Guardian headline: “Bob Carr, ‘a masterpiece’ and a hornet queer fantasy”
And this, kids, is why we need Oxford commas…
06.03.2026 02:21
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Guardian headline: “Bob Carr, ‘a masterpiece’ and a hornet queer fantasy”
And this, kids, is why we need Oxford commas…
I'm not sure there is a functional difference between hallucinate/fabricate/err, in this context. Regardless what you call their errors, LLMs no longer fabricate scholarly references so routinely as they did earlier. But that improvement hasn't sufficed to make them dependable research assistants
I'm not sure if this is the kind of data you're thinking of, but this 1992 paper concluded, "Overall, light environments are similar to those found in other forests, both in New Zealand and elsewhere." newzealandecology.org/nzje/1912. Why do you think it unlikely to be a response to Moa browse?
Is it valid to ask what is the 'right' price for an energy-intensive, wealthy commodity-capitalist society to *pay* for cultural burning, given the currently perceived benefits (mostly maintenance of culture + fire safety + biodiversity/carbon)? It may be very good value for money. 2/2
I'm sure you're right about HS's cynical motives, but isn't there a real question: cultural burning was developed as an integral part of a non-commodity, non-wage labour, low-resource-use society. 'Payment' for CB was participation/maintenance of culture & safe, food-yielding landscapes. ... 1/2
Probably yes on one or two (if sooty mold is so pervasive, does that suggest that Pseudowintera colorata's spotty leaves are moldy mimics?) but the pattern I refer to is the dark veins, pale intervein areas, or more diffuse mottling, with areas of apparently reduced chlorophyll
Yes, one of them might be: but if so, does that imply that Pseudowintera colorata has evolved to mimic sooty mold?
www.inaturalist.org/photos/1181706
Lara Shepherd's wonderful paper on Alseuosmia mimicry just makes it weirder: "I'll just imitate several unrelated species, each of which has made itself hard for Moas to see". Large birds as apex browsers impose very powerful selective pressures on leaves.
academic.oup.com/evolinnean/a...
I guess visually-guided browsing during daytime by Moa, rather than aroma-guided night-time browsing by mammals, is the obvious evolutionary driver. But there's hardly a paper speculating on this.
More mottled leaves in New Zealand forests. This is a flora that pretends to be suffering from lime chlorosis
Why the conspiracy of silence about mottled leaves in the New Zealand flora
In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.
This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.
it's easy to see why it was confused with Licuala
A photo of an ice cream machine with a sign reading, "Anything is possible with ice cream." Beneath that is a hand lettered sign reading, "No ice cream".
2026 basically
correct, but no problem if you provide a citation
As botanists and Plant Architects in Montpellier 🌿, his vision of forests 🌳 profoundly shaped the way we think about and observe plants. A giant has passed, but his legacy will remain a major source of inspiration, worthy of our deepest admiration and gratitude.
This is worth watching. It reminds me of the claim that DDT was "so safe you could drink it." Yet another example of industry recycling refuted claims. @kaurov.org @michaelscherer.bsky.social @davidho.bsky.social
> www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovKw...
>
🌿My two (botanical)-cents🔍
In this forum paper, I reflect on the value of plant-identification expertise and offer a few ideas on how we can better highlight the role of botanists and their knowledge.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
scholars should actually have read the articles they cite! Who knew?
😂
It is hard to overstate how critical @ncar-ucar.bsky.social is to climate science in the US and around the world. It's the beating heart of our field. Generations of scientists have trained there, and almost everyone I know relies on deep collaborations with NCAR scientists. It's end is unthinkable.
It’s simply not possible to overstate how important NCAR is to US and world science. We need to fight this with everything we’ve got.
The dismantling of NCAR should be the trending story on Bluesky, not the fucking Oscars leaving ABC for YouTube.
Superbly informative (and entertaining)
Can you provide a link to those articles?
while this one suggests AMOC shutdowns lead to drying in northern Amazonia, & wetting only in southern Amazonia (but are AMOC shutdowns during Heinrich stadials analogous to AMOC shutdowns today?) 4/3 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
