Commentary: Unequal fitness standards were a major theme of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s recent speech, but fitness standards are not the best indicator of combat readiness, writes Laura McTaggart. In the real world, “lethality” requires more than big muscles and a smooth jawline.

This will be forever one of my favourite garments in the V&A. It is a late #1890s coat from Marshall & Snelgrove, featuring hand embroidered sweet cicely flowers with white felt petals that float on top of blue velvet, V&A #FashionHistory 🗃️🪡

Hello, fellow cadets

Scientists revive old Bulgarian recipe to make yogurt with ants. Ants carry lactic and acetic acid bacteria that help coagulate milk, as well as formic acid to acidify it. They even partnered with Danish chefs to create three recipes using ant yogurt. arstechnica.com/science/2025...

What's a life well-lived? Researchers looked at 38 MILLION obituaries over 30 years to study virtue. Among the fascinating results, this one is chilling: After the pandemic, benevolence dropped in popularity and never recovered. In its place, tradition as a virtue experienced a popularity surge.🧪

Just came out of two hours of teaching early humans and primates to hear that Jane Goodall has sadly died. The legacy and impact of this human is beyond measure. She brought us closer to each other, closer to primates and face to face with our evolutionary inheritance.

‘The appeal to the mystical image of the “warfighter” is that it avoids having to discuss war in concrete terms. It sells the attractive myth that by doing more of the parts of war that look cool and really make you feel like a man, you can actually win wars.‘ www.deadcarl.com/p/clausewitz...

On a similar topic, a reminder that James Blunt (yes, that one) and General Sir Mike Jackson (using creative politics and a bottle of whisky) completely fouled up direct orders to be stupid in Kosovo. It can be done!

The truth, the truth, the truth is on fire

I'm sorry to say that I agree with every word of this, and I'm willing to say so on Bluesky. This doesn't mean I agree with everything Noah Smith says. He has offended me plenty of times, but he's right about this. www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-bluesk...

Turns out it was 43 minutes of a Large Chested Anime Lady looking into the camera, go figure

#ThrowbackThursday: In 1980 the 🌍🌎🌏 was declared #smallpox free, thanks to mass vaccination efforts. Smallpox was an acute contagious disease caused by the variola virus. It was one of the most devastating diseases known to humanity. #VaccinesWork

Masser af fine forsider relateret til trafik. Ping @sorenhave.dk

What gif pops up when you type your name?

This is one of the most beautiful things I have witnessed, the craft here is impeccable.

Just gonna call this flattery and move on!

Queen of Denmark—an Alba rose—with a quartered flower looking as though someone had taken a spoon and stirred it round, as a child might stir a bowl of strawberries and cream. #gardening

De nova stella: Tycho Brahe, great Danish astronomer, identified first supernova in 1572; established Uraniborg observatory on island of Hven, with cornerstone laid #OTD 1576. Hand-coloured copper-plate engravings from Blaeu’s Atlas Maior 1662-5 National Library of Scotland

Happy 34th Birthday The World's First Website! On August 6, 1991, the World Wide Web (WWW) creator, Tim Berners-Lee launched the world’s first website. #InternetHistory

12/ That said, constant self-reassurance that Ukraine is holding and Russia is on the verge of collapse is harmful. The front may stay static and advances slow, until the situation deteriorates to the point where Russia might seize thousands of square kilometers per month

Wow—the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention (named after Raphael Lemkin, a Holocaust survivor who coined the term genocide) says plainly: "No more discussions, meetings, reports, sessions, summits…IF YOU HAVE THE POWER, YOU MUST USE IT." "HISTORY WILL DETERMINE THE RECTITUDE OF YOUR ACTIONS."

Young astrophysicist Dr. Brian May, born #OTD in 1947, seen here with a black cat and his homemade Fabry-Pérot Spectrometer, the Red Special. Note the disk magnets in the pickups and the custom pulse-counting electronics. 🧪 🔭 Image: Brian May Archive

“Whoa! Watch where that thing lands—we’ll probably need it.”

A wonderful podcast about a wonderful meeting in Tuscany last March, to ponder (if not answer) the question: What Is Life? And BTW Anne and Steve are two very lovely people. www.ttbook.org/show/island-...

