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Neil Banas

@neilbanas.bsky.social
842 followers 384 following 205 posts

Real and imagined oceans in equations, paper, and code. Strathclyde Uni + Wasps Studios, Glasgow | neilbanas.com/projects

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Reposted by Neil Banas
Sardonicus @sardonicus.eu · 27/09/2026
On the Outskirts of the City Jaromir Funke, 1940
a house, a few trees. a road leading from the house to a large rock.
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Neil Banas @neilbanas.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
"We thank the reviewers for their insightful comments, which have improved the manuscript." (www.britishmuseum.org/collection/i...)
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Neil Banas @neilbanas.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
@emilydoolittle.bsky.social , Michelle Campbell, Preeti Pansare, and I are in Studio 110 at The Briggait in #Glasgow this weekend with the #doorsopen (waspsstudios.org.uk/open-studios...). Triangles, #crochet, and #invertebrates in many combinations. Drop by!
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Neil Banas @neilbanas.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
(slightly) new #origami #nudibranch design. If you're in Glasgow, come by Doors Open Days at The Briggait for many more! waspsstudios.org.uk/open-studios... background: an Anna Atkins cyanotype, as seen recently in the @lrb.co.uk. (Algal cyanotypes are critical habitat for origami nudibranchs.)
A bluebrown nudibranch glides heavenward atop a bluewhite blade of seaweed. The nudibranch is origami designed and folded by Neil (origamiplankton.org) and the seaweed is a cyanotype by Anna Atkins, 1853.
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Maija Karala @maijakarala.bsky.social · 01/09/2025
#SciArtSeptember 1: Islet Somewhere in the waves of Barents Sea, a rocky islet acts as a perch for seabirds. Puffins, guillemots, razorbills and skuas are still here, though threatened by heating oceans and spreading disease. With them sits a lonely ghost of a great auk that once roamed these seas.
A simple landscape illustration with a grey-green ocean, a dark grey rocky islet partly covered by orange lichen and a light grey overcast sky. On and around the islet are seabirds of several species, most pictured realistically in colour. The largest bird is a now-extinct great auk, depicted as a semi-translucent white ghost figure.
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Neil Banas @neilbanas.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Paris opera set designs by George Ciceri. I love how they conjure worlds and also call attention to their own flatness at the same time. www.metmuseum.org/art/collecti... (this is either vagueposting or theoryposting about my day job as an ecosystem modeller)
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Andrew Yool @dryool.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
Recently made an unwelcome discovery while digging up old papers for a lit. review. I wanted to cite Fasham, Ducklow & McKelvie (1990), AKA FDM90, a towering giant of a paper in 🌊 #BGCmodelling, only to discover that its #DOI no longer worked. (1/7)
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Neil Banas @neilbanas.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
John Montroll's raccoon, folded by me (one duo-colour sheet). I love this design #origami
Grey and black origami raccoon standing on wee pointy feet on a wooden desk. A blurry stack of 2025 summer reading is out-of-focus in the background
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Neil Banas @neilbanas.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Sometimes it crept with its Belly to the Ground, and ſtretched itſelf out ſo long that it ſeemed to reſemble a Serpent moving without Feet. It was let run looſe about the Houſe. www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/50196490
Colour illustration of The Indian Ichneumon, from A Natural History of Birds by George Edwards, 1850. The Ichneumon appears to be a bright eyed, point-nosed mammal, who is in no way a bird and simultaneously eager to please and up to no good.
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Dr. Jonathan Foley @globalecoguy.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
I especially love this diagram.
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Remedios Varo @remediosvaro.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
Allegory of Winter botfrens.com/collections/69/content…
"Allegory of Winter" by Remedios Varo presents an enchanting and surreal forest scene with whimsical, tree-like figures encasing delicate animals and plants within translucent vessels. The composition evokes a sense of mysterious stillness and intricate beauty, characteristic of Varo's symbolic and mystical artistic vision.
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Nick Record @seascapescience.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
Fascinating story It’s almost impossible to get rid of rope drive.google.com/file/d/1CVHW...
drive.google.com
The Impossible Task of Throwing Away Lobster Rope _ Local News _ midcoastvillager.com.pdf
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Dr Daisy Abbott @daisyabbott.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
Exciting collaboration with Australian First Nations Wardandi artists Vivian Brockman Webb and Mitchella Hutchins and Scottish/Australian land artist Elaine Clocherty as well as lots of Glasgow artists for @glasgow2026.bsky.social festival. More info: www.elaineclocherty.com/glasgow-2026...
Awakening – See Spirit – Djunnung Djanga – Faic Anum
Commonwealth Games Glasgow 2026 Festival

Across cultures and continents this summer we invite you to join Australian First Nations Wardandi artists Vivian Brockman Webb and Mitchella Hutchins,  Scottish/Australian land artist Elaine Clocherty, interdisciplinary researcher DrDaisy Abbott, (GSA) writer and artist Amanda Thomson (GSA),  writer and artist Dr Chris Fremantle (EcoArtsScotland), Tam McGarvey (GalGael), Glasgow artist Shan Daly and others, as we converge for Glasgow2026 during the Commonwealth Games. We will create a large, collaborative, ephemeral land artwork at Bellahouston Park, acknowledging the First Nations Peoples of the Commonwealth.  
 
