I know the president has ordered the elimination of pennies, but we should save up the ones we've got so that we can pound that malleable metal into arrowheads after civilization falls.
Retired geophysicist, pro bono data science, writer of letters to the editor, troublemaker. https://www.ajackson.org/Blog/
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I know the president has ordered the elimination of pennies, but we should save up the ones we've got so that we can pound that malleable metal into arrowheads after civilization falls.
I know this sounds crazy, but shouldn’t the Secretary of Energy know something about energy?
I have now lived a long and full life, with a Republican Treasury Secretary saying that adding a national sales tax -- imposed on an odd assortment of goods -- *raises* economic growth. Can't wait to raise other taxes to raise growth further. Or to double tariffs so we can double growth.
Does Paxton know that Jesus spoke Aramaic, not Elizabethan English?
NGL, when I read the actual Frankenstein, I was genuinely floored--I'm not sure I've ever encountered a bigger disconnect between the source material and the Hollywood version. Source: a non-green, deeply erudite good guy, no villagers with torches, etc. You know: like this.
Never forget, a 13-year study found that protected bike-lanes led to a drastic decline in fatalities for all road users. ALL ROAD USERS. And painted bike-lanes? No safety improvement at all. For sharrows, it’s actually safer to NOT have them. Via @usa.streetsblog.org @nyc.streetsblog.org
When they start saying it out loud, it's bess we start listening #nokings #nopedophiles #nonzis #nobillionaires #defenddemocracy
New this week: Chicago likely has had fewer shootings through August year than any year since the mid-1960s. Gun violence remains a problem there, but I wrote about the city's encouraging trends and the data challenge of historically contextualizing this year. jasher.substack.com/p/contextual...
When it comes to 19th-century French art most people go gaga over Impressionism, but I think they're missing out on Gustave Courbet, to me the real GOAT whose devotion to Realism (with a capital "R") made something monumental out of the lives of everyday people, as in his "Burial at Ornans," 1849-50
The indictment was handed down 2 days after career prosecutor Richard Barker, the acting US atty for eastern Washington state, resigned. In a social post, Barker wrote “I am grateful that I never had to sign an indictment or file a brief that I didn’t believe in.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
A new op-ed by @oliviajulianna.bsky.social in the @houstonchronicle.com: Thank you, Gavin Newsom, for trying to save Texans from our government www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outl...
There are also plenty of "Texas Christians" working to stop the entanglement of state and religion.
A decline like this would be huge news just in general. But given JUST how rapidly this drop happened makes it extra-newsworthy. Given it happened while Trump yells abt “crime!” to justify authoritarianism makes it even MORE newsworthy. Yet… mostly crickets and “ppl still think crime’s up.”
Redirecting NPR’s headline: “Scientists find literally hundreds of errors in a new 111-page DOE climate report” www.npr.org/2025/09/02/n... interactive.carbonbrief.org/doe-factchec... www.science.org/content/arti... Do better NPR. You have little to lose at this point.
Because the population can expand to infinity. No problem.
Yes, it’s a BMW. What else would it be? #WorldBollardAssociation 🤭
I hope they hold the ceremony at four seasons total landscaping
Your Labor Day good news. $500m new investment in science. Our apologies to @anandwrites.bsky.social
You can have Ivermectin, but you can't get a COVID vax. The level of mendacity is breath-taking. "Public service" is a bad joke.
Crime is literally lower than it has been in the entire life of every single non-senior-citizen American. If you are under age 65 you have never lived at a time with lower property crime rates, lower violent crime rates or lower homicide rates. Never.
Results so stunningly clear they inspired this classic xkcd (xkcd.com/2400/):
Parsing out clues about the President's health like old time Kremlinologists
I also would like to know how many who identified as R 20 years ago still do. I know quite a few ex-Republicans. How much of the change is due to people who are not true believers bailing?
NEW: This morning, DOJ's Drew Ensign confirmed that the last of 76 children the Trump administration tried to put on planes & send to Guatemala in the middle of the holiday weekend are back in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the result of a well-timed lawsuit & fast-moving judge.
My wife and I pick up trash whenever we walk - which is almost every day. We have... opinions about it.
Everything he touches is cheapened beyond measure.
2%-7% of the population is allergic to lavender. Using scented products like that is as bad as smoking cigarettes.
Good for him. Maybe it will catch on.
What a terrible waste. Reminds me of Henry Moseley.
The camera is a 360' GoPro on a telescopic mast clamped to my bike frame. Google Streetview is a proprietary product with high licensing fees but the service I contribute to, Mapillary, is opensource. Pavement surveys, bike lanes, signage etc all get mapped for anyone who wants it (like the city).
