Mayday

The President of the United States is a mad menace to the whole world.

Isometric NYC

When I learned that someone had used AI to generate an "isometric" representation of NYC to look like something from animation or a video game, I had to check out the neighborhoods I've lived in and live in.

A fun feature is that you can click a button and it's suddenly winter! (Try it for yourself - the snow blows by in gusts and flurries.)

The real world

Just one UN member state voted against today's General Assembly motion to switch from using the Mercator world map to the Equal Earth map. Mercator exaggerates the size of the global north; it makes Greenland and Africa look about the same size, when Africa is in fact 14 times bigger! Equal Earth is one of several alternative mappings which offer a more accurate representation of the true relative size of continents and seas, though still imperfect. Who could object? 

9/11: This map - not sure its provenance - shows northern northern hemisphere countries cut down to size from Mercator inflation.

Onboarded

My courses are both off to a good start, new versions of old courses but already, with the students' help, breaking new ground.

In "DIY Religion" yesterday we brainstormed "religion" and "DIY" on their own before imagining what "DIY religion" could be, discovering at least three kinds of DIY - and so three kinds of DIY religion - on the way: (1) learning by doing, (2) finding what you need, (3) making do with what's to hand. These are quite different, and lay the groundwork for richer conversations than we had last year.

And in "Religion of Trees" our regular starting encounter with an elder - the elm in nearby Washington Square Park fêted as Manhattan's oldest tree - was enriched by the brand new New York Tree Genus Map, and revelations about the tree itself from Harriet Rix's wonderful The Genius of Trees. We call it an English elm (a colonial tree!) but it's not originally English either, having been brought to the British Isles as a cutting during the Roman Empire - and originally from Spain!

I'm not sure students were quite ready to follow me in wondering if this makes it the same tree as the one it was cut from, almost four centuries ago, and the same as all the other cuttings before and after, but notice has been served. We'll follow up on the surpassing strangeness of trees (not just clonal ones like elms) in our next class, when we consider what pronouns to use when referring to - or addressing - them.

Rising tide

The timing of the record is particularly notable. Global ocean temperatures are typically highest in March and April, following the austral summer, yet this record has been reached in August. It also exceeds the previous highest August value, recorded in 2023 at 20.98°C. This latest daily record follows a succession of monthly sea surface temperature records and near-records observed throughout 2026 across the extra-polar ocean (60°S to 60°N), underscoring the persistent warmth seen across much of the global ocean. Copernicus

Misery map

After having our flight cancelled on the way over I thought we'd burned off our bad travel karma... and perhaps we had. Our return flight today was delayed 30 minutes, then 60, eventually arriving in New York two and a half hours late, but along the way I had time to learn that we were fortunate to be flying at all. The JetBlue terminal at JFK was full of long lines of marooned travelers. Indeed almost a thousand flights within, into or out of the US were cancelled today. 

 

The same flight we were on was one of almost two thousand flights cancelled yesterday (and it was cancelled twice more in the ten days before that), among countless flights cancelled across the country because of combinations of bad weather and an air traffic controller shortage. Today's "FAA ground stops" were in response to almost half of the exhausted air traffic controllers around the New York area calling in sick. You can watch the disruptions on FlightAware's "Misery Map."

 

I don't remember flight cancellations being a thing. Perhaps that's because I've been lucky enough not to experience a cancellation before, but it's surely also connected to the more extreme weather brought on by climate change and the regime's attack on government services. 

 

Sierra high

气候变暖的彩色

When it isn't one thing, it's another. Today it was both and then some. Real-feel temperatures in New York neared 100˚ (it felt the same in the shade as in the sun!), brought down only a little by a sudden torrent an hour ago. All the while, the air was unhealthy because of smoke from wildfires half a continent away. Still, we're not getting the worst of any of this. We haven't, like many western states (and European countries, Asian cities and Kenya), had our highest recorded temperatures, aren't encountering fires exploding around us like in Canada, the American West or Spain, or, like many of the places we visited in China last month, wading through streets flooded by slow-moving typhoon Bavi. But we do have a Congress with nothing better to do than try to make daylight savings time permanent, "saving daylight." Deckchairs!

