"If we don't participate it'll just be lions with no Christian perspective at all."

"Trump was expertly manipulated by Netanyahu" I mean yeah probably but he has also been expertly manipulated by Putin, Mamdani, Infantino, the Mercator projection, and whoever made the AI video of the US warship on fire last week and posted it on social media. The dude is just intensely manipulable.

Domestic superglue packaging really isn’t up to the job of ‘the user will want to dispense precisely one drop of this reactive chemical every other year’. But we don’t stop buying a new £3 tube every other year.

I have Thoughts about whoever designed these eco friendly boba straws which are clogged unfixably by boba of the 95th percentile of stodginess or above. Did his drinks usually contain four or fewer boba?

It is a little odd for the price of electricity in my house to be quite so dependent on the speed of the wind in the North Sea, though I guess no odder than my comfort in a house in Montreal being utterly dependent on icy water rushing through turbines in James Bay

I described Ribena as ‘purple water’ to my toddler once five years ago, and now all squashes are $COLOUR water in my whole household forever …

Dunkelbrise!

I am wondering whether switching to flexible electricity pricing five days before Netanyahu bombed Iran may not have been the best plan. In dunkelflaute conditions like now the lowest per-unit price (0330-0400) is 24p/h while non-flexible prices are 27p/h 24/365.

Is anyone else on Moixa ( mygridshare.com ) having their dashboard not update? I've been unable to contact their support since Friday morning which makes me worry something larger-scale is wrong.

Head of Police Federation of England and Wales arrested on suspicion of corruption

I am waiting for BA to start advertising flights to Colombia heavily, pushing the the plus points that you’re going nowhere near Dubai and you’re changing planes in Madrid rather than the USA …

It’s weird living in the future. One-handed astrophotograph with a cellphone while holding the lead of a lively Staffie (portrait by moonlight) in the other hand

So, this August there is a total solar eclipse visible from central Spain. This means that flights UK to central Spain have gone up enough that we start contemplating a road trip. It’s a thousand miles, roughly DC to Miami: Americans who’ve done that sort of thing, any advice?

I thought that the big Gulf airlines, routing some large percentage of eastern hemisphere air traffic via DXB and DOH, were explicitly the same sort of gambit as TSMC: become indispensable to everyone so nobody attacks you. Apparently didn’t work.

I am deeply unconvinced by grep's reaction to finding a block of zero bytes in the middle of a log file being to print 'binary file matches' *to stderr so at best it appears at the top of the output* and then stop looking for matches. Makes grep|tail really actively misleading. alias grep grep -a

Combining knitting with my aerial embroidery... I knitted a base, which was then attached and sewn over to create a wild meadow 🌱🌼 the first of hopefully a series of landscape experiments using this method! I wanted to create more variety than my usual cotton bases. Zoom in to see the flowers :)

Mutant crunch cream!

Had a lovely ten minutes this afternoon watching a cormorant fishing in the bay at Es Cana. Really not immediately obvious from rear view it was bird rather than something in the seal or otter line: a sleek brown back above water and the folded wings looking rather foot-like.

Make index table of size p^2 to save having to implement binary search. Memory usage of code is O(N^3/p) So getting it to fit in RAM as N goes up requires increasing p. At which point the index table stops fitting in RAM. Guess I have to implement binary search now :(

After ten weeks on quite a fast computer with 200GB of memory, I discovered that 861^8 + 1953^8 + 2012^8 + 3113^8 = 1128^8 + 2557^8 + 2767^8 + 2823^8. A few minutes later I discovered that Nuutti Kuosa had found this in 2006, presumably using much less compute :(

5^10+23^10+34^10+34^10+85^10+92^10 = 16^10+25^10+28^10+32^10+71^10+95^10 is the smallest number that can be written in two ways as a sum of six tenth powers; 1^10+8^10+15^10+26^10+26^10+33^10+38^10 = 22^10+23^10+24^10+29^10+32^10+35^10+36^10 is the smallest with seven.

Most elements cannot be spelled using element-symbols because you can't do -ium. I am amused that the two newest elements, TeNNeSSiNe and OGaNeSSON, can. Also that SiLvEr became spellable when livermorium (116 Lv) was named in 2012.

