omg I found the picture ❤️

ECP@ecppdx.bsky.social · 15h ago

Years ago I coined the milleneuve, which is a unit to measure how horrible the sky color is based on Villeneuve films. Blade Runner 2049 is around 900mn. Today is around 250 I'd say. (It's a very scientific scale.)

Hoooo boy. If I could say the thesis in a single sentence, I probably wouldn’t have needed 85,000 words to execute. Or the sentence would be just display copy? So that’s on me, I guess.

Alexandra Lange@langealexandra.bsky.social · 52m ago

Wait this is very funny and I am retroactively applying it to all my books

An analysis finds that New Mexico's measles outbreak cost $5.4 million last year. NM had 100 cases. AZ outbreak is more than 3x larger; Utah's is more than 7x larger. TX and SC are each 10x larger. Welcoming back measles is going to be very expensive. www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/...

Economic Impact of the 2025 New Mexico Measles Outbreak: Highlighting the Cost of Efforts to Prevent Future Outbreaks | Annals of Internal Medicine

Background: In 2025, the United States experienced its highest measles case count since 1992. In New Mexico, 100 confirmed measles cases (99 outbreak-related cases), including 1 death, occurred across...

acpjournals.org

Now on @sciam.bsky.social: Behold! These are the sharpest images of the sun's surface ever obtained, and they reveal something *wild*: never-before-seen whirlpools of plasma called Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities that are fundamental to solar energy flow. www.scientificamerican.com/article/spec...

Spectacular images reveal never-before-seen whirlpools on the sun

Strange whirlpools of plasma seen in the sharpest images ever captured of our star help explain the deep origins of Earth-threatening space weather and more

scientificamerican.com

Hey, you ever heard me (constantly) going on about Babylon 5? It's starting to air, in its entirety, on YouTube.

Midnight on the Firing Line | S1 E1 | Babylon 5

YouTube video by Babylon 5

youtube.com

Nome@nome.bsky.social · last yr.

Broke: Star Trek says humans will abandon all religion in the future. Woke: Dune says religion will continue to be both a source of strength and a tool of control for oppressed peoples. Bespoke: Babylon 5 says we'll get MORE religions, and Jews will have to sort out what alien foods are kosher.

It's a crime, though? Like an illegal one? Against laws?

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 22h ago

RAJU: Sen. Moreno is calling for Max Miller to resign. Do you side w/Moreno? THUNE: It's a family matter &, um, I don't have any observations beyond that Q: If a member of Congress is facing domestic abuse allegations, should they continue to serve? T: It's a House matter. It's a family issue too

The cowardice is just gobsmacking

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 22h ago

RAJU: Sen. Moreno is calling for Max Miller to resign. Do you side w/Moreno? THUNE: It's a family matter &, um, I don't have any observations beyond that Q: If a member of Congress is facing domestic abuse allegations, should they continue to serve? T: It's a House matter. It's a family issue too

That’s $120,000 per Freedom!! www.bbc.com/sport/mixed-...

UFC White House: UFC loses $30m staging Freedom 250 event at White House

UFC owners lose $30m (£22m) staging the Freedom 250 event, which was attended by US President Donald Trump, at the White House in June.

bbc.com

It’ll never not make me sad that Paul MacCready’s company, maker of human-powered airplanes, a beautiful solar powered race car, and the first modern production-level electric car…is now a preeminent weapons builder.

Jared Keller@laserwars.net · yesterday

HUGE NEWS: @noahshachtman.bsky.social reports that the US military is poised to finally award a contract for its first-ever directed energy program of record after more than 50 years of laser weapon research and development www.wired.com/story/landma...

This is cool. The Center for Scientific Integrity (which oversees @retractionwatch.com) announces the first winners of its Ctrl-Z Prize for researchers with the courage to retract their own work. 🧪 centerforscientificintegrity.org/2026/08/04/2...

The Center for Scientific Integrity announces inaugural winners of the Ctrl-Z Award for courage in retracting their own work - The Center for Scientific Integrity

The Center for Scientific Integrity is proud to announce the inaugural winners of the 2026 Ctrl-Z Award. Named for the universal keyboard shortcut for “undo,” the Ctrl-Z Award this year honors a junio...

centerforscientificintegrity.org

An oxcart broadcasts a distress call to any wolf in the sector: "We are tied to a hostile empire's trolley track by an impossible knot." Attempting rescue will doom the responders to fight an insurmountable Imperial trolley. One wolf doesn't believe in a no-win scenario and cuts the knot in half.

