Andrew Alden

There's always some little thing.

Ocher quarry update The former campus of Holy Names University, in the hills just above the Warren Freeway, has been for sale for a while, but no one seems to want to move an existing college or start a new one there.…

New blog post!

Dark orange-red siliceous ocher, Oakland Hills, with various light blue-green lichens

New blog post coming mañana

But dams and stills are mas macho

HB2U!

🧪🏺 Update - authors have new paper showing how useless gen- #AI is for archaeological illustration.
All 400 images were multiply inaccurate (physically, socially, technologically, environmentally), even with improved prompts.

JUST USE HUMAN EXPERTS & ARTISTS

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

It's a weird day. Today marks the one-year anniversary of my illegal firing from NOAA. And what a year it has been.

In the last year, I've seen pretty much my entire 15 year NOAA career attacked.

Bye Climate Prediction Center
Bye Climate.gov
Bye State Deptartment climate work

1/3

Chunk of ocherous colluvium, red-orange, on bland duff

chunk of reddish precursor rock next to a concrete step with "10-80/SWS/Simon" hand-inscribed on it

How to date the old Ohlone ocher quarry? . . . Aha, an absolute age clue!

For some reason(s) Male nean. X Female sap. seems to have predominated, then all nean. genes were suppressed in sap. across the board.

"All the women in my workplace are nervous. Must be the female brain."

Looks like a Bruce Beasley lamp.

We'll be unmaking bad coastal decisions the rest of our lives.

We are devastated to learn about the passing of the great palaeontologist Hans Sues.

May his legacy live on through all that knew him and the students he mentored. Our thoughts are with his family at this incredibly difficult time 💔.

🔊 www.paleonerds.com/podcast/hans...

The library had a table with their copies of our books. Mine looked beat-up, but to me it said "Many, many readers have opened me and I'm ready for many more."

Circular 1652, “Artificial Intelligence Strategy for the U.S. Geological Survey”

And there are TWO Heyday authors in the honor roll.

Authors Dinner 2026 The 23rd Annual Authors Dinner will be held on Sunday, February 22, 2026, at the Berkeley Public Central Library. Click the button below for more information about our honored authors, celebrity hosts...

Looking forward to being feted at this august occasion tomorrow night.

Picture of a mineral inside a glass case. The mineral is a combination of azurite, malachite, and gypsum, meaning that on the rock is a combination of one mineral that is so deep an indigo that it's almost black, a bright turquoise mineral, and a flat white mineral growing out in spikes. Behind the sample is a book called Introduction to Mineralogy, which has the same exact mineral on the cover.

Met a celebrity today

Those aren't fractures, they're clints and grykes.

Is there a job where I can charge companies $100,000, and they'll take an hour to run me through a new idea or product they're thinking of spending millions or billions on and I can just say "Yeah, that'd be cool", or "That's fucking stupid". I could have save Meta $79 billion RE the Metaverse.

mummification -> fossilization -> memeificatiion

Sorry this is so hard!

NCGS has awarded $2000 scholarships:

Nancy Carman (U Wisc Milwaukee), "Redox-driven mineral evolution in Lassen’s hydrothermal system: Seasonal controls on active surface alteration"

Gwyneth Chilcoat (UC Davis), "Reconstructing shellfish communities of the Holocene San Francisco Bay"

Congrats!

It's fake slop. The sun wouldn't reflect from the water like that during a real eclipse.

I hate to "like" this.

It's funny: my Substack newsletter (Deeper Oakland) has had only four subscription cancellations in the past year during 30% growth, but I feel each one of those four.

The plate interface is *ready* for the next megathrust quake. Not a prediction!

Here's the paper in Nature Comms Earth & Environment

And this was *before* The Origin of Species.

Seriously, "New Tools" is all that needs be said.