Four articulated buses blocking each other in a roundabout making them stuck.
So this happened in Oslo yesterday. Four articulated buses got stuck in a roundabout.
A log with many giant oyster mushrooms sprouting out of it, with a person's hand and leg for scale
These are *not* the same logs we inoculated last May: these oyster mushrooms simply volunteered in some of the remaining logs. This harvest (the 2nd one this month) was 4.5 pounds, which will make for a very nice Thanksgiving feast!
The organisers of the world's biggest planetary science conference are outlawing any DEI-related submissions because their lawyers are afraid they'll lose federal support.
They're losing the support of the planetary science community fucking fast.
www.science.org/content/arti...
CAP Staff and Fellows page, which showed Larry Summersโ profile just a few minutes ago, now says โLawrence H. Summers is no longer with the Center for American Progress.โ
UPDATE: Summersโ page is now offline.
Got my trusty Acme Thunderer at the ready.
CBP reported to be coming to Raleigh tomorrow. Here's the Siembra NC hotline. Please share widely.
โThe prohibited activities would include joint research, co-authorship on papers, and advising a foreign graduate student or postdoctoral fellow. The language is retroactive, meaning any interactions during the previous 5 years could make a scientist ineligible for future federal funding.โ
I Want You to Understand Chicago Politics Chicago 2025-11-08 I want you to understand what it is like to live in Chicago during this time. Every day my phone buzzes. It is a neighborhood group: four people were kidnapped at the corner drugstore. A friend a mile away sends a Slack message: she was at the scene when masked men assaulted and abducted two people on the street. A plumber working on my pipes is distraught, and I find out that two of his employees were kidnapped that morning. A week later it happens again. An email arrives. Agents with guns have chased a teacher into the school where she works. They did not have a warrant. They dragged her away, ignoring her and her colleaguesโ pleas to show proof of her documentation. That evening I stand a few feet from the parents of Rayito de Sol and listen to them describe, with anguish, how good Ms. Diana was to their children. What it is like to have strangers with guns traumatize your kids. For a teacher to hide a three-year-old child for fear they might be killed. How their relatives will no longer leave the house. I hear the pain and fury in their voices, and I wonder who will be next. Understand what it is to pray in Chicago. On September 19th, Reverend David Black, lead pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, was praying outside the ICE detention center in Broadview when a DHS agent shot him in the head with pepper balls. Pepper balls are never supposed to be fired at the head because they can seriously injure, or even kill. โWe could hear them laughing as they were shooting us from the roof,โ Black recalled. He is not the only member of the clergy ICE has assaulted. Methodist pastor Hannah Kardon was violently arrested on October 17th, and Baptist pastor Michael Woolf was shot with pepper balls on November 1st. Understand what it is to sleep in Chicago. On the night of September 30th, federal agents rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter to execute a raid on an apartment building on the South Shoโฆ
Kyle Kingsbury is not a journalist. He is not an op-ed writer.
He is a computer safety researcher.
And he has written one of the most compelling, comprehensive accounts of the ongoing hell in Chicago that you could possibly imagine.
In under 1600 words.
aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...
๐ธ Image of the month: November 2025!โฃ
This month we are delighted to feature โ๐๐ก๐๐ซ๐๐๐ญ๐๐ซ๐ข๐ณ๐ข๐ง๐ ๐ญ๐ก๐ ๐ก๐ฒ๐ฉ๐๐ซ๐ฎ๐ง๐ข๐๐จ๐ซ๐ฆ๐ข๐ญ๐ฒ ๐จ๐ ๐๐ข๐ฌ๐จ๐ซ๐๐๐ซ๐๐ ๐ง๐๐ญ๐ฐ๐จ๐ซ๐ค ๐ฆ๐๐ญ๐๐ฆ๐๐ญ๐๐ซ๐ข๐๐ฅ๐ฌโ by Maher et al.
๐ doi.org/10.1103/l5hk...
Donโt miss out on the colloquium next Monday from 4-5pm in 2010 Biltmore Hall!! Dr. Vashan Wright, from University of California San Diego and Scripps Institute will discuss โSearching for Evidence of Water in the Martian Crustโ. | More info:
physics.sciences.ncsu.edu/event/physic...
My 11-year-old sitting with her pile of Halloween candy, sorting it into a bar graph
We have progressed from data collection to data analysis.
Person dressed in all black with a safety vest that says "Louvre Personnel" and a person dressed in all white carrying some "jewels" (green Mardi Gras beads decorated with tinfoil filigree) nestled on a pillowed box.
