Between this, the bragging at the teaching workshop about an AI TA that was wrong 20% of the time, the climate denier on the disaster policy panel, the firehose of geoengineering $$, and whatever this crypto thing was, it's kind of nice no longer being at UChicago. stanfordreview.org/uchicago-los...

kind of darkly funny that "gender studies" is the stereotypical "useless degree" because gender studies will help you understand a large and important chunk of the current psychosis in american life

What a pleasure it was to write the epic story of plate tectonics - and the woman who brought the theory from the ocean to the land - with the fabulous editors at @highcountrynews.org. Give a read! #womeninstem #science #geology #scicomm

lol we're suffering because rich tech bros were uncool in middle school

A sensational guest post by Derek Cronmiller, Theron Finley Panya Lipovsky and Jan Dettmer of the Yukon Geological Survey: Photos and Preliminary Observations from an Overview Flight of the 6 December 2025 Hubbard Glacier Earthquake, Yukon Territory, Canada. eos.org/thelandslide...

After reviewing nearly 200 applications from prospective grad students and postdocs over the past few months for a couple different 🧪⚒️ postings, here are some tips, at least as they apply to North American positions. I hope they help future applicants. Share with your networks. 🧵

I cannot help but think of my former community of Springfield Ohio now. Depopulation that was stopped by immigration that will now be rapidly accelerated by halting work. We have the opportunity to make climate/war/pain exodus less horrible. www.newamerica.org/the-thread/b...

“Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate." ― Edward W. Said

"None of these stories of 'apologizing for being white' involved any apology for being white, by the way—or any apology at all. The act of other people bringing awareness to what whiteness does is deemed a de facto apology for whiteness—and an obvious aggression." www.the-reframe.com/apologies-fo...

Same with scientists. Each "fun" generative AI thing shared makes me a little less confident in the quality of your research.

Another scientist of unknown birthday: my #linocut of Chinese Han Dynasty #polymath & statesman Zhang Heng (78-139) who invented a seismoscope (simplified seismometer which does not make a record of earth motions) to detect distant earthquakes & indicate their direction 2000 years ago! 🐡🧪⚒️#histsci

Million-year-old seashells preserved in siltstone.

Don't forget folks: allowing yourself a vision of the future you'd want for our country and planet - not the one you'd settle for, not the one you fear, but the future of your dreams - isn't naive, it's a vital cognitive skill. That's how we articulate what we most value. What's worth fighting for.

If your position is that regime change should be forced on countries where the president does not respect democratic norms and regularly kidnaps opponents using an officially sanctioned paramiliatary, have I got news for you about your position on the United States

another morning when it’s an existentially shameful thing to be an american huh

Do you wonder what a glacier fjord sounds like underwater? Calving icebergs melting ice, melange, and more. Check out our new paper! agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

Just say phrenology, this is taking forever

It’s no guarantee but the first thing you should do if you see an outrageous story that’s just an image or screenshot or video with no link to a reputable source is to check the replies and see if someone is saying “that’s an AI fake.” And then don’t spread it either way because it’s not sourced.

I've been tracking the spread of nonconsensual deepfakes on X for more than two years. Here's a timeline of how Musk's leadership allowed the practice to flourish from a once-underground market to a viral trend, with little recourse for victims or legal enforcement. spitfirenews.com/p/grok-csam-...

What’s most disappointing in reading this is the active role of the NYT science desk in spreading transphobic disinformation. Really shameful what Azeen Ghoryashi (used to respect her for covering sexual harassment in science) and Virginia Hughes did to twist science for their anti-trans campaign.

The Monster At The End Of This Book

#EarthquakeReport for 2025 Annual Year in #Earthquakes and #Tsunami See summaries and interpretive posters for 13 earthquakes from 2025 See cumulative energy release plots for M≥6.5 earthquakes from 2017-2025 earthjay.com?page_id=12459

The children's museum in my hometown started doing Make-Believe Midnight at 8:00 so kids could do a big countdown but still have a reasonable bedtime. A bunch of my family now celebrates Make-Believe Midnight at home even without kids.

They want to wipe out almost a third of the country. It’s got nothing to do with illegal immigration. It’s white nationalism pure and simple. They’re fascists, and there’s no reason to doubt it.

If asked i would say that the Rosetta images of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko are tied with those of Satrun by Cassini as the most dramatic and incredible of a solar system object ever returned via spacecraft. Just look at the mood here.

