Sunset over the rice paddies of Northern California 🌾🌅

Reminds me that I've seen little tractors like this on vineyard slopes in Austria and Germany that look way too steep to drive equipment on at all. One was plowing, up and down the slope, I guess for a new planting. 🤷‍♂️

Ice on Chesapeake Bay and in Chincoteague Bay, 2/3/2026. Sentinel 2 image. Pocomoke City, Maryland, is near the center of the image. See the next post for zoomed in views.

Scoop from @henry-redman.bsky.social, who has been in Western Wisconsin & Minneapolis all week: Twin Cities ICE presence extends into Wisconsin wisconsinexaminer.com/2026/02/06/t...

Not trying to “read the news” for people, but just trying to get more eyes on the *actual* problem we face— this, like dozens of stories before, and after this moment, are fruits of a tree with roots in the fact that Most Americans Are Ignorant of Immigration Policy.

For more than a decade, the USDA Climate Hubs have helped farmers, ranchers, foresters, and communities adapt to climate change. While their funding may be uncertain, the Climate Hubs' impact is very certain. Their loss is America's loss. www.kcur.org/environment-...

Keep him! “Information continuing to emerge from eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) claims that the M23 armed group has detained Erik Prince, the American national known as the founder and former head of the private military company Blackwater.“

If I post about my university, it's often to criticize something administrators have or have not done or maybe to mock "traditions" like raising money with plastic flamingos, but there are a lot of faculty and students here doing great things, worth praising and worth defending.

Wrong on two counts, taking out the caffeine and adding all that sugary crap.

Rétro Station Service ⛽️ ESSO ⛽️ avec une voiture 2cv années 80

Pretty sure one was consulted, definitely was for the album news.wisc.edu/pop-star-bad...

While you were watching low-scoring football and weird commercials, I was completely absorbed by SNOTEL data. Did you know there's a SNOTEL station at less than 2600 ft elevation in the Cascades in Oregon? Which in some years has much more snow right now than 10,000 ft + stations in Colorado?

This years Super Bowl ads are all sponsored by the buy nothing movement

The Box Springs (L) and Fish Lake (R) SNOTEL stations in southern Utah have 9% and 3% of the 1991-2020 median snow water equivalent for this date. They've barely accumulated snow this winter; most of it has melted after short periods of accumulation. Several other stations in the region at 0-3%.

Looking at the forecast, we're going to have highly treacherous morning and evening ice on sidewalks for at least a few days this week. Hope most of the ice is lower-case, as it has been so far this winter.

The Colorado basin. #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

judge a quarterback by whether or not he defrauds millions of dollars from poor people

Yes. This. Let people talk about their joy. Let people live. That's the fight, for people to be able to live. So let people do it, in the ways that they are managing to.

Marc Bloch, historien et résistant juif, entrera au Panthéon le 23 juin

My dad's hometown, where he went to college down the street from his childhood home. His father was a high school shop teacher there, his grandfather helped build many of the older houses in town. The community response to ICE raids there does not surprise me at all. www.mprnews.org/story/2026/0...

some inside baseball from the other place: this is (allegedly) where the extreme-right Singularity influencer "eigenrobot" lives. so there's one guy there who's for this barbarism. probably calls in tips whenever he sees anyone with a tan.

Death on the Ridge Road https://www.wikiart.org/en/grant-wood/death-on-the-ridge-road-1935

Full disclosure: When I was a kid I had a book about building Big Mac (the bridge) that I liked very much.

Ice in the Straits of Mackinac, Jan 31, 2026 (Sentinel 2). See the channel opened for shipping, passing under the Mackinac Bridge in the closeup view? See next post.

Fantastic music-making. Thelonious Monk's quartet, recorded live in the studios of Radio France, February 1964. “Don't play what the audience wants, play what you want and let the audience embrace what you do, even if it takes them fifteen or twenty years.” —Thelonius Monk

The GLO database includes no records of patents to the Union Pacific RR in this area, although this is within the 20 mile limits where the UP received every other section. That's not unusual for railroad land grants. Only a few patents at all before 1889; most look like town lots. Seems late.

