Sarah Carmichael

A reminder that you need to actually have deposits to mine ore. And if you have an ore deposit it takes years of exploration and then years of planning and permitting before you can ever start digging. Mining takes long term planning and mistakes cost $$$, no one’s gonna be rushing things.

North Carolina voters say lawmakers retaliated over redistricting reform The plaintiffs claim the state’s General Assembly interfered in local elections by preventing voters from adopting alternative election districts.

Common Cause sued a North Carolina county board of elections in federal court Wednesday, claiming the state’s legislature passed discriminatory measures to impose new electoral districts. #nccourts #ncpol

@courthousenews.bsky.social

www.courthousenews.com/north-caroli...

Users: Can we have a search engine that works?

Google: How about an AI summary you didn’t ask for?

Users: No, thank you. Accurate search engine?

Google: How about if we make the summaries wildly unreliable?

Users: Please, no.

Google: Take it take it take it take it….

Users: WTF?

Wait I am so confused. The paywall meant I couldn't get to the part where it explained what these two things have to do with each other, and why an Asheville church is a polling place for another country's election???

First Responders Are Being Overwhelmed by Data Center Fires First responders in a small Ohio town have answered 84 emergencies between two Amazon data centers, all on the taxpayer's dime.

Yet another way that tech billionaires are stealing from us while getting richer off of planetary destruction (in addition to data centers being unbearably loud, noxious, water hogs that are driving up local utility prices):

Arduous and Unequal: The Fight to Get FEMA Housing Assistance After Helene An analysis by ProPublica and The Assembly of the more rural counties in North Carolina hardest hit by Helene shows that the households that got the most aid tended to have the highest incomes.

NEW: Income isn’t supposed to play a role in how much housing assistance FEMA gives families.

But in some North Carolina counties, the highest-income homeowners received two to three times as much money after Hurricane Helene as those with lower incomes.

With @theassemblync.bsky.social

Kristi Noem Fast-Tracked Millions in Disaster Aid to Florida Tourist Attraction After Campaign Donor Intervened The DHS chief has been widely criticized for slowing down FEMA’s response after natural disasters. Texts and emails obtained by ProPublica point to an effective way to get help faster: have one of Noe...

!

www.propublica.org/article/kris...

The power went out before stuff got really bad, so you only see a tiny fraction of what was to come for us here in the High Country.

Helene was the worst fear I have ever experienced. I haven't been the same since Sept 27, 2024.

A morning at the grocery store for Helene’s survivors • NC Newsline One year after the worst storm in North Carolina history, the Foscoe Home Team's store remains a "safety net for the High Country."

A morning at the grocery store for Helene’s survivors
ncnewsline.com/2025/09/22/a...

This isn't s major city, but I really enjoyed Essen. It's a world heritage site for its history of coal mining. We rented bikes and got around everywhere via bike. It was lovely and livable.

Checking out alternative locations for our geology field methods field trips this weekend, and the Helene damage is still so stark, even one year later. This is a landslide off the trail of one of the few locations that's still even passable.

Matthew McConaughey says he wants a private LLM, fed only with his books, notes, journals, and aspirations, so he can ask it questions and get answers based solely on that information, without any outside influence.

this exists it is called thinking

As data centers go up, North Carolina weighs how to handle energy… Duke wants to build gas plants, but clean energy advocates argue that solar, battery storage, and demand response could help alleviate growing strain on…

North Carolina is anticipating a data center boom. Will residents face higher utility bills and more polluting gas plants as a result?

"The conclusion of this experiment is that ChatGPT Plus did not meet SciPak’s standards"

You don't say.

Will LLMs someday predict renewable electricity output, or guide dispatch decisions, as well as today's (far less resource intensive) systems? It's possible. Will the incremental performance improvement be worth all the pollution and power grid strains/costs from data center buildout? I doubt it.

If a dude offered to help you write crappy memos and essays, and you found out they were also helping children kill themselves, would you keep working with that dude?

Who would i talk to about getting a flood gauge on the North Fork of the New River? We're in a data-free zone up here in NWNC. There's gauges on the South Fork but nothing at all on the North Fork which is where some of the steepest slopes are.

Thank you for this. It's difficult to look at, as 1 year later we're *still* rebuilding and clearing debris on my property, and the roads and bridges around me are still being repaired from the landslides and floods.

Helene in Southern Appalachia One year later: An event analysis and how we move forward.

I’m proud to say that @noaa.gov and NCEI has released a 1 year retrospective on #Helene using ESRI Story Maps.

arcg.is/aqCD4

Here is a brief thread of how this came to be and how NOAA can still do good things (even while wearing pajamas).

Dinosaur extinction can explain continental facies shifts at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary - Communications Earth & Environment Dinosaurs promoted open habitats in the Late Cretaceous, and their extinction could have led to a radical reorganization of the landscape and ecosystem structure at the beginning of the Paleogene, acc...

Whoa, kind of mind-blowing. The rocks above the end-Cretaceous mass extinction look different than the ones below it because of the ways that dinosaurs modified the environment. www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Gov. Josh Stein seeks $13.5B in federal aid as NC nears Helene anniversary Stein has been pressing the federal government for months to provide more efficient and equal aid to Western NC.

As of this morning, the Department of Homeland Security has released the $64 million, Sen. Budd has been fighting for. Last week, Budd announced he would prevent DHS noms from moving foward while DHS Secretary Noem delayed payment to NC. #ncpol
charlotteobserver.com/news/politic...

We are so deeply fucked.

I'm listening to this right now as an audiobook and it's fascinating. The early human history stuff in particular, plus the whole way everything is tied together is 👍

Draft zero. Just get it on the page. Copy/paste quotes. Complain that you don't understand something. Complain that an author's work is crap but you have to cite it anyway. Just get it on the page. Then come back and edit.

People. This book is SO GOOD. Truly -- I am about 70% the way through and the way Peter explains and synthesizes and expands and provides fresh perspective is truly stunning.

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Not enough people know about Homer City. The single largest fossil fuel plant that's being built *explicitly* to power a data centre.

This isn't a future projection, or some hollow marketing. This is physical stuff happening right now.

bsky.app/profile/keta...

Something I didn't get to say yesterday:

We heard over and over during the event about "human-centered" approaches to "AI". But if refusal is not on the table (at every level: individual students and teachers right up through UNESCO) then we have in fact centered the technology, not the people.

I really don't think we've barely begun to come to terms with how tech companies have actively decided to destroy the basic infrastructure of human information to juice their share price