Michael Battalio
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Michael Battalio
@battalio.com
3.4K followers 310 following 1.3K posts
Research Scientist at Yale studying planetary climates
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Twenty-fourth Annual Christmas Mass Email on your Personal Continuum
Twenty-fourth Annual Christmas Mass Email The cliche of a “day taking forever but a year being quick” has gained new meaning as I enter my 40s, but even the days seem fast now, too. One of my recurring ACME themes is appreciating the present. Dwelling on the written past and fretting on the unwritten future only distracts from the good in the present. But, I’d like to reframe this a bit. I’ve begun to turn my not infrequent inability to focus on the present to motivate myself to do the little things that might make future life better. The anticipation of the future is a strong motivator for the present; it focuses my attention on achieving specific goals, which I can only do in the present. A year from now, whether we’ve learned a new language or finished that book on the nightstand or painted the shutters or whatever else or not, we’ll still be a year older. Perhaps we better just get on with it this year. Leverage your worry in the present to make your future better. Don’t just think about it. Try to plan it; commit to do it. But forgive yourself if it doesn’t work out. The getting from here to there is not a step-wise process. You don’t suddenly know Mandarin or get through War & Peace or give up and just buy new windows. The development of each of us as individuals is a process each day. You don’t suddenly become yourself, but you were never not yourself. You are a continuous process that is present in every moment but uniquely different at every moment, day, year, decade. You progress from A to B along a trajectory as you the whole way, whether you perceive it and whether you perform it with intent and effort or not. Sometimes the path maintains a steep gradient, and you change quickly by necessity or willful determination. Sometimes development moves gradually or in loops to double back, again not always by choice. Broadly, there is no positive or negative direction. Up is just as good as down, left as right, forward as back. The only pitfall is stagnation through ambivalence. I’m sure situations arise where stagnation is a necessity, but otherwise, stagnation is a choice: the wrong choice. Since our development continues regardless of intention, we must choose to direct it. You are continuous, not continual. The subtle distinction is vital. Even the careful introspection I often advocate is a deliberate, continuous progression. The development of you cannot be continual with starting and stopping, because you as an individual occur without interruption in an unceasing, continuous way. Because your life is a continuum and you are a process, relating to your past you or envisioning your future you can feel more difficult than interacting with other people now. Similarly, the people you knew a year ago can be different now, and the people you dismissed before might surprise you. Your personal trajectory might parallel someone else for years or decades, then abruptly or slowly drift away; you might only obliquely cross with someone else. You might meet yourself from time to time, but recognize that the person you are now is tied to each of the people you were. Importantly, your trajectory along your personal continuum contains no wormholes. I choose “wormhole” deliberately and not “shortcut”. I mean there is no jump from A to B; there is no waking up tomorrow a different person or stepping through a portal to improvement. The trajectory demands work and intent, but this doesn't mean we must always take the hardest path. I genuinely think worthwhile, valid, and precious shortcuts—that is, available bypasses that are easier to traverse to reach the next you—are available if the effort to search for them is made. I can’t say what anyone’s shortcut might be. But what I mean might be culling abusive relationships, quitting an exploitative job, forgiving an old enemy, or going back to school. Each person’s unique trajectory and continuum affords something different, with an unfair array of opportunities compared to those luckier. I merely advocate openness to the possibility and intention to point your trajectory. Embrace the continuity of your experience. Forgive the errors of your previous selves. Anticipate and ameliorate the potential problems of your future selves. Choose to advance along your personal continuum. Take the long way or the short way, but move deliberately, carefully, and patiently. You’ll be a year older for ACME 25 either way. Congratulations to all of us for making it through another year. Merry Christmas; Happy Holidays; Happy New Year. Be well, and Be continuous. Battalio _____________________________________ Two wind turbines are in a field together. One wind turbines says to the other, “What kind of music do you like?” The other turbines replies, “Well, I’m a big metal fan.”
December 25, 2025 at 6:36 PM
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Proud to see the first paper (out in @agu.org JGRPlanets) from Dr. Campbell, the postdoc @sguzewich.bsky.social and I mentor. She did a spectacular job explaining the source of the odd dust activity (called the B-storm) during Mars's SH summer. #planetaryscience #Mars 🪐🧪🔭

doi.org/10.1029/2025...
Geographic locations of dust storm instances for the B‐storm season in MY30 from the MDAD. Each instance is outlined separately for each MARCI swath and shaded by solar longitude. The background image is a composite MARCI swath generated from the median of all swaths between Ls=255° and Ls=280° in MY30.
