I'm so old I miss rec.arts.books.

I rarely lose things and when I do, a few seconds thought is usually enough to tell me where they probably are.

Oh good!

As people on the RodDreher reddit page have noted, Rod never fact-checks when he wants the story to be true.

Before you joined our call last week, even our esteemed colleague of much achievement admitted to saying no to something recently.

MS Project “helping” me with scheduling…

The White House is proposing $18.8 billion for NASA in FY27, a 23% cut to NASA's 2026 enacted funding. Science, ISS, and education major targets of the proposed cuts.

www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/u...

In my field (astronomy), there is a funny story of how Alan Sandage would take people off his Christmas card list if they disagreed with his value of the Hubble constant.

learning that astronauts have to use microsoft outlook in space is unspeakably depressing. we have set microsoft outlook free from the bounds of earth. polluting the stars with that janky piece of shit

I mean, at least they ditched the bow tie.

I see these men trying to for an easy-mode sense of worth. Instead of working on themselves, they want to just shove others down and then celebrate how exalted they are.

That was exactly what I felt when I watched the instrument I worked on get launched and installed in Hubble: we aren't all bad.

This is why I don’t use AI. After 20+ years of technical writing , it’s faster to do it myself than to proof AI. Plus, I like to learn new things and you don’t learn if you don’t do the work.

Even if the Supreme Court rules to uphold Birthright Citizenship, and I suspect it will, Trump will still have succeeded in politicizing an issue that has largely gone unquestioned by most Americans. To that extent he will have weakened--perhaps permanently--another pillar of our democracy.

I had a CU observing class there during one of their runs. I think the students liked that even more than getting to use the 3.5-m telescope.

When the birthright citizenship decision comes out, people will say it could never have gone any other way, that the law was obvious. But the mere fact that SCOTUS took on the case is evidence enough that we are living in a time of democratic precarity.

Derry Girls

We taught a journal club last fall for our SwRI/UTSA students and I had them read the papers on K2-18b. They're mostly solar and planetary students, so I wanted them to understand the role of hype in driving exoplanet research results.

"The whole world should be outraged by it."

If "it" means the consequences of the unnecessary war that President Leeroy Jenkins initiated in the region, then yes, yes they should be.

O rly???

Making the Strait of Hormuz safe for energy shipments would be a remarkable accomplishment, one that the world has never seen since the beginning of the month.

I gave an extemporaneous talk at a debate tournament wherein I pronounced "Politburo" as "pol-burrito." The judge was laughing during the entire presentation.

ICE officers getting paid for standing around doing nothing while TSA employees work without pay is a pretty succinct summation of where we're at right now

Agreed. We are really putting ATCs through the wringer.

Rand Paul: Who ordered you on this 'classified mission?'

Mullin: Oh, you wouldn't know them, they go to a different Intel agency.

La Brea Tar Pits.

A line graph of the number of NSF awards in fiscal 2026 compared to fiscal years 2021-2025. The fiscal year 2026 is well below the other curves and increasing only very slowly.

NSF Update through March 13, 2026

1/2

I just finished Hemlock & Silver and what I want to know is whether @tkingfisher.com has read Wicked Plants, because if she hasn't, well, she needs to.

I’ve taken up watercolor. We all need something right now.

I won’t tell you how many hours of it I have played…