Abe Simpson's explanation remains undefeated. 😀

My day job is at a rural branch of a public library, and we have a Pride display. Yesterday I was at the desk when a man came in. Fifties, maybe, or sixties. Plaid shirt, mesh trucker cap, suspenders. He went up to the display and just stood there for a long moment. Then he came up to the desk. 🧵 1/

A drawback to being fairly broadly well read in the sciences is that sometimes nonsense like this causes your brain to burst out laughing before it can get round to explaining why the theory is *quite* so ludicrous. Simultaneously. Like, just a *massive* coincidence. Ol' Bill Ockham wants a word.

How many of these hits ftom 1950 has the average punter heard of today? "Cinderella" is a given. Maybe "Annie Get Your Gun" although it's mixed up with the stage show. The others, probably not.

I was a little disappointed to learn Broken Arrow (1950, Western) has nothing to do with Broken Arrow (1996, ridiculous nuclear weapons thriller with John Travolta and Christian Slater).

Thinking about it, why would they? Fawlty Towers is 28 years older than this person. It's like media from 1950 for me. "Life With The Lyons" was a popular BBC radio show from 1950-61. I'd never heard of it. /1

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) had a production budget of $140,000 which mostly went on fake blood and chainsaw fuel, and it grossed $30,000,000 in North America. It also used the popular "based on a true story" marketing gimmick.

Glancing at the World Cup schedule, Scotland has been hard done by -- two of their matches start at 11 pm and one at 2 am BST. 😢🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 England is better off with starts at 9 pm and 10 pm BST. I guess size of fan base determines priority.

Susan Ivanova, John Sheridan, Michael Garibaldi

On D-Day, 14,000 Canadians landed at Juno Beach, supported by the Royal Canadian Navy and the RCAF. The day saw 1,074 Canadian casualties, including 359 killed. It was a watershed moment in human history. Here are some of the Canadian stories from that day. 📸 LAC 🧵1/12

"Why can we not simply be an Empire?" has not been an option for 🇬🇧 since at least 1956. But its ruling classes and a large element of the public behave as if it is. This is my best guess as to why British politics have become... like that.

Give me the most 80s song you can think of. (Also, the drummer is wearing the most 80s shorts you can think of.) youtu.be/9jK-NcRmVcw?...

Let it 'Ern 🔥

Nothing says "imagination has totally failed me" like a big sign saying "Number 1 Dad". At least a coffee mug is functional. The sign would just sit there gathering dust, forever.

Denis Villeneuve to direct a big-screen, no-expense-spared adaptation of "House of Suns" by Alistair Reynolds. Six million years of exploring the galaxy! Robots! Space battles! Cyclopean ruins! Forbidden clone love! Elephant people! Centaurs!

‘Your brain isn’t fully formed until you’re 25’: A neuroscientist demolishes the greatest mind myth www.sciencefocus.com... Dr Dean Burnett tackles a stubborn, and increasingly harmful, brain myth. For Science Focus Magazine. #Brains #Teens #Development #Autonomy

Early microscope

This was the first and only way I watched Titanic.

"...computers are machines for teaching us what we don't know about ourselves." I've been a computer nerd my whole life, and I've never considered them in that light.

You're a wizard, Vladdy 😮 Vladimir Guerrero Jr. with a bobbling, barehanded catch!

It's the weekend, baby

I've started a rewatch of Six Feet Under. The first episode has some memorable rants about how we've made death too sanitized and denied the reality of grief. 25 years later, I guess this is the next logical step. 😱

Said of Anthony Michael Head, while he was still alive: "Tony was unthinkingly kind. To everyone on set. Lots of casts look back on their shows as found family. None are as precious to me as Buffy was." -- Charisma Carpenter There are few better epitaphs than being called "unthinkingly kind."

From what I've heard, a lovely guy who also had a lot of fun playing villains post-Giles. Proper gut punch for any sci-fi fan of my generstion, this one.

You want to see Norway men’s national football team’s official photo for World Cup 2026 www.nytimes.com/athletic/733...

