This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.

In honor of (hopefully) today's launch of NASA's Artemis II mission, the first crewed mission to orbit the Moon in more than 50 years, here is a to-scale graphic of exactly how far away the Moon actually is. (Click image to expand.) You could fit about 30 Earths between the Earth and the Moon!

Thinking deeply is, itself, beautiful and productive work, to turn the developer's ridiculous reasoning back on him. Cogito ergo sum, and all that. If people delegate their thinking, we will collectively lose what makes us human. www.404media.co/whats-the-po...

This is important...

I’d rather be a Canadian with a Silver than an American with a Gold.

You can't... repeal... a scientific finding. At that point it's just called lying about it.

I was on a career panel tonight with several awesome women* but the best questions probably came in the short networking time afterwards.

Love this!

"...we have something too — the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home, and to act together. That is Canada’s path. We choose it openly and confidently. And it is a path wide open to any country willing to take it with us." www.policymagazine.ca/the-old-orde...

Depressing but probably right. www.thebulwark.com/p/this-is-th...

Danish Parliament Deputy Speaker Lars-Christian Brask: "If I could come with some advice, it would be for the Senate & House to start to take control of political power in America because with this erratic & mad behaviour, you have to ask the question, is the President capable of running the US?"

“Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Canada are sending troops to Greenland amid continued threats from U.S. President Donald Trump to annex the territory, multiple outlets reported.” Good.

Has not one reporter asked why NATO would not be intervening in the case of a Russian or Chinese invasion of Greenland??

PSA: if you have a mini-split heat pump and (ahem) don't always get around to cleaning the filters on time, do it today. It makes a big difference!

The “End of NATO” clearly isn’t a deterrent for Trump and Putin. IT HAS TO BE A DETERRENT FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE!

Denmark, however small, has been a vocal and financial supporter of Ukraine. Punishment for that could absolutely be part of the plan here (similarly for Canada and the 51st-state nonsense). Europe needs to stand firm on both.

Conic Sections xkcd.com/3189/

“I love maps,” the president continued. “And I always said, ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.’” Does he know about the Mercator projection?

Greenland is not for sale, and not for taking over.

I take no leave of you, 2025. I send no compliments to your mother. You deserve no such attention. I am most seriously displeased.

In my upper-year astro techniques course, I get the students to do basic ray-tracing for eg a Gregorian telescope. This is giving me lots of new ideas. :-) xkcd.com/3182/

Usually I find the Vancouver winter rain to be an OK tradeoff for warmer temperatures than the rest of the country. But atmospheric rivers are just gross (much more so for the people dealing with flooding).

In the last couple of days, I have had to push back on TWO requests to review proposals for the last week of December or first thing in January. After the term I've just had, I am not planning to work over the break, and no one should be trying to impose that expectation on anyone.

I like "Country Roads" as much as the next person who has spent time in WV. But, UBC folks, classes are not over yet, some of us are in frantic work mode, and having loud music blast on campus is just not helpful.

Hey you, at the entrance to the pool! That sign saying, “Please remove shoes here?” That’s directed at you. Your shoes are not magically cleaner than anyone else’s.

The doublespeak is astounding.

Hey so “underage girls” are…children. The word you’re looking for is children. They’re not like, women-in-waiting or women-lite or whatever. They’re children. I think some of you are very uncomfortable with what that means for you but it is still true.

Attention #YVR physics enthusiasts, especially high school students, there are two exciting TRIUMF Saturday Morning Lectures by @sfuphysics.bsky.social faculty happening next weekend (Nov 15th) in Surrey. ⚛️ 🎢 🧪

As we watch Trump & the GOP ignore the Constitution & the concept of human rights in the United States, consider what’s been happening in Canada with right-wing Premiers and Poilievre normalizing the common abuse of the Notwithstanding Clause to make Canada’s Charter of Rights & Freedoms irrelevant.

AND today would be ANOTHER good day for Pierre Poilievre to prove to Canadians that he’s actually capable of passing the same, normal security check, & getting the standard security clearance he’s STILL refusing to get. Until he does, I’m still assuming that it’s because he KNOWS he can’t pass it.

Timeline cleanse

We have people in power making broad claims around certain drugs and autism that have been continuously disproven. The degree to which those comments can undermine public health—is violence against the truth. - Barack Obama

Could Karen Attiah please be reinstated now? Himpathy—the endless prioritization of white men and their feelings over everyone and everything else—distorts who we rally around as well as who we memorialize katemanne.substack.com/p/what-we-do...

Autism does not need to be cured Ableism does The end

A plea on behalf of special-relativity instructors everywhere: could we have one major pop-culture franchise with plausibly relativistically-moving characters that is NOT owned by a problematic entity?

Someone took the chip from their Presto Card and put it into a magic wand.

I will say tongue in cheek it's a bit funny! Y'all be out in the streets fighting for the free speech of rich white men actors Stephen Colbert & Jimmy Kimmel. Alright now, we need that same energy for everybody else!

Teaching astronomical coordinate systems is always fun. Lots of arm-waving and spherical trig, and huge discussions about which direction the Sun actually sets in Northern summer.

Thys emayle koude have been a sonnet

Inviting an evil, racist, misogynist to speak to the cabinet is not a good look. I don’t care what playbook he knows. Don’t normalize this. www.cbc.ca/news/politic...

Using Preview on Mac to annotate a pdf with tutorial solutions (yes, clunky, but for *reasons* I inherited tutorials in Word format, so I'm working with this scheme). Preview's annotate is helpfully trying to provide answers, with units, to the equations I type out. But they're incorrect!

A science journalist and PhD astrophysicist, Adam Becker spent the last several years investigating the futurological vision of our tech-bro masters – and found it’s a bunch of nonsense.

Not terrifying at all.

my daughter came home from her first day of 10th grade and said that her history teacher told her that if she refuses to use AI for assignments, she has to cite her sources. i asked how she’d cite it if she used AI, and she said, that’s not required. i’m still internally fuming up about this.

Good essay: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/o...

If we don't see it, it doesn't exist. Kinda like those job numbers. www.npr.org/transcripts/...