River scenes

Visited the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers today - our first time. It's full of delightful discoveries, like Wade & Croome's 180-year-old Panorama of the Hudson River from New York to Waterford which shows steamboats going up and down the river and depicts what you might see if you were on them, though it also tries to capture the river's twists and turns. (This bit near West Point put me in mind a little

fancifully of the scroll paintings of the nine turns at Wuyishan.) To see what's on the other side of the river you turn the book upside down! At top above is the stretch from where we are (between Manhattanville and Bloomingdale at far right) to Yonkers, if you were taking the steamer up. Here's the view you might see to your right you went back down - though it really looks like the view from out our window today!

Northeast!

Some scenes from the recent vertiginous trip to China's northeast, more or less in sequence except this map from the museum dedicated to the neolithic Hongshan culture in Chifeng, which conveniently shows all the places we went in black, starting with Dalian at the bottom and winding up in Shenyang at the far right. ... There's a story to each pic. Ask! 

 

 

 

 

 

Key: Grand water display and a more mysterious coastal veil near 大连 Dalian, followed by tabletop barbecue, a friend's young son helping turn the skewers. Classic holy mountain scenery at 医巫闾山 Yiwulüshan and unique mountaintop outcroppings at 克什克腾世界地质公园阿斯哈图石林景区 Heshigten Global Geopark. Silkworms fried to perfection at a restaurant near Yiwulü. Roadrip into Inner Mongolia yielded signs in Mandarin and Mongolian, blades of giant windmills as long as a parking lot, and delicious dried stonefruits. Contrived jade dragon worship and big sand dunes at 玉龙沙湖 Yulong Sand Lake, a few hour north of 赤峰 Chifeng. An enteprising espresso-tuktuk with very good coffee at the entrance to Chifeng's 赤峰红山文化博物馆 Hongshan Culture Museum and a scene of the red mountain (=hongshan) which gives it its name. Models of pagodas at the 辽代历史文化博物馆 Liao Dynasty Cultural Museum (starting with the ancient 木塔 wooden pagoda south of Datong which we saw nine years ago), also in Chifeng, and a live v-logger in rented Qing dynasty kit holding forth among peonies at 喀喇沁王府, a Mongolian prince's mansion an hour closer to Beijing. One of a myriad fossils - this a bird-like feathered dinosaur named after Confucius - found in the Jehol Biota near 朝阳 Chaoyang, a town (at 3 million probably the smallest city we stayed in) with a fun non-chain coffee shop in an old housing complex and whose Liao dynasty pagoda is accompanied by a steady stream of circumabulators. (You might recognize it from the scale models in Chifeng.) A wall of apartment complexes in 沈阳 Shenyang and the somewhat clunky cherubs gracing the lush landscaping of the one we stayed in. Shenyang's 东陵 tomb complex for the founder of the Qing dynasty, which I remembered from my first Shenyang trip, has steles in Mongolian, Manchu, Tibetan, Arabic and Chinese and some happily overgrown roofs. A diaorama of worshipping Hongshan people from the 辽宁省博物馆 Liaoning Provincial Museum, and a fragment of a face that could be any of us any time. Just some of the offerings at a swanky seafood hotpot place, 小鱼当家. And one more view of the fossiliferous neolithic and Liao-shaped Northeast, from the seatback of our Korean Airlines Flight out. 

Road trip

A little California driving between Christmas and New Year's, driving up to stay with a friend in Campbell, day trips to redwoods, Berkeley and a winery. Today we drove 450 miles accompanied the whole way by rain, and Rachel Maddow's terribly timely podcast on the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WW2.

JFK --> SAN