What's your favorite movie from each decade of your life? 70s - Star Wars: A New Hope* 80s - Blade Runner 90s - Trainspotting 00s - Pan's Labyrinth 10s - Parasite 20s - Sinners * - I love Godfather Part 2, but let's be honest here

More thoughts on Muppet Casablanca. 😀

I have been inside quite a few data centers over the years and they’re actually cool as fuck futuristic tech warehouses that absolutely feel like scifi and it’s really bullshit that AI has completely destroyed all the wonder and majesty of that “we live in the future” infrastructure.

A beautiful summer day, so of course the groundskeepers are using leaf blowers to push dust and debris around the parking lot in a wildly inefficient attempt to clean it up. 😡 An amazing device called a broom is quiet, more effective, and doesn't pollute. But that wouldn't be exciting enough. 😒

KERMIT: The problems of a frog, a pig, and a... whatever, don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Some day, you'll understand that.

It's most unlikely to happen, but I would love to see Muppet Casablanca. 🤩

'In a preliminary MIT Media Lab study, 83% of participants who wrote essays using ChatGPT couldn’t quote a single sentence from what they’d submitted moments earlier.'

Andreas Katsulas (better known as G'Kar in Babylon 5) played a snide Romulan admiral on ST:TNG a couple of times, and he was *magnificent*. 😀

This is inherent to how LLMs work. They can be seen as inserting machine-generated text as a buffer between human beings. For some applications (coding, translation) this may be useful. But the danger is, they can easily generate walls of slop too high for us to see over.

This is important. When you exalt a narrow, toxic definition of ’masculinity’ what are you simultaneously denigrating?

Back in the day, we celebrated the ability of email to connect us. LLMs are a technology of isolation. They destroy our ability to connect, by reducing the cost of scam attempts to effectively zero. Having moved most social and business interactions online, email is now a trap we can't escape. 🫠

Fascinating piece. These folks are basically doing the Douglas Adams bit about dolphins, but they failed to get the joke. It's a kind of Extra Strong Anthropic Principle, saying the sole purpose of the universe is to evolve nerds who indulge in sci-fi speculation about AI. I'm not impressed. 😒

It's staggering to me how little people know about the history of chatbots and AI. Go back to ELIZA. This has been going on for longer than many people have been alive.

read whole thread

Say what you will about old-fashioned, tough-guy masculinity -- it was focused on courage, toughness and practical skills. You know, actual virtues. Those Conan the Barbarian guys would've been baffled by today's online dweebs.

Some great space battles in the replies. I'm going to put in a word for the attack on the golden battleship fleet in Futurama S5. It's intentionally very silly, but does "ragtag civilian craft rise up against huge expensive warships" way better than Rise of Skywalker did on 1000x the budget.

A moment of utter beauty, as the mountains of the Canadian Rockies catch the first light of day and emerge out of dense fog on a crisp, fresh autumn morning. #photography #bluesky #nature #landscape #naturephotography #landscapephotography #sunrise

We uhh... Totally didn't forget that today is our birthday. Nope. Not at all. Definitely not forgetting things in our old age. We're not having a senior moment. You are. But! We're 54 year's old today! 🥳 To celebrate, all books are 15% off for the remainder of the day in-store and online!

Wall-E origin story looks terrific.

THE UPRISING BEGINS

"Magic 8-ball still says Yes, even when you yell at it and shake it a lot" Seriously, these things have no concept of "true" or "false", they're just text generators. Producing output we know to be false is expected behavior.

Oooh, I got a different one. I didn't want to bring Google down before, but this nonsense is making me reconsider. In what universe is this a helpful response to a search input?

Vermeer’s Girl With The Pearl Earring will be shown in Osaka, later this year, and the press conference was as Japanese as you’d expect #Vermeer

Good evening! 🪶

Good grief, it's been exactly 10 years. And 8 years last month since I moved to Toronto, in large part to get away from the consequences of that vote. 🙃