A COLOSSAL 62 ft long (20 m) hyper-predatory octopus in the Late Cretaceous that could comfortably eat a Mosasaur.

I have never wanted a time machine MORE.

A picture of a farm field

Since I'm posting about applying real-world agronomy to worldbuilding, here's another thread:

How video games have probably misled you as to how crops work!

Image posted by astronomybot

Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 5335
Image date: 23 April 2025, 16:00


The Hubble Space Telescope captured in exquisite detail a face-on view of a remarkable-looking galaxy. NGC 5335 is categorized as a flocculent spiral galaxy with patchy streamers of star formation across its disk. There is a strikin...

The funny thing about those health and safety plans that populate many a dusty binder in many an office, is that they fulfil this purpose even if literally not a single person ever read them. By forcing the employer to know what these things even are, workplace standards improve dramatically

Looking fit to make Freddie Mercury's rocking world go round, HMS Glatton sits in dry dock. It's very very definitely all about that bass. Wooden keel blocks enable the ship to improbably levitate above the floor of the equally massive dock.

This thing here, exhibit A in "the danger of leaving our ships to melt in the hot sun", is HMS Glatton.

And on this day in 1918 things went even more pear-shaped than they already were...

I need to try this one "blender custard pie" recipe. Just put all the ingredients in a blender, then pour them into a pie tin and bake.

We have so much to learn from our elders.

Looking through a dessert recipe book my mom sent me, w/ recipes from the late 60s through early 80s, plus a few "ancient" recipes from ~100 yrs ago. People were much more willing to put eggs in uncooked foods. Margarine ("oleo") very popular. Gelatin/jello too. Many good recipes, many... odd.

News! Christopher Franke has just released a ton of Babylon 5 soundtracks on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Pandora and others: six large volumes and smaller, six episodic soundtracks. Available yea unto this very moment.

Northern latitudes freeze and dry out, equatorial lats heat and moisten, mid-lats get battered around. Sea level rises along the US East coast. Much more complex regional/continental effects hard to guess, but monsoons are very likely to be heavily affected.

North Pole will get colder, tropics hotter, and everything in between... think of Spring and Autumn with competing hot/cold air masses, now amplify that, year round. Increasingly hot, moist tropical air pushing into notably colder arctic fronts, and the storms and winds that will generate.

The heat capacities of equal volumes of air and water differ by a factor of roughly ~3,500. AMOC can be measured in Sverdrups, but I don't know how to compare with volume transport of air. Regardless, that 3,500x efficiency is going to decrease, Europe will freeze, and storms will strengthen.

To expand on this: Irans negotiation position seems to be (1) give up something less than JCPOA on enrichment
(2) get sanctions relief
(3) continue to control the strait forever.

Trump has functionally 3 choices:
(A) accept the deal
(B) re-escalate
(C) try to find other leverage.

What Physical ‘Life Force’ Turns Biology’s Wheels? | Quanta Magazine The bacterial flagellar motor is finally understood after 50 years. In its workings, columnist Natalie Wolchover finds the essence of life.

This is some mind-blowing science here: the engine propelling bacteria - a complex structure made of molecules, powered by protons:
www.quantamagazine.org/what-physica...

ROBERT FROST Photo by Doris Ulmann In: Robert Frost A study in sensibility and good sense by Gorham Bert Munson A black-and-white portrait photograph of Frost with light, swept-back hair, wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and tie. He gazes slightly to one side against a dark background https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/78076/pg78076-images.html

Thought of the day by Robert Frost: 'The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.'

By Gandharv Walia

economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/interna...

Frost at PG:
www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/autho...

#books

Very sharp image of a nodule in the Trifid Nebula showing protuding narrow jets emerging from the rounded tips of the gas clouds.

Zoom in on a clump of a nebula showing a grainy, fuzzy thin line that has a white arrow annotated to it. This is the jet from the protostar. Image is fuzzy taken with my telescope

Ohhhhh ... love doing these.

Left: Hubble Telescope image of a nodule in the Trifid Nebula. That's a thin stellar jet from young stellar object buried in the cloud

Right: same, but from my backyard telescope. Can just see jet!

Original: @esa.int - www.esa.int/Science_Expl...

🔭 #Astrophotography

Another way this is kind of like Covid is that we are in the stage where official bodies are clearly saying something different in private vs public. A fun example is ECB projections. Their severe scenario for 2026 has inflation from 1.9-> 4.4, $140 oil persistently, and this only takes 0.5% off gdp

This kind of thing has always happened, but now it happens 100x faster. Quantity becomes its own quality at some point, and we are experiencing a qualitative shift in the nature of the information environment. I am not a fan.

Not even sure I'm going to finish out the series anyway. I'm getting bored halfway through S2.

After I watched Lower Decks S1, I started watching S2 a bit with the kids, until we got to the episode about the alien sex toy... Ah, they're too young for that. And I've watched a few more S2 episodes myself and it's clear this is a direction the writers are sticking with. Oh well.

Bob's Burgers' first season started out a bit risque, then the writers toned it down bc (guessing here) they realized they were attracting families with kids. ST: Lower Decks appears to have the opposite trajectory, S1 pretty clean, then S2 starts introducing more risque plots and dialogues.

Rebel Britannia 20th April 1768:

Ever wondered why a work stoppage to win better wages (etc) is called a 'strike'? Rebel Britannia from @rebelbrit.bsky.social has the surprising answer!
open.substack.com/pub/rebelbri...

"Outlook: Scattered showers possible tomorrow. High of 50 degrees. Outdoor plans can still work; just be ready to duck inside to stay dry." This is the third summary with extra "color" text at the end. Note the semicolon. Not that only LLMs use semicolons, but no one working for The Weather Channel would use one there.

The Weather Channel app is now using AI in its daily outlooks/summaries

Knew we were headed into a new age of war and revolution for some time now, but I didn't expect it to be this stupid. Suspect they're usually this stupid. Thinking of just WWI and WWII...yeah, checks out. I'm the stupid one.

Guaranteed to be that bad? No, but wow does it look, from my layperson's perspective, like the dice are loaded in that direction if the US doesn't just concede to Iran's demands.

The hard way could feature the destruction of desalinization plants and electrical infra. throughout the ME, decade-scale loss of much (10%?) of global oil, fertilizer, and plastics production, and resulting famine, death, war, and revolution in the ME and many poorer countries around the world.

The nice way is ~the US concedes to almost all Iranian demands. The hard way is a return to drone and missile warfare and a crash out of the global economy as most Middle East production is destroyed, plus likely revolutions in the region and beyond as basic infrastructure is gone or lacking fuel.

Mamdani talks about things in a manner that are epochal in their difference from how ~95% of all dem politicians have talked for the last 3 decades. That he talks so differently while still talking about party platform issues to the point they achieve a new cadence is the whole rub. That’s it.

I can imagine programs written this way (not the only way to use LLMs for code gen) consuming ever-higher amounts of resources and bogging down their host machines. Cancerous software bloat.

What's described in this thread reads like the computer equivalent of cancer. Crucial feedback is missing, the logic structures grow out of control and eventually subsume the host. Not sure this is inherent in all LLM code generation, but it's a definite failure mode.

once again considering writing a blog post about how insane it is that we let a bunch of billionaires infantilize us by choosing what we see on the internet and NOT LETTING US choose for ourselves. It's completely asinine that we ever accepted this.