To trigger lightning, researchers fire a small rocket with a thin, grounded metal wire into a charged thundercloud. The wire initiates a lightning strike on command. www.quantamagazine.org/what-causes-...

By analogy with "gaydar", I call this hypothetical ability "gendar". 🙂

I am becoming increasingly certain that Trump is the Emperor of Mankind from Warhammer 40K. My money is on Steven Miller as Horus.

I went to scream into The void But that void was filled With the screams of the ancestors I went to scream into A neighboring void But that void was filled With the screams of our progeny So while I seek A void with room left for my screams I gather my skirts And breathe deeply And begin to sing

In three weeks I ride my 🚲 from SF to LA for @climateride.bsky.social so tomorrow I’m going get up early and ride as far as I can through the Oakland hills so I can see how fucked I am. If you see me, please do not hit me with your car. TYVM. #bikesky support.climateride.org/participants...

If you’re trans & born before 2000, when asked who you are you can legit answer: “Do not ask me for a single title, I have crossed millennia under different names and worn more than one form besides. Revered by some and feared by many, I am remembered differently in each age that survives me.”

I have a Google camera in my living room for a number of good reasons. At some point they added a feature where you got a daily summary of activity seen by the camera, powered by Gemini AI. Here is today's report. Only my white cat and I were at home. Lives are being destroyed based on this tech.

It's, it's, a ballroom blitz! 🎶

The measure of an engineering failure story is how many times it uses a phrase like "And that would have been fine, except..." thedailywtf.com/articles/emp...

WPA 2: Rural Electrification Boogaloo

Snort #groanUp

Slightly diminish several books: The Baron of the Rings A Sketch of the Artist as a Young Man The Middle-Aged Man and the Lake The Weak Nuclear Force's Rainbow The Okay Earth The Umpire in the Rye Forty-Nine Shades of Beige David Nickelgarden Just So-So Stories Señor Quixote

Slightly diminish several films: Reservoir Puppies The Six Samurai Eyes Somewhat Squinty Star Skirmishes Logan's Amble A Bridge Just Near Enough The Man Who Would Be Viceroy The Grapes of Petulance Key Points About Eve The Man Who Knew Just Enough Jesus Christ B-List Celebrity Resident Alien Kane

This photo was used to show the World Cup countdown clock in Union Station in the linked article about how unprepared Los Angeles is for that. But I love it because it captures the stunning beauty of Union Station. It is a perfect blend of Mission and Art Deco styles. www.torched.la/the-fifa-cou...

Slightly diminish a film The Adequate Gatsby

i've been getting more folks telling me about this and it's not anything i agreed to. it's been stolen like AI steals. please vandalize it if and when you see it.

“The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.” — Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes (20/20)

Here's another way to think about privilege that might help. Let's assume that the US is a video game with microtransactions. There are four types of currency: tickets, gems, coins, and experience points. There are things you need to play the game that can only be bought with these currencies,

I had a terrible sinking feeling last year when I asked myself "These LLMs are so phony and cloying; who could possibly want this?", and then immediately knew the answer.

AI researcher Roger Schank made an unknowingly prophetic joke while talking to my CS class in 1982: "I don't want to write software I'm proud of. I want to write software that's proud of me."

Humans need a small amount of Vitamin D to survive. There isn't enough Vitamin D in most diets. We typically get most of our D via a chemical reaction in our skin which is powered by the UVB component of sunlight. This means that humans are photosynthetic in the broad sense of that term. 🤯

The moral of my favorite of Aesop's fables is "The fox knows many tricks, but the hedgehog knows one *really good* trick." Apparently foxes continue to learn new tricks today. We should let some hedgehogs into the solar farm just to see what happens. 🙂☀️

My abstract mental image of Richard Dawkins is as an ever-growing pile of annoyance and cringe. At the bottom of the pile, occasionally visible as the crud shifts and settles, is a tiny lighted sign reading "The Selfish Gene was pretty cool".

ELO tends to be dismissed as a frothy disco-tinged pop band with prog pretensions, and that's not entirely wrong. However, I find it very impressive that in 1981 they put out this spot-on song about people in the future falling in love with their AI personal devices. open.spotify.com/track/3vESDN...

