Cheney Orr took this picture for Reuters in Washington, D.C., on July 4, 2026. It reminds me of the James Baldwin quote, “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”

Two Russian military satellites, COSMOS 2581 and 2583, performed a sophisticated maneuver, passing within 3 meters of each other in low Earth orbit last week. The purpose of this close proximity operation remains undisclosed. #space #News

‘Whatever Russia is testing, it’s sophisticated’: Satellites pass within 3 metres of each other

Two Russian military satellites, COSMOS 2581 and 2583, performed a sophisticated maneuver, passing w...

yahoo.com

This is a fairly fascinating video. Most people don’t realize this: AI pricing and latency mostly come down to batching. Bigger batches = cheaper tokens but slower responses. Faster modes? You’re literally paying to jump the queue and reduce batching efficiency. www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmkS...

How GPT-5, Claude, and Gemini are actually trained and served – Reiner Pope

YouTube video by Dwarkesh Patel

youtube.com

This is clever: Sentinel-2 captures RGB bands ~1 second apart. Moving vehicles shift between captures → creating color “smears.” DrishX turns those into vehicle counts, speeds, and trends across the globe. github.com/sparkyniner/...

The numbers here are difficult to ignore. If aid reductions continue, we’re looking at tens of millions of additional deaths by 2030, including millions of children. What you see here is derived from actual historical relationships, not hypothetical ones. #AIDE - www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

What if LLMs aren’t the future of AI? AI pioneer Yann LeCun argues they’re a dead end—too brittle, inefficient, and disconnected from real-world understanding. A new modular approach may be next. Great video discussion. #AI www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IMV...

Are LLMs a Dead End? (Investors Just Bet $1 Billion on “Yes”) | AI Reality Check | Cal Newport

YouTube video by Cal Newport

youtube.com

Growing concern over academic freedom as some college students monitor & report professors for perceived political incorrectness. Texas A&M incidents cited. #AcademicFreedom #News

There’s an intensifying kind of threat to academic freedom – watchful students serving as informants

Growing concern over academic freedom as some college students monitor & report professors for perce...

theconversation.com

I built a GitHub issue–centric workflow framework for Claude Code. A GitHub issue # drives everything: plan → audit → execute → review. Fully configurable (TDD, ADR, etc.). At this point, my 9-year-old could probably do most of my job. github.com/Eric-Ness/Tiki

GitHub - Eric-Ness/Tiki

Contribute to Eric-Ness/Tiki development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Big milestone today: I integrated my satellite-based water quality models into the web app I built. I can now view and interact with the models in one place. Shown here: chlorophyll-a in the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers. #RemoteSensing #WaterQuality #GIS #Landsat #EarthObservation #DataScience

Tired of firing up QGIS just to peek at a raster? viewtif lets you: • View single-band + RGB GeoTIFFs • Overlay shapefiles • Browse NetCDF time steps • Open HDF/HDF5 + FileGDB rasters All from the command line. #GeoSpatial #Python - github.com/nkeikon/tifv...

SWOT captured 65-ft waves during Storm Eddie, the tallest ever measured from orbit. These waves traveled 15,000 miles, carrying the storm’s power across entire oceans. #SWOT #EarthObservation #RemoteSensing #ClimateScience www.space.com/space-explor...

The World Bank just released updated high-resolution official boundaries (Admin 0–2) across GeoJSON, Shapefile & GeoPackage. Includes NDLSA areas, ocean masks, and full data dictionary + attribute tables. #GIS #RemoteSensing #Geospatial datacatalog.worldbank.org/search/datas...

Burnscar Detection Pipeline: NASA FIRMS + Sentinel-2 + Google Earth Engine + SQLMesh + DuckDB = open-source system to spot suspicious burn scars & potential arson events. #OSINT #RemoteSensing #FIRMS Library: github.com/Centre-for-I... Writeup: bigdatarepublic.nl/articles/det...

So I just implemented a major update to the news clustering algorithm on newsmap.org. If anyone is interested, I am also currently supporting a number of new languages.

Wildfire modeling just got faster. PROPAGATOR uses stochastic cellular automata + rate-of-spread physics to simulate fire behavior in minutes — helping emergency teams make real-time decisions. #GIS #EmergencyManagement #RemoteSensing www.mdpi.com/2571-6255/3/...

My cat's litter box is connected to the Internet. Surely this is a sign of the end of days.

This looks interesting — Lonboard 0.13 just dropped and now supports H3, S2, Geohash, and even A5 layers. Lots of new ways to explore geospatial grids in Python. #GIS #GeoPython #Lonboard - github.com/developments...

GitHub - developmentseed/lonboard: A Python library for fast, interactive geospatial vector data visualization in Jupyter.

