeing people as people deserving of all of the rights as anybody else. That should not be up for policy debate.

In case you wanted some specifics on the Liberal 2025 budget cuts on the environment. thenarwhal.ca/carney-budge...

The last time I critiqued the current Prime Minister's climate action I was told I was being overly critical and should read his book and look at the Liberal Party platform. Not sure how to square that sentiment with today's budget - $ for LNG and CCS and sets a path to eliminate industrial cap

Teen Vogue was one of the very few mainstream media outlets that used well researched and well written articles on politics and economics to speak truth to power. That appears to no longer be the case moving forward and our media landscape will be all the poorer.

The letter is crashing because so many people are trying to sign it (which is good). According to federally connected ethics peeps, the most important thing we can do if we are directly affected is to fill out this form and ask to make a formal complaint: services.priv.gc.ca/demande-info...

Canadian Academics: Your demographic data as an applicant and/or reviewer is being sought by a parliamentary committee where some members are pushing an anti-EDI agenda. This 🧵 outlines the massive problems with this. There is a sign-on letter circulating, hopefully you've seen it.

American billionaires have been shameless in trying to buy off Donald Trump with trinkets, baubles, and outright bribes. By sacrificing his long-held beliefs on climate change (and giving the bad-faith skeptics a win), Bill Gates topped them all. www.nationalobserver.com/2025/11/01/o...

Every day it feels more and more like a zombie apocalypse over on LinkedIn, in which you start a conversation with someone who you hope is an ordinary person and then a couple of turns in discover that they have surrendered their brains to the "AI" mass delusion.

TIL: If you raise the idea of travelling by train with a European be prepared to have your train system be ridiculed. Vancouver-Jasper is about 100 km further than Munich-Hamburg but takes an extra 13 hours. And, yes, mountains. But look at Quebec-Toronto (~same distance and 9 hrs + connection)

2 thoughts on AuntieGate. 1) Calling people auntie, uncle and cousin is pretty universal (I know it’s a thing in my family) 2) aunt, cousin, cousin once removed - it doesn’t change the fact she was scared to wear her hijab after 9/11. That’s the pt of the story!

I "enjoy" this disconnect between tech titans claiming that AI will have us all eating pastries and working two days a week and the reality of firing people en masse while simultaneously supporting fascists who oppose universal basic income and are actively destroying the social safety net

Can confirm this works and, yes, Gemini was turned on by default. Also… Stop Shoving Your AI Into Everything!!!! FFS

“Survival Center” is a powerful, chilling, and brilliantly honest thing to call a food bank. We should do so more often. Banking is a luxury, food is survival. #EndHunger 🍞🥗🥧🥘🌽🥑🥕💪

This gave me immeasurable joy as someone who both cut their teeth programming in the 80s and was nearly a religion minor.

Always nice to know your Himalayan Pink Salt is not genetically modified.

my 2 cents: part of the problem with carbon removal *as an industry* is not just the hype but who is buying it and why. An industry focused on one end of the emissions hierarchy would limit removal to residual emissions from: -Hard to abate sectors -Inability to meet targets (1/2)

Somebody check my numbers because I have to be getting this wrong. The new 4x300 MW small nuclear reactors to be built in Ontario come in at $17000/kW? That's based on $20.9 billion project cost for all four. That would be ~10x utility scale solar? Yes, capital cost is not everything but still.

It’s even more extreme than that if you want full self-sufficiency. The average US diet requires ~2 acres of land (cropland + pasture)/person/year. So a family of 4 would need ~8 acres. (It’s less if you eat more plants/fewer animal proteins than avg American, but it’s still a looooot of land.)

Here's an interesting wrinkle in the GenAI, crypto and Energy front. BC's government is proposing no energy for crypto data centres and strict rules around AI data centres that force them to compete for a set pool of power capacity. All based on the idea of highest societal value for that power.

Racist fearmongering propaganda in the age of AI slop. WTF Done with absolutely no subtlety. It’s just so over the top. I mean, the opening with Mamdani eating rice?!?!?!?

"Amazon Web Service's outage caused people's "smart beds" to overheat and get stuck in an upright position." That is a sentence that belongs in a really badly written B-grade public-access TV type of sci-fi show. The fact it is true is why I am happy none of my appliances (or beds) are smart.

This article is a perfect example of the muddling of different types of AI. 🍎The AI concern around water/power is mainly abt Generative AI (language and video). 🍊The AI being used to increase energy efficiency, etc. described here is (I am nearly 100% certain) is non-GenAI machine learning tools.