Going through TSA for a recent flight, the screener detected that I'd forgotten to empty the water in the small metal thermos bottle in my purse. Fair though. But rather than just letting me empty it right there, they made me choose between 1. Throwing away the entire bottle. 1/3

I have become perfect in the tonal interval sense.

This is my new favorite post to savor without context.

I'm waiting in the Cedars-Sinai ER with my partner, who is having a non-life-threatening but worrying medical problem. Two hours in, my boredom level has reached the point where I noticed this cluster of displays across the room and thought "Wow, that's one big pixel!" 😁

So in the end Schumer never endorsed the cosmopolitan left-liberal Muslim who made basic criticisms of Israel but has decided to endorse the rich young Obergruppenfuehrer who spent his youth killing Arabs in an imperialist wars before deciding it was the international bankers who made him do it.

I worked on obstacle-avoidance software for autonomous underwater vehicles for several years. This involved typing the word "obstacle" many times a day. Each time, there was a 50% chance I'd type "obastcle" instead. It got so bad that I developed a pronunciation for my version, "oh-BASS-tuh-kul".

Thank you, YouTube. This was the perfect recommendation for one last video before going to bed. I'll gladly accept the price of having this stuck in my head all day tomorrow. 🙂💙🎵 youtube.com/watch?v=j4gP...

friendly reminder to turn on the "require alt text before posting" toggle in your settings so you never forget & everyone can get in on da jokes with you :)

The personal irony of the whole current "trans defense contractor" discourse is that my first two jobs out of college were at defense contractors, but at the time I was still deeply closeted. I'm not sure how to score that. 😁🏳️‍⚧️

Yes, gender is a performance, and the tech-and-blocking rehearsal is a complete clusterf*ck.

Amen. There are endless ways to ridicule deserving targets based on their ideas and actions. Using irrelevant attributes as weapons hurts innocent people who share those attributes far more than it hurts the actual targets.

Bluesky achievement unlocked: I was just blocked for politely suggesting that a direct transition to global communism might not be a practical solution to our current problems. I pity anyone who tries to satirize this place. 😁

PHAETHON Winging westward Crossing a continent The sun sets slowly As I chase its horizon Higher than Himalayas Faster than falcon Going as God How is it I am bored?

YouTube just gave me these two adjacent recommendations, and now I have "Whistling in the Dark" by They Might Be Giants stuck in my head. 🙂🎵

While at an OTO conference this weekend I heard the sad news that Peter Carroll has died. He was an extremely controversial figure in the occult community, and I disagreed with at least half of what he said, while finding most of the rest inconsequential. 1/3 www.specularium.org/blog/the-wiz...

PHAETHON Winging westward Crossing a continent The sun sets slowly As I chase its horizon Higher than Himalayas Faster than falcon Going as God How is it I am bored?

Film you've watched more than six times with a gif. Hard mode: no Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, DC, Marvel, Disney, Pixar, Spielberg, Cameron, Wachowskis, or Ghibli.

Oh cool, it's about time they tried a reboot of the Fourth Crusade. 🙄 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_...

Every addict I've ever known goes through a phase of making "clever" plans that will supposedly get their life together without having to stop using. The lucky ones eventually realize that they can't MacGyver their way to a solution. This is AA step 1. Maybe we need a planetary 12 step program.

Today's Headline Mad Lib: "[Powerful asshole] sends [adjective] message to [large group]." 😁

@cmuirmath.bsky.social Bluesky has no algorithm, but I do: 1. Someone I don't recognize likes one of my posts. 2. Read their profile. Interest is piqued. 3. Check posts. First one is a repost from xkcd. 4. Hit "follow" button. 🙂

"this character can't be trans because the author wasn't explicitly trying to create a trans woman" neither were my parents, how'd that work out for them?

@pkrugman.bsky.social used this for the sign-off video on his post today. First, it is incredibly cool that an economist I've admired for decades has such great taste in music. Second, I hadn't watched this in far too long. Enjoy! youtube.com/watch?v=1eTS...

Nothing like being 509 years late to the party.

Yes, Swiss scientist Fritz Zwicky coined the term “dark matter” which is impressive, but he also coined the term “spherical bastard” to describe people who are bastards no matter which way you look at them, and I think that should be celebrated more.

I have an idea for a LotR movie where after Bilbo returns from his adventure, he amuses himself by tiling the floor of Bag End with repeating geometric tiles portraying the dragon he fought. It's called "The Tessellation of Smaug".