December 15, 2025 at 7:56 PM
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Wrote to @delauro.house.gov of @ctdems.bsky.social about this. She's the minority leader on appropriations and been in congress since 1991. We need new Dem leaders top to bottom. They're clueless.
Dear Congresswoman DeLauro, Reinstating Rep. Cuellar today to his leadership position is pathetic—absolutely pathetic. “We followed the rules of the caucus,” you said. Then change the damned rules. It is morally wrong and politically stupid. Dems can be the anti-corruption party. The country is clearly hungry for something other than the grift that has taken over, but you **YOU PERSONALLY** demonstrated that you don't care as long as *our* team does it. When it comes to messaging, differences in the magnitude of corruption are not going to break through the non-political consciousness. All that the average voter will see is that both parties are corrupt, and you helped prove it. You could be better; we could be better. Your leadership, along with Jeffries, is lacking and failing to meet the moment. Do we really have no one better than Cuellar, Jeffries, and you? If Dem House leadership isn't careful, 2026 will find yourselves in the situation of the 2010 GOP with the Tea Party takeover, and you should be afraid of how many of your voters would welcome it. Michael Battalio East Haven
December 12, 2025 at 11:57 PM
battalio.com
Wow, this looks exactly like the five cyclones around Jupiter's South Pole.
agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
Figure 1 from Gavriel&Kaspi, 2022 Five cyclones surround one cyclone at South Pole of Jupiter. Figure caption reads: Infrared radiation photograph of Jupiter's south pole taken by the JIRAM instrument on Juno. The black point represents the pole. The dashed lines represent intervals of 60° longitude (longitude 0° in System III is the line going “upward” from the pole). The green 'X's are the estimated location at the centers of the south polar cyclones during PJ4. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM.
October 29, 2025 at 8:37 PM
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The full comments I wrote to the CNN writer. I'm delighted the part they pulled is about the broader usefulness of studying Mars.
The 3-step process of creating a dataset with humans, training an AI , but then validating is robust against false detections versus trusting AI. The combination of 2 cameras that can detect the motion of small-scale features at different times of day make this new catalog of dust devils particularly useful for probing Mars's weather and climate. This catalog might be used to estimate the background wind and would be valuable as we have no way to measure winds on a global scale. At present, we only derive winds from temperature, but this is computationally expensive. Winds across all scales from meter to 1000s of km control the opacity of the atmosphere and dictate where dust travels. These wind observations validate and improve models to ensure crewed and robotic mission safety, durability, & longevity. These results highlight the value in having a range of long-term datasets, the future of which is in jeopardy due to proposed NASA budget cuts. Separately, studying Mars's climate is important for understanding Earth. Mars's unique conditions provide an independent laboratory for comparing to how Earth's weather works to make sure we have the most complete, general formulation of atmospheric dynamics possible. Studying the solar system broadly isn't just about exploration, it helps us understand our home. A second use of this dataset to extract information about the atmosphere is to use the dust devil observations to estimate generalized dust lifting from non-dust devils. The maximum wind stress values derived from this study are appreciably larger than what models provide, and this was only found because the dataset can probe a range of times of day. This study supports the hypothesis that an under-appreciated amount of dust is lifted in joint events by both vortices and straight-line winds in combination instead of the two types operating somewhat separately. This is not captured well in models, but appears to be an important part of the Mars dust cycle.
October 8, 2025 at 7:26 PM
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Avi Loeb and I talk the importance of rigorous peer review before claiming aliens.
NYT opinion headline: "Ben Shapiro and I Talk Political De-escalation" By Ezra Klein
September 16, 2025 at 3:18 PM
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Elsevier's newest employee. h/t Adam Deitsch
Multipanel comic from Cyanide and Happiness modified with the following text: Panel 1: Character behind desk: "I tried to access your CV but I was unable to?" Panel 2: Job interviewee: "Download the PDF for $39.99 or 24h access for $10" Panel 3: New boss behind desk: "WELCOME ABOARD!" Panel 4: Pullback from office showing interviewee is newest employee of Elsevier
August 13, 2025 at 3:21 PM
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Screenshot to not feed the troll. I see this occasionally, and it's worth it to respond. My pinned skeet says that "cool stuff that happens on one [climate] has parallels to help interpret the others." Let give an example that I'm writing up right now.
Skeet from troll saying, "NASA sending Beatles CDs to Mars isn't helping a burning and dying planet. Work on getting green fuel cell technology to the auto industry ASAP. Looking to the stars is useless if your tennis shoes are on fire! Environment first, space second."
