Ryan Ward

Though not sure if this just means brick and mortar cults…. Like momma used to make (no shortage of metaverse cults)

Tragic

The Decline of Deviance Where has all the weirdness gone?

And to think this doesn’t even get to AI stagnating our culture open.substack.com/pub/experime...

Research Papers Used to Have Style. What Happened? A Brief History of Scientific Writing

open.substack.com/pub/newscien...

Eat Me On Rosalía's "Lux" and our collective gut health

I wrote about Rosalía's "Lux," martyrdom, and our collective gastrointestinal health johnpaulbrammer.substack.com/p/eat-me

Seems not great

Trudeau/Katy Perry, Louvre heist… this is the type of shenanigans reporting that we don’t get anymore when the news cycle is all fascism and horrors of AI

Our new article out today takes a hard look at some practical limitations on stratospheric aerosol injection and what they means for the riskiness of this approach. @mcneill-lab.org w/ @gwagner.com & @steingart.bsky.social @climate.columbia.edu @columbiaseas.bsky.social

Here's the press release:

😽😽😽😽🙂🙂🙂wish I could be there🥲🥲

Come on Joan Didion

Who Goes Nazi?, by Dorothy Thompson

Every few months now I re-read this "Who Goes Nazi?" piece from 1941 and am blown away by how it captures the people we are dealing with 80 years later.

harpers.org/archive/1941...

Celebrating Richard Flagan's 50 years of service to @caltech.edu! Rick arrived in 1975 intending to study combustion chemistry and ended up playing an enormously influential role in developing new instrumentation to quantify atmospheric aerosol and helping to mitigate air pollution in LA and beyond.

This is one of the most beautiful things I have witnessed, the craft here is impeccable.

I like the tracked changes holdover error getting us started on page 2

vividly remember playing apples to apples in elementary school and the favorite card was always the supermodels card (caption “long legs = big bucks”)

not sure if/what it says about that era

They should read our new study. In Los Angeles Purple Air sensors are likely more accurate than the expensive sensors. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

There’s other interesting science in here too, I think (eg how changes in nighttime o3 buffer NOx reductions vis-a-vis ammonium nitrate formation). Hopefully a little something for everyone 🙂

Also surprising is how much effort has been made to match purple air to the FRM/FEM when it performed the best in high ammonium nitrate periods. Our mantra in the field is generally that purple air is over-reporting, but it makes me question many of the corrections we’ve made to that instrument

Susanne Hering (👸) and Glen Cass first pointed out (in 1999) that the FRM is biased for semi volatile species like ammonium nitrate. It is surprising we haven’t adopted even nylon filters so that we can accurately report the PM. It is clear that a great control strategy follows speciated data

This is a super optimistic finding. Yes, ammonium nitrate is underreported. However, that it is ammonium nitrate and shows a dependence on NOx bequeaths a plan. electrification of the vehicle fleet, while good for climate, can still be impactful in 2025 for air quality

I think the most important finding here is that since ammonium nitrate is still pervasive in PM2.5, reducing NOx (eg mobile sources, diesel, off road) is still critical. If the PM was only organic, the control strategy is less clear (especially since we are still fighting over SOA sources)

This work was really fun for us (I think) and also shows a lot of our biases. We’ve been so focused on organic aerosol the past decade (at least in LA), that when we saw that the nitrate component was more abundant than the organic, we had to unearth the ancient texts on ammonium nitrate

Poorly quantified trends in ammonium nitrate remain critical to understand future urban aerosol control strategies Regulatory monitors fail to measure ammonium nitrate aerosol, masking its importance as a top aerosol pollutant in Los Angeles.

Coming across your paper, @ryanward.bsky.social is an excellent twist of fate.... I ❤️ your work! Congratulations.

Thank you🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂 had to fight to keep that phrase in lol

from across campus in the rain I can hear a chorus of boo’s at Columbia commencement

The thought of Lori lightfoot having met the pope

a lot of discourse about AI destroying student creativity and critical thinking paired with a perhaps ironic lack of creative solutions

To say nothing of his boss!

Another statement was sent to the community and published here universitylife.columbia.edu/content/upda...