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Kale Sniderman

@muddypollen.bsky.social
563 followers 581 following 372 posts

Palynologist, paleoclimatologist, plant biogeographer | vegetation and climate history | fossil pollen

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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 3h
Pterostylis pedunculata (maroon hood), Erskine Falls, Otways (leaves speckled with silt) 🌱🧪
A clump of the orchid Pterostylis pedunculata (maroon hood), Erskine Falls, Otways (leaves speckled with silt)A clump of the orchid Pterostylis pedunculata (maroon hood), Erskine Falls, Otways (leaves speckled with silt)
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 19h
Bogong Moths are deservedly getting all the attention but we are in serious Utetheisa pulchelloides season – the heliotrope moth – with clouds of white moths rising from the ground everywhere as we walk along in the bush (this photo is not mine, of these flighty fellas) 🧪
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Recursive self improvement likely outcomes #73 pbfcomics.com/wp-content/u...
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
The animals have had enough and they're fighting back abcnews.com/US/biting-ra...
abcnews.com
Biting rabid beavers prompt partial closure of popular Maryland park
Authorities are investigating what they said is a "possible rabies outbreak within the local beaver population" at a Maryland park.
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Proteacidites punctiporus in action
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
What is so weirdly deficient about this town square, that the blogpost below has less than a dozen likes?
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Turing test v. 327
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Matt Bors @mattbors.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
It was exactly ten years ago today, on my 33rd birthday, that I posted this comic online.
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
I may gently correct @doctorow.pluralistic.net's geophysics projections but the Enshittocene is the only post-Holocene -cene worth two cents
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
I acknowledge that 500 years of thermodynamics is a lot to ask the public to digest, @doctorow.pluralistic.net, but sea level is unlikely to have stabilised 500 years from now (eg see Turner's Fig 5) agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... m.youtube.com/watch?v=nTqC...
agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Illustrative Multi‐Centennial Projections of Global Mean Sea‐Level Rise and Their Application
Projections of global mean sea-level rise to 2500 have [5, 95]% intervals of [0.3, 4.3]m under SSP1-2.6 and [1.0, 7.6]m under SSP2-4.5 The most uncertain sea-level contributor continues to be the...
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
*Of course* it was 'unlawful' in any meaningful sense; *of course* it was a crime against humanity,; *of course* Britain is obliged to provide restitution www.theguardian.com/uk-news/ng-i...
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Annals of paleoecology: shifting baselines
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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 09/09/2026
As once-extinct diseases sweep through America, sickening, maiming and killing, the wild lunacy of anti-vax superstition grows ever more difficult to excuse.
A leaky drop ceiling with a large, dirty water stain.
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
It's surely not just me that finds that GPT's Luna is a bit of an idiot, lacking executive function altogether
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
The database will surely be as boring as batshit, but this is a great initiative to help us understand which sediments do, or don't, preserve fossil pollen 10.1016/j.revpalbo.2026.105710
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Totally spesh
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Very fine Quaternary stratigraphy
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Amidst the world's troubles it is soothing to split firewood and feed longicorn beetle larvae to the old chook
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
possibly the most interesting use of this meme I've seen. But does CO2 care, if it goes into and out of glycine? Shouldn't the indignant face be the leaf, or more directly the chloroplast, angry that its duplicitous enzyme servant is double-timing with O2, not giving all the goods to the leaf?
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 25/07/2026
The set of cultural touchstones that Ezra Klein assumes his listeners are familiar with is essentially infinite but somehow does not include dialectical materialism
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
The Matuyama-Brunhes reversal doesn't get much love outside of science, but when it does whoo boy www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...
theguardian.com
Politician’s claim Earth’s magnetic poles could flip if NT doesn’t use more groundwater criticised by experts
NT minister for trade and business Robyn Cahill makes scientifically inaccurate claims while pushing to make territory ‘datacentre capital of the globe’
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Lena Struwe @drgentian.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
"Hence our dismal conclusion: rather than finding that LLMs free us to do a better job of what we were doing before they came along, they shift scientific incentives (and the playing field of academic competition) in ways that compel us to do more and more, faster and faster, less and less well."
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CSIRO Publishing @csiropublishing.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
"Australia may soon face unprecedented conservation decisions, from relocating native species & gene-editing invasive pests to deliberately creating ecosystems better suited to the conditions of the future." @ausjbotany.bsky.social #AusJBotany #OpenAccess Read more: www.scimex.org/newsfeed/wha...
scimex.org
Lab-grown meat, gene editing and extreme fire: Researchers' prediction
Lab-grown meat, gene editing and extreme fire: Researchers' predictions for life in the 2100s A major study has examined the deep environmental technological and societal challenges and sc
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
a diamond of a leader
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ArtButMakeItSports @artbutmakeitsports.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
Lamentation (flipped, detail), by Gerard David, 1515-23, 📸 by Roberto Schmidt
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
Easy quiz. In what part of Australia was this photo taken? 🧪🌱
The photo shows a tree with very distinctive bark
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
Isn't this wonderful Whoops! Most arXiv papers contain information never meant to be shared www.nature.com/articles/d41...
nature.com
Whoops! Most arXiv papers contain information never meant to be shared
Passwords, GPS coordinates and private conversations have all been found in the metadata and source files of millions of preprint submissions.
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
