Amazingly, reaction times using screens while driving are worse than being drunk or high—no wonder 90 percent of drivers hate using touchscreens in cars. Finally the auto industry is coming to its senses.

how i’m going into the next year

Well now, would you look at that? A massive, 4-YEAR-LONG study of NEARLY 30 MILLION people in France found that individuals who received a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine had a 74% LOWER risk of death from severe COVID-19 compared to unvaccinated individuals and ZERO increased risk of all-cause mortality.

OM Ben Nicholson, circa 1936 (sculpture), 1936 https://botfrens.com/collections/14375/contents/1126259

Gingerbread 2025 Dumpster 🔥

Anyway. They spent the last decade telling us STEM degrees were the future and the Humanities were worthless then they spent hundreds of billions of dollars to build a glitchy Humanities robot.

Marx Santa sticker spotted in Mexico City

Tonight is Christmas Eve, when we in Iceland open presents. All the Yule Lads have already come down from the mountains, but tonight the Yule Cat arrives and he will eat all the children who weren't gifted any new clothes for Christmas. My daughters both got woollen socks so they are safe 🙏

I see there’s a post about microplastics going around with a photo of drinking straws, so here is my semi-regular reminder that the 3 biggest sources of microplastics are tires (45%), synthetic clothing particles (35%) and paint (~10%). Lay article attached:

concentration camps.

Nice in-depth story on immune memory by @amandabkeener.bsky.social in @nature.com. “If we can develop multivalent vaccines that have many different flu antigens in them, we can replace original antigenic sin with a blessing of induced immunity.” www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Game changer: pesto made of pistachios, parsley, green olives, fennel seed, garlic, parm, oil, s&p. No basil.

I feel this in my BONES. I think I bought a box of 45 holiday cards over a decade ago, with the best of intentions, and I probably still have 43 of them. They’re good cards, too. They have a bacterial DNA transcription “tree”.

I count 10 cities in 2025 that are on track to have the fewest murders since at least 1970. Newark is on pace to have the fewest murders since 1956 (though only have data through Oct this year) and San Francisco is on pace to have the fewest murders since 1942.

Please take the @sfwa.org survey and tell them to ban "A.i." entirely. If they don't, they don't deserve our membership or support. gregpak.net/2025/12/23/t...

Had to clamber over a barbed wire fence, rip my coat and trespass to get a photo of this folkloric monster pretending half-successfully to be a tree. I have no regrets.

moss pig

New: They survived a Cybertruck crash. Then a fire killed them. Tesla has marketed its trucks as seemingly impenetrable — bulletproof, with shatter-resistant glass and able to contain blasts. What happens if those same features trap people inside? www.washingtonpost.com/technology/i...

Forget the "Happy Holidays" debate. Let's talk about why the British (& Australians/New Zealanders) say "Happy Christmas", while Americans exclusively say "Merry Christmas." HAPPY derives from Middle English 'hap' meaning "luck" (as preserved in "hapless"). Happy Birthday = "Lucky birthday!"

🧵

Apologies for linking to substack, but this explores gendered issues with AI nicely.

important

THREAD. My parents' cat Bridget vanished. As the weeks dragged on they became ever more worried, so to distract himself my dad began to paint Bridget's adventures, imagining her travelling through time and popping up at some of art & music's most important moments. I've collected his work here...

"Every cyclist is a rebel" Stencil seen in Athens, Greece

Academics and technologists are sounding the alarm about a growing crisis in scholarship as we know it: AI-generated citations of nonexistent papers that have infested real journals. Despite being fake, the sources are widely assumed to be authentic the more they appear in published literature.

You might be thinking, "CPSC, does a dry Christmas tree really burn that much faster than a well-watered tree?" Friend, let's find out together by watching this PSA.

Today's advent collage is of a sturdy orange crab amongst the kelp. Facing away from us he stares at a shoal of orange and yellow fish who swim before a midnight blue coral stabbed sea.

Medieval Inventions We Still Can’t Fully Recreate Today www.medievalists.net/2025/10/medi... #inventions

Oh. My. Fucking. God. You must listen to this.

🧵

Wowwwwwww

This 🧵 is important & I want to highlight: They are going to give kids in an Guinea-Bissau a placebo for Hep B even though it's already proven to be safe. These white supremacists are putting African children at risk to support a thesis we know is wrong. They do not value Black lives.

In your 20s, there will be a LARPing event that will suck so bad you'll spend three days having back to back panic attacks. It's very important that you go. Or: let me tell you about how I learnt I was autistic. 🧵

This tracks with my experience. DHS made up stories like this in Chicago, too. Every story ICE told about being attacked by community members was debunked in court. To assume anything they say is even potentially credible is irresponsible and out of touch with reality.

Before the 1990s, plane crashes caused by microbursts used to kill planeloads of people fairly regularly. Dr. Ted Fujita and NCAR scientists figured out how to detect microbursts and warn pilots about them. Since then? Zero airliner crashes from microbursts.

this is, of course, exactly what republicans have always intended for vouchers to do: defund public education to facilitate the creation of a private system of segregation academies

One of my favorite social media posts of all time:

this field biologist does a great job highlighting the insidiousness of AI editing these one-click AI edit buttons are incredibly appealing to many photographers, amateurs and professionals alike, and are framed as innocuous this is worth sharing and educating people about

“Imagery-competing task intervention”!!

This will not go well. What this will do is push teenagers, already more digitally literate than lawmakers, into using increasingly sketchy methods to avoid age checks. Let me tell you how I know... 🧵 1/

My statement on Ai from the mini-comic as syllabus i made for new class I'm teaching that starts tomorrow! It robs you of your decisions & struggles - and the joy of being surprised. We won’t to be robbed of our learning - this is essential. This & the full mini at post: bsky.app/profile/nsou...

With the single exception of the demographic group "white teenage girls", higher levels of social media use are associated with higher self-esteem and greater self-confidence in teens of every single racial and gender category.

🧵!!!!

It’s good to see papers start to address LLMs as structural plagiarism — provenance, more hidden than the original words or training data. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Mark Zuckerberg’s new data center in Louisiana will use 3x more electricity than ALL of New Orleans — and guess who’s paying for it? YOU. Billionaires like Zuck are passing the cost of their corporate greed onto everyday Americans with higher water and electric bills.

A tiny trial in New York has shown that personalized mRNA vaccines can provoke massive, lasting immune responses against pancreatic cancer, even as sweeping federal cuts now threaten the fragile labs required to produce them. theintellectualistofficial.substack.com/p/a-breakthr...

#FrogFriday 🐸: J. Martin Pollock “I AM AT THE ZOO BRING ME A FLY.” 1923 Lithograph in colours, backed on linen, 40 x 25 in. (102 x 64 cm) London Underground / London Zoo www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-5...

Run, don't walk, to see this AMAZING video about the bioluminescent ostracods! As said at the end, "I want people to know about them" A #Crustmas feature related to work of @ostratodd.bsky.social @nikohensley.bsky.social @emilylau.bsky.social @lisayetermesrop.bsky.social @emily-ellis.bsky.social 🧪🦑