It's about 50 years old. I don't remember where I got it. Sadly it continues to be relevant.
Fear of crying wolf.
📰 Maureen Dowd totally disembowels RFK Jr. in the NY Times @nytimes.com in an opinion piece with the headline: VAX QUACK LACKS FACTS. Surely the best headline ever since the classic HICKS NIX STIX PICS! www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/o...
Great to stop by Hyde Park and see Chef Erick Williams. This Black Business Month and every month, we’re proud to show the world what Illinois is really all about.
I think you could buy the governor.
"Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter, In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore". Poe
This isn’t just semantic nitpicking. I think it gets to the heart of some of the politics here. Anti-MAGAs can’t convince MAGA that they’re wrong by pointing to (alleged) inconsistencies …. bc they are not, in fact, inconsistent. It’s that one word (freedom) means two VERY different things.
RFK Jr: “If you’ve ever compared an unvaccinated kid to a vaccinated kid… you see the bright eyes, the engagement, the social interactions, the curiosity. And you compare them to the child who even had one or two vaccines, and they’re completely different.“ This man is an existential threat.
Found stumbling in a garden and very thin, this owl was brought to CROW (Clinic for the Rehabilitation Of Wildlife) and xrays revealed a pellet in the shoulder. Careful support with the help of Peace River Wildlife resulted in a full recovery and release crowclinic.org/support-crow/ #owlsintowels 💛🦉
I would bet money that Vance has already been discussing it with an elite group of insiders.
I think it's time to discuss the 25th Amendment.
senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, former chief economist to Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) & director of budget and spending policy for Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign👇🏽
I'm glad that the work is continuing. Sucks for us.
Racist losers just gotta be racist.
Where is the mainsteam media? Anyone out there? Can you hear me???
Larry Ellison bankrolling £118M AI vaccine research at Oxford University
This seems important:
It does not escape me that those of us who have been saying it was a genocide, since early days, are also the ones who correctly called what is happening here fascism, since early days. Things are pretty obvious if you are willing to look.
This is not normal. Japan is continuing its run of astonishing temperature records. The country has just had its hottest summer for the third year in a row, and by a substantial margin. Data: JMA
My great grandfather was an engineer on the Rock Island RR line and participated in the 1946 national strike. He was proud of that. Decades later he told me stories about it as a toddler that were as suspenseful and colorful as his cowboy tales from the final era of the XIT Ranch. Happy Labor Day!
Who's the worst cartoon character? I vote Henry, the dad from Dennis the Menace. He's a mask deliberately invented to whitewash the identity of his creator, Hank Ketcham, one of the worst men to ever make comics. It's gonna take a thread.
Understanding the z-score can significantly enhance your data analysis skills. I've created a tutorial on how to compute z-scores in the R programming language: statisticsglobe.com/z-score-in-r More: statisticsglobe.com/online-cours... #advancedanalytics #research #datastructure
Jam GPS over Russia. Tit for tat.
“The whole airport area GPS went dark" Her plane circled for 1 hour, then landed using analogue maps. This is an attack. Enough with the "plausible deniability" and doing nothing in response to clearly dangerous and deliberate action. 1/n www.ft.com/content/3c33...
What's wrong with the obsession to consume high protein in your diet or via bars, supplements, or powders? A review of the data on efficacy and safety erictopol.substack.com/p/our-preocc...
Today at the Bike the Drive in Chicago.
You saw or you made something awesome related to Quarto either with #ObservableJS, #RStats, #Python or #JuliaLang? Please submit a suggestion issue to #AwesomeQuarto PS: if you like this list, star it and share it 😉 github.com/mcanouil/awe... #Quarto #DataScience #QuartoPub
No suckers this year. Jamie Raskin is giving kids copies of the Constitution at the Kensington Labor Day Parade. “It’s got the Impeachment Clause in there!”
Russian GPS jamming over the Baltic closed a Finnish airport for a month Russia was behind a plot to put explosives on cargo planes from 🇪🇺 to North America DHL cargo plane crashed, due to Russian GPS interference Ignoring Putin and pretending things aren't happening will make things worse. 2/2
“This is unacceptable, and it should alarm every American, regardless of political leanings.” -almost every former living CDC Director with the conspicuous exception of lab leaker-turned-anti-vax fabulist Robert Redfield www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/o...
Outstanding piece from @radleybalko.bsky.social
China's exports to Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Uzbekistan are off the charts. The bulk of this stuff is transshipments to Russia. The EU should stop any and all development aid to these transshipment hubs as part of the 19th sanctions package...
