Announced that I once slept on a caught. Now everyone finally agrees that I do *not* have that particular vowel merger.

The part of me that wants to have geologists' lore about minerals at my fingertips is not DESPERATELY CURIOUS about other interesting minerals that fossils can become.

I learned today that the Python library "Textual" has (a) a nice set of tools for building terminal-based user interfaces, but also (b) a companion library that will serve your application as a responsive web page with those same keyboard and mouse interactions. Cooooooool

Watch the reflection of the sun move from the center of the field of view to the Indian Ocean and become an ocean sunset thousands of miles across. Then, because it's solstice season, the twilight zips around Antarctica on its way to becoming the dawn. 🔭

A company whose full-time employees qualify for welfare should have to pay 200% of the benefit as a tax penalty.

Hey fun fact google thanatophobia

I really enjoyed this visualization of polynomial coefficients and solutions animated together in the complex plane … with some serious reservations, described below. 1/🧵

"It wrong," is what they are doing. They are doing it wrong.

In quantum optics, light with "left circular polarization" is made of photons which have "right-handed helicity." I bet lots of technical fields have these sorts of context-dependent contranyms.

This isn't a pun. It is a crime.

"A comparative approach to the evolution of kissing," in Evolution and Human Behavior (2025), doi.org/10.1016/j.ev.... Open access.

I read about this from Kip Thorne, but it was his "Black Holes and Time Warps," which was assigned reading when I took freshman astronomy in 1997. Careful with your "looooong time ago," scamp. The idea is that you make a wormhole whose two mobile ends are initially near each other in spacetime. 1/

Have you ever wondered what sound looks like? My latest video answers this question, and is now out on YouTube! Here's the official trailer, the link to the full video follows. If you like @veritasium.bsky.social, @3blue1brown.com, and @smartereveryday.bsky.social, you're going to love this!

Ooooh, this paper is open access. I think that, in many scientific efforts, you learn the most by starting very carefully exactly what you don't know. Quantitative ignorance.

Schlieren imaging really feels like magic. You do some fiddly adjustments with a lamp and a camera together right at the focus of a curved mirror, and suddenly the fiddliness becomes sensitive to tiny variations in the air density near the mirror itself. The "oh, wow!" moment for me here was 1/🧪⚛️

It's pronounced "deplorable," Mr. Rather.

I really enjoyed this colloquium-style talk 🔭 about the origin of the Chixulub impactor — a carbonaceous chondrite which must have formed in the outer solar system, beyond the "snow line," and then scattered into an Earth-crossing orbit. 1/6

Everybody's favorite extremophile, the tardigrade, is sometimes also called the "moss piglet" because supposedly that's where you can find them in your yard. Now we have learned about an extremophile moss, so future space tardigrades can have a place to come home to! 🧪

Is it an anachronism to put this kind of acrostic into Chaucer's mouth? My understanding is that acronyms are (more or less) a twentieth-century development. But there are acrostic poems going back to antiquity.

Manufacturing stymied by lepton number conservation

Well, we might imagine a rule where the unpunctated quote (here, "features)" must ALWAYS take following punctuation inside the quote marks. But that's an abomination.

Part of the fun here is trying various accents until the pun works.

A video about how "high sodium is bad for you" and it's a chemistry nerd using sodium metal to set water on fire

Apparently tsunamis displace enough air to distort the ionosphere. This past summer, such distortion was used in real time to monitor the evolution of the tsunami from the Kamchatka earthquake.

Chatbots offering advice to literate baby animals

What if chelation could also be charitable

If you want "cellar door" to have the magic sound like "Selador," the elvish hero, you need Tolkien's accent. I have too much Tennessee; "cellar door" is unremarkable. In your neighborhood, someone speaks a distinctively local dialect. What is an unexpectedly beautiful word in their accent?

this cuts awful close to home for a fortune cookie

Companies whose full-time employees qualify for welfare should pay 200% of the cost of the welfare benefit in their federal taxes.

I think I understand that a smaller eye corresponds to a stronger hurricane, but six nanometers is smaller than I was prepared for

Oh, this is a great collection. 🧪⚛️

Ages ago, Jeff Atwood complained in a blog that coding job candidates couldn't code, even an elementary program like "FizzBuzz." Hundreds of people responded with half-working FizzBuzz programs. Lots of preaching in the thread below about opining on religion isn't preaching if an atheist does it.

thanks, i hate it

My daughter sent me a video of a person singing a song called "today is national transfer money to your daughter day." So I opened up Venmo and sent her twenty-seven cents.

totally radula-ical

There was a young lady from Knoxville who bought her brassieres by the boxful. They were stuffed with corn kernels and old Wall Street Journals and that's how she kept all her frocks full. (Keillor, 2008-ish)

When my daughter learned to lean back in her chair at the dinner table, I told her that it would make her grow a beard. She clapped her face and said, "but I'm a girl!" She believed me for TWO YEARS. Having reasoned your way out of an absurd lie is an essential part of intellectual development.

This rating scale is worth having in your back pocket.

@alyankovic.bsky.social did the President (age 79) delete you

Do you like tiny hovering dinosaurs? Do you also enjoy when the rolling shutter effect reveals surprising information about a rapid oscillator on video? Then you (like me) need a hummingbird feeder with a camera.

I have been using speech-to-text dictation with my phone for a while and I am quite concerned that my habit of specifying where the punctuation goes is going to leak into my conversations with human persons.

You know what would make today better? A giant fountain of lava.

Protein synthesis 🧪 as interpretive dance (1971, fifteen minutes, converted from 16mm to YouTube). The soundtrack is the "Protein Jive Sutra." youtu.be/3GfWZy6SSAg

I think that the original biological function of human language was group identification, with information-carrying as a bonus. Think of the last time a stranger asked you for directions. Long before they had finished "pardon, which way to the," you had formed an opinion about where they grew up,

On the other side of "do it" vs. "you're a dolt" in computer interfaces: I once spent an embarrassingly long time trying to figure out why some installer wouldn't run when the space available was "0K," which surely meant "adequate," yes?

I was just chatting with my teen about a book I'm rereading from fifteen years ago and some background-noise TV that I'm watching from the 1990s. I'm trying to imagine an equivalent conversation with my dad in 1996 where he would have been reading a book from 1981 and watching a movie from 1961.

This is what computers are for.

I did not know about the Video Background Play Fix extension, wow, thanks!

Oooh, this looks delightful. On my "to read this afternoon" list.

Hegseth: "lethality, not legality" FUCK THE LAW, WE WANT TO KILL