In the century leading up to 1975, nearly 6000 freighters went down in the Great Lakes. The Edmund Fitzgerald was the last. The last. In 50 years, not a single commercial freighter has been lost in the Great Lakes. Why? It's NOAA. Of course it's NOAA.

An engineer wanted to make a quiet high-speed train. “The question then occurred to me — is there some living thing that manages sudden changes in air resistance as a part of daily life?” The answer: the kingfisher. See my story today for more tales of bioinspiration. Gift link: nyti.ms/4otNQyl

Groundbreaking British Museum show set to challenge samurai myths | British Museum | The Guardian share.google/EODJcwgkzB06...

Ever tried. Ever caved. Never mind. Try again. Cave again. Cave better

i think this is key. taking the deal would amount to taking the blame. it would turn a clear political victory into an unambiguous defeat.

Peter Christensen's "The Decline of Iranshahr: Irrigation and Environment in the Middle East, 500 B.C. - A.D. 1500" springs to mind immediately.

It is, and what goes unsaid is that the piece in question a) opened with one of the most blatantly racist ledes I’ve read in years* and b) was by Jeremy Peters, who for the last decade has functioned as effectively a Heritage Foundation-type operative inside the Times newsroom

First image (as far as I know) of the strip showing the final count of the Haihun Hou Shijing “305 poems, 1,076 sections” This is the first complete edition of the Shijing among excavated documents that is preserved well. It has 66 sections more than the Mao version mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Gaedwhy4Um...

悲劇？

This is probably the coolest thing you'll see on the internet today. itiner-e.org

the Iranian drought story is insanely undercovered. foreignpolicy.com/2025/08/07/i...

We're honored to have @jppinfo.bsky.social featured in the NDL's Current Awareness Portal! We hope many more colleagues based in Japan will sign up for Japan Scholar Search, our project opportunities, and more! 🥰

What a nightmare! Chinese astronauts can’t come home because space debris hit their return craft. The rapidly increasing amount of stuff we launch into space is something everyone should be aware of.

McDonald's introduced their styrofoam containers in 1974, so beyond the usual AI slop markers this is also just wrong

The thirty candidates for neologism of the year have been announced. I've just learned チャッピー (no.13 on the list) is ChatGPT. news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/ae4...

At this point, I am going to have to assume that any short video depicting a curious event is AI generated. Like this one.

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

New post, on the time Einstein had his first run in with the US peer review system: kucharski.substack.com/p/einstein-v...

Idealized science: take walk in the park, think very hard, be struck by brilliant insight. Marvel. Science frequently: it is week three of being unable to reproduce my experiment from six months ago. Was I wrong then or am I wrong now? Is it just noise? I have not seen the sun.

Imagine you time travel back to 1847 and you find the left response to industrialization is a) machines will never be as good as human weavers or b) we need to copyright loom patterns or c) it’s a speculative bubble. You’d say “Y’all. Not helping. What you need is obviously a labor movement.”

Alternatively a Drum stone or Baogu Shi. The round, or drum, shape with a floral motif usually indicates the original occupants were army (this one is from a hutong cluster formerly controlled by the Manchu Bordered Yellow Banner). They usually come in pairs on either side of the entrance…

LLMs are injective; one prompt maps to one output, and true also for other way. So you can get exact prompt back for any LLM generated blurp. #SparklyLinearAlgebra

Wouldn’t it be great to have questions about LM internals answered in plain English? That’s the promise of verbalization interpretability. Unfortunately, our new paper shows that evaluating these methods is nuanced—and verbalizers might not tell us what we hope they do. 🧵👇1/8

I did not expect that: Large Language Models are invertible: arxiv.org/abs/2510.15511

New from 404 Media: you can't refuse to be scanned by ICE's new facial recognition app, according to internal DHS document I obtained. Photos captured by the app are stored for 15 years, including U.S. citizens. We've seen officers scanning faces w/ phones on streets www.404media.co/you-cant-ref...

東京国際映画祭でシンポジウム「『桃太郎 海の神兵』から『ペリリュー -楽園のゲルニカ-』まで――国産アニメーションは戦争をいかに描いたか」（10月29日）が開催されます。 副読本として、佐野明子／堀ひかり編著『戦争と日本アニメ――『桃太郎 海の神兵』とは何だったのか』もぜひごらんください。 書籍 www.seikyusha.co.jp/bd/isbn/9784... シンポジウム 2025.tiff-jp.net/ja/lineup/fi...