It took cops three hours to finally go into the Pulse nightclub the night of the shooting. If you wander near a crosswalk in Florida with a piece of chalk right now you'll have four cops on you in under five seconds.🤷♂️
It appears the Trump admin may again be lying to a federal judge.
"People tend to fetishize big... acts of “Resistance" w/o remembering that small individual acts of noncompliance are also tools that can frustrate great & evil powers. We can save a life, [ease] the suffering of a person, or can change a mind. Right now, that has to be enough of a reason to try."
M-orons A-re G-overning A-merica shorturl.at/Y5yPL
Donald Trump says he’s a war hero. Well, so am I. You and me, Don, we know the hell we haven’t been through. @hcrichardson.bsky.social @fieldteam6.org #PaulaPoundstone #Comedy #Satire #WarHero #DonaldTrump #PoliticalHumor #StandUpComedy #CurrentEvents #SemperFony #heydonaldtrump
I’m just exhausted by frozen caveman journalism, where journalists acted shocked by perfectly predictable outcomes that would seem obvious with just a little reflection. “Who could have possibly foreseen seen this completely obvious policy failure by those in power?”
Unexpectedly, when the price of Good X went way up, while the piece of nearly-identical Good Y stayed the same, demand shifted heavily towards Y. I mean, yes, I spent 6 years getting a PhD in Economics. But I feel like this is sort of outcome a five year old would expect.
Idiots are going to needlessly kill people.
"Election laws are set by state legislatures and are then governed by a combination of the governor, the attorney general, the chief election official, and the state board of elections. The Constitution does not give the president the power to regulate elections." EOs 👏 Are 👏 Not 👏 Laws 👏
Mitt Romney's campaign manager is now quoting Jim Hightower. smdh Original quote was "a yellow stripe and dead armadillos."
We made a fire tonight, and added in one of those sticks that make it somewhat blue. Thought these pics of that came out pretty cool. (Not every post has to be bleak, despite my posting history. There’s still beauty in this world.)
www.cnn.com/2025/08/29/w...
What struck me about Founder's cemetery was how young most of the folks buried there were. Houston was a nasty, pestilential place.
it shouldn't be easier to get a gun in America than the covid vaccine
Normally they've booked 40% of their fall soybean sales to China at this point. This year, they are at 0% booked, and no, that's not a typo. www.farmprogress.com/soybean/us-s...
Curious about which fields poast the most? Medicine / Social science / Environmental science / Biochemistry Note that these aren't corrected for field size, so love the strong showing from earth science too ⚒️🧪
They’re doing all this to prevent people from MEMORIALIZING A MASS SHOOTING
Goal is to try to proactively move those neighborhoods to higher ground.
Basically trying to identify poor, under-resourced neighborhoods subject to chronic flooding. Currently working with EPA dasymetric population grids and NOAA sea level rise grids, plus CDC social vulnerability measures. And FEMA historical data.
After doing hobbies for a few years, I fell into doing what I call pro bono data science. Currently doing work for an NGO disaster recovery group.
What’s wild to me: NOW, media outlets & medical organizations are “stunned” by the damage RFK Jr. is doing to CDC, other health agencies, & public health. Me & my colleagues have been screaming about him for years. Years. Even more so in the last year. We were called hyperbolic. 1/
If you know anyone who works for a Pbm and has documentation supporting this , pls let me know
CHICAGO…
Who needs experts? We have Google. And AI!
Stephen Manning, this guy’s lawyer, is one of the best in the country. It’s very good news that he’s taken this case.
What are we even doing?
Brilliant detective work, but he still doesn’t know who took the strawberries.
Alexander Hamilton created the Coastguard to stop smugglers trying to avoid tariffs.
Thousands of farm animals & livestock are going unattended. They aren’t being milked. They aren’t being fed. I feel a great deal more for those animals than for the farmers who voted for this shit. They KNEW who their workers were & where they came from. But they voted to hurt them anyway.
Here @hannahritchie.bsky.social gets at one my pet points, which is that EV batteries are lasting much longer in the field than is predicted by (very conservative) models.
Jones: I want to bring theology into this because you have all these people that want to give thoughts and prayers. But I was a minister, and that is a form of theological malpractice—when you pray for something you have the power to change.
"Congratulations to President Donald Trump and his whip-smart administration on turning America’s brave National Guard troops into the most expensive gardening crew in human history." https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2025/08/28/trump-national-guard-picking-up-trash-dc/85853498007/
