Ian Ramjohn

I recorded this for my father's funeral today. youtu.be/c6WWROsaCwY

Related: I’m still looking for leads and help on jobs, fellowships, and freelance contracts on drones, GIS, aid, disaster, OSINT, tech ethics, and journalism. I simply will not work for evil people and/or weapons manufacturers, which is also why I haven’t had paying work since Trump 2.0 began.

Gut punch of a story about an Amazon engineer who trusted ChatGPT-4o to manage and reduce her seizure med dosages. You'd hope someone who made it into a top engineering position would have known the limits of AI circa May 2024 www.nytimes.com/2026/10/27/w...

Here is @emilybregel.bsky.social’s story. CW: self-harm 38yo Andreea Marin is brain dead on life support, her brother says, after not getting the medication she needed for her mental illness in ICE custody. Yet her wrists and ankles are chained to the hospital bed. tucson.com/news/local/b...

I skimmed the article yesterday, but missed the "Lansing, MI" and Jocelyn Benson parts. I got my BWL bill 8 days later than usual this month. I have more faith in the stray cat.

"Habibi, everyone remembers the rhinoceros"

My heart is heavy. Walter Koenig, our Ensign Pavel Chekov, passed away early today. Walter and I met on the bridge of the Enterprise in the 1960s, and we stayed friends for nearly six decades. When Brad and I married in 2008, Walter stood beside us as our best man.

One more way that Ai systems create more (uncompensated) demands on everyone else's time. Probably by stealing their work in the first place, to train the Ai

New paper! 🌲 We followed invasive Douglas-fir seedlings in Patagonia for 2 years Seedlings generally performed best at intermediate invasion stages, with survival linked to canopy openness. Local context matters for tree invasions! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Huge relief to wake up this morning to see Lula had won. He's incredibly impressive here (but the sign language interpreter is the really winner).

i'll do another proper announcement post later around primetime but the no AI notice with cute fox is up on itch now: eniko.itch.io/cute-fox-no-...

Don't forget to sign up for "The many faces of Sans Souci: Black watchmakers in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Caribbean" if you're keen to join the friendly & welcoming London Group of Historical Geographers in person or online for this Tuesday's Institute of Historical Research seminar.

marine corps boards crossing out their instructions "expel trans marines" and writing in "we keep this trans marine" is, frankly, a great example of what it means that a society is more than just its government

Kansas Dem Sen. nominee Adam Hamilton on trans rights: “I don’t think we should take a small group of people and bully them, pick on them, and hurt them. I understand one thing really clearly when it comes to transgender people, and that is Jesus told me I was to love my neighbor as I love myself”

The life expectancy of someone living with Cystic Fibrosis more than DOUBLED (26 to 66) from 2008 to 2025!

Obama: "You got the defense sec who is like a laser focused on important matters like the jawline & testosterone level of our troops, and livestreaming executions because that's how he thinks you cultivate that manly warrior spirit. How much time do you think this man spends in front of the mirror?"

Obama: 'Drain the swamp' -- the only thing they drained is the Reflecting Pool because some no bid contract got it all messed up. And then they tried to blame it on this 3 time Olympian! You remember that? Said he vandalized it!"

The US west has lost nearly 300 glaciers since the 1960s. Climate crisis is drastically shrinking what’s left www.theguardian.com/environment/... #climate #pollution #environment #Blues

JUST POSTED: Today at The NYT we are publishing a major investigation into how President Trump used his executive powers to expose millions of Americans to greater cancer risks. A six month-long investigation built on more than 10,000 pages of FOIA records. Read it www.nytimes.com/2026/10/24/c...

I'm hoping it's #1, and also that as time goes on, more people will feel comfortable being out, open, and leadership providing LLM/"AI" haters. Like @aclanthology.org anthonymoser.github.io/writing/ai/h...

In 2024 Michigan politicians got >60% of their donations from PACs, and <14% from voters. PACs are also allowed to give 10x as much as voters (to each candidate). That's mind-boggling. But also makes me wonder what things look like at the federal level, and in all the other states.

Every year, Research!America does a poll that asks, "Can you name a living scientist?" In January 2026, 76% of respondents said "no." Of those who said "yes," 5% named a scientist who was, in fact, dead. www.researchamerica.org/blog/can-you...

Three years ago, my dad said that all fish are the same shape. Out of spite, I decided to draw all 478 families of bony fish listed in Nelson 2016. There's still some stuff I need to edit and some fish I want to redraw but, after 985 days, I finished my big dumb fish project last night.

"Ordinarily, moving historical items within the building is a deliberate process overseen by curators. Hegseth’s staff dispatched its own team to relocate an Eisenhower globe. They dropped it...The resulting gash appears to be several inches wide." wapo.st/3WF2YQo

How can you release an elderly man *who can't walk* without contacting his ride? And how can you refuse him a wheelchair? This is such an extreme failure of basic human decency.

Neil Bush, brother of George W. Bush and son of George H.W. Bush, has posted a political message on Facebook for the first time, saying he voted for James Talarico for US Senate over Ken Paxton. Bush says he isn't just opposing Paxton, he has come to admire Talarico.

El-Sayed: "People like Vance think America is too small for some of us. I think America is big enough. America has been big enough include people whose families came, were here before anybody else showed up, or who were brought here despite themselves. His view of America is small -- small like him"

The president shouting "fake news" is bad enough, but the FCC commissioner threatening to punish broadcasters for promoting "fake news" like "the president is historically unpopular" is so much worse. Add this clown to the list of officials who need to be impeached and removed.

Democratic US congressional candidate Brad Lander said Wednesday that he was released by Israeli forces with a “warning” after he and dozens of others were detained while helping Palestinians harvest olives in the illegally occupied West Bank. therealnews.com/palestinians...

I have no idea if it actually has anything at all to do with race, but I am 0% surprised that she's Black.

'The irony should not go unremarked: we are promised machine-learning systems that can drink deeper of the pool of human knowledge than any human ever could, while at the same time other machine systems are dumping huge loads of swill into it.' www.science.org/content/blog...

A very welcome update to a case I wrote about: A district judge has rejected the Trump admin's attempt to intervene in and then unilaterally dismiss the NAACP's lawsuit against xAI www.reuters.com/legal/govern...

the idea that empathy is dangerous has been permeating right-wing spaces for a while, but it's not an actual element of their ideology as much as it's a defense mechanism against confronting the reality of their cruelty

On IG just now, @bradlander.bsky.social says he's been detained by the Israeli military. Israeli security forces have taken a NY congressional candidate on the eve of a US election.

When you've lost Ken Griffin...

New book about #Wikipedia whose publication I somehow missed!

“Obviously they had taken care of themselves first and totally ignored all other shareholders in the entity,” said Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist at Public Citizen. buff.ly/6ZfjKee

CSUN Biology seeks a "Bird or Mammal Biologist" studying extant, non-model birds or mammals, and having experience in collections management, to teach Avian Ecology and/or Mammalogy and help steward our natural history collections (showy examples pictured) careers.pageuppeople.com/873/nr/en-us...

Since it is Spartacus day in the Roman Republic class ⚔️, a reminder: the University of Mannheim has a database with all known tombstones of ancient gladiators. gladiators.geschichte.uni-mannheim.de Take a look! Here is a fav for a man named Palumbus (“pigeon”) from the gladiator cemetery at Ephesus.

I wish I had any clue what it costs to rent a venue and a sound system in Caro, Michigan. Because this would be an awesome "Having your opponents spend $250k to create a viral moment for you: priceless"