Yesterday’s Alex Pretti memorial ride in Portland ended by passing the Portland ICE facility and of course ICE tear-gassed the crowd, including kids on bikes. Thursday in Salem, Oregon, feds tore a US citizen’s rotator cuff yanking her out of a car window. The Minneapolis surge really is […]

Remember this important comparison when reading an article about a new breakthrough in carbon sequestration and storage: Check whether the price per unit of atmospheric carbon stored is better than buying some coal and putting it in a hole. Pro tip: It never is, and will never be. CSS is a […]

Does any country have measuring tick marks (inch/centimeter) on their currency? I think about this every time I use a dollar bill to (roughly) measure something. A dollar is just a tad over six inches in length, so it sorta works. I always think there should be real marks (inch on one side […]

Okay, I'm calling it. Musk is an agent of the Great Filter, sent here to trigger a Kessler Syndrome and trap us on this planet. https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-eyes-1-million-satellites-for-orbital-data-center-push

I wonder if Trump is starting to regret not being able to threaten to take away funding from public broadcasting anymore?

"Israeli strikes kill 30 Palestinians, including children, as Gaza ceasefire inches forward" Inches forward, how, exactly? Has Israel, on any single day since the beginning of the ceasefire, ceased fire? Has there been a single day since the start of the ceasefire during which Israel didn't […]

I'm #colorblind and I use https://xkcd.com/color/rgb/ frequently. Randall 'xkcd' Monroe did a survey of over 100,000 readers where he showed them random rgb colors and said "what would you call this?" and afterwards he did his best to sort the results into the most popular color names and the […]

One of the oldest errors of war– they invaded The Winter People in the middle of winter.

"You Will Not Disgrace Us."

In New York, USA. 🇺🇸

Always thought they didn't like the "Black" but it turns out they also don't like the "lives matter" part either.

I love how if you search "Is He Dead Yet" on DuckDuckGo, the search engine has absolutely no confusion and knows who the search is about. Meanwhile, Google no longer seems to publish trending searches but only what *words* are trending but not whole phases. I suppose that's to keep "Is Trump […]

YES! It wasn't budget slashing, just snow. Mauna Loa Observatory data is back from Jan 9th on. The data suddenly becoming unavailable right at the beginning of the year had me seriously spooked. https://www.co2.earth/daily-co2

#Monsterdon The terrible romance side-plot does work nicely as a break from the terrible lizard plot at least.

#Monsterdon... I don't recall Godzilla breathing fire. Of course this is the first one I've actually watched, but... Is this lizard supposed to do that?

#Monsterdon Shouldn't it be a giant pile of fruit if it's a mutated iguana?

I'm still hung up on radiation creating "a hybrid"... hybrid? hybrid of what and what.. and what does that have to do with radiation? #Monsterdon

"soylent greed" is a killer name for SOMETHING will one of you please run with this and make some good trouble.

Woh... Craigslist is down. I'm pretty sure I've never seen Craigslist go down.

It looks like Mauna Loa Observatory data is down. Is this a technical glitch, or an intentional attack by the science denying disgrace to humanity currently in the White House? It looks like no new data since Dec. 31st. This is, essentially, the most important piece of data in the world and […]

Funny, Google has made YouTube links sent by text message useless on Android now. There's no way to get the URL. It'll play on the phone *in the text message program*, but... no. I'm not gonna squint and watch videos on a phone. Especially not outside of an appropriate browser with an ad […]

@stevenaleach We must dive the Potomac, find the mummified rind of the cheese and destroy it to free the country from the terrible curse.

There is something deeply wrong with this country and I think I've found the source. A totem, a moment, and artifact that has poisoned the American psyche since our nation's inception. I speak of course of "The Mammoth Cheese of Thomas Jefferson." Basically this "founding father" as had a big […]

On the surface? It sounds charming, right? Harmless. But think again. No one said "this is too much cheese, this is unseemly, cut it out" they just... went along with it. Munched on it for months! No one could question it. And this is the root of the evil in the soul of this country. We are […]

Watching "Andor" and I've got some questions about this design... The clarinet body stuck on the end of a flute is bad enough, but the added tube hanging under it isn't actually plumbed into the main tube in any way and wouldn't really be part of the instrument.

can someone come and take our president pls?

"They're walking their children, they're walking their wives". Umm... WTF?

