Hisham Zerriffi

Update: today does not appear to be the day. It’s stopped snowing

Nice. It stopped snowing here.

The UBC Reconciliation Pole (a tall Coast Salish totem pole) with buildings and a parking lot in the background. There are little white flakes of snow in the picture. But the grass is green.

Is today the day #Vancouver gets its first snow accumulation of the season?

If not, we’re on track for this to be the first year with no measurable snow accumulation since the early 80s.

I don't think most people grasp the insane amount of resources that the US allocates to weapons and war machines. The list of better things we could do with the military budget is nearly endless.

Aww, thanks!

Join us!

Just walked by a colleague's classroom after my class finished and he was talking about Elvis, getting blank stares and so he had to ask "Does anyone know who Elvis Presley is?"

It's rough out here on these teaching streets.

This didn't happen. The perception that it did is largely based on fictional shows that were about rich people. Much more common was a household where one person (theoretically Dad in a het household) was the higher earner and paid the housing costs and the other paid utilities & food

Picture of DOGE guy Nate Cavanaugh

Screenshot of my DOGE letter “Dr. Joseph Rezek Dear NEH Grantee, This letter provides notice that the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is terminating your federal grant (Grant Application No. FEL29509824) effective April 3, 2025, in accordance with the termination clause in your Grant Agreement. Your grant no longer effectuates the agency's needs and priorities and conditions of the Grant Agreement and is subject to termination due to several reasonable causes, as outlined in 2CFR§200.340. For instance, NEH has reasonable cause to terminate your grant in light of the fact that the NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President's agenda. The President's February 19, 2025 executive order mandates that the NEH eliminate all non-statutorily required activities and functions. See Commencing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy, E.O. 14217 (Feb. 19, 2025). Your grant's immediate termination is necessary to safeguard the interests of the federal government, including its fiscal priorities. Any objections or appeals to this termination will be managed in strict accordance with the President's Executive Orders,

Last year, this guy (left) from DOGE used ChatGPT to find NEH grants that were too “DEI” for Trump, and canceled them, including mine, as shown by the letter I received last April (right). Huge new NYT article on the back story link below

This woman invented the cure to camera lens flare and you’ve probably never heard of her This International Women’s Day we say thanks to Katharine Burr Blodgett, the inventor of non-reflective glass, crucial for stopping lens flare

Happy International Women’s Day.

Here’s a great little story about Katharine Burr Blodgett. I had never heard of her until today but as an amateur photographer, I’m grateful for her work developing anti-glare lenses.

#IWD2026

Cover of "Picture an Astronomer: Best Practices for Retaining Talent in Astrophysics", which features an illustration of a 19-year-old Vera Rubin looking through a telescope over a backdrop of a first light image of spiral galaxies from the Rubin Observatory.

Happy International Women's Day!

Perfect time for me to (re)share our white paper on increasing the retention of women in professional astrophysics (really full of suggestions that broaden participation in academic science in general).

arxiv.org/abs/2512.24465

🧪🔭☄️👩‍🔬

I have not! Will take another look at it.

For anyone who thought I was joking…

That sounds amazing. I’ve borrowed some candlekeep adventures and re-skinned them to fit in my campaign. They’re a ton of fun.

Yeah, tricky not to railroad while still having this vision of it all coming together. What makes it easier is that they each have a BBEG so I can have them come together to fight either way as the stories unfold

Hey #TTRPG and #DnD5e GMs:

Ever run two simultaneous campaigns set in same world and same time, laying breadcrumbs in each that will allow to bring both parties together at some point to fight a common BBEG?

Been doing this for months and it’s tricky to keep things straight. Tips appreciated.

Haven’t played with the web tool yet but, yeah, that would be an issue. I use the original (despite it being outdated) in my class because with having to choose 8 out of 15 wedges it is manageable. They choose on their own and then negotiate a consensus in small groups. Would be tough with 30+

Ever play the NYT Connections game and think “I need this to be more of a time sink”?

In this game you have to make 45 groups of 45 items. Have fun?

thomaswc.com/2025.html

Very cool. I’ll just be over here patiently waiting to be notified my pre-order has arrived.

You could move to British Columbia. We’ve finally come to our senses.

What you do after you hear about the Zong massacre and why it still matters What does it mean for us being human when a massacre does not stop you in your tracks?

What does it mean for us being human when a massacre does not stop you in your tracks? In this essay I examine the various ways in which scholars have tried to imagine the undoing of the endless night of the Zong, the undoing of a world we cannot live within.

folukeafrica.com/what-you-do-...

Yes it is. There were three full projectors and screens on either side of me. Completely bizarre.

About to guest lecture in the weirdest room. It is 60 seats wide and four rows deep.

I’m a person who walks back and forth when I teach. Definitely hitting my step count today.

Democratizing climate change mitigation pathways using modernized stabilization wedges Mitigating climate change requires broad societal buy-in. Integrated assessment models (IAMs) produce cost-optimal pathways, but these are complex and not easily customized to reflect individuals’ pre...

Been waiting for someone to update the "Wedges" from Pacala and Socolow for a long time (which saves me having to do it). Great classroom activity if nothing else.

Kudos to Nathan Johnson and @iain-staffell.bsky.social for doing so and including options down to net-zero.

Yeah. Interestingly enough they do have religion breakdowns (not sure about other socio-demographics) as they seem to implicitly assume morality and ethics derive from a person's religion. Which, I guess is partially true but definitely not the whole story.

B.C.'s move to end time changes sparks cross-Canada conversation | CBC News British Columbia’s move to permanent daylight time has reignited conversations across the country about scrapping biannual time changes. After B.C. Premier David Eby announced Monday that most of the ...

British Columbia is eliminating the bi-annual ritual of changing our clocks.

And we are all acting perfectly normally about this in my household, why do you ask? No, I am definitely not ordering a cake with a clock on it to celebrate on Sunday. Nope. Not at all.

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Oh, I have some Quebecois friends who will be very happy about this.

With a bit of digging, I think this is the question:

“Generally, how would you rate the morality of (survey country nationality)s – are their morals very good, somewhat good, somewhat bad or very bad?”

From here: www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/u...

Ah, if only everybody thought so.

I could definitely see breaking this down as a good little in-class exercise