For 3 days, Vivian, Mitchella and Elaine will be working in Bellahouston Park and everyone is welcome to participate – you can help with the land art, join discussions, guided walks and celebration.
 
Program 
Bookings open June 15th 2026

Humanix booking page https://events.humanitix.com/awakening-see-spirit-djunnung-djanga-faic-anum
More Information https://www.elaineclocherty.com/glasgow-2026-festival
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Neil Banas @neilbanas.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
from 2033, Exam Boards will take _mal du siècle_ under consideration as qualifying Personal Circumstances, if documented by an official note from a moody novelist aeon.co/essays/young...
aeon.co
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Gilbert White @gilbertwhite.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
1777: Cut 24 fine cucumbers. Clouds flie different ways. Distant thunder.
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Neil Banas @neilbanas.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
Bison giubato just got back from a festival. Bison giubato has borrowed some woodworking tools from Cabionara (vol. 3) but hasn't had time to do anything with them. Bison giubato isn't listening to your story but also won't talk about anything else.
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Neil Banas @neilbanas.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
Another world is possible (just usually not with camels) cheesemap.netlify.app
cheesemap.netlify.app
The Cheese Map — Charting the Combinatorial Space of Cheesemaking
An interactive reference mapping every intersection of milk, texture, rind, aging, and technique in cheesemaking — revealing where cheeses exist, where they're rare, and where the gaps are.
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Neil Banas @neilbanas.bsky.social · 07/05/2026
This is cool. A couple years ago I got a Here's-a-Hardhat-Look-Thoughtful tour of the sewage reclamation plant in Irvine—sewage in at one end in a big pipe, and drinking water out the other in a small pipe. Part of a real 1960s Spaceship Earth tradition, inseparable from the freeways.
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Sardonicus @sardonicus.eu · 07/05/2026
"Southern Right Whale (Eubalaena australis), Valdes Peninsula, Argentina". Sebastião Salgado, 2004, part of his "Genesis" project.
The image captures the fluke of a Southern right whale emerging from the ocean, with the coastal landscapes of the Valdes Peninsula in the background.
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Sardonicus @sardonicus.eu · 02/05/2026
Moche Vessel in the Form of an Owl Impersonator 100 B.C./A.D. 500 Peru www.artic.edu/artworks/915...
an ceramic vessel shapd like an owl holding an orb
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Lorraine Wilson @rainewilson.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
Oh hey it's #EarthDay and @solarisbooks.bsky.social are having a sale on books full of the wild places, ecological themes and excellent (or fucked up) beasties! Go fill yer boots! 🌍📚🖤
Graphic of a range of Solaris ebook titles on sale for 99 (p or c) against a leafy background. Authors include me, Sam K Horton, MK Hardy, Natania Barron, Karin Lowachee, Adrian Tchaikovsky & Aliya WhiteleySimilar graphic just for my two books We Are All Ghosts In The Forest and The Salt Oracle
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Jeff Noon @jeffnoon.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
Seventeen vast crumbling bullet-ridden battle-scarred migration ships, each one the size of city, riding the waves of space along unknown routes, away from planet Earth. The dying Earth. The whole armada powered by the last remaining Commodore 64, circa 1987.
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The Marine Biological Association @thembauk.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
Who else needed to see more rainbow sea slugs this week? 🌈 These photos of Babakina anadoni we're taken by @yolandave_24 in Falmouth. #nudibranch #seaslugs #intertidal #rockpooling
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Neil Banas @neilbanas.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
So sad. I remember (90s) when Gifford Pinchot was a symbol of what environmentalists were fighting _against_—forest as harvestable crop vs forest as self-contained preexistent universe. Now the idea of sustainable harvest (as opposed to pure short-term asset stripping) is enough to make him a hero.
hatchmag.com
Trump administration orders dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service
Late Tuesday afternoon, with the subtlety of a wrecking ball and the morality of a foreclosure notice, the Trump administration announced the most devastating attack on the U.S. Forest Service in the agency’s 121-year history. Not a budget cut. Not a policy shift. Not a “reorganization.” An execution.
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Cameron Blevins @cblevins.bsky.social · 03/04/2026
This is so, so well-articulated.
People call this friction "grunt work." Schwartz uses exactly that phrase, and he's right that LLMs can remove it. What he doesn't say, because he already has decades of hard-won intuition and doesn't need the grunt work anymore, is that for someone who doesn't yet have that intuition, the grunt work is the work. The boring parts and the important parts are tangled together in a way that you can't separate in advance. You don't know which afternoon of debugging was the one that taught you something fundamental about your data until three years later, when you're working on a completely different problem and the insight surfaces. Serendipity doesn't come from efficiency. It comes from spending time in the space where the problem lives, getting your hands dirty, making mistakes that nobody asked you to make and learning things nobody assigned you to learn.
