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

Tried to watch _One Battle After Another_ this evening and walked out after 45 minutes; super slow moving, something about the cinematography felt unanchored in time - is this the seventies or today? and not a moment of amusement in what I'm sure was claimed to be a dark comedy.

My new iPhone absolutely fails to recognise my face when I’m wearing glasses - to the point of saying ‘FaceID doesn’t work’ if I try to enroll without taking my glasses off. Any ideas?

I wonder what anatomical image was inscribed deeply enough into the roof lead of Carfax Tower to require a patch to be welded in …

I am quite surprised that a professionally made tapestry from the 1660s has so many of its N embroidered as И but no other letters mirror imaged (Sheldon Map of Oxfordshire in the Ashmolean)

I am deeply amused by my old college’s response to the prevalence of pink hair among undergraduates …

I found my old college’s copy of Lucretius (as a special treat, returning alumni were allowed into the Old Library). It does not appear to have manuscript annotations @adapalmer.bsky.social

“The world must be round because the shadow during an eclipse is round” illustrated in 1545 by Peter Apian

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA 10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

John Lee Hooker with a diagram of the evolution of the Blues.

Currently playing _Luigi's Mansion 3_, it's good fun (I have defeated the piano ghost and am half way through the castle level), though I probably shouldn't admit having to google 'how to get out of the garage' right at the start despite the big picture of a door with an arrow on the garage floor

American Girl announced Wednesday that its 2026 Girl of the Year is Raquel Reyes, a Mexican American 10-year-old from Kansas City, Missouri. Raquel Reyes’ family owns a paleteria in Kansas City, though her family lineage traces back to another famous American Girl doll.

I'm wondering what a drive-train-modification hot-rodding culture looks like for electric cars. My guess is that the dragster-equivalents go for superconducting cables and motors, the fetish is the massive intricate heat-sinks on the back for the quad cryocoolers keeping the nitrogen liquid.

It seems almost a waste of breath to recommend @tkingfisher.com books, but the new one Hemlock and Silver has a protagonist lovely even by her standards, and a descent into a truly disconcerting world.

Really quite startled that a wedding-reception-type event for 35 only got through 7.5 of the 18 bottles of fizz we provided: maybe the stats about declining alcohol consumption are actually true. Central Cambridge so less worry about driving back than most places.

Ada Palmer is a glory of the world, and I am loving her new big popular orange history book _Inventing the Renaissance_. Particularly some of the half-sentences: ‘first we have to get through more iterations of nineteenth-century people being fractiously, meticulously and well-footnotedly wrong’

I love that Huawei are doing with a solar farm the sort of thing that individual Japanese farmers do with their rice fields sometimes www.huawei.com/en/sustainab... www.bbc.co.uk/travel/artic...

If you already liked @benaaronovitch.bsky.social‘s Rivers of London series you probably were buying #10 anyway, and if you aren’t then it’s an odd (but not ridiculous, though I’m saying that as someone who started Bujold with _Memory_) place to start, but I read it today and it’s a really good one.

Amused to see how swift the reaction to ‘put my mug of ice water down next to the data logging thermometer on my desk’ was

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... - 500 hotel rooms seems low for a park expecting 55,000 visitors per day at peak - Tokyo Disney has 2500 and a peak of 80,000 per day across the two parks.

These aren’t even expensive noise cancelling headphones, but in full-NC mode I can feel our plane shake as other planes take off on the nearby runway but I can barely hear the jet noise!

Chart in a Japanese museum with the X axis labelled in regnal years, Meiji to Taisho to Showa! Something to do with silk production iirc

It is odd to notice that one’s train of thought is ‘we are travelling much faster than the wind and for a distance larger than most weather systems, of course the weather will be different when we get off the Shinkansen’

There is a certain inelegance when coupling two shinkansen units together …

Any idea what this leaf served on top of my donburi is? The margin reads strongly enough as ‘nettle’ to me that I was quite wary of eating it, the taste is mildly minty.

Pride of place in the gift shop at the UK pavilion at Expo 2025 is given to this Liberty print Brompton !

The line-goes-up tree at Fushimi Inari shrine

Surprised to find the Kaiyodo museum in a basement next to Osaka castle: some lovely paleo toys on display @tetzoo.bsky.social

Very comprehensive code shares for our flight, spanning nearly four continents: Asiana, Air Canada, Ethiopian, Etihad, ANA

Where Find My Devices thinks the things that are in my rucksack next to me on this train are …

Climeworks’ capture fails to cover its own emissions. Oops. HT @otherprofgreen.bsky.social. heimildin.is/grein/24581/...

Metamorphosis (not after Ovid)

I am surprised at the BBC's description of ETFs in www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... : 'popular with large institutional investors' seems odd, large institutional investors have the logistics to hold and trade physical gold, whilst I'd much rather have 50 shares in $SGLN.L than an ounce of gold

why is the hero with a thousand faces historically so prevalent in surviving old narratives? (keep in mind the huge selection bias.) because it's the story template of a patrilocal founder. that's why the hero returns. sometimes with a bride! it's a corporate biography for a Bronze Age leader.

just over the last 5 weeks, Trump has helped swing elections (against him) in Wisconsin, Canada, Australia, and the Vatican.