Imbolc is coming. (Garlic planted last fall erupting through the mulch last week.)

AURORA ALERT TONIGHT!!!! (Pass it on....)

If you haven't read and internalized King's letter from a Birmingham jail, please don't be tossing his safer quotes around like he was a Disney princess. He was fiercely kind, but not nice. Nice gets little done.

Dr. Gladys West, the pioneering mathematician whose work laid the foundation for modern GPS technology, has died. She was 95.

I tried to write about what this fascist moment feels like as an abuse survivor, especially in light of the mansplaining we've been getting for a decade. This is the result.

To be fair....

We just finished up the darkest 8 weeks of the year in these parts. Imbolc is just a couple of weeks away. I'll start looking for crocus shoots with the next thaw. (Watsessing Park, Bloomfield, NJ--this is not a B&W photo.)

Looks like a unicorn defending us from the ICE stooges.

This is a great teaching example for why cross-national comparison matters in social science. People also make “bad choices” in peer countries, but they’re far less likely to end up homeless.

Needed a new whistle for kayaking, last one bought around 2001, but the metal ring corroded and the whistle is somewhere in the big deep now. Then: run into sports store, buy a whistle. Now: Spend two hours researching, buy similar whistle.🙄

Good morning. I read this dispatch from a comrade in Minneapolis this morning and thought that some of you might appreciate it too.

It's that time of year when the rhythm of making bread flows easily with the increasing daylight. When calculating the costs of homemade bread, economists add labor to the costs, forgetting the joy hands feel in the warmth generated by the yeast and your muscles folding dough. You cannot buy that.

Let's be sure that we don't forget or whitewash his legacy.

So many of the Black mediamakers I interviewed for my book talked about this frustration. Raising the alarm before the 2016 election and having white editors and colleagues still sure Obama’s presidency meant widespread racism was a thing of the past dismiss their warnings.

If we're honest, the loudest online scolds aren't organizing. People who are organizing are too tired to scold people online.

Defund. Abolish.

Fuck CBS.

When the cop murdered Philando Castile his girlfriend and her 4 year old daughter were also in the car.

Folks bypass things like the fact that NYPD activated drones and 30 cop cars for a demonstration of 1000 people in freezing weather today. The levels of surveillance and potential repression are taken as regular order in this country.

Perihelion in about two hours--Happy New Year!

And the year has barely started....

hey remember when a bunch of middle-aged drunk korean lawmakers climbed the locked gates to the national assembly to hold an emergency session after the president gave illegal orders to the military, all of which ended with said president being sentenced to prison

Looks like a metaphor about the US and the rest of the world.

I'm not done with break yet....

For years I thought Europe was extremely cold in the winter. Celsius makes even reasonably cold temperatures sound drastic to a USian ear.

If you're a teacher who can be easily replaced by AI (or at least define our profession by the tasks AI is trumpeting as useful for a classroom) then maybe you need to take a good look at what you're doing. (If you're just in it for the paycheck, though, AI is a freakin' goldmine.)

The private sector does not dictate what the public sector values. Be wary of the indices we use to measure the "effectiveness" of public education, especially if the assessor has something to sell. And most assessors (e.g., David Coleman) have something to sell.

If people have lost buying power, no matter the numbers, that feels like wages low and prices high. If people have buying power then it feels like wages high prices low. People aren't asking for a contradiction they are asking for buying power to afford life.

You cannot grasp a fistful of earth through AI. Our fingers were made for more than touching screens. But you can do something about it. You can reconnect with your mortal mammal self. Technology gives us permission to be less human, and for many that is lure enough.. Or you can take a walk.

"I'm a pyloric sphincter" just sounds too pathetic....

If you don't have 4 bowling balls, a radiometer, 4 year old pond water sitting on the windowsill, salamander food, a box of broken glass, a few large unidentified mammalian bones in a cardboard box, and an old bald-faced hornet's nest in your classroom can you even call yourself a science teacher?

Communion in a public high school: www.science-teacher.net/2026/01/01/o...

In 2026 I want all of the decent people to remember one thing. You aren’t meant to be this disciplined, this self-sacrificing to survive. The environment is supposed to support good living. We can have that. You are not a failure. That is politics. That is all.

I got "joyous brain rot" after accidentally nudging the bar over my excitement over "joyous"--fookin' thing is prescient.

Transubstantiation has a shaky religious foundation, but fits right in the atomic theory in the science world. You eat, you digest, break down, then breath out carbon dioxide. Wheat picks up the CO2 and smushes it into part of a water molecule. Grind that up you got flour. Flour and water, voila!

Shoving chlorinated chicken up your bum prevents COVID, at least that's what RFK told me.

Mark my words, the "Oxford Word of the Year 2026" is going to be "janky."

🤔I don't understand this take. Why are we worried about the identity of the person with the DHS Twitter account password when... ...the person setting US immigration policy literally has a SPLC warning page, and was one of the policy minds behind "peaceful ethnic cleansing?"

For the New Year I will continue each day reading my favorite James Baldwin quote, try to walk barefoot outside the first few moments of waking, and remember that the food I ate yesterday is already back in the air as tiny particles eventually put back together by plants so I may eat again.

This is how like like to see "my" royals.....

Nothing quite like a quick barefoot walk out into a snow squall your first waking hour of 2026.

SQUALL!

This is here for me so I can find it again later: www.science-teacher.net/2025/12/31/k...

Buying a thermocycler just to anneal something.

Time to get cracking on my Perihelion cards!

Pretty much dinner tonight--clam/kale/potato stew and a freshly baked loaf of rosemary sourdough bread. Happy New Year!

Clamming was pleasant despite the forecast. Clam kale stew on the stove, rosemary sourdough bread baking in the oven. Going to feast tonight on the grace of the critters of the mud flats and in the sourdough. The perihelion is coming.