I want to pay taxes for roads I don't drive on, schools for children I don't have, training for doctors to do operations I will never need, and I don't understand how hard it is for some people to fathom that society, humanity is caring about things beyond one's own personal benefit.

"Kew Gardens has had a weather station since 1871. This July was, based on third party analysis of Met Office data collected at the site, the first calendar month on record where no rainfall was measured at Kew."

London's first month without rain

Plus: There's nowhere to bury the dead • London wants to keep its money • When will it stop being so damn hot • Who is to blame for turning off the air conditioning in the tower block?

londoncentric.media

Medieval bat in stained glass at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge

Here's who online anonymity is for. expression.fire.org/p/in-defense...

PARADISE LOST - dashare.zone ADMIN

I am never trying to hurt you: everything we do is to keep you safe because we love you; for the love of God, fireworks cannot hurt you and you have no need to be afraid of them.

Sarah Z@sarahz.bsky.social · last wk.

Your pet magically gains the ability to perfectly understand your human language for the length of one sentence. You can say one sentence to your pet, and they will understand your meaning and retain the information forever. After that, they will go back to only speaking pet. What do you say?

Woke up, saw the news and knew it was time to write about the creepy day I spent with Jared Leto, who now stands accused by several women of sexual wrongdoing open.substack.com/pub/heawood/...

The day I spent with Jared Leto

and how we ended up in a cupboard, buttons undone, "regifting the gift"

open.substack.com

This is just to say I have OCRed the text thet was in tne arch:ve and whicb yov were prabaldy seamhing for "breahtast" Fargme ms fheg mem debo:w5 sb ?mccf mmb 5c oc1b

Time for another ‘elephant done by a medieval artist that had never seen one’ - 15th century, BnF Français 24381, f. 179v

Morning

Each time I start a new Python-based project I think, "Surely, this project I won't use duckdb. I don't need a lightning-fast vector-optimised columnar database system. I can use pandas." And every project I'm like "Actually, I do need duckdb. I really do."

Twice a year, Hawai'i experiences a strange moment where the sun appears to be exactly overhead & anything that is completely vertical casts no shadow. Let's learn about Lāhainā Noon, subsolar points & 'Kau ka lā i ka lolo', meaning "the sun rests on the brains."

This week’s brilliant ‘elephant done by a medieval artist that had never seen one’ - 14th century, BnF Français 22545, f. 66v

An interesting and thoughtful thread about the national year of reading and this giveaway.

Mark Bradley@markbradley.bsky.social · 3w ago

Have many thoughts about this and the wider Year of Reading. Want to say this up front: - I really like Impossible Creatures (& Rundell herself seems ace) so this isn’t about that. - I think this is a lovely idea - Whilst it’s nice, I think that this initiative is a little misguided

Rise and grind

it's the biggest technological revolution of our lifetimes and you almost never hear about it (because it threatens to bankrupt many of the fossil fuel interests who currently run our society)

lines down@linesdown.bsky.social · 3w ago

The growth of solar energy in Pakistan

THE PEOPLE’S PRINCESS!!!!!! #ENGARG

It’s the 508th anniversary today of a woman starting to dance spontaneously in the streets of Strasbourg. Soon, she was not alone, and by the middle of August, hundreds of people were dancing uncontrollably in public place, and starting to drop dead 🧵

"This Whole Thing Smacks Of Gondor," i holler as i overturn my uncle's funeral pyre and turn the 4th Age of Man into the 4th Age of Shit

@medievalmarginalia.com hi! Just wanted to say how much I LOVED the anchoress talk yesterday. One of the most interesting talks I've been to in a long time. I hope you manage to give the talk you hinted at about female devotional practice - I'd be super keen to learn more!

Horrible new bullshit from the sea every time. It’s never ‘oh we found a new pink fish that is so happy’ it’s always stuff like this, the crush-depth screw-headed dongwongler, and it’s got to have big long creepy bits. Sick of the ocean tbh.

Oh, have I not told this one here? Okay. So Grandma had The Charisma.

Hipster Viking Amy@lasrina.bsky.social · 4w ago

Summoning @tkingfisher.com to tell the story of her grandma getting like five marriages annulled.

I have a few but this one sticks. Not even sure why.

Jodi Pickens 🏳️‍🌈🖖✨@jodipickens.bsky.social · 4w ago

Art question 🎨 What painting, photograph, sculpture, or piece of visual art has stayed with you long after you first saw it? Not necessarily your favorite. The one that lingered.

This was life changing honestly

Jodi Pickens 🏳️‍🌈🖖✨@jodipickens.bsky.social · 4w ago

Art question 🎨 What painting, photograph, sculpture, or piece of visual art has stayed with you long after you first saw it? Not necessarily your favorite. The one that lingered.

On my way, Clacton.

I was in two intensive week-long workshops this year with neuroscientists, philosophers and computer scientists and not *one* thought LLMs are conscious, or that anything is ‘mysterious’ in a model trained on scifi and Internet chat doing woo-woo musing about self-consciousness. And do you know why?

Drew Harwell@drewharwell.com · last mo.

Claude's ‘spiritual bliss’ attractor state features a lot of woo woo talk and blue spiral 🌀 emojis @nitasha.bsky.social www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Had to go and find it again because it’s still so good