From NASA: It happened again! Here's Phobos passing in front of the Sun as seen by the Perseverance rover from the surface of Mars on Aug. 12. science.nasa.gov/photojournal...
Giles Sparrow is adrift in the vortex
@gswrites.bsky.social
Pop science writer/editor consultant for hire, specialising in astronomy and its history. Regular nerd with @somethingwho.bsky.social
Ah yes, the anti-AI side is pouring billions into pushing their agenda, it's so unfair on all the mom-and-pop AI corner stores.
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 19h agoNorth Carolina Republican Senate candidate Michael Whatley: "You gotta remember that this opposition to data centers is not organic. This is being ginned up."
Think the discourse on “lanyardian” is missing the far crazier part of this, which is that it’s a conversation between two people who now believe that saying “UK” is a weird, Starmer-like affectation. Margaret Thatcher used it, because it is literally the name of our country!
Jordan@jordanpfot.bsky.social · 2d agoYou’d think a historian would be more intellectually curious, wouldn’t you?
This interview with Russ Abbott by @shattenstone.bsky.social is lovely. Abbott had a career, a good one. He had a lovely time. And then he stopped. And that's fine. www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...
‘In 1984, I worked 363 days’: how Russ Abbot soared to success – then walked away
The comedian dominated Saturday night TV in the 1980s, with his sketch shows attracting 18 million viewers. Next came the West End musicals and sitcoms. But in 2016 he quietly disappeared from the lim...
theguardian.com
When future historians excavate this piece of timeline synchronicity, they may ponder just what it was about Gemini listening in @unfortunatalie.bsky.social's conversations with her cat that pushed humanity into open revolt agains the machines.
Sometimes society at large rejects certain ideas because they’ve been thoroughly shown to be wrong and also because they suck and the people who espouse them suck and when someone comes around arguing those ideas should be part of some edgy modern debate we can and should shun them and move on.
ok great now do the racialised civil war stuff
The Guardian@theguardian.com · 23h agoMinister tells social media firms to remove posts that ‘celebrate’ dangerous driving after A66 crash
Honeybees drinking moisture from algae and moss in a Welsh rainforest.
much as the murder of Brianna Ghey mysteriously stopped being about the climate of transphobia in the UK and became about teen access to social media, the death of Jason Arday is, equally mysteriously, no longer about racism and is becoming about free speech in academia
Very excited to learn about the Predicted Antwren, a bird that scientists figured out *should exist* based on the biogeography of a specific part of the Amazon and then went out to find it and did. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predict...
Predicted antwren - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
We have had this conversation so many times. You do not have to platform/debate obscene views that are also false. I wrote during a wave of pressure on progressives to compromise with far-right haters:
Patrick Sturgis@patricksturg.bsky.social · 2d agoHow about refuting them on theoretical and empirical grounds? That is kind of how science works. It doesn’t work by calling people names, refusing to engage with their claims and attempting to get them fired.
The idea that we need “intellectual diversity” in academia conflicts with the idea that the goal of some fields should be to learn actual truths. We don’t need to hire young earth creationists in geology departments, because the field has taught us young earth creationism is false.
Columnist Class hounding a Black academic for fun, over claims in his memoir that rudimentary research show to be true, doubling down because they've got a good anti "woke" narrative going now & falling over each other to defend the sweaty little white supremacist whose racist blog kicked it off
Jarring and poignant to come across this Jason Arday event in the upcoming Cheltenham Literature Festval programme. The festival is sponsored by The Times and Sunday Times, which led the merciless pile-on to expose Arday’s plagiarism and fabulist claims. A case of having their cake and eating it?
Gerry Hassan@gerryhassan.bsky.social · last wk.The industrial scale hounding of Jason Arday by the UK media is nearly off the chart. Figures from Newscord show 249 articles about Arday in the UK media in a matter of weeks with The Times leading the pack with 44 & Daily Telegraph at 43. A morally bankrupt industry.
The US and SpaceX are going to destroy Earth orbit, the atmosphere, and the night sky for every living thing on Earth. 🔭🧪
Space.com@space.com · 4d agoTrump signs new national space policy to enable 1,000 US rocket launches per year www.space.com/space-explor...
More broadly, the defining character of our era is "person who chose 'Contrarian' as a career but is traumatised by people disagreeing with them"
Stephen Bush@stephenkb.bsky.social · 4d agoThe thing I really hadn't expected was that racism's renaissance would be so....whiny.
Xanadu-du-du push pineapple, shake the tree Xanadu-du-du stately pleasure dome decree
I'm getting really bored of the persecuted crybully victim shit around this. You type into software. It's not an identity. The rest of us are having our work degraded and stolen for this and when these people aren't sobbing about being ostracised they're gloating about robbing us.
So we know AI helped a negligible number of students. But how many did it harm? I've crunched the raw data provided by the lead researcher, and what I've found is that ~9,500 students using AI studied less than even the *least* studious, non-AI using student. This should shock the conscience.
Benjamin Riley@benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 5d agoBoth the Economist and others suggest this study demonstrates that AI can help students. So I contacted the lead researcher to figure out how many. Answer: Out of ~26,000 kids, a total of 20. And five months after starting to use AI, only four continued to spend 65 minutes on homework. Four.
He may well have 1000 Einsteins and Mozarts working in his warehouses right now, but they can't do anything with their abilities what with having to work 18 hours a day under constant threat of being fired for taking a piss
FFS. Not that you'd know it from the headline, but the death threats (surprise!) came from people ranting about "giving into wokes", NOT the initial critics. Also, LOL at claiming he's "keeping the memory alive". As if the history-industrial complex might ever give us a break from it.
LBC@lbc.co.uk · 4d ago"My wife got death threats." The manager of Graveley Fruit Farm describes the 'intense' backlash around his Titanic-themed ride.
michael wolff’s hard drives should be seized by a guerrilla army of journalists who will actually write the fucking stories that need to be written instead of waiting for a personally advantageous moment to trickle them out
The Daily Beast@thedailybeast.bsky.social · 4d agoMichael Wolff is revealing two “red flag” letters Harp sent Trump in full.
Platonic ideal of newspaper columnist.
Mark O’Neill 🐻@radiobeartime.com · 4d agoHow the mighty have fallen CONT PAGE 21
Remembering Geoffrey Keen, born this day in 1921.
(AI actually has been used in science and medicine for decades and is incredibly good at doing things like finding cancer that can’t be seen with the human eye but that is a completely different type of AI then we’re all angry about it and we shouldn’t discuss them in the same conversations TBH)
Ben Collins@bencollins.bsky.social · 5d agoTalk to the people who would use this for dream use cases — the cancer scientists, the people who want to make material goods out of it — and they will tell you it’s either a marginally useful if unreliable trick or completely useless. It has produced 0% of the utopian products promised.
Meanwhile, in the UK, serial asset strippers with a track record of such activity are closing down stores distributing comics and magazines across the country and there’s no sign of any government response…
Jordan Collver@jordancollver.bsky.social · last wk.Popped into a random supermarket while waiting for bus in rural France and THIS was the comic book selection (and only part of it), the majority of titles I'd never even seen before. Magnifique.
Baffled that none of the spreadsheet people discourse has mentioned this incredible piece of news: windowsreport.com/microsoft-is...
