Close up of a patch of moss and fern fronds.

Spent most of the day away from my computer, came back to a lot of AI discourse, here and elsewhere. Ugh. So here's a timeline cleanser.

Target the person, not the blade. If the tip is way off to the side like that, it's not a threat and can be ignored.

A quick search puts them at 0.025 g/cm^3, which is less dense than cork (0.15 g/cm^3).
Feathers make intuitive sense, too: they're made from inherently light elements, and there's an evolutionary advantage to being as light as possible.

The lightest solid element is lithium, but you're unlikely to find pure metallic lithium in nature. I'm going to say probably some highly porous biological structure: feathers, cork, something like that.

Ex-Bostonian here to say that people got pretty excited when they started seeing dolphins in Boston Harbor again.

I learn a lot by reading about genres I don't write in. (Yet.) Right now I'm really enjoying Making Nonfiction Comics, by Eleri Harris and Shay Mirk. #FridayReads
www.crucialcomix.com/product/preo...

Where the DOGE Operatives Are Now WIRED tracked down some of the most prominent figures of last year’s DOGE invasion. Here's where they are now—in government and beyond.

Wired also. www.wired.com/story/where-...

Is that what the boys see out the window?

Illegal here, too, but hard to trace.

Do they send incorrect information to “bad” demographics? That’s a favorite trick of their US counterparts.

LOL. Someone I know was recently bragging about their clever way to get around usage-based API charges.

So, The Mummy was the Sylvia Scarlett of its era?

Well, in the US a significant fraction of the population is told -- daily, and loudly -- that their government hates them. That probably adds a little bit of stress regardless of your actual circumstances.

"Is the millionaires tax driving wealthy residents from Mass.? There’s new data, but still no clear answer." - Boston Globe - Mass. Budget and Policy Center The Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center reads the numbers differently. The progressive think tank pointed to the shrinking net loss of $200,000-and-over households leaving the state as a sign that ...

Seems to be working in Massachusetts.
"the state is on track to collect even more this fiscal year than the last one."
massbudget.org/2026/03/20/i...

Ask Us! - UW Libraries Ask Us! Chat with a Librarian Connect to our 24/7 real-time, online question service. This service is staffed by UW Librarians, but at peak service times or off-hours you may be chatting with a librar...

lib.uw.edu/ask-us/

The link goes to the University of Washington page. They're part of a network of academic libraries, so you might get someone at a different university.

Oregon grape in bloom. Dense clusters of tiny yellow flowers, on a shrub with spiky, holly-like green leaves.

Sigh. I was happier before I looked up what's going on. That'll teach me.
Here, have a timeline cleanser.

Also HOAs.

If anyone is out there spreading joy with Amazon-derived money, it's Mackenzie Scott.

It's really hard to prove a negative, too.
But one might start the same way one would fight any plagiarism allegation: by producing multiple drafts of the work to show how it evolved over time, by producing research and critique notes, etc.
In other words, keep backups!

It makes me so happy that Tech Review and MIT Press have leaned in to science fiction. It's an obvious fit for their audience and they're doing it *so* well.

Oof. Not gonna say that a writer of your ability couldn't have pulled that off, but it certainly would have been a very different book and a very different character.

The number one most useful skill that martial arts will develop is awareness. The sooner you see trouble coming, the easier it is to deal with. OTOH, awareness should also include understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your training.

It's not a "pre-defined" set of answers. They run the model anew for each prompt. That's part of why they burn so much energy.
Now the *weights* in the model are pre-defined, as part of the training process. But that's not the same thing.

I think what they really mean is that these are the books (some) *parents* are looking for.

The kids? You mean the kids who were disciplined by their universities for having the temerity to not want Palestinians murdered? The kids who are scraping together two or three different jobs to pay rent? Those kids?

A WHOLE CIVILIZATION WILL DIE TONIGHT My son needs lunch, and I have to put his backpack together, but a whole civilization will die tonight, so I'm wondering if they've closed their schools. Like, a snow day, maybe, except instead of snow it's "keep your children home so if you die, you die together" — instead of "well open back up once the plows have cleared" it's "we don't know if we'll be here tomorrow, hold your babies tight." It's just "talk" I'm told, which I've been told before. "It's how the president makes his deals." But I've never heard anyone talk about other human beings this way, and I'm not certain I can look my son in the eyes if we all agree to stomach it one more time. A civilization will die tonight, but as I zip up his backpack and kiss him off to school I think: if this is what we call leadership then I'm not entirely sure ours isn't already dead. @michaelfdubois Mukad A QuBoy @michacifdubois

Brutal.

I committed retail therapy in the form of a visit to my local indie bookstore. Also there was ice cream.
We will not speak of the deadline toward which no progress was made. Sigh.

The problem is that’s how a large fraction of the US felt once Biden was inaugurated. They forgot that monsters don’t stay gone.

I’m so sorry your book day is landing in the middle of *gestures.* If it helps, it’s already in my TBR list.

Well, since the hairspray nearly destroyed the ozone layer there were non-nuclear forms of terror, too.