July 25, 2025 at 3:00 PM
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Image of the "Car salesman slaps roof of car" meme. Text reads: "Climate modeler: *slaps roof of computer running GCM* This bad boy can fit so many random planet orbits in it."
July 20, 2025 at 1:24 PM
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Analysis by the fantastic Mike Wong at Berkeley proves how bad ROSES 2025 is. 82% cut for solar system research. Our only hope is that Congress ignores Trump/Vought, and the program officers can fill this back up. More depressing graphs on his blog.

research.ssl.berkeley.edu/~mikewong/bl...
Two bars on a graph. Left bar is 2024 research and development and right is 2025. 2024 bar shows $73M; 2025 bar shows $12.9M This is a cut of 82%.
July 12, 2025 at 1:28 AM
battalio.com
Things are going great. 95°F/83°F=121°F heat index.

AC struggling.
Current Conditions at my house in CT at 2:45 on June 23, 2025. Outside Temperature 95.0°F Heat Index 120.6°F Wind Chill 95.0°F Dew Point 82.7°F Outside Humidity 68% Barometer 30.056 inHg (-0.015) Wind 1 mph NW (315°) Rain Today 0.00 in Rain Rate 0.00 in/h Inside Temperature 83.9°F Inside Humidity 48%
June 23, 2025 at 6:47 PM
battalio.com
93°F/82°F at 10:20 in the morning. Heat index is 116°F.
What are we doing here? This would be bad for MS much less CT.
Current conditions at my house in CT: Outside Temperature 92.9°F Heat Index 116.1°F Wind Chill 92.9°F Dew Point 82.1°F Outside Humidity 71% Barometer 30.077 inHg (0.003) Wind 0 mph N/A ( N/A) Rain Today 0.00 in Rain Rate 0.00 in/h Inside Temperature 77.0°F Inside Humidity 47%
June 23, 2025 at 2:26 PM
battalio.com
The President's Budget request as released yesterday will gut scientific research. Why should you care?
1) Science is fundamentally a jobs program. Many 100,000s are employed to do science and work for you, the US taxpayer.
NSF, NASA and NIH budgets per year, inflation adjusted from 2000-2025 along with the proposed cuts. NSF includes research component only. Massive cuts across all sectors, well below support spanning 25 years.
May 31, 2025 at 3:30 PM
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Made a list of NASA cut highlights(?) by request with references to the NASA budget request.

www.nasa.gov/fy-2026-budg...
NASA Science top-line cut 47% (NASA SCMD-3) 41 space science projects canceled Earth Sci: top-line cut of 52% (NASA ES-2) Research and Analysis competed grants cut by 43% (NASA ES-2) Eliminates Orbiting Carbon Oobservatory-2 and -3, CloudSat, CALIPSO (ES-49), Atmosphere Observing System (ES-7), LandSat Next ( Heliophysics: top-line cut of 46% (NASA HELIO-2) Astrophysics: top-line cut of 72% (NASA ASTRO-2) Planetary Sci: top-line cut of 32% (NASA ASTRO-2) Research and Analysis competed grants cut by 28% (NASA PS-2) NASA education budget zeroed out (NASA BUD-1) Budget proposal decimates current missions in favor of re soliciting for future missions. Current Venus missions in the “Discovery” mission class eliminated only for new Discovery calls in 2028 (NASA PS-30) New Frontiers class (the class between “Flagship” and “Discovery”) has current missions eliminated including JUNO, OSIRIX-REx, New Horizons (NASA PS-35). Mars Sample Return is canceled (NASA PS-50) Mars Odyssey and MAVEN also canceled, NASA contribution to European Mars Rover canceled. (NASA PS-45) Note: Moon to Mars exploration (crewed missions) get $2B increase, effectively earmarked to SpaceX (NASA EXP-3)
May 31, 2025 at 12:29 AM
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I'm going to do something a bit dangerous and contradict a narrative—example screenshot and more in alt for context, but I've seen this in a couple of threads now. I'm only research faculty, but I have seen lists of students the actual faculty consider for admission at Yale.
Post from an intentionally anonymized Harvard professor as part of a larger thread reading, "Harvard sponsoring those students [undergrads for grad admission] is not zero sum At the frontiers of research -- where those students sit -- you can maybe find a dozen people around the world with the right skills and interests to take human knowledge into the unknown" I'm not quote tweeting because I do not want to risk getting bombed if it gets the attention of the 20K followers from the OP.
May 25, 2025 at 3:15 PM
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Got spam to my work email from The Weather Company advertising themselves as "world's most accurate forecaster.*" [Asterisk theirs; ha.] I've never engaged them before. Scientists in industry may defend NWS against dismantling by DOGE/P25, but that's not how their business offices see the situation.
