Even Hegseth is still Secretary of Defense! Congress hasn’t renamed DOD.

It all started in 1955 with a misprint in a Colorado newspaper and a call to Col. Harry Shoup's secret military hotline. Shoup played along with the tiny voice who called, and a tradition was born. From the NPR archives.

The name "Popular Science" doesn't mean we shift our coverage depending on public opinion. It means we cover relevant subjects that are rigorously researched, reliable, and grounded in reality. And trans lives are grounded in reality. We see y'all. No matter what. www.popsci.com/science/tran...

'Overall, the evidence presented by the article backs the general idea that de-politicization and increased technocratic qualities of constitutional courts would help them gain social trust.' Highly recommended, and particularly timely for our US friends www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

yeah, most ✨Shameless Self Promotion Saturday✨ are devoted to underlining being a place where people can get things they want while paying no more than they can justify (or just giving shit away) last one before Xmas. it's been a slow month. please be generous today. we could use it.

The networks were afraid not to run Trump because they assumed he would use his office to punish them if they didn’t. The irony is that this is what Biden was warning about, a warning they chose not to share with America.

Grinch of Tai Chi

NEW: The FDA won’t tell Americans where their generic drugs are made, so ProPublica did it instead. Use information from your prescription label to locate the factory and see if the plant has a history of inspection violations.

NSF is about to dismantle NCAR at Russell Vought's direction to protect the fossil fuel industry. It's hard to communicate just how much NCAR does, so let's take a look: I've never worked at NCAR, and I've worked with NCAR researchers once ever. What scientific discoveries has NCAR made possible? 👇

Oh to be a little Tardigrade walking across a microscopic slide. 🫧🐻🧪

One of the biggest moments of my career: USCIS canceled my client’s naturalization oath ceremony. We filed a lawsuit, went to trial, and the judge swore him in right there in the courtroom!

“Luke learns design” month, (cheat) day #21: Star Trek 1971! In 1971 a high school kid wrote a game on punch tape about hunting Klingons. In 1972 he rewrote it in HP BASIC, and it became briefly the most distributed software of all time. The code is still available. So I ported it! Check it out!

Happy Hanukkah for all of us at NSF, may the LOX last for many launches this year 🎥Jasmin Moghbeli/Instagram

On Day 14 of #25DaysofFishmas, we say Feliz Navidad as we leave the Southwest US! But not before one last stop in south Texas for the country’s only native cichlid species - the Rio Grande Cichlid (Herichthys cyanoguttatus, also known as Texas Cichlid) - and our 2nd #SundayFishSketch mystery fish!

the line is actually "no JESUS for us meeses," an oblique reference to the fact that, as muppets are unable to take communion, they are forbidden from entering the kingdom of god

Please join me in pouring one out for our fallen comrade, The Louvre of Bluesky. Louvre was a real one. They were harassed by a stalker for months who kept ban evading, then doxxing and threatening them. Bluesky Trust and Safety failed them, and we have lost a gem and icon because of their failure.

The repeated pattern (see also Washington Post) is that these choices to veer rightward are not economic decisions: they turn off the core audience. Editorial choices are loss leaders for bigger corporate goals.

ICE snatched a human rights hero. Guan Heng risked his life to capture video of Uyghur concentration camps. After escaping to the U.S., Guan was in hiding for years, not knowing his work had been crucial to substantiating China's mass detention practices. On Monday, he has an asylum hearing in NY.

Having a good #caturday

Cowards refused to do a progression of knives in/out/up/down/top/strange/charmed

"how many memes does the Pope have?" some 20-year-old groyper who discovered coke nine months ago says as he posts on another official U.S. govt account.

Truly delightful story

Very sad that I felt I had no choice but to resign from The Infinite Monkey Cage - a victory for the transphobes and other bigots - I did it because so much of the media has chosen to believe the kind and empathetic people are a fiction - they are real and so often unrepresented.

As much as I've been a goofy fuck about promoting I Will Kill Your Imaginary Friend for $200, the genuine reception it's getting is incredible. Especially with people totally unfamiliar with my work. Here's an early review thread, starting with the incredible starred feature in Publisher's Weekly.

This is a real problem! I'm not sure what to do about it but definitely subscribe to Assigned Media in the meantime

Court watchers have built what they call a "habeas machine" with @repdangoldman.bsky.social. For months, the congressman'office has been a rapid response center. Families go there after a loved one is detained and lawyers immediately get on the case. talkingpointsmemo.com/feature/new-...

