I don't know - if there was ever an object that should simply be named for Charles Messier, it would be this one, the first of his own discoveries to be catalogued.

A wide-field astrophotography image of the globular cluster Messier 3. The cluster is a dense, spherical concentration of thousands of stars with a brilliant, glowing white core at the center. Individual stars radiate outward, fading into the deep black of space. The surrounding field contains scattered stars in various colors, some exhibiting thin diffraction spikes.

Messier 3. A globular cluster containing about 500,000 stars. It doesn’t have a cool “common name” and I find that sad.

That means we get to name it, right? Submissions are open until May 8th. I’ll publish the best one in my very unscientific journal.

#Astrophotography #Space #Astronomy 🔭

BBC Proms 2026: James Bond and Prog Rock among the line-up Concerts celebrating Benjamin Britten, Steve Reich and Miles Davis also appear in the programme.

“Taking place on 18 July, the Prog Prom will include new orchestral arrangements of hits by Genesis, Emerson Lake & Palmer and Jethro Tull, amongst others.” 🙌🏻

Folk singer, celebrity and nut.

The Thing with Two Fish Heads

with Dr. Demento at his retirement party in Long Beach yesterday

MST3K: Keep circulating the tapes

One rejection, or a thousand. Write the stories you love—the stories only you can tell—and eventually you will find an editor who loves those stories as much as you and wants to help you share them with the world. Don't self-reject and don't give up.

Lithium - Wikipedia

Silvery-white:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium

Rubin bags 11,000 new asteroids! This is just the beginning, too. There are more millions more out there waiting to be seen.

The Vera Rubin observatory has already discovered 11,000 *previously unknown* asteroids... and the proper observing sessions haven't even begun yet!

badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/rubin-bags...

🧪 🔭

Time to crank up lawsuits against those claiming our money for participating in an illegal extortion scheme.

Awesome image!

Not sure it was wise firing lasers at the Tarantula home world!

(it's for a good reason, see the link!)

Sure - the AI business is less about machine learning models and large data sets and more about employing hundreds of thousands of indentured workers to manipulate the output into something more more woo and less bizarre or illegal. These will be slaves producing under Russian guidelines.

A digital illustration done in simple contour lines and rough pencil coloring on neutral tinted paper background of a woman reclining on a surface in a faint. Seen from a foreshortened angle from her knees and feet. She’s laying on one hip with her torso twisting to supine. The back of one hand lays across her forehead and the other is held limply on her ribs. Her head is back and her red curls spread out on the ground around her. She’s wearing a white, voluminous and old fashioned night dress. Orange lettering in an Art Nouveau style to the right reads ‘Maybe it will happen today’.

MUSICK, by Laibach 10 track album

It's a fractally warped Liabach song. Brilliant. Richard X producing, the album's title track is strong too:

laibach.bandcamp.com/album/musick

Laibach - Allgorhythm (feat. Wiyaala) [Official Video] YouTube video by Laibach

new Laibach dropped

www.youtube.com/watch?v=erR5...

`curl > /dev/sda` – How I made a Linux distro that runs `wget | dd`

buff.ly/7nTcWgd

This is part 0 of a four-part series about doing weird things in early Linux boot.

<-

1. brilliant & inspired

2. scary

3. initramfs is _way_ too complicated & we should eliminate it

Red ink line drawing of a Kebab Chef with his Meat Roll. On the roll the pattern from the album cover of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures, which is also the caption under the image.

IC 2087 and Barnard 22 - AstroBin An image on AstroBin.

🔭 IC 2087 & Barnard 22 in Taurus — a young stellar object buried deep in a dark cloud, its reflection nebula glowing against the surrounding dust.
#Astrophotography #Nebula #Taurus #IC2087 #trevincaskies #astronomy

Half of all the world's bluebells are in the UK. I can't imagine living in a country where the woods don't turn into this every spring.

The cover of XTC’s Live Boots released on vinyl as part of Record Store Day 2026. It has an art pop image of a pair of Doc Marten -like boots, the foreground one in red, the background one in green. There is a blue Type G (BS 1363) plug as is common in the UK apparently plugged into the near side of the red boot, with a blue power cord coming from it and exiting image left. The background is a series of tight black and yellow lines (akin to a warning) sign aligned to the primary diagonal.

XTC - Live Boots, 2026 release of a cleaned up 1981 bootleg.

#RSD #XTC #thisispop

"What I had missed is that we deployed a new internal service last week that sent less than three GetPostRecord requests per second, but it did sometimes send batches of 15-20 thousand URIs at a time. Typically, we'd probably be doing between 1-50 post lookups per request."

*a week later* oh no

Some people have misunderstood this.

We literally saw how Claude itself, coded by Claude, turns one API call into a DOS of thousands upon thousands of API calls done in the sloppiest fucking way possible.

This postmortem shows Bluesky vibecoded a function to DOS itself, in a similarly stupid way.

pckt.blog/b/jcalabro/a...

The postmortem of the *last* big outage shows that it was because they DOS'd themselves through vibecoded slop.

That's how it starts. JD's sofa is getting the house in the settlement.

Animaniacs Prince joke

Since its Prince night on BBC4, here’s one of my favourite Animaniacs jokes #notTOTP

Mr. Colbert, your take-down of Trump’s #2 at FEMA, Gregg Phillips, who claims he was tele-transported to a Waffle House was so hilarious I spit my milk out through my nose.

But I’m not laughing anymore. Phillips may choose our next president, he’s that powerful. In fact, he chose our current one.

Vigilantes Inc: Trump Plan for 2024 Taken from KKK Plan of 1946 If we don’t expose it, this old Klan scam will pick your president!

Phillips’ challenge system is based on a 1946 campaign conducted by the Klan. FBI files show the KKK challenged the ballot of every Black voter in Georgia. The Klan worked under the alias “Vigilantes Inc.” — hence the title of our film. www.gregpalast.com/trump-plan-f...

Watch Vigilantes Inc. — Full Movie Watch Greg Palast's award-winning documentary, narrated by Rosario Dawson, and introduced by Martin Sheen.

And now, ahead of the next election, Phillips is training literally 40,000 MAGA vote challengers who’ve exchanged white sheets for spreadsheets.

So, I’m asking you to watch Vigilantes Inc.

If you’ve seen it already, pass on the link.

▶️ watchvigilantesinc.com 🎦

It's well past time. The US trade agreements that subjugated nations to its tech services industry are no longer meaningful, and US IT isn't congruent with democracy. Ciao.

I'm rooting for @amendlocke.bsky.social's Union, now that the Co-ordinated States turn out to be Russia and the US.

Not all Linux distros will feel the need to be available in a repressive United States, and not all hardware vendors will cooperate on an end run on the means of computation.

Microsoft, Google, Apple are all locking down. You are expected to buy services, not run software locally.