Mike MacFerrin

Not all heroes wear capes, but seriously someone get this dude a cape.

“Nero fiddled while Rome burned”

Disability accommodations are a rare thing that actually trickles down. You like curb cutouts? Auto-opening doors? Jar openers? Ramps? Hand rails? YOU’RE WELCOME

Even as an abled person you use disability accommodations every single day.

Supporting accommodations actually helps everyone.

OMG Outlook Search! WHHHHHY!

I can type a name verbatim and it’ll show me a random selection of “likely-related” matched emails from the past 8 years but NOT SHOW ME the email from that exactly-named person sent just yesterday.

I honestly couldn’t explain the difference between “OneDrive” and “SharePoint” if you forced me to at gunpoint, other than I can stare at the same document in both depending on where I navigated there from, and each platform has its own peculiarly-subtle-but-distinct flavor of hell.

I laughed unreasonably loud at this
😭

a man with a beard and glasses is wearing a blue shirt and giving a thumbs down sign . Alt: A man with a beard and glasses in a blue shirt is quietly and unceremoniously giving a thumbs down sign with a deadpan stare.

Our Uni force-migrated us to use Microsoft-everything (sigh) and our team is having to scale back because:

- Sharepoint sucks (!) for editing docs
- MS Teams randomly throttles peoples’ audio on group calls where we can’t even hear each other
- File-sharing gets wonky as hell
- etc

It sucks! 👎

We are going to need Nuremberg Trials when this is all over.

“Please give me $100M to put my thoughts and feelings on the Blockchain for the world to see and we’ll make a $billion back by having computers solve a trillion sudoku puzzles to save them there forever.”

It really was a flawless business model.

amazing insight bro

Quote graphic with text: “It moves Colorado into the 21st century of civil rights related to people's decisions over their own bodies. We can leave some of these old Eugenics-era policies in the past.” — Jack Johnson, Attorney and Public Policy Liaison, Disability Law Colorado.

Eugenics is not just history; STILL it’s written into law in some states.

In Colorado, people with disabilities can still be sterilized over their objection.

This MUST end.

https://nationaltoday.com/us/co/denver/news/2026/02/15/colorado-bill-aims-to-repeal-forced-sterilization-law/

I’m old enough to remember when the Blockchain was going to change absolutely everything.

I get “One year of free credit monitoring” about every 3-8 months at this point.

I 🖤 how in the modern US, every 6 months you get a letter like…

“We wish to inform you [a Company you’ve never once heard of] had all your medical information which may have been compromised & leaked in a security breach. We’re sure it’s fine tho.”

…and you can’t do a single damn thing about it.

I truly wish more of these bills would get introduced (and pushed through!) in times when we have a Dem majority and presidency, when they have a chance of passing. But then it’s *crickets*. This feels purely performative.

a man in a suit and tie is holding his hair Alt: Jim Carrey in a suit, yanking his hair in flamboyant exasperation, emanating a WHYYYYYYY expression of sheer frustration.

An anti-vax elderly family member has been sick & coughing for 3 straight weeks, refuses to get tested, and insists this “bad flu” is being treated effectively by their chosen regime of supplements.

For 3 weeks!

I love this person enough to care but they’re driving me to wits’ end with this.

So you’ve been to these. 😁

I skipped the felt cowboy hat! Primarily because it didn’t fit (I have a big noggin’) and I had nowhere else to carry it, lol.

100%. We run relatively simple “AI” algorithms (like random-forest decision trees, etc) for specific scientific apps on a desktop machine with just a handful of minutes compute time. Not all ML algorithms are “wasteful” in the “drain aquifers run a data centers” theme of Grok, ChatGPT, etc.

(Narrator’s note: It was allowed, and pre-Trump was a welcomed part of Broader Impacts. Reviewer 2 just didn’t like we planned to PAY people for that work rather than it being all-volunteer.

I’m still miffed the PM let that factually-false comment sail through review untouched.)

We had a killer proposal exploring the boundary of melt zones in high-elevation Greenland. Zones were discovered just in the last 8 yrs; no one knew squat about where they intersect.

Tanked in part b/c Rev 2 didn’t like 5% of our budget doing DEI work. “I don’t think that’s allowed,” they quipped.

I've become ever-more impressed with scientists I know in anthro and sociology.

Physical Earth Science, by contrast, is closing its eyes and hoping to weather the fascism by putting its head down & ignoring the fires. (Exceptions exist! But not enough.)

The scientists who study human behavior? 🔥

I had never in my life thought about it. But yeah, somewhere, there’s gotta be.

CU Boulder’s Regents have done this multiple times, each time it’s been a sham.

They use closed-door discussions to select a slate of “up to 5 finalists” that then open to public-comment period. When “1 sole finalist” is nominated, the fix is obvious.

But then, see, you don’t *own* a digital receipt for the worst monkey drawing you’ve ever seen! Think of the possibilities!
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They’re torturing kids in concentration camps and building 10x more camps right now. It’s all happening right now.

Free them all. Burn the entire system to the ground. All of it.

"the camp was raided to confiscate letters from the children"

100%. Any candidate preaching “moving on” and “let’s get back to bipartisanship” can go to hell. People need to be tried and convicted, very publicly, for these crimes against humanity. Hundreds of people (at least). No meaningful change without accountability.

I spent 2 good-but-exhausting days at a geospatial conference & trade show. After getting home, my family meticulously picked through my pile of 15 free vendor pens and just cherry-picked the very nicest ones for themselves.

I feel so used. 😭 🖊️🖋️

I was on a (failed) proposal for one of the “Earth System Explorer Future Missions” that just got frozen.

One of those “silver lining” things personally, but I have colleagues on a competing ESE mission that was funded. This’ll destroy careers (and 🛰️s!) if it sticks even a cpl months.
🤞 it doesn’t.