My hottest take is that letting cops park in red zones for mundane errands and coffee breaks; I think “you can break the law at your discretion as a job perk” is the small domino that ends in the large domino of “shooting protesters in the face with rubber bullets”

also, we need to shift our messaging away from the muscle memory of defending the meager sums we spend on public health. we need to flip that frame and go on the offensive — if you want to live in a modern society, then you need to pay for it

I made a Chrome extension that swaps Times New Roman for Calibri on every site or just .gov. It also had Open Sans and Open Dyslexic, because f**k these people. I’m waiting for Google’s approval for it to install automatically, but you can download it and install it in 90 seconds. Instructions 👇

i feel like this video has genuine utility as a "this is what AI video looks like now" PSA, lotta ""savvy"" people falling for it in the original thread because their expectations are still at 6 limbed eldritch abominations

Friends, my holiday shipping deadline this year is December 15th 🎄✨ Please consider this your reminder to shop your #science and #astronomy gifts on time if you're shopping for the holidays 🎁 🔗 sciencesocks.com Thank you for shopping small. Sharing appreciated 🙏 🔭🐡🧪🎨

WE. DO. NOT. DONATE. TO. THE. BIGOT. BUCKET.

Just as I was thinking about getting a set of Murderbot books by @marthawells.com for my son for Christmas, Humble Bundle put em all out there. Get these. Get these for other people. My favorite series of the last decade and part of what you pay goes to support support World Central Kitchen.

I’m but a simple country theoretical physicist, and I can say, in my professional capacity, “datacenters in space” is so colossally, monumentally stupid that it is difficult to know where to start with which laws of physics the idea is spitting in the face of the most.

The mass deportation of undocumented people was one of Hitler’s largest coercive policies before the war. This set off a chain of events which can give us a useful perspective on where we are now. snyder.substack.com/p/self-terro...

Gemini works alright but I'm sad it no longer does a little jingle when you name a timer

my latest investigation for @consumerreports.org is based on months of reporting and 60+ lab tests of leading protein supplements we found that most protein powders and shakes have more lead in one serving than our experts say is safe to have in a day (🧵) www.consumerreports.org/lead/protein...

Mass extinctions, millions of years ago 🐚🐙🪸🦪⭐️🪱 443 mya💀 🪸🦪 🦈🐌🪸🐙🦪🌱🦂 372 mya💀 🦂🦈 🦈🪳🦂🪸🌱🐟🍄🦐 260 mya💀 🐟🪳 🕷️🍄🪲🐟🦐🐭🦈🐸🐛 252 mya💀 🐸🪲 🐟🦗🐭🐸🪸🐢🌲🐸🐜🐠 201 mya💀 🐢🌲 🦎🐢🦕🐔🐊🪰🐌🐦🦋🌺🦖 66 mya💀 🐊🐭 🦥🦇🐊🦜🦣🐀🦤🐠🐻🦥🐂🧔🏾‍♂️ 0 mya💀 🐀🧔🏾‍♂️…

Of all the things the US has chosen to do differently than the rest of the world, I think this may be the dumbest. You'd have trouble finding any urban neighborhood in Europe or Latin America without a plaza. It's just so basic. And yet the US has virtually none! No public space, no public.

Society is a construct. You can just ask someone to do a ska cover of Faith of the Heart and they'll say "$300 please" and you give it to them and then you have it. Everyone, give @skatunenetwork.bsky.social your money. They deserve it.

big news

ICE trying to ORDER a church to REMOVE A NATIVITY SCENE is one of the most astonishing First Amendment violations I've seen in ever

folks we are into “breaking gerrymanders” territory here we are going to win

This is such an issue, one I got conned by recently (the "animal shelter lets dogs choose" video) and I'm not sure how useful their guidelines are for identifying the fakes.

tbh i think more charts could use this kind of clear labeling

Remember when MTG spread insane bs about the Democrats controlling the weather, and regular meteorologists were getting death threats? Pepperidge farm remembers. bsky.app/profile/chad...

I was literally just teaching about the creation of fixed prices by supermarkets and restaurant chains in the 1920s to the 1950s. Fixing pricss and telling women upfront what things will cost was hugely popular, utterly transforming the consumer economy in the US.

In May, Human Rights Watch released a report showing how gig platforms use opaque algorithms to erode workers' wages. Now a new investigation finds Instacart is running AI price experiments: charging different people different prices for the *same* groceries, sometimes by more than 23%. Read this:

I have finally watched "Sinners" and I regret to inform you that everyone was right, it whips ass. Actual chills thinking back over it. Incredible cinema.

Thinking a lot about this moment from literally the first chapter of "1984."