checking my spam folder

You gotta hear this song, it'll change your life I swear. (plays the Shins cover of "Wonderful Christmastime")

Critics are raving about Potato!

Happy holidays, Bluesky! I got you a megathrust earthquake, soil liquefaction, spine-tingling papers about the way our networks confound knowledge, and a PDF in a pear tree. It's my wrap on a year of trying to make sense of how we make sense of what's happening to us. www.wrecka.ge/landslide-a-...

Here’s a thread of comparisons as I have time. The source data will all be © Vantor, CC BY-NC if from their Open Data Program. My goal here is not to deride standard pansharpening methods, only to show what’s different – what this is all about.

I just published Potato, a new pansharpening package. It aims to render certain kinds of satellite imagery more clearly and accurately than what’s for sale and on satellite maps today: github.com/celoyd/potato/

They laughed at Galileo. Louis Pasteur was only allowed to present his results as Pierrot. They made Simone Weil wear a diving helmet and swim fins. I guess senses of humor have really changed.

Miss you all but am still sort of temperamentally misaligned with broadcast social media for the moment. I remain reachable, even borderline friendly, in other media.

Alison Gopnik’s AI interpretations continue to interest me in way that almost no one else’s do: www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBmz...

Miss you all but am still sort of temperamentally misaligned with broadcast social media for the moment. I remain reachable, even borderline friendly, in other media.

🟡 M4.8 #earthquake detected 3 km ESE of Berkeley, California at 9/22/2025 2:56:12 AM PDT This reflects data from the U.S. Geological Survey that is subject to change. Visit the USGS page linked below for the latest #quake information

Introducing COYOTE: A worker-owned Bay Area media collective. Our stories will be public for the first two weeks. Read ‘em and subscribe! www.coyotemedia.org

Every time I notice how this dashboard software labels its axes I emit a pulse of psychic distress strong enough to rustle papers, nudge the empty seltzer can on my desk, make the more nervous of the crows on the power line out the window take off, etc.

Best thing I saw last week was someone posting a video of Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” with the caption that it was too bad they wasted a nice guitar riff on a song about furniture. The tsunami of poorly typed replies from old men, properly harnessed, could have sent a tractor to Aldebaran.

I’m sick of all the damn helium littering. These days every back alley and vacant lot is strewn with the refuse of irresponsible balloon animal artists and feckless blimpeurs.

while you're all paying attention to this let me remind you that USGS, which produces this invaluable information as a public good, is currently facing a 39% budget cut

If you look at the buoys near the Kamchatka earthquake (www.ndbc.noaa.gov) you can see it nudged enough water to make easily measurable waves even in deep ocean. Heaps of energy.

Lately I keep having to choose between open access and paying my staff's salaries. It would be nice... not to have to do that.

It’s amazing how little you have to capitalize in written English to be (1) clear and (2) formally correct! RAW photos? Those are just raw photos! RE the last e-mail? That’s the Latin word “re” and not an abbreviation! Are you learning Martial Arts? That’s not a trademark! Let that shift key relax!

We talk about the northern and southern hemispheres, centered on the poles, and the eastern and western hemispheres, centered on 90° E and W, but we don’t hear enough about the implied third pair of hemispheres, those centered on Null Island and the equator/antimeridian point. In this essay,

It’s the final week of Coyote’s fundraiser! Support us in creating an independent Bay Area journalism powerhouse if you can!

1. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst 2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griffin... 3. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cro... What these very early-’90s things share – the low-fat esotericism with artificial history flavor – was mostly bad, I fear (without revisiting). But it feels due to come back around in some form.

I gather there is a feud going between (what remains of) media Twitter and (what remains of) sports Twitter, and I would just like to say: Healthy, respectful debate about discourse norms in shared spaces is incredibly important, and I hope that somehow both sides lose the feud very badly.

“Oh, solid enough they seemed to touch, Had anyone dared it. Marvellous creation, All various shapes and sizes, and no sizes”

Bearded post-hipster, to rockabilly-adjacent partner, as they arrive at a block party I’m walking past, in a mildly happy tone, as if discovering something nice: “peanuts – they’re just beans!”

