Brad, not actually a cat

Me, getting out of meeting about extremely large NSF proposal: Maybe I should pop onto bluesky just to see what is up.....

Just had a sample of the Eaton Fire ash that is in my driveway run on the department XRF. Is there titanium (new house paint)? Yup. Lead (old house paint)? You betcha. Heavy metals? Check. Treat that ash like it's toxic folks (because it is)

I am a former incarcerated firefighter. I served in a California fire camp from 2009 to 2012. Misinformation is afire on the internet, so here are facts about the prison firefighter program, all in one place. A thread.

Also here is a spreadsheet of displaced Black families from Altadena docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

The National Weather Service has *once again* issued an elevated "Particularly Dangerous Situation" (PDS) Red Flag Warning for large portions of Los Angeles & Ventura Counties early Tue though Wed due to return of very strong offshore winds and extremely dry air. #CAwx #CAfire

I wrote a review of A COMPLETE UNKNOWN: the brand new Bob Dylan bio pic. And I guarantee you it is totally unlike any other critique of the film that you are ever going to run in to. merrillmarkoe.substack.com/p/a-complete...

This piece about Toshi Seeger in the new Bob Dylan movie is a hilarious explainer of the very Hollywood problem: “there’s a woman in this story that we can’t get rid of because she kind of ran everything so what can we possibly do?” merrillmarkoe.substack.com/p/a-complete...

Availability of contraception and abortion are basic to women's political freedom.

This is thread 6 of updates and resources for Hurricane #Helene, primarily covering western NC. Image source in next post. Please share these threads with people outside this platform as needed; they're public and don't require a Bluesky login. Previous thread: bsky.app/profile/lind...

Update from the city today... The water line that supplies 80% of Asheville's water was buried under 25 feet of soil before flooding from Helene fully exposed and catastrophically damaged it. It's going to be a while.

It's hard to explain to folks who aren't on the ground just how impassable the roads are rn, and a chinook can't do this. www.southernliving.com/hurricane-he...

~13,000 missing persons / welfare check requests were completed by local volunteers, who were organized in an emergency by some folks who, IMO should be put in charge of absolutely everything from now on. www.citizen-times.com/story/news/l...

The scale of this disaster is so great that both mutual aid and federal resources have been needed in equal measure. While the military & FEMA are pros, local organizers on the ground are mobilizing distributions of similar scale from scratch, while also managing their own personal losses. Amazing

If you solder a ~10cm long "antenna" wire to a laptop's DRAM data bus, it makes it extra sensitive to electromagnetic interference. So much so that clicking a piezo-electric arc lighter nearby can induce bit-flips. I wrote an exploit to turn those bitflips into a shell:

I realize folks in the Southwest are tired of the heat, but...there's now a strong signal for a prolonged autumn heatwave over next wk that may culminate in October monthly record heat by next wknd. & additional warmer-than-avg weather after that, just less anomalous. #CAwx #AZwx

Latest storm surge forecast for Helene has raised the high end from 15 to *TWENTY* feet above ground level for a big chunk of the Florida gulf coast.

Brendan Loper in the New Yorker

My analysis of Robert O'Brien's argument for MOAR NUKES! And explosive testing!