So I'm watching Stranger Things for the first time. From the beginning. And 3 episodes in, there's an advert for an AI feckin summary in case you want to skip watching the rest and go straight to the finale. Which, if I wanted to do, I could just... not bother? ALSO IT'S GOT SPOILERS IN THE AD 😠

Looking for postdoc positions in the UK studying weather extremes? Two jobs with deadline 4th Jan: Historical windstorms, working with two insurance companies: jobs.reading.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai... Storylines of extreme events, as part of a European collaboration: jobs.reading.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...

Sorting old book donations. Published 1975. @statsgeekclare.bsky.social thought you'd appreciate this!

Anyone know what these mystery Christmas presents are? Possibly templates for clothes making? @flowerhorne.com

Bedmap - Ever wondered what the land underneath the frozen ice of Antarctica looks like? We released the most detailed map of Antarctica's hidden landscape, revealing ice up to 4,757m thick and filling major knowledge gaps across the continent.

Oh that's a nice example. The passing on of a title is very very confusing for an LLM.

BOND: "Do you expect me to talk? GOLDFINGER: "Actually I have more of a comment than a question..."

Woke lefties like (checks notes) the Royal Family.

Drilling a 200m sediment core from the bedrock beneath 500m of Antarctic ice is a complex process, so we've broken it down step-by-step in this explainer. From melting snow in our flubbers through to filling our core barrels, what we're attempting 700km from the nearest base is no mean feat!

An old thread is making the rounds again, so here's an updated version. Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol is one of the most enduring and adapted works of literature in history. But did you know that he wrote 22 sequels? Some are great! Some are trash! Some are bizarrely fascinating.

Shit, Mads got an amazon gift card (I know!) so opened an amazon account, they let her put on the gift card, order things, and now they want her passport before they will put the order through. Has she lost that money unless she gives Bezos her identity?

The South Pole! Do we have a North Pole entry???

Day 24 and we’ve reached the final window of this year’s Coastal Lexicon Advent Calendar! Today’s word is: 🌊 tide — the rising and falling of the sea twice each lunar day A Common Germanic inheritance concerned with time; cognate with German "Zeit", Dutch "tijd", Norwegian/Danish "tid". 1/3

First time my mum went to my dad's parents house she noticed my granddad had a party hat on. Seemed odd as there was no party. "Why is he wearing that?" she asked my dad later. "It's because he's so forgetful," said my dad. "My mum makes him wear it every time he's switched the immersion heater on."

One more thought: a lot of what I do as a historian is discard material. 50% (or more) of what I read/find does not go into my books. But I still need to know what these documents say, where they're located, and why I'm choosing not to include them in the book. This is vital.

So, oceanographers watching #TheWarBetween The Land And The Sea. It's set in the #DrWho universe, will you have to hide behind the sofa in the science bits? Well, there's definitely ahem... narrative convenience... but they do at least acknowledge the biggest fudges. Safe to peek!⛅ 🌊

Another one of the pillars in that xkcd cartoon, this one built with some backups.

Ouch ouch ouch. Catching up with #TheWarBetween #DrWho and some horrid man in a meeting has just told Kath Lethbridge Stewart to "Calm down love". Perfect expression from her (Jemma Redgrave) in response, that blend of patience and fury and determination.

On my first walk with newborn I saw a helicopter and started telling tiny (too small to even care about the noise) about the fluid dynamics of lift and rotor blades. Found myself utterly overwhelmed by the complexity of the world and how much there is we can learn.

What we need is for the runmyshop dot com api to come with a default filter for "has pockets". Filter by size, pockets, price, colour. Which means "has pockets" needs to be in the item metadata. Or, if this sounds like too much hassle, just put pockets on everything.

There is a story the bees used to tell, which makes it hard to disbelieve. #Storytime

Terrifying and not just for the US. Some of these diseases will spread like wildfire. There needs to be urgent international pressure on them for this or we will see babies die of preventable disease again.

Oh now that's nice. Very merry XMAS Kylie, and thank-you for a much-needed upbeat moment. 🎶 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

They give the watered one a 30 second head-start, because otherwise it would be hard to see the smouldering on that side.

Good punning effort in this writeup www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

If you live in the area and felt the earthquake, or even if you didn't, please consider filling out this short questionnaire, which helps our scientists learn more about the event: earthquakes.bgs.ac.uk/questionnair...