Screenshot of spam from The Weather Company [from business@weather.com] advertising their services while NWS is being attacked and defunded by DOGE/Trump/Musk/Project 2025.
May 20, 2025 at 3:15 PM
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While most science is halved (see great post quoted), NASA is only cut by 25%. That difference isn't because *science* in NASA isn't also destroyed. It's because NASA's budget for crewed missions by unnamed private space companies balloons, hiding in the topline that NASA science is decimated too.
Chart showing budget changes in discretionary spending by Trump. Science and aid programs are hit hardest. NASA is the science hit least at drop of ~25%, but that topline hides science cuts.
May 3, 2025 at 4:30 PM
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This not about efficiency. This is about eliminating scientists as an objective source of information outside the control of Trump/Musk/Project2025 authors. Since Inauguration, the US government has spent MORE money this year than last year.
Graph of time on x-axis versus cumulative federal spending by day on y-axis. As of April, 2025 is clearly larger than 2024. Credit: NYT / https://www.hamiltonproject.org/data/tracking-federal-expenditures-in-real-time/
April 11, 2025 at 5:22 PM
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Cuts to #science of >50% at NASA and >75% at NOAA would end US climate and space science research.

NASA cuts are '...an "extinction level" event': arstechnica.com/space/2025/0...
"At this funding level, Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research is eliminated...": www.science.org/content/arti...
Graph of science funding of NASA from 1980 until present with estimated 50% cut included. This drops NASA Science to under $4B. Image source: Casey Dreier/The Planetary Society
April 11, 2025 at 5:22 PM
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Famously in my hometown of Vicksburg, there are marks on the flood gates separately indicating the 1927 flood as it happened and as if the levees had held. Standing near the river bank and lookup back up is fairly unsettling.

Credit: Library of Congress www.loc.gov/resource/hig...
Series of flood markers on a concrete wall. Markers read from top down up, "FLOOD MARKS", "1927 GAGE 62.2 IF LEVEES HAD HELD", "2011 GAGE 57.1", "1927 GAGE 56.2", "1937 GAGE 53.2", "1929 GAGE 52.9", "2008 GAGE 51.0" Credit: https://www.loc.gov/resource/highsm.42588/?r=-0.738,-0.053,2.476,1.667,0
April 8, 2025 at 12:44 AM
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This low-high-low pattern happens for an independent measure of the dust too, called the column optical depth. This is measured differently than the reanalysis dataset we used to calculate the mode from winds, so the effect of the Annular Mode is in two different datasets on 3 different variables.
From Battalio+2025. Polar plots of the surface of Mars in contours, with the relationship between column dust optical depth from Montabone+2024 and the Annular mode at different time lags in shading red for +, blue for -. Plot for -73 sol lag, 0 sol, and +73. At a lag of 0, the dust is anomalously positive (red). At a lag of ±73, the dust is anomalously negative (blue).
April 2, 2025 at 5:24 PM
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This is important because winds lift dust. The 150 day period of the mode/winds imparts similar repeatability of the surface stress. The stress basically estimates friction that picks up dust. In these plots, at Lag±75 sols there is low (blue) stress near the pole, but at Lag=0, stress is big (red).
From Battalio+2025: Polar plots of the surface of Mars in contours, with the relationship between surface wind stress and the Annular mode at different time lags in shading red for +, blue for -. Plot for -73 sol lag, 0 sol, and +73.
April 2, 2025 at 5:24 PM
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This shift back and forth isn't random. Mars (& Earth)'s modes migrate towards the pole every 150 sols (or Mars days). The blue blob in the fig goes from 30°N at -70 sols at bottom left to 75°N at +70 sol at top right. And the next cycle starts at the same 70 sol time at 30°N again.
Plot from Battalio+2025 of one‐point lag‐correlation map of zonal-wind in red for positive, blue for negative. X-axis is time and goes from -120 (left) to 120 (right) Mars days (sols), Y-axis is latitude and goes from 25°N at bottom to 85°N at top. An area of negative correlation goes from -60 sols, 30°N to +60 sols, 75°N.
April 2, 2025 at 5:24 PM
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Wikipedia faster than Schumer.
Updated Storm Thurmond wikipedia article noting he has the second longest filibuster.
April 1, 2025 at 11:21 PM
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5.) Kevin McCarthy: you kissed Trump’s ring and were disgracefully kicked out of the House anyway last May.
Kevin McCarthy swinging the Speaker's gavel no more.
April 1, 2025 at 6:12 PM