Geologist and Photographer.
Views are mine.
Haven't posted photos in a while because I'm woefully behind on editing anything new.
Case and point here - these are from a local northern lights outing along the Oklahoma/Missouri state line from October 10 of last year.
In keeping with my local sightings in the four state area, I tried to see the lights from as many states as possible, so I also have some pics from Missouri and Arkansas as well, although less vibrant due to light pollution.
Did NEXRAD radar MISS the Vaughn/Highfill, Arkansas tornado? Maybe, but it happens. And radar quality was near 90% there, better than much of the area.
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1291849958967737&set=a.255832835902793
The 2nd image is the Radar Quality Index in the area at the time, based on available radars. It was 85-95%, much better than other areas. Sometimes radars just miss things.
And at least for us, just through pure luck of the draw, we haven't lived in communities with tornado sirens since we moved to Arkansas about 10 years ago. So they're hardly universal.
Many towns either have never had them installed on a large scale (or at all), or phased them out at the end of the Cold War. Many were installed for civil defense purposes with a side benefit of being useful for weather alerts.
There were, as always, many complaints about not hearing tornado sirens as evidence that no warning was issued.
As the mayor of Highfill and every local meteorologist has pointed out (time and again), tornado sirens are meant to serve as warnings for people outdoors. If you are indoors, and more specifically indoors and asleep, you need to have other means of getting weather alerts.
Wouldn't have helped in this case, but too many people see sirens as a one-stop option for getting warnings.
There aren't many times when tornadoes truly strike without warning, but the tornado in Highfill, AR earlier this week falls into this category.
It was due to a combination of it being a QLCS-type tornado that developed rapidly, plus a radar 'hole' over Northwest Arkansas, where radar beam heights from the 3 closest radars in Tulsa, Fort Smith, and Springfield, MO are sometimes too high to pick up very low level rotation.
https://www.nwahomepage.com/news/residents-question-lack-of-sirens-before-highfill-tornado/
I'd like to take a moment to congratulate all Americans for now legally being defined as women.
According to Executive Order 14168 (https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/01/30/2025-02090/defending-women-from-gender-ideology-extremism-and-restoring-biological-truth-to-the-federal), the "biological truth" of the genders has been legally defined:
(d) “Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.
(e) “Male” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.
Here's the problem, turns out that the universe isn't taking attendance at the time of conception and handing out little pink and blue genderino badges before your gonads even exist. At the moment of conception, EVERY embryo's default state is set to produce, eventually, the larger reproductive cell (the ova). It's not until 6-8 weeks AFTER conception that the Y chromosome, if present and activated, decides to show up to the party and begin the process of differentiation into a body that will, eventually, produce the smaller reproductive cell (the sperm).
So, once again, I'd like to congratulate literally everybody in America for, at this moment, being legally AFAB.
Study confirms White Sands footprints are ~23,000 years old
Results are consistent with two earlier studies dating the footprints to between 22,000 and 24,000 years ago.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/06/study-confirms-white-sands-footprints-are-23000-years-old/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social
Overnight storm damage coming to light in Northwest Arkansas, with significant damage being reported in Highfill and West Fork. In the case of Highfill, some of the damage to homes appears significant in photos. A radar confirmed tornado was observed in Adair County, Oklahoma.
https://www.nwahomepage.com/news/photos-highfill-neighborhood-hit-by-overnight-storms/
An email went out this morning from NASA's Science Mission Directorate, effectively indicating that there are no plans in place for hosting the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference starting next year without a new host being selected.
LPSC is one of the two primary conferences for planetary scientists in the U.S. and 2025 marked the 56th annual conference to be held. It switched to a virtual format with mere weeks notice during the pandemic, but won't survive this admin.
Seeing the news today of AccuWeather boasting (without evidence) of being the best at hurricane forecasting at the same time that the future of the NWS and NOAA is under threat.
Companies like AccuWeather have been lobbying for a long time to push for the full privatization of weather forecasting services in the U.S. (weakening NOAA), so the timing and nature of this announcement is zero percent surprising to me. The warning signs have been there since at least the first T. administration.
With the firing of the head of the Copyright Office and continued degradation (obliteration?) of any concept of copyright protections in the U.S., I'm back to revisiting the status of my photography website. Since I just renewed a couple of months ago my plan was to keep it online through the end of the year but now weighing removing all content much sooner.
My thought is to publish a single page that discusses why I'm removing my content, but would that be equivalent to giving up the fight?
The sum of the proposed cuts to NASA's Science Mission Directorate seem intended to result in or force the closure of the Goddard Space Flight Center.
To say that what's being proposed in these cuts would decimate science at NASA is an understatement.
The work around had been to just download the album all at once rather than buying one song at a time, but that trick didn't work today when I downloaded a new album in its entirety all at once, and it still split off into two "separate" album entries that I'll now need to correct from my laptop at some point.
I'm finally reconfiguring my laptop setup starting this weekend, so I'll follow up when I have a chance to sync my music library and show what this looks like in practice.
This may not be intentional, but it's a bug that exists regardless of where songs are downloaded from, originating from both the desktop app and iOS app.
The fact that it spans multiple applications points to, at best, neglect by Apple to correct software issues or at worst, that they are allowing issues in iTunes to persist to push people into subscribing to Apple Music.
I stopped using the native Music app and started using Cesium about 2 years ago to avoid the pushy subscription ads.
Latest example of enshittification.
Something I've noticed for the past year or so is that when I purchase multiple songs from an album, or an entire album, from iTunes, the album will get split into multiple album entries in my music library.
Rooting around it seems to result from slight formatting changes to how the album is named, which results in separate entries being created. The only workaround is to sync the library to a laptop and manually change the album names in the file directory.
And I do know that my photos, as well as those of other photographers, have been ingested by generative AI training datasets because of this poignant example from DALL-E several years ago. The prompt was "supercell over Kansas" and the resulting image attempted to replicate photographer watermarks along the bottom of the image. My photo of a similar scene on the right provided as an example. It's shameless, and still theft.
I posted about this briefly a couple of weeks ago, but I've seen the impact of AI web crawlers manifesting in higher than average increases in hosting costs for my photography website, which is slowly making it no longer feasible (or desirable) to keep online.
https://www.engadget.com/ai/wikipedia-is-struggling-with-voracious-ai-bot-crawlers-121546854.html
Adding to this list, items that I purchased yesterday (January 31, 2025) in anticipation of the imposition of tariffs today.
Avocado (each): $0.96
Bettergoods Pot Pie (family size): $8.94
The Bettergoods pot pie is a new Walmart brand item and one of the few foods both kids will eat right now, and prominently labeled as "Produced in Canada."
Gas and other foods unchanged from Jan 20, however I did find a dozen eggs for $3.50 at one of our closest Trader Joe's in Kansas City on Tuesday.
For no particular reason.
Prices on January 20, 2025 (NW AR/SW MO)
- 12 eggs: $4.17
- 1 lb ground beef: $4.63
- Gallon whole milk: $4.23
- Gallon gas: $2.67
I'm finally following through on the advice of my dentist to get an electric toothbrush. I haven't owned one in probably 15+ years, in part because models at the time weren't particularly sustainable and I found myself replacing the entire toothbrush every year or two.
Digging around now I'm finding conflicting reviews and testimonials of rechargeable toothbrushes needing to be entirely replaced either at 9 months or 3 years for the same model. Any recommendations from my feed?
