The NASA #Artemis II tracking website: www.nasa.gov/missions/art...
It includes a nice moveable visualization of the Moon, the spacecraft, the Sun, and the Earth, so you can get a feel for the relative positions of them all.
Despite its looks, the English word ‘heart’ is etymologically related to ‘cardio’, ‘cordial’, ‘to record’, ‘courage’, and even Spanish ‘corazón’.
Through Germanic, Greek, and Latin, these words all derive from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning “heart”.
Click my new infographic to learn how:
Irish “croí” seems to have the same origin www3.smo.uhi.ac.uk/gaeilge/donn... Maybe Welsh/Breton “kalon” too? en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kalon#:...
“John, it’s Marvin! Your cousin, Marvin Cage! You know that new sound you’ve been looking for? Well listen to this!”
(silence; ambient noises and hushed conversation)
Lá Fhéile Bríde agus Imbolc sona daoibh!
Fun fact: "Lovers' Walk" in Cork has nothing to do with amorous feelings, but is a jingle-jangle mis-translation of Siúl na Lobhar "lepers' walk", i.e. the area into which leprous people were confined, just like in Lepers' Town.
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Ancient illustration of a mythical figure with intricate designs on a beige background. Bold text reads "WATCH THIS SPACE...".
Hello Bluesky!
Dublin is now the 11th most congested city in the world & 3rd in Europe
Governments answer:
End 2:1 spending ratio to roads
Delay public transport projects
Seemingly cancel parts of the Rail Review
Cancel RSA repurposing so it’s actually effective
www.irishtimes.com/ireland/dubl...
A pinhole camera photo taken from Summer to Winter Solstice. It's a bit blurry as the aperture was made with a tiny needle and no focus mechanism. There are yellow to green lines across the photo, that's the Sun moving across the sky over the course of a day. The top line is from the Summer Solstice, the bottom line from the Winter Solstice. Cloudy days don't have any lines or broken lines as the Sun was obscured by clouds. There are some trees on the left, right and in the background.
A pinhole camera photo, a 6 month exposure from Summer to Winter solstice. There are trees on the right side and background. A house with two cars in the drive are visible almost in the center of the photo. The lines are made from the Sun moving across the sky with the bottom line being the Winter Solstice and the top line the Summer solstice. On cloudy days the lines are broken or not visible as the sun was obscured by clouds. The lines show some reflections from a tree trunk. The lines are mostly a white color with some hints of blue, green and yellow in places. Some of the colors could be from rain or snow staining the paper I was using.
A solargram/pinhold camera photo taken from the Winter Solstice of 2024 (21 Dec) to Summer Solstice of 2025 (20 June). It's a 6 month long exposure taken with a beer can pinhole camera, it shows the sun's movement across the sky during that time period, each day the Sun scribes a line on the paper in the pinhole camera. The bottom line is Dec 21 2024 and the top line is 20 June 2025. This kind of photo makes the movement of the Sun during the day into visible trails on the paper in the camera. There is a long orange-yellow arc going across the paper showing the whole 6 months. There is a shadow of my tree on the image, the tree blossomed during the exposure. Shades of blue and pink are on the paper too. There is a black kind of semi circle at the top of the image, that's where the water was disintegrating the top part of the paper.
Happy Winter Solstice!
Beer can, pinhole camera photos of the Summer to Winter Solstice (2024) and the Winter to Summer Solstice (2025).
You never know quite what you're going to get with these photos, set the beer can pointing towards the sun at hopefully the correct angle and wait 6 months!
I have often thought of this in connection with the popularity a decade ago of autotune-as-effect. The robotic voice it gives sounds to me *very* like the vocals on 64kps Napster-era MP3s, and I wonder if to a generation that was subconsciously what singing was meant to sound like.
This paper contains some good arguments about an issue that concerns me a lot when I hear my colleagues talking about LLM use in developing their research:
Whose ideas are you presenting as your own?
(Though the fatalist argument the authors make at the end of paper is disappointing/bizarre.)
Are you all ready?!?! The earliest sunset of 2025 in Dublin will be at 16:05:43 on the 13th of December. You know what that means? The #TheGrandStretchIsBack on the 14th!
Absolutely riveted by this video of women filmed in the 1970s reminiscing about their young adult life in the 1890s
"I was a feckless girl"
"The mud, everywhere, mud to our knees!"