"moving marginalized people to government camps, they say, is an idea with a long and shameful history." You think???

We need and want your help: If you know of specific book bans/orgs/local groups pushing for book bans and trying to get teachers fired etc, please let me know so I can request docs about what's going on / investigate further

Some exciting news: 404 Media just won a grant via Muckrock to investigate book bans and educational censorship in the U.S. The plan is to file hundreds of public records requests around the country and to report on and archive all the documents for public use: www.404media.co/help-us-inve...

Patrons keep asking "I had this book on hold but now I don't have it on hold anymore, why not?" and we keep having to explain that we had the bookn on order, but now we have to find a new place to order it from. People have been mostly okay about it, but it's exhausting.

Private equity destroys 200-year-old book distribution company that libraries around the country rely on and now libraries are having trouble getting new books: www.404media.co/libraries-sc...

The presumption that facial recognition is definitive is a recipe for horror stories.

「縄文人の痕跡を現代人に探る」 縄文人由来の遺伝要素は，現代日本人のゲノム内に細かく分散して今も残っているようです。 都道府県ごとの「縄文度合い」の違いや，現代人の体質との関係が見えてきました。 別冊日経サイエンス269『ゲノムで解き明かす人類史』 www.nikkei-science.com/sci_book/bes... #ヤポネシア

After years of research, scientist Leonid Pshenichnov concluded Russia + China cannot continue fishing krill, the main food source of many marine creatures, at current rates without risking breakdown of entire ocean ecosystems. Russia had him arrested: www.theguardian.com/environment/...

dear US friends, when a sitting president (re)builds the seat of government, it almost always means the president has no intention of leaving at the end of term. your African friends with decades of experience

📌Just signed a contract for a new title for publication end of 2026: ❝Du Fu in His Time❞ 【Working title】 by David Lawrence McMullen Emeritus Professor of Chinese, Fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge. A monograph on the career and mental landscape of Du Fu…

My latest fitness obsession: “Four seconds of intense intervals, repeated until they amount to a minute of total exertion, led to rapid improvements in strength and fitness in middle-aged and older adults.” Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2020/12/30/w...

#writingtips #writingcommunity #amwriting #writesky #writers

Nice! Need to get a hardcopy myself. Here’s a pdf version for searching if you need it: liturgyscholar.ca/wp-content/u...

disgustingly excited about this new acquisition

🎉This week we celebrate the First 🎂 birthday of: ❝From the Studio of Sour Mood: Poetry and Prose of Guan Yunshi 貫雲石 (1286–1324)❞ By Richard John Lynn quirinpress.com/ISBN/9781922... 🙏 celebrate by re-posting/direct order a copy 20% off Code: SourMood Valid to 31Oct quirinpress.com/direct-order...

The press is understandably translating Kimi Onoda's foreigner policy portfolio title in different ways. On the Cabinet website, 外国人との秩序ある共生社会推進担当 is translated as "Minister in charge of a Society of Well-Ordered and Harmonious Coexistence with Foreign Nationals". japan.kantei.go.jp/104/meibo/da...

Despite all the rude things I might have to say about Harvard and its dominance on any day ending in "y", this is a colossal national disaster for research.

The silver lining is the Professor still has his faculty job, but this is explicitly viewpoint discrimination, a message that there is no such thing as faculty governance. All admin must be aligned with a political party. For all the talk of leftist indoctrination, this is no different from China.

Couldn't recall why I'd saved this picture, Image search reminds me it's a photograph taken by Tokugawa Yoshinobu (the last Tokugawa shogun) of his cat, Han. It is perhaps Japan's oldest pet cat photo.

Who is he fooling?

“Food allergies in children dropped sharply in the years after new guidelines encouraged parents to introduce infants to peanuts, a study has found… a 36 percent reduction in all food allergies, driven largely by a 43 percent drop in peanut allergies” in children under 3 years old.

TIL Irokawa Daikichi and Ueno Chizuko - 2 of the most creative intellectuals of their generations, IMO - were married for a sum total of 15 hrs They wed on Irokawa's deathbed. To ease Ueno's handling of posthumous affairs, Irokawa agreed to change his name. His death certificate reads Ueno Daikichi

The Trump WH spent all weekend ripping Gavin Newsom for being concerned that this stunt by Hegseth and Vance could endanger people driving on one of the busiest highways in America. These idiots are going to get people killed.

お恥ずかしいです。 I'm sorry you had to see that. #amtranslating