Joe Levy

The Zipper Is Getting Its First Major Upgrade in 100 Years By stripping away the fabric tape that’s held zippers together for a hundred years, Japanese clothing giant YKK is designing the future of seamless clothing.

I am irrationally excited about this. 3rd-grade me took a stab at improving the zipper as part of a science fair project. Alternative take: zippers with tape are user-replaceable. Integrated zips might look and feel nice, but are Apple/JD-level user servicble. #design

www.wired.com/story/the-zi...

Students selected 2 real cobbles, & then learned sculpture & painting techniques to produce (very!) convincing fakes. In the group photo, all those cobbles are fakes. A colleague & I judged 3 rounds of “best rock” & then a best-in-show round. The long image is the top contender pairs, real and fake

One of my new favorite moments @colgate.edu was getting invited to judge a Fake Rock competition this week in the first year seminar “Fakes: Deception, Illusion, & Misdirection.” The course is all about illusions, art, and what counts as real. ⚒️🧪 🌎🎨

Clawligarchy?

Adding a bunch of good stuff (cation rich octahedral layers in the form of Chips Ahoy) in between the TOT Oreos gives you chlorites.

It's a favorite! Oreo cookie crust is tetrahedral layers, creme is octahedral. So, kaolinite is open-faced oreos stacked up, while 2:1 clays like smectites are stacked whole cookies. They're expandable! But if you add frosting (interlayer cations) btw cookies, they become unexpandable like illite.

Oreos, cookies, and frosting in lab? It must be clay minerals day in Seds. ⚒️🧪

Writing a good paragraph is a solid cobble of effort! It’s more than the pebble of finding a citation or making tweaks to a plot, but definitely less than the boulder of outlining or writing a full section of a paper. I think I knocked out two pebbles today between classes. I’ll take it.

One concept that @akoleszar.bsky.social brought into our Senior Thesis workshop at Colgate has been breaking down writing into pebbles, cobbles, & boulders (see UW link). I use it for my projects, too! Got 5 minutes? Knock a pebble off your to-do

advance-resource-admin.engr.uw.edu/file/EKQe1pZ...

I think I figured out why my dataloggers stopped telemetering. The playa they were on decided to spend some more time as a lake. ⚒️🧪

I mean, most patients are probably proficient at reading an unspecified, vaguely log-scale axis.

I couldn’t resist looking at the gage data. The Vance family bump is a small plateau on Aug 2. So it’s smaller than rainstorm related pulses on the river. But still a classic example of ruling class humans who are used to exerting their will over people trying to also rule nature. Earth dissents.

They're very cool! Fully lacustrine in origin? Or is there a glacial process involved (not just as a till source)?

This is a very rough cut. Next steps are reflectance processing with the calibration tarp and incorporation of concurrent hyperspectral data. Very high cadence imagery like this helps us figure out the water budget of these wetlands which are the incubators in which Antarctic soil is being born.

Fun and games with #drone ortho-images. Here's three weeks or so of #Antarctic water track wetlands expanding during the '24-25 austral summer. The gif runs forwards then backwards to help spot change. You can see which way time's moving by looking at the shrinking snowbanks at right.

Wow, poster putty is a lot stronger in Europe than it is in the US.

I sometimes think I did much of my best research in grad school and as a postdoc, which is also when I had the greatest commitment to post-lunch naps in a hammock strung across my cubicle. There may be other confounding factors, but I think the 20 minute power naps were key.

A bar graph showing elements of the GOO spending bill items in orange are labeled costs. Items in green are labeled savings.

It’s not “costs” and “savings,” @nytimes.com. It’s “forfeiting the revenue the government needs to its work” and “abandonment of the needy and the future.”

Snuck in there is also expansion of a police state, of course. But it just ain’t “costs” and “savings.”

Even more fun--sand wedge polygons! Even though there's ice-cemented permafrost about 40 cm down, the active layer under these polygons is nearly dry, so the wedges are all winnowed sand and pebbles.

Putting together some #drone orthoimages from this past year's #Antarctic fieldwork. I noticed an oblique image in the set (all the mapping shots are nadir). Team dronie! Very RHPC: "And crawling on the planet's face, some insects called the human race. Lost in time and lost in space...and meaning."

This is why I tell my students that “Geology is destiny.” Politicians often think they’re imposing their will on people, who are famously squishy. But if you want to explain why some policies or state actions work or don’t, the answer is often in the rock, soil, and water underlying those people.

I love Garamond, even if I recognize it as The Font of Borrowed Authority

Maps show the cities about to experience extreme humidity and heat Humidity will soon surge to extreme levels across 40 states. Find out where there will be excessive heat and humidity — and how humidity patterns are changing.

This is bad for those facing level 11 Awkward Ringlet Index warnings. And, also, for everyone. Be careful in the heat and humidity—it’s the most dangerous weather phenomenon.

wapo.st/4lfEc0x

Nolite te glaciers carborundorum

He’s my rep and he is awesome! Fightin’ NY-22!

Um, @nytimes.com, Leo IV, who was born in Rome in the year 790 CE, was probably not the first American pontiff. Numeracy (and Roman numeralcy) matters.

For #1, you can’t beat The Day After Tomorrow. For all the awful weather depictions, the movie ends with the Earth winning (ie, AMOC shuts down and there’s no restarting it) and the final scenes show humans needing to adapt (because they failed to mitigate). I think that’s climate movie gold.

If anyone wants to come up to central NY to talk planets (and go cross-country skiing, er, simulating EVA operations on Europa) we’ve got lots of nice conference cabin compounds that are pretty unbooked during the snowy season.

Optimism is submitting new proposals to the 2025 NSF call for research projects requiring Antarctic fieldwork. Advocacy is reminding my senators’ offices that US scientists can’t be leaders in polar #geoscience without funding. Polar environmental change affects all Americans. #StandUpForScience

All Terry Pratchett books are pretty good books