I spend on average a pound a week on Samsung remote controls because we have a dog :(

Is there something about hydrostatic pressure that makes 'transparent plastic water jug should survive a two-metre drop onto tile while full, and also not damage the tile' a difficult design requirement?

I am confused by the reporting here: I’m pretty sure individuals dont pay corporation tax so i dont understand why the analysis mentions corporation tax rates www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

More members of Liz Truss's cabinet are in Reform than in Badenoch's shadow cabinet...

Weber State with a "WTF did I just watch? (Complimentary)" to win the partner stunt competition at nats www.instagram.com/reel/DTmAnJx...

I love this exposition of the Hierarchy of Heaven (‘Santi protettori di Palermo invocano la grazia contro la peste’) - the people ask S. Rosalia who asks the Virgin Mary who asks Jesus who asks God. @adapalmer.bsky.social ‘s translation of grazia as ‘client-patron influence’ is an epiphany

A category of devotional object I hadn’t seen before - a manuscript order of service, from the Gloria to the blessing after the Mass, in an almost reliquary-grade frame

Somebody looked at the Garden of Unearthly Delights and decided to reproduce bits of it in 3D at tchotchke scale … www.clart-store.com . I do not have luggage space for something this fragile :(

Arancina con aranciata

Bother, I have followed my nose to a place where the roads don’t link up to where the bus goes from without retracing my steps. But look what beautiful flowering succulents I am lost by!

I am having trouble thinking of another city in a setting quite so good as Palermo. Lisbon’s not bad, am I missing somewhere obvious on the English coast where the hills go up to 2000 feet around and behind it? Are there places I could take a photo of Los Angeles not unlike this one?

The cathedral construction started in 1174 and the King who ordered it married Joan of England, sister of Richard I, in 1177; so of course the set of saints includes Thomas of Canterbury (martyred 1170, canonised 1172)

Whoever made this Head of John the Baptist had definitely witnessed a real decapitation!

I have read enough @adapalmer.bsky.social to gasp audibly at a *whole sarcophagus made of porphyry* (William I of Sicily in Monreale cathedral, late C12)

This is a Persian carpet of ceilings, looking up into one of the towers in the Royal Apartments at the Norman Palace in Palermo

I wonder which enemy of King Roger of Sicily the rabbit was intended to represent

This image ought to win some sort of prize for anatomically implausible bowdlerisation. That is not a good place to wear your lion’s paw.

“Although the concentration of fluoride in seawater is only ~ 1.3 ppm, 11.5% of the dry body weight of the sponge Halichondria moorei constitutes fluorine” (it makes its skeleton out of K2SiF6 !) www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

It turns out I am exactly the sort of person who’d rather walk half an hour uphill than try to figure out how to buy a bus ticket in a new Italian town. Fortunately the sidewalks are very generously proportioned.

On a slow train across Sicily, this bit is looking much like the Peak District except for a lack of sheep

It would be foolish to try to change my persona such that I could pull off a bright orange knee length coat, wouldn’t it?

I do love the surprise triumphal arch parts of walking around a city new to me

I guess I should be contacting a professional rather than trying to decide whether brine shrimp eggs and algae could be slid through the gap the water entered by

I think it may not be a good sign that the humidity in my bedroom is higher than the 65% in the tropical frog enclosure at the local zoo.

The only numbers less than 2*10^25 which are sums of five ninth powers in more than one way are the already-known X = 12^9+17^9+116^9+175^9+180^9 = 26^9+30^9+91^9+101^9+192^9 along with 2^9*X and 3^9*X. The search is memory-limited, getting to 2*10^25 used about 80GB of memory and ten CPU-days.

No number less than 2^90 is the sum of four eighth powers in more than one way. By the end of January I will either have found an example or be able to change that to 2^91.

Your annual reminder that if you get this cracker joke and are confused by it, it's apparently because "ffi" is a special character in some fonts and when the typeface is changed to one that doesn't have it, those letters disappear. It's supposed to be "coffin medicine".

Zootropolis 2: the closest you'll get to a big-budget cartoon adaptation of the biography of Robert Moses or of the history of the Model Cities Program with songs written by Ed Sheeran and sung by Shakira.