BREAKING: The #StateOfClimateAction 2025 finds the world is failing to act fast enough to combat the climate crisis and secure a livable future, with no indicators of global climate action currently on track for 2030. 🌏🌡️ Read the report to learn more: bit.ly/4o6hPwm

The Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disaster dataset is back and now at @climatecentral.org! Through the first half of 2025, there were 14 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters across the United States, costing $101.4 billion. 1/2 www.climatecentral.org/climate-serv...

Was so great to have @lisabrideau.bsky.social come to class today to talk about marginal vs. radical change and give us her perspective as both a planner in city gov and as a fiction writer. You should check out her book Adrift. A cool near-future mystery story that's also abt climate.

I don’t know why LLM doesn’t give people more of a clue that the point of the output is to seem like a sentence a human might generate—not a sentence that evaluates the evidence, not a morally sensitive sentence, not a true sentence…..

I had to stop after every paragraph and internally scream: "It's a Large *Language* Model! What the hell are you talking about?"

Same problem in publishing and film. Everyone gets paid long before the writer, and then it's pennies on the dollar, if we're lucky. People can't create like this. We shouldn't have to create like this. There's no product without us, yet we get told it's more important to pay everyone else.

Are we doing "The ACA Sucks" Discourse again? I'm going to guess most people hating on it from the left have never received a hospital bill the size of book; I put the apple there for scale. That's the $1.3 million bill my kid incurred in his first ~94 days. Why does that make me respect the ACA?

Head of the Manhattan #NoKings march!

It's Black Speculative Fiction month! All October, health allowing, I'll update this thread with fun recs for classic & current black spec fic & a bonus work of my own. 1. MY BONES & MY FLUTE www.barnesandnoble.com/w/my-bones-a... 2. A RUIN OF SHADOWS www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-ruin-of-... 1/2

Today's theft from the Louvre ( art-crime.blogspot.com/2025/10/jewe...) is making me think about my favorite series of museum heists. Buckle up for a 🧵 on priceless porcelains, the Dead Zoo Gang, a Pekinese named Looty, and the unsolved mystery of who's stealing Chinese art from European museums.

“Don’t hear what I didn’t say“ T-shirt sales help and program to help autistic adults learn job skills. #AutismAwareness

I was glad to see that some conferences & summer schools in #AmericanStudies chose to change venues (to Canada f.e.) in the past year to keep particularly int’l & precariously employed attendees safe. But that‘s only a short term solution. Traveling to the US has always been risky for some … 1/

I very briefly worked at my student paper. This is 100% checks out.

”German far right setting agenda as opponents amplify its ideas, study finds” I don’t think this effect is limited to Germany. In fact, by analogy, this supports the argument to block early and block often on this site. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...

Had my first conversation with a close colleague about GenAI usage. We’ve been working together at a low level for a but but about to launch a bigger project. So it seemed to be the perfect time. Our positions are close but not perfectly overlapping. But it did highlight something from me. (1)

Great piece on insider views on AI that are overlooked. My sense though is that treating AI as a “normal technology” would mean a much smaller set of use cases that is incompatible with the current AI business model. But looking forward to reading the longer piece referenced in this post.

As an ex-Montrealer who also recited The Lord’s Prayer in my public school I fully endorse this message. The idea that Catholic symbols everywhere are “heritage” but people must be protected from “from religious rituals that mostly affect minority groups and immigrants” captures the hypocrisy

Some great marine conservation news and a long time coming. Congrats to the Haida and Gitxaała Nations for getting this done.

A major US academic conference is offering a special info session with immigration attorney for int’l attendees. Sad it’s necessary and great they’re doing it. But it’s always been tough for some people (eg “Global South” scholars). So this should have always been happening.

Hi, I'm the ProPublica reporter who's been tracking an unusual stat: U.S. citizens grabbed by immigration agents. I did it because the government isn’t. This is what I found.

Nope. Nope. Nope. Not cool. Not here. Not ever. We will keep working with real translators and narrators (and artists and proofreaders and authors and...) without any of this "AI" bullshit.

To put a finer point on this, how do you resolve differences between collaborators on the use of GenAI? And how to discuss and document it? A chat? Written up in a collaboration agreement? Maybe easier for new collaborations. What if you have fundamental diff on this with long-time collaborators?

I am part of the 42%. But even that was not willingly. A few years back my 2012 Mac (i7, 16 gig ram, 1 TB drive) violated IT policy because Apple no longer supported system upgrades. So, I partitioned the drive and installed Windows 10. Damned if I was going to jettison a perfectly good machine.

“We also site renewables. It’s not either-or, but yes-and.” Presenting “The Improv Theory of Climate Action” “I’m installing solar home systems!” “Yes! And I’m going to reduce how much energy we actually need!” “Yes, and I’m going to push for systemic change to make that easier!”