If tick eradication becomes a centrist-brained obsession, I'm here for it gift link: www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/...

Kill the Ticks

America needs a bigger plan to control its tick problem.

theatlantic.com

This is your annual reminder that if you inadvertently write on a whiteboard with a Sharpie, you can trace over that with a whiteboard pen and then the whole thing will come off.

Douglas Fairbanks clears a table as he duels Noah Beery in THE MARK OF ZORRO (1920), his first full-costume swashbuckler. Doug's brother, Robert, acted as a stunt coordinator and propmaster, lowering the table slightly to make the leap look even more impressive.

I didn't like APT but now I do.

i highly doubt it. we usually do $25/hr on the rare occassion we get a babysitter bsky.app/profile/cbow...

CB@cbowers.bsky.social · 2d ago

I also don’t totally buy the ‘babysitters are expensive now’ argument. I think they’re largely asking less, adjusted for inflation, than my babysitters got

It's nice that The Odyssey is getting its day in the sun as a synecdoche for history. But when this summer is over, it's back to the relentless, remorseless rise of Jane Austen.

McDonald's The Mickey-D (1993-1993): A 1/3 pound (5.3 oz) burger patty, with thick-cut sharp cheddar cheese, slivered red onions, diced tomatoes, and a "zesty, Mickey D sauce", served on a crusty baguette roll. A quick 🧵on this unique offering...

Hello world! 👋 We’re Minds, Machines, and Brains (MMB) 👤🤖🧠 a new open access journal from @mitpress.bsky.social exploring the principles of intelligence and cognition across natural and artificial minds. Submissions open this Fall! 🔗 direct.mit.edu/mmb

and when Dora saw the breadth of her domain she wept, for there were no more worlds to explorer

Scottish-born inventor Alexander Graham Bell — who died #onthisday in 1922 — goes to kiss his wife Mabel while she stands in one of his spectacular tetrahedral kites. See more of these wonderful creations (and the kiss realised) in our post here: publicdomainreview.org/collection/a... #OTD

Anacapa Ocean, Channel Islands National Park #NPS #NationalParkService #ChannelIslandsNationalPark

Only 12.5% of the accommodation in this hotel is occupied, which makes one ruminate.

unseal your cards, unseal your comics, take things out of the fucking box. it's all just cardboard and plastic. fuck the resale market

Dexerto@dexerto.bsky.social · 5d ago

K-pop star Momo is under fire after breaking open a vintage graded Pokémon card to stick it on her face and keep it in her phone case

Let me get this straight: From Sweden, via Finnic, come words for the Rus and Russia. The Mongols turn the Russian term into Oros, to avoid initial /r/. Mandarin Chinese gains this as 俄羅斯 (Éluósī), 俄 for short. Then, due to the Vietnamese reading of the character 俄, 'Russia' in Vietnamese is Nga.

Sipping my coffee ☕️ and thinking about these marvellous Minoan cups! They look so modern it’s incredible to think they were made by Bronze Age potters some 3,800 years ago! Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Crete. 📷 by me #Archaeology

honestly the dean (Dean Wormer) in Animal House put up with a lot of shit and was just trying to administer an institute of higher education.

You have a month to write a 33 1/3 book about the album of your choice. Which record are you going to write about? (No previously covered albums allowed; new shit must come to light: see below.) (For all books in the series: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_1/3) (H/t @monostich.bsky.social

33 1/3 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The way water and light interact has to be in the top three of all things of all time right?

w/o red meat i'm having difficulty getting enough protein, which is particularly important to avoid losing muscle mass at this age. so i last night made this extra-protein overnight oats and woke up excited to try. a miraculous ~50g protein. sadly it tasted god-awful and i'm never making it again.

This is more than the NSF social sciences division - now on the chopping block - awarded in grants last year. Think about that: a single AI company has the money to fund more social science research than the US govt.

Hetan Shah@hetanshah.bsky.social · 6d ago

Anthropic AI research fund offers $5m - $30m for social science research on themes of AI impact on workers; transition initiatives; income support; building worker stakes; and wider evidence on public investments. Total fund of $200m available www.anthropic.com/news/economi...

Key words in this clip to listen for: "auto" (lowered /ɔ/) "epitet", "federal", "specialists" (low + backed /ɛ/) "tax", "gas" (raised /æ/ - tho less diphthongal in her Michigan clips) "mock", "colleagues" (fronted /ɑ/)

Now! Vowels are the most indicative (to a linguist) but also can fly completely under the radar for normal speakers. In fact, Michigan specifically has been famous for its speakers both doing the NCS and reporting that they don't. (Niedzielski 1999; Preston 1996 inter alia) (16/n)

Here's the isoglosses for the NCS. The upshot is: it's much broader than just Michigan, but Michigan is the central area where DRESS is lower than TRAP and COT is fronter than center. (that little tail follows the old Rte 66 down to St Louis) (15/n)

Okay. So the Northern Cities Shift (NCS for short) is a pattern of vowel shifts that are common in the Great Lakes area. There are 6, but the most important are the /æ/ vowel (the sound in "trap"), which is raised and often diphthongized, and the /ɑ/ vowel (sound in "cot"), which is fronted. (14/)

So we can plot a speaker's entire vowel space. In this case, I'm showing 7 vowels that are the most important for identifying Michigan English. I'll get to that in a second - the point here is to show that every speaker has a range for each vowel, but also a clear pattern of how the vowels relate.

Okay. Then we're going to take those F1 (Formant 1) and F2 values, and plot them. We put the axes going backwards, so that the result can match the shape of a vowel space, if we imagine a face facing left. So [i] is the vowel where your tongue is frontest and highest. [ɑ] is low and back. (12/n)

So let's zoom into one of those areas of dark bands. I'll highlight the first and second formants - those are the most important for vowel pronunciation. You can see I highlighted about 1/3 of the way through the vowel (red dashed line), and a Hz value is shown on the left (for the 1st formant)

So let's take a 2 word phrase. The top here shows the waveform - this will be familiar to most of you. The bottom is the spectrogram - it's a Fourier transform of the waveform. It shows us where energy is concentrated - those dark bands ("formants") show us where the vowels are. (10/n)