Thor bites ʕ•̀ᴥ•́ʔ

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geologist working in paleo; weekend signmaker; n+1 bikes & bear suits; 🏳️‍🌈
bluesky@thorbites.bsky.social
Red Crowned Amazon parrots. Not very happy to see me on the porch. Pasadena, California, Dec 23, 2025
#birds #parrots #pasadena
Silver Alert in Hacienda Heights (Los Angeles County) #MissingPerson #SilverAlert #HaciendaHeights #LosAngeles #LACounty

#Random

"We will rebuild" is repeated a lot after climate disasters nowadays. Sadly, i don't think you can "rebuild it back like it was" and expect different results and a repeat nowadays.

Personally, I think the Japanese have the right idea with "Tsunami Stones"

Smithsonian: These Century-Old Stone “Tsunami Stones” Dot Japan’s Coastline

“Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point.”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/century-old-warnings-against-tsunamis-dot-japans-coastline-180956448/

These Century-Old Stone "Tsunami Stones" Dot Japan’s Coastline

"Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point."

Smithsonian Magazine
Stores that remove items on the brink of expiration, donate them to food banks and fill up the emptied shelf space with fresher inventory get more revenue from sales and earn higher profits. https://buff.ly/4fTF2NV
Grocery stores that donate expiring food − instead of price discounting or discarding − make higher profits

Supply chain improvements could help lower the food insecurity rate and reduce food waste while boosting profits for retailers.

The Conversation
Berkeley and East Bay people! There are still some tickets left for my conversation with Ed Yong tonight 6/18 at the Hillside Club, 7pm. We'll be talking about psyops, but I promise to leave you with some hope for peace. https://app.gopassage.com/events/stories-are-weapons/event_times/1490223
Annalee Newitz with Ed Yong / Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind | Passage - Your event. Your fans. Your mobile box office.

Booksmith and Berkeley Arts & Letters are thrilled to host friend of the store and author of the nationally-bestselling Four Lost Cities, Annalee Newitz, for Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, a sharp and timely exploration of the dark art of manipulation through weaponized storytelling. Annalee will be in conversation with Ed Yong, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. Join us for what is sure to be a special evening!About the bookIn Stories Are Weapons, bestselling author Annalee Newitz traces the way disinformation, propaganda, and violent threats—the essential tool kit for psychological warfare—have evolved from military weapons deployed against foreign adversaries into tools in domestic culture wars. Newitz delves into America’s deep-rooted history with psychological operations, beginning with Benjamin Franklin’s Revolutionary War–era fake newspaper and nineteenth-century wars on Indigenous nations, and reaching its apotheosis with the Cold War and twenty-first-century influence campaigns online. America’s secret weapon has long been coercive storytelling. And there’s a reason for that: operatives who shaped modern psychological warfare drew on their experiences as science fiction writers and in the advertising industry.Now, through a weapons-transfer program long unacknowledged, psyops have found their way into the hands of culture warriors, transforming democratic debates into toxic wars over American identity. Newitz zeroes in on conflicts over race and intelligence, school board fights over LGBT students, and campaigns against feminist viewpoints, revealing how, in each case, specific groups of Americans are singled out and treated as enemies of the state. Crucially, Newitz delivers a powerful counternarrative, speaking with the researchers and activists who are outlining a pathway to achieving psychological disarmament and cultural peace.Incisive and essential, Stories are Weapons reveals how our minds have been turned into blood-soaked battlegrounds—and how we can put down our weapons to build something better.Advance praise for Stories Are Weapons“Annalee Newitz’s thoroughly researched and masterfully crafted book gives us something hopeful—a way to disarm the narratives that have been used against us and reclaim better ones.” – Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of An Immense World“Annalee Newitz always sees to the heart of complex systems and breaks them down with poetic ferocity.” – N.K. Jemisin, author of the Broken Earth trilogy“A brilliant historical deep-dive into psyops, military covert influence operations, and the corporate attempts to conquer the mind. This will change the way you understand America.” – Molly Crabapple, author of Drawing Blood“Well-researched, accessible, and grounded in history, Stories Are Weapons is at once clarifying, terrifying, and forward-looking. An important contribution to a particular moment in time when so many of us are desperate to try to understand the precarious societal moment and peril in which we find ourselves.” – Anna Holmes, author of The Book of JezebelAbout the authorsAnnalee Newitz is a journalist and author of science fiction and nonfiction, including the national best-seller Four Lost Cities. They write for the New York Times and New Scientist and co-host the Hugo Award–winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. They live in San Francisco. Photo by A Klass.Ed Yong is an award-winning science writer who until recently was a staff writer at The Atlantic. His writing has also appeared in National Geographic, the New Yorker, Wired, the New York Times, Nature, New Scientist, Scientific American, and more. He talked about mind-controlling parasites at the TED2014 conference, and his talk has been viewed more than 1.4 million times. He is the winner of the Byron H. Waksman Award for Excellence in the Public Communication of Life Sciences (2016), the Michael E. DeBakey Journalism Award (2016), a National Academies Keck Science Communication Award (2010) and awards from the Association of British Science Writers for Best Science Blog (2014) and Best Communication of Science in a Non-Science Context (2012). Photo by Urszula Soltys.please note:> this is an offsite event held at The Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar Street, Berkeley.> tickets are still available, but limited. if you are in need of additional tickets and advanced sales have ended, we will have them for purchase at the door until we reach capacity.> check-in will begin at 6:30.> books by Annalee and Ed will be for sale before and after the show as supplies last. > after the reading and discussion, there will be a 20 minute QnA facilitated by our host and a 30 minute signing. we ask that all guests be out of the venue by 9pm.> masks are not required, but can be made available upon request.questions? accessibility requests? email us at [email protected]

Passage - Your event. Your fans. Your mobile box office.

Shout out to our new/old Sierra Madre neighbors

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5x8HFhLGYkg

Mountain lion sighting has some Sierra Madre residents on edge

YouTube

March 8, 1796, likely birthday of Orra White Hitchcock (1796 – 1863). She was one of America’s earliest female botanical & scientific illustrators & artists, best known for illustrating the scientific works of her husband, geologist Edward Hitchcock (1793–1864)

https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/voices/a-pioneering-female-scientific-illustrator-rediscovered/?fbclid=IwAR05aOjGqN685cvLCkUQI8bDFGH_ZTCJ6RapMZM97S0ffRRD0baAXKwFQGs

A Pioneering Female Scientific Illustrator, Rediscovered

Orra White Hitchcock’s elegant 19th-century geologic drawings shine at the American Folk Art Museum

Scientific American
Oh, this is now my favorite shorthand

Despite Republicans constantly wailing about crime in cities, crime is down.

So weird. It’s like they’re just trying to scare the crap out of their base. 🤨

After Rise in Murders During the Pandemic, a Sharp Decline in 2023-
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/29/us/crime-data-fbi-homicides.html?mwgrp=c-mbar&unlocked_article_code=1.KU0.Ugps.BMNe2UYBBstZ&smid=url-share

After Rise in Murders During the Pandemic, a Sharp Decline in 2023

The country is on track for a record drop in homicides, and many other categories of crime are also in decline, according to the F.B.I.

The New York Times