Saramoira Shields

Note: we were *very* far away and left when the wind shifted in our direction. The gas cloud is extremely toxic!

Volcanic eruption viewable from the road. Channels of lava cooling to the left of the active crater.

Second vantage point of the active eruption

First vantage point of the eruption on our way back from the Blue Lagoon.

Tongues of crumbly lava reaching across a destroyed road near the Blue Lagoon.

Without planning on it at all, we caught part of the eruption in the Reykjanes peninsula in Iceland a few days ago. Also saw some of the lava scars from last year. What an otherworldly place.

A tired looking puffin tucking its beak under a wing, but still keeping an eye on the sky.

A puffin family just outside of a cave nest.

A puffin family watching humans watch them.

A moment of reassurance - two of the puffins seemed young and unsure despite having adult coloring.

I met some puffins yesterday! They are much smaller than I expected, though just about as cute as I expected. They all had adult coloring, but many of them seemed to be rather new to adulthood :)

I just have to say, as a historian of the Reconstruction-era Klan, that masked paramilitaries are very bad and masked vigilantes are even worse and there are causal links between the two and none of this is good for democracy.

"I asked ChatGPT" "I asked Grok" ok well I asked Gandalf and he said he has not passed through fire and death to bandy crooked words with a witless worm

To groups like ICE/police this is a feature not a bug.

I get that, I really do. But I grew up in a part of the country where unauthorized paramilitary groups flourished, and I think it’s important to both recognize and fight back against state sponsored violence *as well as* the fact that these groups often aim to infiltrate “official” organizations.

That may be true but there were also guys there wearing patches with white supremacist-associated iconography. And my point about anyone being able to buy badges and patches online still stands - how many of them were actually employed by the agencies they were claiming to represent?

Like literally anyone can buy tactical gear online. Patches too.

At this point if I see a guy in tactical gear of any kind my first thought is white supremacist paramilitary, and “official” patches are so easy to obtain online that it doesn’t matter to me if they’ve got them.

I’ve been watching all the videos out of Minneapolis and LA and at this point I’m wondering if the majority of armed dudes in masks wearing “ICE” gear are even employed by them. Like ICE should be abolished *and also* most of these guys are just claiming to be them in order to terrorize people.

Read my brilliant pal Matthew.

Two LIGO sites are essential for independently validating observed gravitational wave signals. Without the second site, we can't constrain the sky position well enough for electromagnetic follow-up searches of binary neutron star mergers. This would be devastating for the whole field ...

it is quite literally not LIGO without two antennas

My people, we need two LIGO sites to prove sources are astrophysical and not, like, a rabbit hopping nearby. ⚛️

❤️ to you, I’m so sorry.

petition to call apps with unnecessary, intrusive, non-toggleable predictive tech "AI-infested apps"

If anyone in my network knows any mathematical artists on blue sky… or artists who use math in their work on blue sky…. Can you let me know? I’d love to follow them.

(I had a bunch on Twitter but I deleted that a while ago and want to see more in my feed.)

I do but I haven’t posted any here. I need to get on that.

Everyone 6 months and older is eligible to get a flu vaccine.

It makes no sense to restrict Covid vaccines to only people who have specific medical conditions.

The FDA is basing its decisions on politics, not science.

you don't need chatGPT i am perfectly capable of drinking a bottle of water and lying to you

So glad you’re out of there. What a creep.

People need to stop following executive orders like they’re laws

Yeah. Just… yeah.

It’s even more offensive because they ASKED US FOR THIS POWER and they’re not using it! They’re shrinking away from responsibilities that they actively campaigned for! They’re spending more time trying to keep their jobs than to do their jobs!

At this point, I don’t take seriously any elected official who doesn’t throw themselves into the gears of the machine because the machine is creating fascism

No one likes this but it remains true that you can’t just oppose a message and expect people to pick it up; you have to actively, aggressively build an affirmative narrative for people to support in order to counter opponents. “You’re wrong” isn’t as powerful as “this is what right looks like”

I’m sorry. Everything about this sucks.

I… did not know about this. This is so bizarre and unsettling.

I know, posted an update a few minutes later. Not happy about the $45-99 price tag. Still wildly inappropriate to be doing a book tour right now.