Well that's one way of dropping a plumb line. Part of a long thread about cathedrals in England...

Lots of wisdom about how to do good dataviz in this piece by @scientificdiscovery.dev substack.com/inbox/post/1...

This talk by ICE (No, not that one, Institution of Civil Engineers) will be available online and is free. It's 18:00 - 19:30 (6:00 - 7:30 pm UK time) www.ice.org.uk/events/upcom...

You’ve got a 5-hour flight over the holidays with some fronds from the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Who’re you sitting next to? 🦦🦀🦈🪱 Let us know in the comments below!

Cor, look at that lot.

Oooh this tide calendar is interesting. I need to think it through but at a glance I think it relies on knowing the local "age of the tide". That is, it would work only at a specific location. Did they have them for different ports? Or get told a local correction to apply?

This isn't in my timeline due to amateur curiosity about infectious disease. This is in my timeline due to people discussing benefits of public climate data sets, from another US institution currently under threat.

I'm not sure most folks are aware of the immense magnitude of loss this would entail for the global weather and climate community, and beyond. NCAR has played a greater cumulative role in advancing weather prediction and atmospheric modeling than perhaps any other single entity in the world.

The Employment Rights Bill is now the Employment Rights Act, bringing a host of new rights for workers and trade unions.This is a historic moment and we’re proud to have played our part, working with the govt & other political parties to strengthen the law and ensure it works for our members.

A little trivia about how Victorian shopkeepers (especially cafes and tea shops) often kept their windows clear of condensation.

Mr KJC moved from the Norman to the Tudor vernacular at this point, creating a two-storeyed building with cantilevered second storey and overhanging roof. A lot of Matchmakers died for this.

XKCD is straying into #geodesy again. Assuming you knew the mass and dimensions of the boat, the force on the line and the water density, how accurately could you estimate g and hence planetary mass? It's absurd. But so are the GRACE satellites! Geodesists are good at absurd. xkcd.com/3179

Je repars pour une matinée "dessins de contreparties" pour le livre des @nouillesrampantes.bsky.social chez @exemplaire.bsky.social ! Deux personnes m'ont demandé des dessins dans l'univers du Disque-Monde, alors ce sera a priori une matinée spéciale Terry Pratchett ! www.twitch.tv/bouletcorp

Was just wishing a news-room friend well, and a question for journalists: What would be your ideal news story, for an interesting, engaging, and not too depressing day? What stories make it a great day in the office?

I hate how much I enjoyed this BIG NERD DESIGN ENERGY 🫦

I hope you allow me as I know this isnt a photo of something Christmasy, but much needed over the festive period. Please share as it may help someone in the UK. A selection of phone numbers for different associations who can support / listen #WeekXforXmas #AlphabetChallenge #CharityPhoneLines

There's some incredible maps at the National Library of Scotland - including this one which is over 450 years old! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 (North arrow points right in this map ➡️)

And I was worried they hadn't specified the direction of the coordinate. Metres depth or up from the sea floor? UNIT arrives in a fancy deep sub to find the sea people bobbing about on the surface. "What do you think we are guys, squid?"

For those like me who had never heard of this creature www.wildlifetrusts.org/wildlife-exp... It digs. A hole. In the rock.

Re-posting with alt text because the post accompanying this is obviously wrong, it's clearly a picture of a woman on a Crosscountry train having found a place to sit on the floor and read, her coffee cup beside her, folks queuing for the loo behind her

This is a heads-up about fake AI accounts which have proliferated across social media. The screenshot is from a genuine thread asking for advice on a mountain route; there are plenty of useful, real human replies. The attempted reply (we stopped it) looks very real - but it is from an AI bot.

Anyone handling university admissions. I know your job is already hard. But please bear in mind that there are kids in parts of the UK in 2025 who cannot easily take A-levels.

It takes strength of character to decide to do A-levels if you go to a school with no sixth form and you have to find a college and travel there. If A-levels are the logical next step at the school you're at then the opposite is true - it takes strength of character to 'drop out'.

Anyone handling university admissions. I know your job is already hard. But please bear in mind that there are kids in parts of the UK in 2025 who cannot easily take A-levels.