I spent at least all of last year trying, again and again, to cancel an Amazon "Prime" subscription I never signed up for (or at least didn't intentionally sign up for). I kept going to "Membership" and clicking "End Membership" and kept being told I now had X days left of Prime. And yet it […]

Having another day where I feel like I need to go around saying "sorry for the USA I'm sorry about America I try to make it not like this but nobody listens to me"

Whatever you might think of Maduro, the seizure and kidnapping of a head of state takes us to a very dark place. Vast, arbitrary, extra-legal power, which could be exercised almost anywhere, regardless of the character of the target government.

And there will be no consequences. This is why all trade and travel should be cut off entirely from any county that hadn't joined the ICC.

"Watch the ball drop on 2025"... no... it drops on 2024, gets raised again in 2025.

@shauna well then! these are 100% what you're looking for: https://us.macmillan.com/series/monkrobot They're short reads but have exactly this vibe

@shauna have you read the monk & robot books?

Re-watched a short bit of Hunger Games last night while searching for something to relax before bed. It struck me just how many of our stories, especially in SFF/speculative fiction, are about people getting more and more traumatized. What if we used our collective imagination to tell story […]

I could chase down the studies on dowsing (which have been done) I could explain about confirmation bias, gambler's paradoxes and the workings of the human mind. I could enter the debate. I don't want to do this. The interface between the mythical and the material can be porous in our minds […]

I've mostly completed moving in to the new place, but am now getting a steady stream of obnoxious messages from the management company's payment portal telling me I've "not yet completed" the renters' insurance "setup step". I keep telling the system to f*** off and it keeps telling me I need […]

Started moving instruments today. One load of saxophones - I'd rather expected the baritone and it's bulky case to be pretty much a load by itself. But it, three altos, three stands, and a case full of accessories all packed nicely into a single trip […] [Original post on sigmoid.social]

Wow. 2026 is gonna be a GREAT year for #jazz standards entering the #publicdomain! "Body and Soul", "But Not for Me", "Confessin'", "Embraceable You", "Exactly Like You", "Georgia on My Mind", "I Got Rhythm", "Lazy River", "Love For Sale", "Memories of You", "Mood Indigo", "On the Sunny Side of […]

Should Exist: Air-lock tents on screen frames for sliding patio doors. Just a zippered tent with enough room to step into that gets swapped out for the screen frame in the winter. Yes I should quit smoking. Definitely. But in the meantime, not wasting heat or chilling the plants when I step […]

Something basic has changed with how I think about time since 2016. Most of my life I'd think of points down the road as such-n-such years/decades, or what age I'd be at some point, etc. Now, if I'm thinking of any multi-year span I now think how many election cycles or presidential […]

Why is it that you sleep *in* a bed, but *on* a couch? Someone can be "on" a bed as long as they aren't reclined (at which point they are "in" the bed). But if you're sleeping on a couch, you are never "in" couch... Also, pets are never "in" your bed, they're "on" your bed - which is also odd.

My new address is the farthest I've lived from the same little corner grocery store since I first moved to #madisonwi in 2019. And yet that grocery is now tied with three others for being the closest to the new place. All FOUR are a half mile from me now. I'm not sure if I should be irritated […]

Emergency autonomous landing due to pilot incapacitation. https://youtu.be/K3Nl3LOZNjc @nyrath @isaackuo we live in the future.

Moving, bit by bit, into a new place. It's an efficiency in a building with a common area including a public bookshelf, couches, etc. Soon on the list of things to move (into my tiny efficiency) is a nice-ish digital piano with fully weighted key action. I've got a few options of where to put […]

Me: *explains NIST Boulder situation* Spouse, a public health nurse: OK. Sorry about your laser clock. Goodnight.

While cleaning a storage room, our staff found this tape containing #unix v4 from Bell Labs, circa 1973 Apparently no other complete copies are known to exist: https://gunkies.org/wiki/UNIX_Fourth_Edition We have arranged to deliver it to the Computer History Museum #retrocomputing

O hive mind: Can you point me to 501(c)(3) nonprofit news organizations that are explaining the depth and breadth of Trump world corruption? The "mainstream" press is doing such an abysmal job on this, and I want to donate to journalists who get why this is so important to flag for public notice.

Interesting - it looks like makeup over a bandage?