iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Breaking News: Well-made, self-contained #BBC drama with clear story arcs, a definite end, no postponed denouement, and no requirement for further continuity cancelled after just one series! Outrageous!

Headline from The Independent newspaper on the non-renewal of a TV drama that totally didn't need one and, in fact, closed off the need for one with its fully-realised story arcs

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

The temptation is to view amped scooters 🛴 as simply increasing the supply of #DarwinAward candidates but, as the article highlights, no matter how careful and considerate a pedal cyclist you are 🚴, they're a hazard to us all.

jezebel.com

An E-Bike or Scooter Going 50 Mph Is a Truly Pointless Way to Die

Since 2007, Jezebel has been the Internet's most treasured source for everything celebrities, sex, and politics...with teeth.

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Possibly this isn't a "predator" in its natural habitat in the south. 😭

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I think you misspelled "threatens" as "promises".

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Alternatively: Climate refugee desperately rolls reproductive dice on Southern California coast 🌊 🐢 🌡️

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

So close ... This could have been a reference to a #SpermWhale rather than a #HumpbackWhale. For an #astronomy account, you've clearly not been leafing through your #HitchhikersGuide recently enough, @apod.shinyakato.dev! 😉 🐋 💐 ⬇️

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

You missed a trick describing the impactor as the size of a humpback whale. You should have gone with the similarly-sized sperm whale. That would have brought fans of #HitchhikersGuide flocking in. Amiright, @hitchhikersguide.bsky.social?

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Anyway, I know this risks being murdered by fellow 🌊oceanographers, but it needs saying. And I say it as a "One Ocean" person who thinks the Southern Ocean is the best ocean because it gets to do its whole thing with minimal interference from the land. But, for the love of Poseidon, don't use this!

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I mean, how the hell does this make sense for helping to understand the patterns of spatial and temporal activity in the underlying ocean field here? Sure, it's free of certain cultural prejudices, and it emphasises "One Ocean", but only at the cost of throwing in the towel for coherence.

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

This video is a perfect advert for selecting 🌊 geographical projections appropriately. If you're doing navigation, Mercator can help. If you're preserving area, it's Lambert cylindrical or Mollweide. And if you're being a smartarse, it's this South Pole-centred azimuthal equidistant projection.

youtube.com

28 years of a living ocean, month by month

YouTube video by Oceanofisica

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Hasn't someone done the obvious thing yet and taught the #AI 🤖 to play noughts and crosses, followed up with some iterative rounds of Global Thermonuclear War? I mean it worked for Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy. #WarGames

arstechnica.com

AI hallucination of Chinese nuclear components almost led to US military attack

But the military's overall use of AI seems to be accelerating.

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Ouch! Our poor visiting fox 🦊 seems to have picked up an injury. 😢 We'll be keeping an eye out for them now. #GardenFox #InjuredWildlife

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

What a rabbit hole to fall down! A fantastic tale that both sheds light on a forgotten / overlooked (female, naturally 🤦) figure and illustrates the vicissitudes of life and contingencies of history. #VincentVanGogh

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Welcome to the life of plants.

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

As an ecological aside, before we all get too self-righteous beating up on LLMs, "destroys its supply chain" sounds like a pretty good summary of human civilization's current antics

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

One might have expected a company made rich by selling an information-based product that it has defended against piracy for decades to understand "fair use" and "intellectual property theft" instinctively, but ...

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

"LLMs are a product that destroys its supply chain" +1 point to @microsoft.com for explicitly noting this self-destructive tendency -1000000 points to @microsoft.com for then ignoring their insight and pressing ahead anyway

avclub.com

Microsoft execs admit AI news is unleashing a "doom loop" on journalism in unsealed legal filing

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I hate to say it, but UK union leaders, when faced with a choice that potentially threatens their influence, are pretty great at choosing the wrong answer. Even when - as here - they're good at spotting the serious threat to wider civic society that unlimited political donations presents.

theguardian.com

Union leaders resist political donations cap after Reform given £72m

General secretaries say union funding is ‘cleanest money in politics’ and different to that from wealthy individual donors

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

More accurately: Resource extraction business that pays no downstream externality costs and has no plan for future other than "continue extraction" urges govt to let it keep more profit behind fig leaf of "helping consumers" and continuance of "ignore socioeconomic / environmental costs" model

theguardian.com

Scrap windfall tax on oil and gas firms early, North Sea industry urges

Labour should replace levy in 2027 rather than 2030 as energy bills are poised to surge over the winter, says lobby group

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Nice - but they need it in a shareable one-PNG-to-rule-them-all format! 😂

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Another generation, another #Commons. We're now treating low-Earth orbit just like we've been treating the atmosphere for decades. Short-term gains for some create long-term problems for us all. Again. But, of course, doing anything else would be government red-tape, regulation, anti-freedom, ...

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

It reminded me to get hold of the similar, if more parochial, table of ocean 🌊 profiles of the elements ... agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/... (Although I can't find a more global ocean version of this - does one exist?)

A bitmap version of the central Period Table published in ... https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/97EO00148

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

So, this is *fanastic*: a #PeriodicTable explaining the #Astrophysics processes responsible for the elements! There are more artificial elements than I thought, although I don't think my high school table had the #Rutherfordium to #Oganesson row on it.

apod.nasa.gov

APOD: 2026 September 14 – Where Your Elements Came From

A different astronomy and space science related image is featured each day, along with a brief explanation.

