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.

The authorities in Maine wanted to check whether the shrimp fishery had recovered. It really hadn’t. The figures on slides 5 and 7 are not tons of shrimp, they are not thousands of shrimp, they indicate that a total of seventy shrimp were caught! asmfc.org/wp-content/u...

Inverted Catenaries xkcd.com/3176/

My favourite fact about Iceland is that we have many, many crime writers but only one forensic pathologist, and he was so busy answering all of their questions that he decided to have a small seminar for writers to get some peace. It immediately sold out so he had another one that also sold out.

65^7+437^7+439^7+536^7 = 146^7 + 365^7 + 412^7 + 554^7 A quick probabilistic argument says there should be infinitely many examples like this; in eight dimensions we're very far from elliptic curves and I don't know where to start for thinking about this kind of variety.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/... I am a bit surprised that adding a Harris hawk to the situation deters the pigeons more given that the market is well inside the territory of the pigeon-eating peregrine falcons living at the cathedral 600 metres away - am I missing something obvious ornithological?

fgiesen.wordpress.com/2025/05/21/o... Apparently on a sufficiently worn-out and slightly overclocked Intel Raptor Lake CPU, occasionally operations on the CH register (bits 8..15 of the RCX register) will operate on CL (bits 0..7) instead ... Wonderful bug, heroic debugging story.

The problem with saving books you’re looking forward to to read when you’re in bed with a cold is that you end up associating @maxgladstone.bsky.social ‘s marvellous Craft War denouement with lying in bed with a cold :(

This is from the conclusion of a series of fantasy novels about undead lawyers, but I can’t help thinking the author might have spent time at the Conferences of the Parties …

When we are constantly told that the price of wholesale electricity is set by the wholesale price of gas, it seems a bit peculiar to have household gas price per kWh drop 5% and household electricity go up about the same amount.

I think it's a bit dubious that the January price cap has electricity go up a bit more than 5%, gas go down a bit more than 5%, and the precise bucket of electricity and gas whose price is the headline number from Ofgem stay essentially flat.

The Economist has contrived once again to bind a 108-page supplement into the middle of an 84-page magazine

The room is almost all elephant. Almost none of it isn’t. Pretty much solid elephant. So there’s no room to talk about it. -Kay Ryan, “The Elephant in the Room” #everynightapoem

If you’re making a movie with Super Obvious Frankenstein Vibes you do not *actually* need to have the Frankenstein character observe someone reading Frankenstein and highlight several important passages twenty minutes in. Banging NIN sound track though!

Lovely work! What sort of repeatability do you get for the astrometry on pictures on consecutive nights? Are you taking them six months apart to try to get a parallax measure too?

Does en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabir_i... give anyone else en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas... vibes? Massive compilation of works all claimed to be by a single author, but for the existence of whose author there is very limited evidence.

I am pretty sure that if I hire someone in Britain to knock down my listed building without getting planning permission, they're liable as well as me. I'm certain that if the builders I hired disturb a nesting bird they're personally liable. Does this not apply in the US?

Today I discovered that the honeycomb in Crunchie bars is a closed-cell foam, and so you can't drink through them in the way you can with Penguin bars.

Is ‘derpy’ entirely neutralised in American English by the My Little Pony character and the tiger from K-Pop Demon Hunters? It’s absolutely not an adjective I feel comfortable using in Britain.

I think this is an example of how game logic shapes policymaking - 'you play the regulation card - in five turns, new market participants appear. in eight turns, produce a five housing tokens every turn thereafter' would be so frustrating for any strategy game. But that's how it actually works!

I suppose inflation since 2003 has been enough that new instances of a fighter jet that entered service in 2003 at a claimed $117 million per plane now cost £200 million (the £8bn deal appears to be '20 now with an option for 20 later') www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Something like 80% of the used lithium-ion batteries in the country go to Redwood Materials for recycling. So they had a thought: what if we hook all these used batteries up as grid-scale storage until they're completely tapped out, and *then* recycle them? Thus was born: Redwood Energy.

What would evidence that the AWS outage on Monday actually cost anyone money look like? I don’t think it took out physical cash registers and I can’t imagine any purchases were skipped rather than postponed. Business continuity people always seem to assign vast values to business continuity.

Mr Sri Lanka. This is a rare case where I think the outfit would be better without the giant gold snakes around his head. Maybe add a cape, but I think the rest of the outfit (what little of it there is) is so great that he doesn't need the snakes.

‘ “Dark doings,” Ingold added. The way he pronounced dark as dahhhk was so pure that I had an involuntary urge to snatch up the teapot and find a harbor to dump it in. ‘ I have started the new @tkingfisher.com Sworn Soldier book

(Amateur) orchestra today: two trumpets, two horns, four clarinets, two bassoons, three oboes, four flutes. So far so good. Two first violins, two second violins, one viola, two cellos. Not quite sure this is the balance Beethoven intended.

Teeny bijou cherry-blossom-biomette