Chris Rowan

3D-printable time: An evolving meandering river as a 3D model where time is the 3rd (vertical) dimension 🧪⚒️

The eruption🌋 of #PitondelaFournaise that started on February 13 is still active, with a growing cinder cone, and a growing lava flow field.

If you’re going to use generative AI, this is the way to do it and to acknowledge doing it.

(I would personally not choose to do it, but there is a world of difference between “I wrote a paper and asked genAI to clean it up” and “I asked genAI to write my paper.”)

“The people in charge were making money by gambling on the very thing that destroyed them” sounds like it comes from a lesson about our fallen civilisation 2,000 years from now.

A town in the Swiss Alps stood for 800 years. In an instant it was wiped out The Swiss Alps are a natural wonder and a key part of the national identity, but life in the mountains is under threat from climate change.

Switzerland’s mountain villages face an uncertain future as climate change increases the risk of catastrophic landslides: “I feel we’re at the point where we can see clear evidence that climate change is affecting the stability of the Alps overall.”

Train on Terminator fanfiction. Get Terminator fanfiction.

Sounds like I was right to grade instead tonight.

Vaccines. Wind Turbines. Fuel efficient cars.

Which have the advantages of being properly defined technologies that do measurably useful things, at a cost significantly below “all the money, all the energy, and all the computers.”

SEM backscatter image of ash from the 2020 eruption of Taal in the Philippines. Credit: Erik Klemetti

Did somebody say Ash Wednesday?

Offshore wind showed up big during the East Coast’s brutal cold America’s two utility-scale offshore wind farms performed as well as gas power plants and better than coal in January — including during Winter Storm Fern.

"The data from January shows that the nation’s two operating utility-scale offshore wind farms — South Fork Wind and Vineyard Wind — performed as well as gas-fired power plants and better than coal-fired facilities"

The Morcles Nappe by Héli Badoux Since the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Swiss geologists have been renowned for their cross-sections which spectacularly reveal the structure of the Helvetic nappes. Among t

New post 👇 on my #Tectoldies blog. It's about beautiful cross-sections of the Morcles Helvetic nappe in the Swiss Alps 🏔️

First in a series I plan to share about those amazing Swiss #tectonic cross-sections. Stay tuned. ⚒️

tectoldies.mystrikingly.com/blog/the-mor...

I *love* this ternary chart showing developing economies increasingly go directly for clean electrons (solar plus some wind), bypassing the fossil economy that the US and EU went through.

I expect Africa will take an even more direct route than India.
ember-energy.org/latest-insig...

Wow - that is about the most comprehensive retraction I’ve ever seen. You can’t help but think it should have been a report from reviewer 2…

“The authors claim these are spherule fragments identified as cosmic impact indicators. During expert consultation, these have been identified as marine foraminifera.”

💀

Look I don't wanna boost that Elon post about English / Scots / Irish stuff more than it needs to be boosted but anyone claiming that English / Scots / Irish culture are the same inherent base culture is inherently disqualified from any further commentary on English / Scots / Irish culture.

“Famous dead person, who is on record as thinking the exact opposite of what I’m arguing, would definitely have changed his mind by now” is certainly a novel spin on the appeal to authority.

It is becoming increasingly clear to me that the ‘academia cosied up to Epstein’ and the ‘universities capitulate to Trump’ stories are, at root, the same story.

‘A good day to bury bad news’: The inside story of an infamous phrase The notorious comment, perhaps the most memorable instance of a government’s attempt to conceal an announcement, is often considered an example of spin at its worst. Alun Evans, the then director of c...

www.independent.co.uk/independentp...

Any UK people remember “it’s a good day to bury bad news?”

⚒️ A very Eeyore or Marvin-ish thing for a rock to say.

“I used to be a mountain. But would the water cycle leave me alone? It would not. Typical.“

Lyme Regis Museum honoured with prestigious national award from Arts Council England - Lyme Regis Museum Lyme Regis Museum honoured with prestigious national award from Arts Council England Lyme Regis Museum is delighted to announce its outstanding Jurassic Coast Geology Collection has been awarded Desig...

Great news today that the geology collection at Lyme Regis Museum has been awarded Designated Status by Arts Council England. Not only does it occupy the site of #MaryAnning 's childhood home, but her spirit lives on in the museum's collecting and research.
www.lymeregismuseum.co.uk/designation/

Also - obviously - dinosaur valentines.

Crevasse in a whitish rock with yellow crystals of gaidonnayite and milky natrolite on a black background. At the Museum of Nature.

To celebrate this year’s International Day of Women and Girls in Science, here is gaidonnayite, named after Dr Gabrielle Donnay, nestled in with some natrolite.
She has two minerals named after her!! Two of the very few minerals discovered in Canada named after a woman. #WomenInSTEM #IDWGS ⚒️🧪

It’s the International Day of Women and Girls in Science! We’re proud of the women who work to improve our collective understanding of the universe—from coral reefs to Earth’s atmosphere to exoplanets.

Here are a few of the #WomenInSTEM we’ve highlighted in our career issue over the years. #IDWGIS

So, while chances are good this is for reasons of cowardice….I don’t really care that much?

Polling is fine, but it fuels so much lazy reporting. Viewing all political news through the lens of whether it shifts opinion polls or not is something I’d like to see much less of.

An image showing 15 illustrations of birds paired with dinosaur skulls. Below each reads the words "Dinosaurs Survived!" with the geological formations and locations of each.

Dinosaurs Survived!

All 15 designs so far.

www.emmalerae.com/store.html

100% this. This is a brilliant metaphor.

1/ ProPublica collected handwritten letters in mid-January from children held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the same facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was taken.

Hundreds of kids are still detained.

We’ll let the children’s words speak for themselves. 🧵

Lawyer sets new standard for abuse of AI; judge tosses case Behold the most overwrought AI legal filings you will ever gaze upon.

Clearly ‘I will not use LLMs to generate documents submitted to the court’ needs to become part of the standard retainer agreement.

Under Trump, EPA’s enforcement of environmental laws collapses, report finds The Environmental Protection Agency has drastically pulled back on holding polluters accountable.

“Trump EPA declines to protect the environment” is hardly shocking, but

“Formal enforcement … is appropriate only when compliance assurance or informal enforcement is inapplicable or insufficient”

is not reassuring language in this "pay me to leave you alone today" Presidency.