One of the monkeys imitates natural language writing well enough that one wolf cannot distinguish the transcript's writer as a monkey or wolf. The transcript: "If one wolf testifies against the other, but the other does not, the one testifying will be set free from the box while the other remains."

One wolf is "Kiki." The other is "Bouba." One salivates at the ringing of a bell. One wolf waits for two treats. One obeys obeys orders to give electric shocks to the monkey conducting the trolley. The monkey is actually an actor working for the experiment. One wolf sees the dress is black and blue.

One wolf will punish anyone who did not directly contribute to the experiment's creation. Every part of this experiment has been replaced, so it may not be the same experiment. The box falls in the forest, but no one is around to hear it. The wolves see only shadows projected on the wall of the box.

There are two wolves. One always lies. One controls the lever of trolley track. They're in a state of superposition inside a box. On the trolley are infinite monkeys at infinite typewriters going to an infinite hotel. The trolley must first travel halfway, but before that a quarterway, and so on...

So there's like six different expensive-nerd-dolly companies making Absolute Batman action figures, and no one's making an Absolute Wonder Woman? That's some bullshit right there.

The sounds of the words are important too. Pete Hamill once gave me a memorable tip for my ledes: always end it with a hard consonant. Makes it punchier. The copy desk didn't hear that either.

The only thing I was ever really good at was newswriting. And I always paid great attention to the rhythm of my sentences. Which is why I would have giant fights with drones on the copy desk, who could not hear the music in the words and would demolish my careful constructs. Still mad, frankly.

(Separately I have an intuition we should stop saying that something that makes us feel good is just increasing dopamine. Feeling good is way more than that, and our machinery is much more complicated—that phrasing minimizes us and it minimizes the experiences we’re talking about.)

OK, what’s dumber? Thought I left all my computer and phone charging cables at home when I arrived on this trip? And so bought replacements for delivery later today? Or, just found the cables in my stuff right now? They’re both quite lame.

Fuck that moon in particular I guess

Bleddyn Bowen@bleddb.bsky.social · 2d ago

That SpaceX Falcon 9 debris that will impact Einstein crater on 5th August: 4 metric tonnes mass 8,000 kph velocity 17 meter impact radius 100km altitude ejecta Equivalent to 3 tonnes of TNT

Counterpoint: We live in a society.

USA TODAY Opinion@usatodayopinion.usatoday.com · 2d ago

Opinion: Mamdani's idea may sound appealing, but it's NYC taxpayers who will take the hit, subsidizing discounts they may never even use.

One of the more frustrating legacies of 2020 is the idea that reporting risk factors for mortality is somehow always a slight against disabled and chronically ill people, as opposed to an essential piece of information for people in that category to assess their risk before *or after* they get sick

The New York Times@nytimes.com · 2d ago

Breaking News: Two deaths in Michigan have been linked to cyclospora. Both people who had the parasite also had underlying health issues.

this is not true. there was no conspiracy. it didn't matter whether the streetcars were publicly owned (seattle, detroit) or private (los angeles, atlanta). a thread (because i wrote a whole-ass book on this): 1/?

David Ho@davidho.bsky.social · 3d ago

Is everyone aware of the General Motors streetcar conspiracy? In the mid-20th century, auto and oil interests bought up electric streetcar systems across the US and systematically replaced them with bus routes and paved roads, funneling commuters toward private cars.

Since we don’t seem to be doing much to get this outbreak contained, and since a *lot* of people have bodies in which serious GI problems are life-threatening, this framing seems blinkered. This is a deadly outbreak, full stop. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/03/w...

Two Deaths Linked to Cyclospora Outbreak in Michigan (Gift Article)

The patients had “significant underlying health conditions” that may have contributed to their deaths, health officials said.

nytimes.com

medicine.yale.edu/news-article...

I just deleted a thing because I realized I couldn’t tell if what I was talking about had actually happened or was an internet ghost. Sorry.