You’d almost think the cool-kid “AI critics” getting piping mad about stochastic parrots/souls/press releases/fingers/hallucinations/… were missing the point, and in fact doing the equivalent of yelling “don’t buy Rolexes; they’re expensive” in that their critiques tended to subtly help its target.

Okay so excited to finally share that I'm part of this really cool team of people trying to spin up a new worker owned publication in the Bay Area! We're fundraising now and it would be so rad if you supported us! Awoooo!!

This time-lapse video of protesters marching down Broadway in Oakland for No Kings Day gives an idea of how many people turned out today @sfchronicle.com

The best part of a protest, I always think, is its spatial and temporal edges: the families staging from SUV to stroller, the old folks greeting each other, the college kids teasing each other about their signs, the music in the distance.

I just like to post these data from time to time to puncture the mythological aura of mid 20th c protests. They were less popular than pretty much any 21st c mass action & people criticizing them used the same lines. Protest is about people coming together, shaping narratives, & building power.

If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of They Might Be Giants.

I saw Elvis Costello at what was then called the Kodak Theatre and the opening band was great. They also never introduced themselves or even spoke. It started to drive people crazy and eventually after each song people were shouting WHO ARE YOU and WHAT’S YOUR NAME

Phone call with my mom on her coasst.org walk. Her grocery checkout clerk today said they stopped reading books when their teacher told them “Howl’s Moving Castle” was too advanced and took it away, so Mom went to my sister’s bookstore, bought it, and left it at the grocery for the clerk.

hey, some of you have a bit of disposable income and either live in or have an emotional attachment to the bay area, yeah? please consider donating what you can to the Oakland LGBTQ center: if you could share this around to other bay baes, i'll be grateful.

I appreciate when journalism manages to go further than “According to [person whose whole persona is this take], by [a while from now], [vaguely defined problem] may be as much as [unhelpful comparison].”

👋 Hi, we’re Unbreaking, a volunteer-run collective working to document our current moment of institutional collapse and its human costs—as well as the pushback and resilience work already underway. We believe this is critical work for building and retaining political agency.

The fact that antihistamines can be used to relieve itches and also as sleep aids has led me to the conclusion that Consciousness is a Form of Itch

I have never seen “Murder in the Cathedral” but I can say that I think about its last temptation differently after living long enough to see people like David Foster Wallace, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Anthony Bourdain have sainthood forced upon them by the most annoying people in the world.

This is a very thorough analysis — including using repeat satellite images to look for “patterns of life”. In this case monitoring the overfull parking lot of a high-explosive factory. More on how to use satellite imagery in data journalism: nightingaledvs.com/from-space-t...

only on social media today because of FOMP

UPDATE: white smoke has *also* been spotted in the city center of Avignon,,, bad news folks!!!

i think @vruba.bsky.social initially shared this with me and it is ever relevant

Surely the good feeling of being certain all the time is undercut by the bad feeling of being wrong all the time.

One of the bittersweet things about adulthood is that I don’t read French comics with absolutely heinous onomatopoeia anymore. It used to be I was always on page 47 of a comic where a character drinking a glass of water went HFROUPF!! and when they broke a twig it was OURLGG!! Not these days.

As a Californian I would like to say that everyone knows this sort of state-to-country comparison is completely bogus and presenting it with anything like a straight face lowers us all. Telling pretty lies where “well, everyone knows how we mean it” is bad, actually. www.gov.ca.gov/2025/04/23/c...

I have both a charmingly irreverent gag about the pope dying and also the perfect one-sentence evaluation of his legacy that somehow encapsulates the whole truth of his influence on the world, but I can’t decide which to post!

"There is no way to play three-dimensional chess with bigots." @lydiakiesling.bsky.social

Happy to see more people appearing here. Am content to be mostly off the socials right now. (E-mail remains the best way to have an internet conversation with me.) Following people back ad hoc if I recognize their username etc.; please don’t be offended if I seem to cold-shoulder you. Will return.