In case anyone was wondering, Wordle is less fun as a multiplayer party game than as a single player online game. Also, my brother is evil.

Every week, Nature publishes yet another breathless puff piece about some AI startup, based only unpublished claims from the company and interviewing only those who work there. How can the leading scientific journal publish piece after piece that would make Kevin Roose blush? I think it's that...

This is a neat new study using LIDAR to document pre-colonization raised agricultural beds along the Menominee River that separates Wisconsin from Michigan, north of Green Bay. “massive field systems like these were much more common than previously recognized” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Just spent some quality time with my dad updating my county map with this year's travels! When my older brother was born, he bought a big paper map to color in all of the places we've gone. We keep digitized versions now, too, but never stopped the paper one.

🚨 BOOK SALE 🚨 For the next few days you can preorder my book THE EDGE OF SPACE-TIME (or buy other books!!) for 10% off while supporting a queer, Black and Asian owned indie bookstore. 🚨🚨 #BookSky Direct link my book: loyaltybookstores.com/book/9780593...

Wow -- a 14 foot difference between one side of a lake and the other, due to wind's powerful push! ⚒️

Sauropods xkcd.com/3185/

ultimately a lot of these guys have the personality trait where they encounter dipshit bullying (which is what a lot of anti-masking sentiment is) and their natural reaction is to make sure the bully thinks they are cool and shouldn't get lumped in with the rejects and losers.

I haven't seen enough Juneau Icefield Research Program on hype on BlueSky! Are you a student interested in polar science? Are you a researcher imagining future field work? Are you an educator looking to teach the best and brightest? JIRP is for you! Deadlines are soon! www.juneauicefield.org 🧪⚒️

Still masking and testing regularly. Lost a sibling to COVID, know too many who are suffering with long COVID, and all too aware of how precarious my own life is — and how much my family relies on me. No one who mocks public health can be trusted to assess public policy.

My mother died of Covid complications this year. She not only refused to believe Covid was ‘that serious’ she also refused to mask when people visited her at our home in India. Anyone anywhere who wants to mock people who mask can fuck all the way off.

Signs of aging: I'm watching a snowboarding halfpipe competition on TV, and on each and every jump I have a thought in the category of "good lord, does your mother know you're doing this???"

Frankly, without better guardrails, I worry that generative AI will *slow* science and other areas of human progress. Too often, it is used to cheat, plagarize, fabricate things, and spread disinformation. And, even when used with good intentions, it's often a shortcut that dulls human skills.

shit like this is the core of the damage the social internet has done to us we have replaced actual expertise with "some dude with a podcast who makes you feel like his buddy while he bullshits into a microphone" and now a ton of people think that measles and chicken pox are the same

Some men say climate change is “overblown.” Turns out it’s less about the data and more about not wanting to look feminine. Fragile masculinity = climate denial. Remind you of anyone…? www.psypost.org/some-men-may...

In like 2022 I wrote about how climate change would make landslides worse

My wife & son provide a sense of scale to the fault scarp (in shadow) of the M~7.5 1872 Lone Pine earthquake. In a few seconds that horrible night, the ground where the shadow stops dropped suddenly away from the ground where my family is standing, a throw of ~22 feet. ⚒️

"Books aren't interactive" is not a sentence you could waterboard out of me.

A technology that looks futuristic and does some cool tricks, but using it hamstrings you in an extremely embarrassing way. Never have I seen a more perfect analogy for generative AI:

There’s no pitch for genAI in the classroom that doesn’t boil down to “it’s everywhere,” or that takes education as more than job training, or, consequently, that actually argues for genAI as a tool that has a distinct function in education. It’s not educators who have their heads in the sand here.

Abolish the pet-riarchy

The days between December 25 and January 1 are the Lanthanides and Actinides of the Gregorian calendar

Help, fellow geo people! The Other Geologist and I both got stumped by a rock my uncle has. He has no idea where it's originally from; it was just decorative in a garden before he got it. Grains/crystals are too small to see, and it's dense and sturdy, not fissile.

You can tell that LotR was written by an academic because Gandalf disappears for like 20 years doing research to answer a single question.

“ The daughter of a well known conservative operative , whose paper did not answer the topic at hand and had a carefully planned media campaign , had a trans instructor fired for grading a paper according to the agreed upon rubric”