Happy Halloween!
In social movement studies, we talk about how marches and protests expand the threshold of acceptable risk so that people take more and bigger social risks IN PUBLIC, EN MASSE. This is extremely important for the bourgeois white folks holding signs and building social rapport.
Poster with the folllowing text: The Chapel Hill Philharmonia A Children's Concert Donald Oehler, conductor 3pm Sunday October 19, 2025 Hall Hall, Moeser Auditorium, UNC Campus Free Admission Featuring The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra by Benjamin Britten and more.
On the subject of cello-ing ... if you've got kids who'd enjoying hearing Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, @chphilharmonia.bsky.social will be performing it tomorrow at 3pm in Hill Hall @ UNC. Your kids will also have a chance to conduct us playing Strauss's Radetzky March.
two protesters in inflatable costumes: a dog with a sign saying "off leash since 1776" and an alien-abduction with a sign saying "I like my ICE crushed"
Sign saying "Drag Kings (check), Drag Queens (check), Orange Kings (X)"
Sign in a socialist poster-art style of a man shouting saying "Make Orwell Fiction Again"
Musicians playing cello and guitar performing onstage
Some signs, the expected inflatable costumes, and a first for me: cello as protest instrument. I mean, we cellists *could* do violence with our endpins, so I can see why we're not so commonly present on stage.
Okay, now that I'm back at my computer ... I loved seeing all the American flags today (I wore red, white & blue myself), it feels like we're reclaiming something. I'm going to be playing the national anthem at a children's concert tomorrow and in past such concerts, some of us had taken a knee.
Dear Secretary McMahon, Ms. Mailman, and Mr. Haley, I appreciated the opportunity to speak with you yesterday. I welcome further engagement around how we can (a) enhance the long-standing partnership between the federal government and this country's leading research universities and (b) ensure that higher education stays focused on academic excellence. As I shared on the call, I do not believe that the involvement of the government through a compact--whether it is a Republican- or Democratic-led White House- is the right way to focus America's leading colleges and universities on their teaching and research mission. Our universities have a responsibility to set our own academic and institutional policies, guided by our mission and values, our commitment to free expression, and our obligations under the law. Staying true to this responsibility is what will help American higher education build bipartisan public trust and continue to uphold its place as the envy of the world. We remain open to other ways to work with the federal government to enhance higher education. Best, Sian Leah Beilock President
Dartmouth is OUT! Thank goodness... a friend at U of A and I have been playing "Who will be the last of the 9 standing?" and it's not gonna be us!
Solidarity!! Last week, Indiana University fired the director of student media & halted print on the Indiana Daily Student newspaper. Yesterday, Purdueโs student paper printed the banned edition & drove two hours to deliver it. Incredible www.heraldtimesonline.com/story/news/l...
Crowd with signs in front of some roofed town commons structures
Carrboro, NC has a sizeable fraction of its population talking about #NoKings today, high energy that I hope translates to action.
Here in Carrboro, NC, and across the world, academic freedom requires #NoKings @aaup.org
TL;DR: Fuck off Trump.
For those who are new to or already use LAMMPSโฆ with reference to a new GUI
arxiv.org/abs/2503.14020
MW correctly reading the room
"Trump directives have undermined a 75-year history of independence and threaten the National Science Foundation's vaunted track record for excellence"
www.science.org/content/arti...
๐งช ๐ โ๏ธ
This is a rather unfortunate change that seems to have come as a surprise to just about everyone. FYI for students and PIs who were looking to apply for the NSF GRFP
๐งชThe NSF has made changes to the GRFP solicitation and eligibility TODAY that may change your eligibility! PLEASE read through the solicitation if you were planning to apply and speak to your mentors about the merits of applying: www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...
Please share with anyone who cares about NSF support for graduate students and take 30 seconds to sign and leave a comment.
The deadline for the 2025 Graduate Research Fellowship Program is about one month away and literally no one can apply. #NSFGRFP
jasonjwilliamsny.github.io/grfp2025/
The white supremacist conceit that everyone in antiquity was living under some kind of global jim crow segregation is just complete bullshit news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...
When stressed, amorphous materials undergo plastic transformations aided by low-frequency vibrational modes. Now researchers have found the same association in an entirely separate class of materials: active matter.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin โจ figured out what stars are made of โจ when she was just 25. ๐ญ๐งช
Her PhD thesis basically established the Harvard astro department โ at a time when Harvard didn't officially allow woman students.
I wrote this little profile to mark the 100th anniversary of her thesis:
