Профиль

My Thousand Yard State has hit legendary proportions. All the chocolate and jumping jacks to try to jumpstart my brain

My grandparents had a hobby of taking road trips across BC to be the first cars driving newly-opened stretches of road. I really should dig up their slides and look at them from the lens of all my landslide hazard risk reduction work on those same roads…

Specific aspects of the Canadian national identity will never fail to make me laugh.

Geologist Marie Tharp was born #OTD in 1920. She built the first accurate map of the Atlantic Ocean floor, discovering the Mid-Atlantic Ridge that provided evidence for seafloor spreading and plate tectonics. 🧪 👩‍🔬 Image: Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

Stalked jellyfish are a super rare group of jellies that don't float, but instead anchor themselves to the seafloor using a special 'foot.' To move, they do cartwheels, holding onto the seafloor using sticky pads between their pompom tentacles. 🧪🌿🌊

Meanwhile in BC: Our decommissioned fire towers are burning down. We lost Jesmund fire lookout (www.sitesandtrailsbc.ca/resource/REC...) to the Big Bar fires on Friday night. So many others are closed under threat of nearby fires. Our fallen sentinels from ages past deserve remembrance.

Many of you have seen Mike’s name come across your feed as part of my disaster threads over the years as he chipped in with his experience from Vancouver search & rescue. People live on in memories.

I am so deeply sorry to hear this, and so incredibly grateful you shared with us what happened so we weren’t wondering when his silence grew. He was always so generous and enthused taking the practicalities of SAR when I was talking about hazards, and so clearly loved making the world kinder

Yeah. It’s survived this time, but what about the next? And the next, and the next… it’s not like any of these locations are immune to severe weather and the hazards resulting from that.

Current status:

I never got my love letter to the DSN published, but I did get to do a deep dive explainer on it: gizmodo.com/keeping-in-t... I have years of interview notes I snuck in when at space centres covering launches and missions that called home through it. I don’t like it being topical.

I’m still thinking about this. The Deep Space Network is such core infrastructure. It’s huge, international, not very flashy, and utterly vital. I tried to place stories on it for years and rarely succeeded. Funding was always touchy. For repairs…? But without it, our space robots can’t call home.

As soon as your ex-roommate dates a multi-gen local, you work as an extra on any production, or you get gas in a mining town, your degree of connection will plummet

6??? With all my cousins, I’m pretty sure 4 is my max.

What is the André-Oort conjecture? I’m so glad you asked! According to the Top 40 pop music radio station that’s covering theoretical mathematics because it involves a Canadian, arithmetic and geometry are connected. CanCon! Where theoretical mathematics slides between Shawn Mendes and The Weeknd

It’s just so freaking adorable how excited and focused we get. We’re a huge country of over 40 million people with so much going on, but every story reads like quaint small-town news of the local high school kid who made it big.

Things that make me happy: CanCon Is a Canadian affiliated with something newsworthy? Fantastic, that’s all we’re talking about. Did you know a tiny BC lady with great arms was Odysseus fighting giant cannibals? Or a Toronto professor won the Fields Medal for helping the André-Oort conjecture?

I am not ready for August. I’m really not ready for September. In all honesty, I’m still not ready for March 2026 and the backlog just keeps getting deeper with every day. But I think I’m clear on February?

I have many rocks, but most often I think of this one. Found on the South shore of Lake Superior. I left him there - his heart wanted to be up there.

"Alien World Chemistry Found Inside Meteorite That Struck New Jersey home" -- awesome work by the homeowner to glove up and put the fragments that came through the roof into glass jars! It's a CM1/2 carbonaceous chondrite, only the second observed fall of its kind www.seti.org/news/alien-w...