Joe Mason

But they can all tell you what the temperature was at Lambeau Field on December 31, 1967.

A fun reminder that a loss of 60,000 jobs in and around academia is ~50% more than all coal mining jobs in the entire country.

Less than half of those polled in this northern Wisconsin county know who Zohran Mamdani is

Not Friday anymore, but here's lunch break in the Tengger Desert, 2013. With some nebkhas (small dunes of sand trapped around shrubs)

Just sent this link to a former student who wanted to know about interesting geomorphology in Washington. It turned into a long email.

For some reason, I've missed this, but this is some beautiful work by @geo-coe.bsky.social portraying the Channeled Scablands: dnr.wa.gov/sites/defaul...

I will say, the drivers are very good about stopping for them when they stroll across the street. Better than I would have expected. But still...

There is a family of three sandhill cranes, parents and an almost fullgrown colt, living at a busy intersection near our house. There are wetlands and brushy areas all around, but they like to hang out in the median. I go by, admire how beautiful they are, then get very worried about them.

With reforms in place, California’s Karuk Tribe works to reestablish cultural burning as 'common practice' For millennia, Indigenous peoples have intentionally set fires to care for the land. Colonization and fire exclusion largely put an end to those practices, though the tradition endured. Now, Californi...

While small, the burns represent a major step forward in the tribe’s longstanding effort to promote cultural burning. It’s the fruit of years of advocacy, and collaboration with federal agencies and nonprofits to bring down barriers to it. www.boisestatepublicradio.org/environment/...

Table showing increasing rate of sea level rise in contiguous US

Conveniently, you can explore all the tide gauge data in the US from the last 55 years here: earth.gov/sealevel/us/...

Sea Level Mis-information from DOE Here in the USA, the Department of Energy (DOE) has issued a report titled “A Critical Review of the Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate.” It is a product of the &#8…

Is sea level around the US accelerating? If you actually do the analysis, instead of just repeating talking points from decades ago, the answer is yes.
tamino.wordpress.com/2025/08/03/s...

a pancake on a table in a dappled outdoor area

a beautiful round pancake with two slices of ham and crunchy cheese on it

biked 40 kilometers in the beautiful dunes but only took photos of my pancake

It's right to demand that churches do better. It's wrong to expect them to. They've failed to stand up to oppression & exploitation everywhere. They're human, not divine — flawed, broken, sinful. Yet they've also been the rock on which millions of people have stood to fight for a better world.

It's a week or so later than usual for this orchard. They will be early varieties.

Big news. New apples arriving this week!

(Grown in the Driftless Area, delivered by our apple CSA)

ERROR 404: Summer humidity not found

GitHub - bburns/Arda: Maps of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle Earth using DEM (Digital Elevation Model) and place vectors Maps of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle Earth using DEM (Digital Elevation Model) and place vectors - bburns/Arda

wait someone rescued them here! github.com/bburns/Arda

Yes, coyotes and turkeys have both visited our backyard recently.

I do remember getting a safety lesson of sorts when it flared up unexpectedly and singed my hair.

When I was a kid, I got to burn the trash in a 50 gallon drum. Not sure why you would ever let a kid do that...

I was going to say it's been years since I saw (or smelled) someone burning leaves or grass clippings around here, but then I remembered I was startled to smell leaves burning behind a house in our neighborhood earlier this year. But that's how rare it is here now.

They're all over in Madison. Like all the wild turkeys in Wisconsin, they're all descended from a few birds brought from Missouri by the DNR, years ago.

When you go to the website to download them, it says "speak friend, and enter"

Okay, but when will DEMs be available? A lot of people might like to see Mt Doom in shaded relief.

Thinking of a 3D model of a loess island once I get done with this other big task I should be working on.

Radar-based satellite image showing streamlined oval to irregularly shaped hills of loess standing above flood-eroded basalt. The basalt is gray, but there are light blue, pink, and red tones on the loess.

Loess islands surrounded by megaflood-eroded scablands (exposed basalt), east of Ritzville, Washington. Sentinel 1 GRD synthetic aperture radar, seasonal composite of VV polarization, descending. Colors relate mainly to seasonal changes in vegetation on the loess, mostly wheat crops.

Satellite image of part of the Grand Canyon and a forest fire on the North Rim. The horizontal rock strata exposed on the canyon walls are visible to the south, with the dark colored conifer forest of the North Rim to the north. Plumes of smoke are moving northeast from a fire in the forest, and coalescing downwind.

Close up of the North Rim, with dark unburned forest on the west edge of the image. To the east are plumes of smoke and gray burned areas.

Dragon Bravo Fire, North Rim of Grand Canyon, July 27. Overview and close-up with part of the burned area. Sentinel 1.

What I like most about teaching: A student emails you, or maybe they stop their bike to talk when they see you walking, and they tell you that what they learned in your class helped them understand something they saw on a trip out West, or encountered in a job, or in a new place they moved.

I use the Oxford comma out of habit. Probably good to use in legal texts or there is some possibility of confusion, but no, it's not essential to convey the correct meaning when the alternative is "someone loves eating their dog"

Why is every example of why we should use the Oxford comma a sentence where there's one obvious meaning and one ridiculous one that no one will believe?