General Land Office plat map of the South Platte valley at Brule, Nebraska, surveyed in 1870. Wide South Platte channel belt, loess tableland to the north, lower terrace to the south. Union Pacific RR and "old road" (Mormon Trail) north of the river, "Old California Road" on the south side.

The Congo basin. #rayshader adventures, an #rstats tale

More rivers of Nebraska, from Google Earth: South Platte near Brule, confluence of the Platte and Elkhorn rivers west of Omaha, Elkhorn upstream from Neligh, confluence of the Niobrara and Missouri just upstream from a reservoir.

The ecological history of Lake Huron according to phytoplankton #GreatLakes 🧪 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... @milkinabag.bsky.social

I just returned from Dakar where I co-chaired the NASEM US-Africa Frontiers in Science, Engineering, & Medicine symposium tinyurl.com/ybdjn22m. It was an extraordinary gathering of leading scholars from across Africa & US discussing timely research. Truly one of the highlights of my career!

Wisconsin Tribes Worried About ICE Tactics in Minnesota

"The trip actually took place in South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where collecting fossils on reservation land without explicit tribal permission is considered looting." aaaaaaaaaa

A further update on bsky.app/profile/bobk... — it turns out if you correct the statistical errors in Michael Schellenberger’s favorite new sea level paper, it (unsurprisingly) shows clear evidence of sea level acceleration

“Why doesn’t the public trust science? Why doesn’t the public like us?” is common sci/comm navel gazing and then there’s this going on the whole while. I’m absolutely disgusted by how many people I met, how many people who acted like gatekeepers telling me what I should do, all tied to this predator

Epstein and Maxwell were also apparently on the board of SEED Media Group, with influence over SEED magazine and ScienceBlogs dot com, which is where I blogged in the very early days of my career.

It’s infuriating and dispiriting how cozy scientists and science communicators were with Epstein. Not just creeps like Krauss and Horner, but former SciAm editor-in-chief Mariette DiChristina corresponding with Epstein in 2014-2015. “He’s done so much for science, I think that deserves some fun!”

Each new discovery underscores how little we actually know.

reminder of cryptogyny, the hiding of women's contributions to science, technology, engineering, and medicine: "although three men received the Nobel Prize for penicillin, women participated significantly in the team effort that brought the drug to medical usefulness." www.jstor.org/stable/jj.55...

Sandhills rivers: North Loup, Cedar, Dismal, Middle Loup (all from Google Earth).

It really pays to remind ourselves frequently that this whole immigration "crisis" is made up out of whole cloth. There was no emergency,danger or problem, only a demagogue stirring up racist grievances for political advantage.

That photo from the air shows the edge of the Sandhills, 5-6 miles north of town. You can see the Cedar River beyond that, a Sandhills river in its upper reaches, with high base flow and clear water like all the beautiful Sandhills rivers.

“Ultimately, the controversy surrounding Eilish’s remark reveals less about celebrity or even property than the limits of America’s moral imagination, including at influential media outlets. Democracy may die in darkness, but America was built in daylight”

Nostalgic Fieldwork Friday: Yellow River at Shapatou, Ningxia, and in the westernmost fringe of the Loess Plateau south of there toward Lanzhou. 2006.

It's unconscionable what we are doing to the very people who work towards the general improvement of our communities.

I'm really grateful to have been part of this paper led by former MS student Sydney Widell that tells the story of & interrogates what is arguably the largest watershed-wide dam decommissioning effort led by the federal gov following major flooding and breaches in 2018. w/ @creekthinker.bsky.social

One group is now proposing “Abundance” on the Colorado River by building a “coordinated suite of desalination plants.” “At some point, doesn’t it seem just a little bit easier, and a hell of a lot less expensive, to live within our means?” @landdesk.bsky.social www.landdesk.org/p/abundance-...

Braided channels on the Rock Prairie outwash plain, east of Janesville, Wisconsin. The outwash sand and gravel here is covered by a meter of loess, more or less. USGS air photo.

I have controversial thoughts about the state of higher ed & the ethics of keeping PhD programs so that research-active faculty can have cheap labor that enables their research programs (e.g., funding models that prioritize 'fit' w/ grant funded research rather then encourage research independence)

Important new article led by @anafochesatto.bsky.social : When the university meets the grassroots: participatory action research and just transitions in agriculture doi.org/10.1007/s104...