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Reckoning @reckoningmag.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
New today from Reckoning X, our celebratory, extra-fancy tenth anniversary issue: "Camouflage", a painting by @rainjordan.com in which a dodo cosplays as a fan coral to fake out approaching colonizers reckoning.press/camouflage/
A painting by Rain Jordan in which a dodo bird stands on a rock wearing a pink fan coral as a hat. In the background is a stormy sea and an approaching sail.
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Neil Banas @neilbanas.bsky.social · 14/03/2026
saw a cool image—sort of Moebius x Ragged Trousered Philanthropists—which turned out to be midjourney, on a blog that should have known better. Searched upstream to likely influences, then downstream to contemporary humans with similar influences, rediscovered @harriorrihar.bsky.social. So great.
harriorrihar.myportfolio.com
Jon Juarez
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Neil Banas @neilbanas.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
Sara Cardona: "so many of the #preColumbian figures have gaping mouths and eyes—they are on shamanic journeys—and they give me the sensation that they are not just seeing an ancestral deity, but maybe…looking at us. So I…return them to the contemporary world" 1/2 www.revuecolle.com/issues/vol-2...
revuecolle.com
ISSUE NO. 141 - Sara Cardona | Collé
ISSUE NO. 141 featuring Sara Cardona
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Neil Banas @neilbanas.bsky.social · 03/03/2026
[opens fridge] [condiments, sauerkraut, four bags of shredded cheddar, two large jars of experimental homemade nonalcoholic whisky] [aloud] Our fridge is weird. I will eat leftovers. [opens freezer] [drawer overflowing with crochet nudibranchs]
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Neil Banas @neilbanas.bsky.social · 28/02/2026
this is such good news. If anything happened to BHL it would change the course of waterwayscollective.org zine-making.
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Neil Banas @neilbanas.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
This showed up in my feed adjacent to the news that Meta is going to introduce versions of your feed that continue without you after you're dead. Same conjuration tradition.
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Neil Banas @neilbanas.bsky.social · 14/02/2026
There's an unrealised world of weird LLM variants, and then there's the form that big corps locked LLMs into within 5 min of creation. Katy Gero, LARB: "Artists of all stripes are allowed to play with technology. That’s our role: play with the world, test its limits, poke at the holes and problems."
lareviewofbooks.org
Making a Literary Future with Artificial Intelligence | Los Angeles Review of Books
Five writers and AI researchers discuss the future of literature.
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Dr Selena Wisnom @lswisnom.bsky.social · 03/11/2025
Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching
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Sardonicus @sardonicus.eu · 11/02/2026
There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive.” Philip K. Dick
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Neil Banas @neilbanas.bsky.social · 04/02/2026
Not 1 but 2 evening #sciart events (w drinks) during #OSM26 in #Glasgow! * zine-making in the pub, Mon 23 Feb (link below) * opening for Constraint Made Visible (Transmission Gallery, 24 Feb)—collabs among local mathematicians, artists, crafters, and ocean modellers Pls help spread the word!
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Markus Eichhorn @markuseichhorn.bsky.social · 04/02/2026
How much temperate rainforest could there be in the UK and Ireland, and where? Despite campaigns calling for restoration in both countries, these questions have been difficult to answer. In our new paper we assess the evidence base 🌏🧪🌐🌳🌲 1/9
besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Comparison of three temperate rainforest climate envelopes for Britain and Ireland: Where could our rainforest be?
There are multiple methods for creating climate envelopes for temperate rainforest, and these climate envelopes result in different extents across Ireland and Britain. An awareness of these differenc...
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Neil Banas @neilbanas.bsky.social · 02/02/2026
a hundred thousand idling diesel cars. Energy requirement of a quarter million homes. For *one* data centre. aprs.scot/press-releas... Can we replace the word "hyperscale", which sounds like slick sci fi but is hiding horrors? "earthcrusher-scale"? "demon-summoning-scale"?
aprs.scot
New hyperscale data centre could have diesel generators equivalent of 106,000 idling cars - Action to Protect Rural Scotland
APRS has calculated that a hyperscale data centre proposed for Edinburgh is planning to use diesel generators for back-up power which would be equivalent to over a hundred thousand idling diesel cars.