Is it ominous that fewer people are starting PhDs, or that only ~5% of PhD graduates find an ongoing academic position?
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
all true www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
theguardian.com
Neil the seal is back, terrorising Tasmania’s coastal communities. Everyone leave him alone! | First Dog on the Moon
Neil is just a lonely teen who wants some other huge teen seals to punch on with. Sadly he has to fight bollards instead
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
herbarium collections as unique archives of the health of pollinator-plant mutualisms
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
Catering plans, maybe 1989
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
The assignment operator in R (<-) is vile and should be banished. It is needed constantly but is morphologically almost identical to <= (i.e. less-than-or-equal-to, ≤). It would be hard to find a smaller visual cue to carry such a large semantic load (though of course '=' just sows more confusion)
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 20/06/2026
calcium-cemented neoliths are interesting objects for inhabitants of the Anthropocene to ponder, but their Myr-scale preservation potential is approx zero if they don't find their way into the deep ocean or a subsiding basin: i.e. they are fated to be surface ephemera aeon.co/essays/the-s...
aeon.co
The strange rocks that wouldn’t exist without us | Aeon Essays
Not natural, not quite unnatural, the strange new rocks of the Anthropocene stretch the boundaries of geology
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
theguardian.com
Bury me in the whale graveyard – let the weird starfish chew my bones | First Dog on the Moon
Scientists have discovered an enormous whale graveyard about 1,200km long, which seems big but then so are whales
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Prof Ian Hall @ianhall.bsky.social · 14/06/2026
When the facts are against you, attack the experts. 
When reality is against you, attack the facts. www.politico.com/news/2026/06...
politico.com
Inside the campaign to discredit a key climate science report
An emerging field of research that can measure how much climate change has worsened individual disasters is under attack by friends of the fossil fuel industry. Billions of dollars are at stake.
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Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
'The career ladder in academia is of particular interest as it is a “greedy” occupation due to its lack of substitutability among workers, long hours with increasing returns to productivity, and the importance of establishing and maintaining personal contacts.' Academia is a "greedy" occupation.
blogs.lse.ac.uk
The lack of women at the top of the academic ladder is driven by unequal childcare responsibilities - LSE Impact
Motherhood, and the unequal childcare responsibilities that follow, explain a large share of the observed gender gap in academic employment. Sofie Cairo, Ria Ivandic, Anne Sophie Lassen and Valentina ...
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Bridget Wade @bridgetwade.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
Why would a species of ocean plankton coil its shells to the right for millions of years and then suddenly, flip to the left? To find out more see Flipping Plankton in PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... by Bridget Wade , Paul Pearson, David King and Valeria Luciani
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
Suddenly this year, Australians applying for research grants that I'm reviewing are structuring components of their proposed research agenda around the notion of "work packages". Perhaps this is language promoted by a grant-writing consultancy?
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
The availability heuristic to my left, the availability heuristic to my right
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Brent Toderian @brenttoderian.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
THREAD: I’m going to share this thread here to clearly state my perspective on electric vehicles, car dependency and better cities, for all those who frequently ask me about it, including media, elected leaders and many others. Here goes. Please share it frequently if you think it will help. 🧵#EVS
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Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌 @chanda.blacksky.app · 13/04/2026
I wrote a little thing about how we orient ourselves toward the moon, thinking with the work of @blmckean.bsky.social on neoliberalism "Who gets to decide what future generations will see when they look at the moon through a telescope? Will there be a democratic process for deciding?" 🧪🌒🔭
news.chanda.science
Desecration or Curiosity: Orienting Ourselves Toward Space
On Artemis, capitalism, and the logics of colonialism
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Pauline Grierson @pfgblue.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
Come join us! The University of Western Australia has two openings for Lecturers at Level B - one position is in Marine Biology, the other is for a Lecturer in Zoology. Both are teaching/research positions. Position descriptions are here: external.jobs.uwa.edu.au/en/listing/ Please repost 🙏
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 03/04/2026
Should be challenged in court
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Sandy Horne @sandyhorne.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
I got the rejection email today. I didn't have any luck with the Australian Geographic photo comp this year. No need for sympathy. I'm used to it. It's very competitive. Here's one of my unsuccessful entries. A yellow-tailed rock wallaby at Boolcoomatta Reserve.
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L Ramalho 🍉 @ramalho.org · 23/03/2026
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
An Open Letter to Georgetown Students, In Response to Recent Announcements about "Generative AI" medium.com/center-on-pr... 🧪
medium.com
An Open Letter to Georgetown Students, In Response to Recent Announcements about "Generative AI"
An Open Letter to Georgetown Students, In Response to Recent Announcements by the University about “Generative AI” Image source: Bibliothèque nationale de France Dear students, As you know, in …
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 25/03/2026
This open letter to students at Georgetown university is extremely good medium.com/center-on-pr...
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Kale Sniderman @muddypollen.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
With no cold offshore upwelling system, the so-called mediterranean climate of southwestern Australia can just be broken by a whimsical tropical cyclone. It's almost as if ex-TC Narelle will track the warm Leeuwin Current down the WA coast 🧪
Forecast synoptic charts showing ex-tropical cyclone Narelle abruptly turning left and potentially delivering >100mm of rain to southwest Australia, over the next 3 or 4 days
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Oded Rechavi @odedrechavi.bsky.social · 10/02/2026
Better suited for a specalized journal
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