A few years ago, Andrew Torrance and I wrote a law review article on California secession. digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/sjteil/vol11... It was featured in an article in USA Today this morning.

underappreciated aspect of renewable energy: it is extremely good for your national security.

Science tidbit of the day: the Zanclean Flood is theorized to have refilled the Mediterranean Sea 5.33M years ago. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanclea...

New favorite poem: www.awakin.org/v2/read/view...

Vertical integration

Come for the commentary on LLM-based fiction. Stay for the pigeon civilization.

The US National Parks are so popular, some are requiring people schedule their visit to try and accommodate everyone. We'd like to suggest a different solution. Expand the parks. Most of USNPS holdings are adjacent public land. So why not.

The small bird on top of this unopened palm frond was almost perfectly round.

AI is not a search engine. It is bizarre that the company that both makes AI and the world's dominant search engine does not seem to grasp this fact.

Yay! Exciting to see our research in the world!

feel like I've shown this figure so many times in the past few weeks I should just post it here so

CA is actively looking for the virus in raw milk, and keeps finding it. Unpasteurized milk can have very, very high levels of the H5N1 virus. Just in time for a raw milk advocate to run the nation’s health… www.latimes.com/environment/...

We’re entering flu season with bird flu raging among US dairy cattle: ~third of CA herds infected. The danger is flu viruses have a trick: they can swap segments —one farmworker co-infected by human and avian flu— to cause pandemics. We may get lucky. I hope so. 🎁🔗 www.nytimes.com/2024/11/29/o...

I made 🍎 and 🎃 pie by the classical method. That is, I produced economics for money and then exchanged money for pie.

Earlier I posted about the orange roughy, a fish that's quite interesting, and a little sad. Thread below. (This is my first thread, so let me know if I'm doing it wrong.)

Aah, maybe I'm not second-degree famous. @alyankovic-real.bsky.social followed my sister @clayonglass.bsky.social, but the veracity of that account has now been called into question. Second-degree fame remains out of reach. @alyankovic.bsky.social

Holy cow, @alyankovic-real.bsky.social just followed my sister @clayonglass.bsky.social ! I'm second-degree famous!

"The orange roughy is not a vertically slender fish. Its rounded head is riddled with muciferous canals (part of the lateral line system), as is typical of slimeheads." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_...

I’m a bad influence on my respectable colleagues.

International Space Station Suffers Helium Leak

In 2020, only 3.6% of the world’s population lived outside their country of birth. This has already led to a lot of anti-migrant rhetoric and policies. Imagine if 33% of humanity have to migrate.

We used to motivate our science proposals with the need for research to understand what to do about climate change. Those days are over. Now we should motivate our proposals with the need for research to understand how dangerous the world will get if we continue to do nothing about climate change.

Keeping 1.5C as a goal isn't fantastical, it's the only acceptable option. Moving goalposts allows indefinite broken promises. A fixed goal highlights urgent reality: every extra tonne of CO2 we emit will need to be removed to get back to that agreed level The longer we stall, the harder it gets.

Everything awful about interface design all in one handy package. userinyerface.com

Apparently these loops in the oil pipelines are to allow for expansion and contraction due to temperature changes. Industrial civilization, you sure are ingenious at making sure the fossil fuel flows uninterrupted.

This Jerusalem cricket was doing a really-not-very-effective job of hiding in a hole.

I'm no mycologist, but I like a nice bracket fungus (like, to look at, not to eat). I learned just now that the little ribs on the underside are called "gills" or "lamellae".

Some random beauty in the world from the other day.

One of a set of educational videos I made a few months ago using Python/HeyGen/ChatGPT/Google Image Search, to learn how to string them all together. It's neat that I can speak Mandarin even though I don't speak Mandarin! youtu.be/wAi8CDOf0qQ

I'm working with generative AI quite a bit these days. I think it can be a powerful tool for good, but it also has non-trivial environmental impacts. Here's a paper my co-authors and I recently wrote on the environmental impacts of generative AI. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Here are some of my main AI tools these days: heygen.com - makes avatar videos midjourney.com - makes good pictures chatgpt.com - one of my two go-to chatbots claude.ai - the other of my go-to chatbots; smarter/more philosophical than ChatGPT, but not quite as much of a can-do attitude.

For my birthday, my family and I went looking for fossil shark teeth. Here's a subset of our finds.