USA: Counties & Population

Very cool animated map of the basic problem of human geography in the USA and anywhere: most people live in small & densely-populated area while most of the country is pretty much empty.

https://walkerke-county-population.share.connect.posit.cloud/#3.85/38.98/-96.7

The Rwenzoris

Cool (almost) cloud-free Landsat 9 image from 13 March 2024: Mountains of the Moon

• Full-size image
• A New 3D Map Shows Precipitous Decline of Ugandan Glaciers (EOS, 3 April 2025)

Art x Climate

Very cool that this is part of the 5th National Climate Assessment: Art x Climate

And here's the matching journal article: Bringing art and science together to address climate change

Maps: Projections & Distortions

Here you can make your own version of reality: Country Centered Map Projections

1. Select your projection.
2. Select your map center.
3. Make things really weird by adding a rotation or two.
4. Share as link or PNG.
5. Awesome!

Chart Makers

Here are three options:

• RAWGraphs
• Chartbuilder
• Infogram

As always: user beware! Some of these 'free' ones / tiers can suddenly disappear or turn commerical.

The Climate Justice Instructional Toolkit (CJIT)

The Climate Justice Instructional Toolkit (CJIT) (by MIT) offers a wide-range of climate justice adaptable teaching modules, a starter guide for teaching climate justice, resources for students, and climate justice data sets that can serve as supportive tools to enhance professor and instructor teaching content and approaches.

StreetWhip

Explore the world by combing Street View & AI in StreetWhip - basically the inverse of all these geo-guessing games.

IRB

Yep, the IRB process is both necessary & tedious.

• Excellent video here: Do you need an IRB??
• IRB Decision Tree (U. Wisconsin La Crosse)

Choosing the 'right' AI tool!

Nice article in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01069-0

All kinds of cool-sounding names: SciSpace, Claude, NotebookLM, etc. & I'm still not sure what these tools could do for me in-practice. But one thing is clear: as expected, there are 'free' versions with limited capabilities and various tiers of 'pro' versions that come at a cost. And here we go again: the rich can get themselves access to the good stuff & further entrench their privilged positions, whereas the poor get the 'decaf' versions.

This is a problem for Higher Education, both between colleges/universities and within them. Now it is not just about who has the coolest gyms & dining facilities, but who offers you access to the best AIs so that you can compete with others. Likewise, poor state-funded schools will not be able to offer any premium AI access to their students.