Stepping away from the thread about Americans and kettles.

You will recall that good sleepers are normally quite unaware of how or why their sleep pattern is so well regulated. #page42

I saw a new exhibit of some of hiroshige’s 100 famous views of edo today and this one stopped me in my tracks

Problem: You have your printer listed twice for some reason, only one of them works, and you can never remember which one Solution: Delete both and re-add the printer Results: You have three copies of your printer listed

Look at these cool weird #mushrooms I found at the UCDavis Arboretum #creepymushrooms #fungi

The thing I despise is inhumanity. It’s not really a political position, it’s an existential one. But if your political party manoeuvres itself into a place where it practises and promotes inhumanity, I will despise you.

Fed up with the John Lewis's website talking to me as if I'm a naughty dog.

A man has been found guilty of writing a stream of consciousness novel. He is about to start a 4 year sentence.

RE: https://toot.community/@openculture/115526460756965309 About seven dozen, unless I missed some. Sadly not including two of my favourites (a pair of hands emerging from the page and drawing each other on it, and a procession of lizards similarly emerging from a partially drawn tesselated […]

[Covid statistics] RE: https://timeloop.cafe/@sus/115525819608937165 (Quoted to add CW) #covid #CovidIsNotOver

Paleontologists discover first-ever fossilized sound. Preserved "Rock-Cast" contains voice of Roganopteryx dismissing claims of incoming meteor as "woke bullshit"

Logic falls apart when logicians attempt to construct the set of all podcasts that do not discuss themselves

There's an erratically rhythmic, quasi-musical muffled thumping noise coming in from outside. I would prefer this not to be the case.

Um. Spending less than £10 for a "128 GB" "Sandisk" MicroSD card wasn't a good idea, was it? (Worse, I got two and they're both the same.) And since the cards are presumably either fake or rejects, I don't think I should treat them as safely usable 96 GB ones either.

I'm puzzled how øl/öl came to mean "beer" in #norwegian, #danish and #swedish but "oil" in #german (which of course calls beer Bier). I suspect that German Öl might be unrelated to Scandinavian øl and öl.

Not sure how long I've been getting my groceries online, but it's around 8 or 10 years and today's delivery driver was the rudest I've experienced in all that time. (Usually they're not even slightly rude, just helpful and either friendly or quiet). I think it might be the same one who refused […]

Reflect Orbital is saying that 30,000 people have requested that they shine a giant light on them at night (bright enough to be incredibly annoying and screw up ecosystems, but not NEARLY bright enough to do anything useful like power solar panels). I'm betting we can get >30,000 people who […]

Norwegian home invasion.

I was amused by this paper about asking AIs to manage a vending machine business by email in a simulated environment https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.15840 Highlights: — AI simply decides to close the business, which the simulation doesn’t know how to accommodate. When they get their next bill, they […]

Maybe the wildest table of contents i’ve ever seen

Just one more subtitle bro i swear bro

A perfectly sensible totally unaltered sign.

Things to Consider: Did you pet the cat? Did you do a good job? Did you ASK the cat if you did a good job?

The "Trending now" on my instance knows exactly what it's doing. #catsofmastodon

A bit of Bach. If you've not heard Evangelina Mascardi, you should. https://youtu.be/1JYjcwW9MmM?si=JThgpP_9QkO_DXwO

Just because a picture of the Pope has some awkwardly composed words added to it doesn't mean they're ones he wrote or said. Especially if they're loosely based on garbled biblical quotes. This is getting like "Shakespeare" . . .

oh the irony

Let me improve your Monday with lizards. #photography #lizardsofmastodon

Just saw a thread CW'd "UK politics". I read it. Then came to "I'm not going to CW this one" at the end of the thread. On the post most in need of the CW. Result: instead of reading some of the person's posts about politics I'll no longer see them, having permanently muted them. Please, have a […]

PSA: it is acceptable to write the phrase "a lot" entirely in lowercase, without asterisks, and without italics or other emphasis.

Incredibly depressing day. I've spent my entire life being told by British governments how dreadful immigration is. New Labour did it. The Coalition. The Brexiters. Now Starmer. All of them accusing the ones who came before them of failing to clamp down. The same old vacant mean-spirited bollocks.

This whole article about who can and can't detect AI writing is fascinating! The average person essentially does no better than chance, but a panel of 5 people who use AI for writing every day got only 1 in 300 wrong. The screenshot describes how they look at the […] [Original post on zirk.us]

I have no idea how to pronounce Finnish. (I mean I do have ideas, but they're probably completely wrong ones.)

Any Swedish birders and/or bird photographers here? I’d like to follow you! Ps. If you’re not but you know someone please let me know.

Just realised that #german "über" looks suspiciously close to #english "hyper" and must surely come from the same Greek original (presumably ύπερ?) It's not far from "over" either (English, Norwegian), suggesting all three might be related. #language #etymology

I've heard from multiple mothers who were thrilled to finally understand why their baby said "dada" before "mama": it's because of the way the babies' sound-making develops. Oral sounds like “d” and “b” appear more frequently in early babble than nasal sounds like “m […] [Original post on zirk.us]

An insidious feature of social media (if you're not careful) is that it encourages you to be looking for new friends all the time, when you could be enjoying and deepening the friendships you already have. (Not helped, I might add, by the redefinition of a friend as a follower whom you follow […]

OF COURSE I "saw what you did there". But you destroyed it by immediately begging people to see it! You've got to trust them not to be idiots and to notice it themselves. If you need to draw attention to a piece of wordplay, it has failed as wordplay. And please, PLEASE never insult the maker […]

This is great! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wv7WVaoJJ0Y&ab_channel=Joseph%27sMachines

I seem quite irritable today. It would help if I had the energy to do something about the things that irritate me (such as, on here, the need to switch to desktop view every time I want to use the ninth or later item from a menu¹). _______ ¹ necessary for filtering an individual post, among […]

Re the last two posts—the backward dates do always grate a little when I see them. Because for a user of British English, they're simply wrong and a date like 3/14 is nonsensical in a year with only twelve months. What grates really, though, isn't the existence of different conventions, but the […]

Dear Dave Brubeck people: Take Five is not in 4/5 time. Indeed 4/5 is a very unusual time signature, since you'd be writing quintuplets all the time for even simple rhythms. You should have been celebrating it a month ago, on 5/4/25. Not in May. Thank you.

Not sure when it happened, but all of a sudden the three-dots menu on a post has become taller, with lots of extra space, and refuses to scroll,so the last few entries are inaccessible. (Example: unable to filter an individual post.)

Well. I never thought I'd need to add the third of these, but it's just happened. Somehow the "u" takes it over the line from painfully annoying to excruciating. (I hate these phrases so much. Using any of them kills the funniest of jokes stone dead in a […] [Original post on mastodon.social]