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Neil Banas @neilbanas.bsky.social · 01/02/2026
Ooh I like this one: Five classes I took at university * The End is Near! (actual title: apocalyptic traditions) * Chaos and Dynamical Systems * Introduction to Buddhist Art History * Quantum Mechanics * History of Jazz sort of eclectic but sort of all on a theme, in retrospect.
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Neil Banas @neilbanas.bsky.social · 21/01/2026
This makes me want to be a biochemist, or be Björk, or believe in gods, or I'm not sure. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn8A...
youtube.com
"Hollow" music video by Björk + Drew Berry (wehi.tv), 2010
YouTube video by Drew Berry Animation wehi-tv
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Neil Banas @neilbanas.bsky.social · 20/01/2026
Ocean zine making in the pub during #OSM26! Please join waterwayscollective.org and the @mastscot.bsky.social Energyscapes Working Group for an evening of #zines and collage in a cosy #Glasgow pub, following day 1 of the 2026 Ocean Sciences Meeting. Sign-up link below, spread the word!
events.humanitix.com
Ocean zine-making in the pub
Come join the artists and scientists of the Waterways Collective for an evening of zine-making in the pub, following day 1 of the 2026 Ocean Sciences Meeting.
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Neil Banas @neilbanas.bsky.social · 16/01/2026
LivingMaps is hosting an online panel discussion with waterwayscollective.org on 3 Feb, where we will share some of the scientific visualisations, zines, and performance materials that have grown out of our #art-science field trips following #Scottish #salmon #rivers. Tickets below. Should be fun!
eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com
The Waterways Collective: Multidisciplinary mapping of Atlantic salmon
Join us to explore multidisciplinary mapping of Atlantic salmon migration and ideas of interconnectedness
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Marine Ecology Progress Series @meps-ir.bsky.social · 15/01/2026
🧪🦤🌐 Why are North Sea sandeels getting smaller? New study finds prey community shifts, not warming, likely drive size declines. A growth model shows how prey, temperature, turbidity, and early-life timing interact under climate change. bit.ly/meps15010 @neilbanas.bsky.social @sbohvm.gla.ac.uk
Painting of a school of lesser sandeels, by Björn Johansson.
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Amy Guidry, Artist @amyguidryartist.bsky.social · 11/01/2026
Sharing another new painting included in my solo exhibition at LeMieux Galleries in New Orleans. In Our Veins is on view now through February 21st as well as online at lemieuxgalleries.com. "Void" Acrylic on canvas 12" x 12" #art #painting #surrealism #nature #wildlife #contemporaryart
Acrylic painting of a black silhouette of a bear with one large human eye in a meadow of wildflowers. The sun is encircled by a rainbow.
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Neil Banas @neilbanas.bsky.social · 11/01/2026
yes @mobydickatsea.bsky.social-bot, I am in fact I am warming up for a weeklong meeting about the Atlantic Meridional Conveyor Belt, its moods and its long sufferings at our hands. Maybe all #leviathan literature is #AMOC literature.
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Victoria Rose Richards @aerialembroidery.bsky.social · 10/01/2026
My 'winter abstractions' embroidery series has just gone live! Snow and ice over water in various shades of blue and teal. There was a focus on shape for these aerial landscapes, both in the water and ice... it was great to explore! Now all here: victoriaroserichards.co.uk/collection/a... #art
An embroidery hoop containing a sewn aerial view landscape. The landscape consists of water in layers of blues and teals, with white snow and ice reaching across.An embroidery hoop containing a sewn aerial view landscape. The landscape consists of water in layers of blues and teals, with white snow and ice reaching across.An embroidery hoop containing a sewn aerial view landscape. The landscape consists of deep blue water and chunks of melting ice in regular shapes.A tiny black embroidery hoop containing a sewn aerial view landscape. The landscape consists of deep teal water with snow and ice reaching across. There are tiny trees visible.
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Neil Banas @neilbanas.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
@monicabyrne13.bsky.social 's novel _The Actual Star_ completely shook up how I think about radically transformed climate futures and resilience (in a good way!) and I bet this online course will be amazing.
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Neil Banas @neilbanas.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
"Breath…is repeatable and trainable, yet also unpredictable and resistant." This conversation about inspiration goes lots of unexpected places. Ultimately I think it's about finding comfort and rhythm in bodies and creative practices that are always a bit creakier and wheezier than one envisioned.
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Neil Banas @neilbanas.bsky.social · 02/01/2026
This megathread of "craziest archive stories" from @appuhn.bsky.social is like actually existing #troikarpg*. Radioactive books on radioactivity; trout; castles; nuns with ladder opinions; maybe I should become an archivist? *(sci-fantasy farce of your choice, if you don't yet play #troikarpg)
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