“The true cost of this massive, misguided methane expansion...will be paid by the rivers and streams that supply our drinking water as this pipeline cuts across six major watersheds. It will be paid by nearby communities forced to breathe pollution from compressor stations. And it will be paid for decades to come as we lock ourselves into fossil fuel infrastructure that drives climate change long after cleaner, more affordable alternatives are available."
https://www.ledger-enquirer.com/news/environment/article317340629.html

Durham is beloved to me, but I had never heard this story before (CW for anti-LGBTQ violence and language)
"The incident at Little River has been remembered as an act of homophobic violence after which gays and lesbians stepped into the public square demanding to be seen. The story of the crime that changed queer activism in North Carolina, however, has never been fully and accurately told."
https://www.theassemblync.com/news/culture/history/gay-rights-lgbtq-durham-north-carolina-little-river/

Oh wow, it's possible that I do not like fish (as food, not creatures--I love fish as creatures!) because it smells different to me than it does to other people!
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982220313439

When you use Copilot to write an email, a bunch of people in New Jersey have to breath emissions from illegal methane generators. Maybe better to just write the email yourself?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/27/new-jersey-vineland-datacenter-permits?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=fb_us&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook#Echobox=1787844779

Anecdotally, I had to go to urgent care here in Georgia twice in the past 2 weeks. The first time, none of the practitioners were masked. The second time they all were, many even wearing respirators, and one of them told me to keep my N95 on because they had a lot of COVID cases.

So I have an acute inner ear thing right now, and it's reminding me, even more than usual, of just how inaccessible the web is. For me right now, white text on black background is a no go. No flashing anything. No video, so autoplaying backgrounds are the damn worst. No clever scrolling tricks where animations move through while I'm trying to read the text. Any of those things can set my world spinning again.

Thankful for audiobooks.

This is a really important thing to be thinking about, especially in Georgia, where have the most extensive continuous salt marsh on the US Atlantic coast.
https://www.wabe.org/a-new-plan-to-preserve-georgias-marshes-give-them-space-to-migrate/

#SilentSunday

Just was reminded of this and so glad to see The Guardian still has it up since Shakesville's archives got taken down. Every single day: swallow shit or ruin the afternoon.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/aug/25/feminism-relationships-sexism-women

RE: https://journa.host/@msfreepress/116777544124910527

I have multiple friends and family with alpha gal. It's really common in the NC Piedmont, where the density of lone star ticks is ridiculously high.

Still one of my favorite books. Everything here is exactly right
https://dansinker.com/posts/2026-06-01-westing-game/

This indicates that it’s not any intrinsic property of so-called neural networks that leads people to believe that LLMs are conscious; it’s simply the fact that LLMs emit grammatical sentences and we are accustomed to reading intention into sentences, whereas we are not accustomed to reading intention into the way that amino acids fold into protein molecules." (3/3)

"The neuroscientist Anil Seth has noted that no one claims that AlphaFold—the program developed by Google DeepMind to predict the folding of proteins—is conscious, even though its underlying architecture is in many ways similar to that of LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude....(2/3)

From the inestimable Ted Chiang, who really is the very best writer (both his fiction and non-fiction) on the intersection of philosophy and technology
https://www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2026/06/no-artificial-intelligence-is-not-conscious/687378/?gift=R2zbWGNBDp_xHqoa7Q8ZRp-EV6jGaHiamQBxQQlMJqI

In Spokane this week for the Society for Freshwater Science meeting. After a long hard semester in a long hard year, it's nice to spend some time by the river talking freshwater science with great people.
#SFS2026

What would happen if the richest 10% reduced their CO2 emissions to the EU average (which BTW is a nice standard of living).
Answer, there would be a 35% decrease in global CO2 emissions.
So, all would be fixed, if we could limit the excesses of the top 10%.

After the Flood is a police drama where the central crime is illegal poor stormwater management. I have trained my whole life for this.

Happy Earth Day! This is how much Atlanta has warmed up #Atlanta #ATL #EarthDay
https://showyourstripes.info/

This pileated flew over the road so low it about ran into me. And then it just sat there scolding me.

The Quapaw Nation is the only US Native community to carry out a cleanup of one of the country’s worst sites of environmental contamination
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/15/quapaw-nation-oklahoma-superfund-cleanup