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.

Appalachian History Series A mountain camp that belongs to Harlan County Tucked against Pine Mountain near the head of Watts Creek, Camp Blanton began life in 1933 and 1934 when Grover and Oxie Blanton, with relatives, set aside about 13 wooded acres for a Boy Scout camp and a public playground for Harlan Countians.

Appalachian History Series Why “Fishtrap,” and why a dam here Early settlers on the Levisa Fork found an old Native fish weir in the river and gave the place its name, Fishtrap.

Appalachian History Series A Lake for Floods and for Folks Where Johns Creek bends through the hills above Prestonsburg, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers raised an earth dam in the mid twentieth century and impounded an 1,100 acre reservoir that locals still call Dewey Lake.

Appalachian History Series Herrington Lake began as an idea on paper and ended as a reservoir that changed work, water, and recreation across central Kentucky. Kentucky Utilities planned the project in the early 1920s to produce hydroelectric power on the Dix River and to steady flows on the Kentucky River. Construction started in late 1923, the gates closed in March 1925, and commercial power followed in 1927.

Quoting from Olivia Guest et al. (2025) "Against the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia."

When military fathers started arriving at her centre in Bulgaria, sharing challenges they faced with their own children, Irina V. found herself drawing on lessons learned not from textbooks, but from conversations with fellow practitioners scattered across a war zone.

A thirteen-year-old girl in Nigeria, bitten by a snake, arrived at a hospital with her frantic family. The hospital demanded payment before administering the antivenom. The family could not afford it. The girl died. This was one of the stark stories shared by health professionals on September 10, 2025, during “Exploration Day,” the third day of The Geneva Learning Foundation’s inaugural peer learning exercise on health equity.

Earlier this week at the sixth NFDI4Chem consortium meeting, Torsten Schrade from the NFDI4Culture consortium gave a lovely and whimsical talk entitled A Data Alchemist’s Journey through NFDI which explored ways that we might federate and jointly query both consortia’s knowledge via their respective SPARQL endpoints.