A Python library for fast, interactive geospatial vector data visualization in Jupyter. - developmentseed/lonboard

github.com

SAR satellites don’t need daylight — they image Earth day, night, rain, or clouds. Different radar bands (P, L, S, C, X, Ku, K, Ka) reveal everything from subsurface rivers to cars in a parking lot. Wild tech. #SAR #RemoteSensing #EarthObservation #Radar #Geospatial - www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT6c...

Why does Synthetic Aperture Radar use different wavelengths? | SAR bands explained

YouTube video by sigma nought

youtube.com

Analysis finds China's CO2 emissions have been flat or falling for 18 months due to increased solar & wind power. Sector emissions remained flat despite rising electricity demand. #ClimateChange #News

China’s CO2 emissions have been flat or falling for past 18 months, analysis finds

Analysis finds China's CO2 emissions have been flat or falling for 18 months due to increased solar ...

theguardian.com

Tired of hunting down shapefiles? The new wkls Python library gives you instant access to 625K global administrative boundaries with clean, chainable syntax — no downloading, no parsing. Just wkls.us.nyc.cityofnewyork.wkt() #GIS #Python #GeoSpatial #Wherobots - github.com/wherobots/wk...

With a $600 satellite dish and open-source software, UCSD & UMD researchers intercepted cleartext IP traffic from 50% of GEO satellite links — voice calls, grid data, in-flight WiFi, retail systems, even military assets. - satcom.sysnet.ucsd.edu/docs/dontloo...

If you’ve ever wondered where endless scam calls come from… SIM farms. USSS just shut a few down. That’s good news. But no, they weren’t going to knock out every phone in New York. - www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBZj...

Did The Secret Service Really Foil A Plot To Destroy New York's Cellphone Infrastructure?

YouTube video by Marcus Hutchins

youtube.com

My advisors and I finally submitted our next paper! #PhDChat

Orbio Earth just open-sourced their full methane detection pipeline—models, tools, synthetic-plume engine & validation notebooks—for Sentinel-2, Landsat 8/9, and EMIT. #Methane #ClimateTech #OpenSource - orbio-earth.github.io/Project-Euca...

How do we track water flowing through rivers from space? This major review says: 1–3 day revisit. Resolution down to 30–100 m widths. Must include width, slope, & velocity. Flood forecasting + water management depend on it. #EarthObservation #RemoteSensing #WaterResources doi.org/10.1029/2024...

The Trump administration is pushing NASA to kill two critical climate satellites. The Orbiting Carbon Observatories track CO₂ globally — data vital to scientists, farmers, and even oil companies. Cost? Just $15M/year. #ClimateScience #EarthObservation futurism.com/white-house-...

White House Orders NASA to Destroy Important Satellite

The White House has instructed NASA employees to destroy two major, climate change-focused satellite missions.

futurism.com

"At the current rate of horrible fiery deaths, FuelArc projects the Cybertruck will have 14.52 fatalities per 100,000 units — far eclipsing the Pinto's 0.85. " - futurism.com/the-byte/cyb...

The Cybertruck Appears to Be More Deadly Than the Infamous Ford Pinto, According to a New Analysis

A new analysis suggests that the Cybertruck might lead to 17 times more fatalities than the infamous Ford Pinto.

futurism.com

Want to overlay a heatmap on a real map using Python? This guide walks through visualizing EF3–EF5 tornado trends across the U.S. with NOAA data, grid-based bins, and Matplotlib. Bonus: how to include tornado endpoints too! #geospatial #Python towardsdatascience.com/how-to-overl...

How to Overlay a Heatmap on a Real Map with Python | Towards Data Science

Visualizing historical tornado trends

towardsdatascience.com

Just launched: SMAP salinity data V5.0 + V5.3 with ice/ocean flags — available now via NASA’s SNWG Earthdata Portal. Track salinity near the sea ice edge like never before. #SeaSurfaceSalinity #NASAData www.earthdata.nasa.gov/news/sea-sur...

Sea Surface Salinity Datasets Now Available on the SNWG Earthdata Search Portal | NASA Earthdata

Access Sea Surface Salinity with Sea Ice Mask, a NASA Satellite Needs Working Group solution, to discern salinity values close to the sea ice edge.

earthdata.nasa.gov

A record-breaking heatwave is sweeping across southern Europe and North Africa. Copernicus Sentinel-3 reveals land surface temps far above normal – and the Mediterranean Sea isn't spared either. #ClimateCrisis #EarthObservation www.esa.int/ESA_Multimed...

Southern Europe’s land and sea sizzles

A powerful heatwave has been gripping large parts of southern Europe. This image, captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission’s Sea and Land Surface Temperature Radiometer on 29 June 2025, reveals t...

esa.int