The stuff is all in the new house. Coffee acquired. Now to unpack.
Jonathan Frankle, the chief scientist at MosaicML and a computer scientist at Harvard, described this to me as the “boring apocalypse” scenario for A.I., in which “we use ChatGPT to generate long emails and documents, and then the person who received it uses ChatGPT to summarize it back down to a few bullet points, and there is tons of information changing hands, but all of it is just fluff.”
oh no I forgot to label the moving box that has the whiskey packed in it
Adding Conservation to BLM Land
One thing opponents and proponents of a recently proposed U.S. Bureau of Land Management rule agree on: It would be a major shift in how the agency manages nearly 250 million acres of federal lands.
The rule would allow for conservation leases, similar to how the agency auctions off parcels of land for mining, livestock grazing or oil and gas development. Supporters say the proposal would lift conservation to the level of extractive uses, a responsible move to protect lands affected by climate change.
I’ll be watching this closely, especially as I embark on my next book project on public lands. It’s a big deal: most of the federal Bureau of Land Management lands are governed by “multiple use”–that is, that land can have multiple, economic purposes (leisure, grazing, mining, energy production, and so forth). The Biden Administration wants to elevate conservation as a “use” which will impact water, species conservation, wildlife, and climate, in addition to the current economic uses of the land.
Where I've Been
🇺🇸 United States
🏴 England
🇨🇦 Canada
🇲🇽 Mexico
U.S. states:
🔥 Arizona
☀️ California
🗻 Colorado
🌭 Illinois
🌽 Iowa
🌴 Florida
🍑 Georgia
🐮 Kansas
🎶 Louisiana
❄️ Minnesota
🐟 Missouri
🚜 Nebraska
🎰 Nevada
🌶️ New Mexico
🗽 New York
🌨️ North Dakota
🐴 Oklahoma
🦫 Oregon
⚾️ Pennsylvania
🌾 South Dakota
🌮 Texas
🐝 Utah
🎓 Virginia
🌲 Washington
🤠 Wyoming
🏛️ Washington, D.C.
The garden is in.

Big race day: Monaco and Indianapolis.
A federal judge ruled Friday that four Missouri hunters did not trespass when they corner crossed and passed through the airspace above Fred Eshelman’s Elk Mountain Ranch.
Good win for public lands.
Currently reading: The Big Empty: The Great Plains in the Twentieth Century by R. Douglas Hurt 📚
Officially the owner of an acreage as of today. Embracing my Wallace Stegner phase of life.
Currently reading: Shaped by the State edited by Brent Cebul, Lily Geismer, and Mason B. Williams📚
Me: “3yo, can you take your volume down a bit?”
3yo: “I can’t bring my volume down. This is just my volume.”
I’m not certain why Past Jason needed to keep a copy of Windows 98.
Packing for our move and I’m over here doing media archeology.
A groundbreaking epidemiological study has produced the most compelling evidence yet that exposure to the chemical solvent trichloroethylene (TCE)—common in soil and groundwater—increases the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease.
Widely used chemical strongly linked to Parkinson’s disease
Know where else has widespread TCE exposure? Silicon Valley.
I’ve been corrected. She’s actually chanting, “¡Mis manos estan deliciosos tortillas!”
The 7yo is walking around the house chanting, “¡mis manos de tortilla son deliciosas!”