"Were the ladies on bicycles or horseback?"
youtu.be/pv6V1yHvJyo
Believing in evolution.
Fire extinguisher next to a statue of Joan of Arc
Hell of a thing to put next to a statue of Joan of Arc. (h/t David Pilling)
“When we realised these jewels were only stolen to inflate the share price of a company whose entire value relies on the wholesale theft of other people’s art, we had no choice but grant immunity,”
Genius from @waterfordwhispers.bsky.social
waterfordwhispersnews.com/2025/10/20/l...
Astronomer Ejnar Hertzsprung was born #OTD in 1873. 🧪 🔭
H-R diagram:
🔵 🟦 🟥
🔵 🟧
⚪️ 🟨
⚪️
🟡🟡
⚬ ⚬ 🟠🟠
⚬ ⚬ ⚬ 🔴
⚬ 🔴
⚫️
The Physics Nobel goes to John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis for a discovery that paved the way for quantum computers. Our reporters dive into the science
Un-frigging-believable. I have waited for something like this for so long!
A stacked area chart of the renewable electricity generation mix on the island of Ireland. There are seven fuel types: pumped storage, biomass, waste-to-energy, hydro, solar, wind, and gas. The y axis indicates the percentage of demand being met by each source. Footnote reads: All-island figures. Excludes domestic solar. Source: EirGrid, SEMO
It doesn't get much greener on the Irish grid: up to 6pm, renewable generation today has equalled 83.1% of electricity demand. Only a dozen or so prior days have done better. With lower weekend demand, there's a chance we'll see an all-time low for daily carbon emissions.
#StormAmy #SpeirGorm
A stacked area chart of the electricity generation mix on the island of Ireland. There are eight fuel types: pumped storage, biomass, waste-to-energy, hydro, solar, wind, oil, and gas. There is also a black line showing electricity demand. Footnote reads: All-island figures. Excludes domestic solar. Source: EirGrid, SEMO
Renewable generation and pumped storage equalled 65% of yesterday's electricity demand, with a peak of 77% at 00:00. Fossil fuel generation (mostly gas) equalled 32% of demand. 2% of generation was exported, 5% of demand was met by imports.
Taken high above Jupiter's southern subtropics, this picture shows various of its cloud bands with numerous storms and swirls and very distinct colour patterns, the area closest to the south pole being notably bluer than the rest.
A bit of #Jupiter (NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS / "Peitho-54")
Calvin & Hobbes is such an incredible body of work and it never feels locked to the era of its creation.
When you think of the middlebrow award winning films, plays and novels from the time the strip was being written (Out of Africa, Driving Miss Daisy) it is stark how well it has held up.
Me: i’m Autistic
Them: Oh you take things literally
Me: No that’s kleptomania
Screenshot: Statement by the Chairman and CEO of Aena, Maurici Lucena, on the announcement by Ryanair It would be hard to find in contemporary business history another case such as Ryanair where the dissonance between a company’s operational excellence and the dishonesty of its communications policy is so striking. Ryanair's impertinence and uninhibited public demands on democratic governments in countries where it operates its flights with the aim of obtaining economic advantages, shed light upon two deep-rooted and unedifying characteristics of this airline company. The first is that Ryanair has a disturbingly plutocratic idea of the political system, i.e. it seeks to intimidate public opinion by slashing its flights, calls for the resignation of ministers from half of Europe and the president of the European Commission, mocks democratically elected politicians, and calls for laws to be changed in its favour because it believes that government decision-making should bend to the interests of the most economically powerful companies such as Ryanair, instead of protecting the "general interest". The second characteristic is Ryanair's communications and institutional relations policy, which is in permanent and deliberate conflict with objective facts and truthfulness. Here are a few examples:
It sounds like Spanish national airport operator AENA is very much over Ryanair and MOL.
Haven’t seen something this… forthright in quite some time, and goodness me, forthright it is.
www.aena.es/en/press/sta...
"In Our Time" is the best radio show in the English language. More than 1,000 episodes archived and available online.
I cannot get tickets on eventbrite, is the event at capacity?
But you know that it was only made up in the 19th century to amuse, and attract, tourists? Before that it was just another Llanfair "Mary's Church".
This impressive crest of #Mirasaura had densely overlapping individual appendages with feather-like contours. But our work shows these are unlike true feathers and indicate an independent evolutionary origin 🦎🪶