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

But I did like the nice little - and true! - detail about an Irish 🇮🇪 weather observer, Maureen Sweeney, who played a significant role in events. And, while marine biogeochemistry didn't feature, there was a teeny bit of wave 🌊 physics in there.

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Actually, #Pressure is pretty enjoyable even if a little melodramatic and shouty at moments. Also, from what I can tell, a little loose with its history - apparently an invisible Norwegian meteorologist was more important to events than the Scottish one played by a well-known actor.

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Seeing real-world progress to #NetZero, and the hurdles thrown in its way, the film really does stretch credulity a bit, what with this naive and idealistic premise where a scientist is *paid attention to*. 😂

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

We just caught this fantastical film today in which a *meteorological scientist* was able to make the powers that be sit up and pay attention just because - get this! - lives were at stake! He even got the bigwigs to actually change their plans at one point.

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

mCDR actually working would help make it feel less scammy. Or, in the best cases, plausibly working at the correct scale. What is successful in a model (my bag) is often a heroically implausible endeavour that would face extraordinary hurdles in the real world.

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

This isn't @theonion.com but it looks like it should be. Credit to Trump for continuing to break the "jumping the shark" record with no end in sight ... thanks to the perpetual credulousness of the US electorate.

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

To be fair, unless you're actually funded on CDR work, your participation is liable to be sporadic. Only really my most recent foray into mCDR has been formally earmarked for this. So, I wouldn't necessarily read too much into this. (But it's also difficult to stay engaged when it feels scammy.)

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Companies who're late to the EV party are going to have serious trouble catching up - EVs aren't easy. In the specific case of Honda, I thought there was something of an anti-EV belligerence at root - if so, that's likely to create further friction down the line even after the penny's now dropped.

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I wonder if something similar might befall Honda? We clung onto our extremely trusty petrol Jazz for several years while waiting for them to finally join the EV revolution. In the end, after its 16th birthday, we gave up waiting and bailed to Renault. (Though no regrets so far.)

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

The idea is to use olivine in a fine sand form to assist with that problem but - you're right - it's still a thing. To model the dissolution we used a functional relationship vs. temperature from the literature, but it's still the case that there are serious uncertainties there.

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Yes, olivine sinks. In the study I was part of we focused on its seafloor deployment in shallow water areas, i.e. so the alkalinity released by its dissolution was still within (or close to) the upper mixed layer. Deep water deployment wouldn't have worked. doi.org/10.1029/2023...

doi.org

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

In the work I've been involved with, we assumed an olivine source for the alkalinity, but other studies have used different minerals or even electrolysis. Depending on the study, sometimes the source is glossed over as a secondary consideration - easy to get away with in model-world. 😜

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

[*] The *films* I should add - the original comic is actually pretty good, fellow nerds.

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

P.S. I say "Facebook" but I crossposted (remember that?) there from The Site We Do Not Mention. I'm trumpeting Facebook here because it was the site that made the effort to remind me today, not because I'm a fan. I'm even less interested in Zuckerberg vs. Musk than Aliens vs. Predator [*].

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Anyway, apart another disappointing realisation that the #Ediacara remains unreachable, I have at least found a use for Facebook and it's Memories function. Note to @bsky.app - maybe add this here, just so I can remember in 12 years that I haven't chased up what a whole #Dendrogramma looks like.

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

I say "-ish" because, rather than being whole organisms, these are actually bits of an as-yet-unseen complete organism. And I say "as-yet-unseen" without having yet done the due diligence on What Happened Next. But I got the answer I was interested in: *Not* #EdiacaraFauna. Damn.

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Flashforward to 2026 ... After being reminded by Facebook that I posted this 12 years ago, I dug around to find out What Happened Next. Of which, I clearly missed the follow-up because 10 years ago the mystery was solved (-ish) by further samples and genomic analysis ... doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...

doi.org

Redirecting

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Don't you love *eventually* getting to the bottom of a potentially #DeepTime taxonomic mystery that you fleetingly paid attention to 12 years ago and posted to Facebook? (Because that's my jam on Facebook - esoteric 🌊 biological BS to show my high school friends that I remained a total swot.)

Facebook posting. Full text is: " Taxonomy fans - maybe the #Ediacaran fauna didn't all go the way of the dinosaurs ... http://t.co/c0tGsxfRGm "

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

As an ocean biogeochemistry modeller I can confirm that it is very easy to add alkalinity to the ocean ... in a model. The idea that we'll manage to organise a novel technology like OAE at the right scale when we struggle to organise (or hold to) emissions reductions is for the birds.

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Certainly for iron in our model, but other nutrients get moved from the land to the ocean this way too. It's one of those Earth system feedbacks that we occasionally make a song and dance about because it's liable to change into the future as the world gets Mad-Max-ified.

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Today I learned a new metric for dust: the GPG. I now just need to convert my model's ocean deposition flux of aeolian iron into the preferred Great Pyramids of Giza units.

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

P.S. Thinking that you're the real deal and those genes are there to serve you? That's just a neat-ass mind-fuck by those genes (who built your mind, BTW) to get you onside! They play a long game.

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Your regular reminder that Nature is a mofo, and that the organisms which comprise it (including you) are merely temporary meat puppets used by its underpinning masters, the genes, to give them a shot at reaching the next generation. Mayflies just make it obvious.

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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Could it be performance art where she's trying to see just how ridiculous she can make things (e.g. perfume + the wrong sense organ) before she's finally called-out on it?

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