Now THAT's a cease and desist letter

„Im Moment ist die wichtigste Anwendung meiner Forschung, mir einen Job zu verschaffen.“ Mit nur 17 Jahren löste Hannah Cairo die Mizohata-Takeuchi-Vermutung, eine Sensation. Mein Kollege Reinhard Kleindl hat mir ihr gesprochen.

If you ask the new Grok (via grok.com without any custom instructions) for opinions on controversial topics it runs a search on X to see what Elon thinks I know this sounds like a joke but it's not. This genuinely happens: x.com/jeremyphowar...

cool english.elpais.com/science-tech... the arXiv paper: arxiv.org/abs/2502.06137

16 years ago, I found myself in the back garden of a couple I'd just met, as they showed me their pillow fighting arena. The lesson they taught me about games - especially competitive ones - has stayed with me ever since, but I forgot to mention it in interviews when asked if competition is bad. So:

I've started a second blog, in which I will discuss in as systematic a way as I can topics about which people (including me) have strong feelings. I explain more about its nature and purpose in an introductory post. First up after that: a long post about the war in Gaza.

My latest for @nytimes.com -- please repost so your followers can see this for free. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Because of [waves hands at the state of the world] there's been a bit of discussion about how difficult it is to sink oil tankers. As this account firmly approves of the empirical method, ie the boffin lingo for fucking around and finding out, let's look at an example. Meet Torrey Canyon.

"Some books are to be tasted..."

”We are all Keynesians now.” John Maynard Keynes, influential economist, founded modern macroeconomics, born #OTD 1883. Pen, ink & watercolour sketch by Gwen Raverat, 1908 National Portrait Gallery, London

Bluesky, unlike X, doesn’t punish posts with links. Which means there is no good reason (and frankly no good excuse) for posts with screengrabs of articles that don’t link to them. It’s bad for readers and bad for the writers whose work you’re using. Posting text? Link to where you got it.

#genuary2025 #genuary28 Day 28: "Infinite Scroll."

Jishen's Tête de Moine #onthecover of #PRL ! 🙌 a PMMH-SIMM collaboration @espciparispsl.bsky.social‬ 👉 doi.org/10.1103/Phys...

We put 10 skeptics in a room. They’ll never believe what happens next

This is one of the biggest challenges of the modern information environment: learning to distinguish between bad faith criticism designed to destroy things and good faith criticism meant to make things better.

Fun new paper at #SIGGRAPH2025: What if instead of two 6-sided dice, you could roll a single "funky-shaped" die that gives the same statistics (e.g, 7 is twice as likely as 4 or 10). Or make fair dice in any shape—e.g., dragons rather than cubes? That's exactly what we do! 1/n

So glad that we’ve agreed to have Erasmus+ for our young people. And to work towards a youth experience scheme. This will allow the next generation to once again live and study in each other’s countries. From my own experience, this will build friendships that last a lifetime.

typical corrupt science

Incredibly powerful investigation in Dutch newspaper NRC: Seven of the world’s leading genocide scholars — including renowned Holocaust experts — describe Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocidal. And according to them, nearly all of their peers agree.

Geophysicist and seismologist Inge Lehmann was born #OTD in 1888. In 1936 she discovered the existence of a solid core at the center of the Earth, based on a careful analysis of global seismic records from a 1929 earthquake near New Zealand. 🧪 👩‍🔬 Image: Royal Danish Library

OK, this is wild. In September 2023, geophysicists across the world started monitoring a very odd signal coming from the ground under them. It was picked up in the Arctic. And Antarctica. It was detected everywhere, every 90 seconds, as regular as a metronome, for *nine days*. What the HELL? 1/

A core feature of the Trump regime is its embrace of "authoritarian democracy", as a battering ram with which to demolish any obstacle to its power. The very notion of "authoritarian democracy" can sound contradictory. But it's an old & dangerous idea, that needs to be better understood. [THREAD]

A break from commissions to draw a bird form my own back garden - The Tree Sparrow

Relatable: pope signed up for Google+ but had no idea what to do with it web.archive.org/web/20190309...