Ryan Moulton: "We think of insects as being canonically their adult crawling flying form, but they spend 90% of their life like this."

Ram prices are now interfering with my scrolling.

How much tat would a tit for tat tat if a tit for tat could tat tat?

Massively Multiplayer RSS.

Thanks again for this, Ryan. This is a delightful resource and I'll be keeping an eye out for these birds in my travels. www.mridulkthomas.com/undisplayabl...

Far be it from me to impugn the data quality of whoever was scanning finches, but I just don't believe this finch, the "dusky munia" reflects 33% of it's incident light and 75% at peak wavelengths.

Common confusion. Mutual AID stands for "Mutual AI Development" in which you take the time to visit and enjoy the vibe coded websites your mutuals make. In that sense, a datacenter is already a mutual aid center, so the conversion is easy.

This is just leftist madlibs, less world knowledge and more of a stochastic parrot than GPT2.

This post is another success of the heuristic "if you've written 10 tweets on a topic, flesh them out into a post on the real internet."

"The unrealistic scenario means this is a training simulation so..."

The problem is that president claude won't believe the news.

A plot of the most colorful birds.

I need a concept like convex hull, but that isn't convex. I'm trying to characterize the birds with the most extreme colors. Here I've taken 5 degree angular samples around white, and picked the furthest point within them, but you can see the big gap in the reds.

if you enjoyed @moultano.bsky.social's color post, you can get a wee taste of expanded color gamuts if you have a modern (e.g., Apple) display with wide-gamut.com/test Just the difference between sRGB and P3 is pretty striking

You all may be interested in a better display of the bird chromaticity convex hull.

Renaming my blog "Triangles and their Consequences."

I'm glad I'm now the color guy and the breakfast guy instead of the i-Ready guy.

Strategy game where the AI does the strategy, out of your hands, and instead you're responsible for the logistics.

This is one way that wilderness in the Eastern US mogs the west. We have lots of things out here, craggy mountains, giant trees, canyons, wide open spaces, but we don't have any greens like this.

Spaced repetition for remembering what your goals are.

What are the natural units of a spectrum that make typical physical spectra into a mixture of gaussians? If I'm using linear wavelength units, should reflectance spectra be made of log-normals or normals?

I'm learning that in the laser pointer market, if a product is intended enough for enthusiasts that it specifies its wavelength, it also has enough power to burn things. Low power lasers with a number in nanometers in their specs are very hard to find.

A practical application of the sleeping beauty paradox. If you've been sleeping poorly recently (jetlagged/sick/too much coffee) if you feel yourself waking up you're better off assuming it isn't morning yet and trying to go back to sleep without checking your phone.

I am so sick of punchy final sentences now. Let it end with a whimper god damnit. If what you told me is good I won't care. Not everything needs a bon mot attempt.

If you liked my color post mostly for: 1. the discussion of perception, you'll like this: moultano.wordpress.com/2025/02/24/y... 2. data-driven essaying, you'll like this: moultano.wordpress.com/2026/02/22/t... 3. nature writing, you'll like this: moultano.wordpress.com/2024/05/03/a...

Working on a graph to improve the explanation of why no natural colors are near the top of the diagram.

It's strange that we accept this sort of restriction on our freedom for drugs or interventions that don't have externalities. Antibiotics, sure, we have a limited microbe evolution budget. Insurance wants a doctor sign off before they pay, makes sense. But if you're paying yourself?

My Carhartts are *real* because they get *stained at work.* (spilling coffee on myself.)

Reposting for Father's Day. If childhood is half of our subjective life, how should that change how we live? moultano.wordpress.com/2025/12/30/c...

The eyespots on a peacock’s train are super cyan, so when the peacock spreads its train feathers it is going super saiyan super cyan.

Does anyone know the ratio among married couples without children of fertility issues to intentional childlessness? I wonder how much pronatalism evangelism is reaching people that might be convincible or just rubbing salt in the wound.

This is such a good post. It makes me want to go and sit in a mixed broadleaf woodland (which, tbf I usually want to do).

[clears throat] AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND MENTIONED

The writing here is sublime. Excellent science writing for the masses carries you along from new concept to new concept, and you never feel lost. At the same time, when you're done you are aware that you learned and also that you know almost nothing! Great stuff, take the time to read it

Man, birds are so great.

I didn't include it in the post because it wasn't directly related but I also ranked birds by their variety of color (mean squared chromaticities distance of samples from their mean.) Pictured are the top 4. docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

I have a feeling my mental health is going to take a turn for the worse now that my phone time will go back to scrolling instead of finding colors to plot.

Truly had some of the purest joy while reading this essay. I marveled, I gasped, I uttered shrieks of amazement, then I sent it to all the people I love. Do yourself a favor and read this!

Fascinating perceptual story! So grateful I get to see colors that can’t be displayed on a screen all the time at Kua Bay.

HOLLERING START TO FINISH this is so good

Truly amazing I've read and thought about several explanations of what we used to call gamuts in printing. But this is by far the best I have read. Very easy to understand. One of my previous favorite examples of s color that exists but we can't reproduce in print or on screen is the campfire.

Every few years I read a article that flips my understanding of the world around. This is one of those. So many things make more sense now! Bravo!

I spent the last month obsessed with finding colors that can't be displayed on a conventional screen. This is what I found. moultano.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/w...

6000 words on color and I haven't touched plants or synthetic pigments. Trying to decide whether I'm done.

In the vote by mail debates a lot of people complain about vote security, but no one mentions how much it improves vote quality. My votes are way more thorough and informed because I can vote at my dining room table. I vote more often, and I vote better, as a direct consequence.

Instead of a shootout, soccer matches should add a ball to the field, and keep adding balls until someone scores.

How much of the memetic success of Christianity and Islam over prior pagan religions was a matter of replacing falsifiable boons, peace, plenty, victory, with unfalsifiable ones, paradise in the afterlife? Easy ratchet to replace a god which can visibly fail with one who can't.

Millennial retirement homes are going to have way better boardgames.

Ornithoptera Croesus, the rare example of an orange too orange to display even on fancy Display P3 screens. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornitho...

Rather than a nice cycle I would have a lot more of these edges pointing at movies.