Appalachian History Series Setting the scene Kitts sat where a small mountain stream meets the Clover Fork of the Cumberland River, a few miles east of the county seat at Harlan. Historic USGS 7.5-minute topographic maps place “Kitts Creek” entering the river just below the rail and road corridor that funneled coal out of the valley, with the town of Harlan upstream and Evarts downstream.

Appalachian History Series Introduction In the first days of October 1864 Union cavalry rode into the steep valleys around Saltville, Virginia. Their objective was simple in design and daunting in practice. Destroy the Confederacy’s most important source of salt. The fight that followed became one of the best documented clashes in Appalachia during the war. What happened afterward made Saltville a byword for racial violence in the conflict.

Appalachian History Series Coal shaped Pocahontas before the town had a charter, a post office, or a railroad. In the early 1880s a 13 foot bench of the Pocahontas No. 3 seam drew speculators, surveyors, and the Norfolk and Western. The first commercial mine opened in 1882, the branch line reached town in 1883, and within a year tragedy and growth arrived together.

AI in academia, $1B NSF cut, AI+biosecurity, bacterial DNA from mammoth bones, understanding LLMs and their math, bioacoustics for conservation, Synthetic Eden, lots of R/AI updates, CRISPR horses...

GigaScience Press is again helping CitizenScience.Asia mobilise Citizen Scientists Across Asia for a groundbreaking biodiversity initiative from October 3 to 12 2025.

Very nice photo of Alex Pritchard’s Aquilops skeleton from DinosaurSkeletons.co.uk. I am often so far down the rabbit holes of my own work (and given that I work mostly on pneumaticity and weird stuff in neural canals, they are literally holes) that I do a very poor job of keeping up with what’s going on in the broader dinosphere.

Appalachian History Series The mine and the men Scotia sat on the Poor Fork of the Cumberland in the Oven Fork community of Letcher County. Blue Diamond Coal opened the mine in 1962 in the Imboden seam. By early 1976 the operation employed roughly 300 workers with about 275 underground, producing near 2,500 tons per day on six active sections.

Appalachian History Series A Strike That Shook the Kanawha In April 1912, union miners along Paint Creek asked for the same wage scale paid in nearby union mines. Operators said no. The walkout spread to Cabin Creek, and by summer the fight had grown into a valley-wide struggle over organizing, company guards, and life in company towns.

Following on from my post about darkmode in ggplot2 4.0, I wanted to also mess around with the new stat_manual() that’s available. And folks, it’s good! source(here::here("_defaults.R")) library(tidyverse) library(tidynorm) library(scales) The announcement blog post says Let’s put it to the test! Plotting sine waves I’m teaching Phonetics this semester, so I’ve got sine waves on the mind.

Appalachian History Series On the morning of February 26, 1972, the coal refuse dam system above the Middle Fork of Buffalo Creek failed near Saunders in Logan County, West Virginia. Within hours a black wall of water and slurry swept down the hollow, tearing through more than a dozen coal camp communities and leaving a scar that Appalachia still carries.

Appalachian History Series On a frigid morning in mid December 1864, Major General George Stoneman’s mounted command reached the Holston at Kingsport with a clear purpose, to open the road into southwest Virginia and wreck the Confederate lifeline there. Before the columns struck railroad bridges, lead mines, and the salt works, they first had to force a crossing at Kingsport.