LilacSunday
@lilacsunday.bsky.social
History, art, science, genealogy, California, and wildlife. Breast cancer survivor. Profile 📷: Self Portrait of Sarah Goodridge, 1830.
»WhatsApp messages show talk of wiping Israel off the map, support for the Iranian regime and claims that anti-Jewish hostility is understandable« 🎁 link (no paywall)
Inside the Green Party group chats that discussed ‘killing Zionists’
WhatsApp messages show talk of wiping Israel off the map, support for the Iranian regime and claims that anti-Jewish hostility is understandable
thetimes.com
OTD: There Will Come Soft Rains. "Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down." www.rogerebert.com/mzs/silhouet...
Silhouettes and Warnings: On Reading Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" On the Exact Day When It's Set
The events of Ray Bradbury's short story "There Will Come Soft Rains" occur today: August 4, 2026.
rogerebert.com
June 10, 1692: Bridget Bishop, the first victim of the Salem Witch Panic, is hanged on Gallows Hill. 📷: The April 19, 1692 warrant for the apprehension of Giles Corey, Mary Warren, Abigail Hobbs, and Bridget Bishop on suspicion of witchcraft.
Just had a delightful "what the hell is that" moment. A Yellow-breasted Chat was using my hummingbird feeder as a perch. 20 years in this house and I've never seen one, I had to look it up. 📷 Kent Jensen, Macauley Library, Cornell University
"...one mushroom vendor sells psilocybin-infused chocolate bars called “Dolosnax,” with an illustration of the park on the label." I say this lovingly, as a suburban cannabis-using cat lady: don't buy psychedelic mushrooms from strangers in SF's Dolores Park. www.sfgate.com/sf-culture/a...
San Francisco's Dolores Park has a whole secret marketplace
"We're just trying to make a living out here."
sfgate.com
Speaking of King Charles II, New Haven Connecticut has streets named after the three regicides who are known to have fled to the New England colonies: Edward Whalley, William Goffe, and John Dixwell. King Charles II sent men to find Whalley and Goffe, but my Puritan ancestors protected them.
To commemorate the Restoration of the English Monarchy on May 29, 1660, here's a snippet of the charter granted by King Charles II to Connecticut in 1662, granting the colony autonomy and territory that reached westward to the Pacific Ocean. Good times. Text at avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century...
"He's been a stray cat too long, he'll never adjust to life as an indoor cat." Aforementioned former stray cat below, confidently allowing himself to be photographed relaxing on my pillow after dinner.
This is fascinating and feels very important and we live in the future yadda yadda, and I still feel deeply unsettled at the idea of "...making the human a first-class node in the computing network, with the same kind of low-latency, high-fidelity participation..." spectrum.ieee.org/wetour-robot...
The Future of Physical AI Isn’t Smarter Robots, It’s Smarter Interfaces
Putting the human back into the computing loop, one neural signal at a time
spectrum.ieee.org
"“Nearly anyone can get into robotics, which is the true holy grail,” Huang tells me. Making it possible for people to control robots with spoken or typed commands, or by demonstrating an action, is the “critical unlock for robots in society..."” It's moving so fast. www.wired.com/story/i-gave...
I Gave My OpenClaw Agent a Physical Body
The coding skills of AI models are about to make it much easier to build and deploy robots.
wired.com
You win, hummingbirds. Traffic dropped at two feeders so I just refilled one feeder. Big mistake! Due to swiftly savage territoriality, hummingbirds per feeder is exponential. 1 feeder = 1 hummingbird chasing off all other hummingbirds; 2 feeders = 5 hummingbirds feeding simultaneously.
Hummingbirds at Feeder Interaction
Alt: Not my gif, but it's a hilarious close-up slow-motion video of a hummingbird in flight extending its legs to pull another hummingbird off a feeder.
static.klipy.com
Worn out by Viking raids, King Aethelred attempted at the beginning of the 11th century to mobilise society by minting some very special and extremely rare coins with Christian motifs. Two of them have been found in Jutland, Denmark.
I'm wondering how gasoline rationing would work this time around. During the 1970s gas shortages, people could buy gas on alternating days based on the last digit of their license plate. This was easily gamed by switching license plates between cars, I wonder if digital records would nix that.
This is disturbing. If the goal is preventing "long-term structured damage to our nation’s agricultural base", how is paying farmers to tear down orchards preferable to, say, using that money to find another market for 50,000 tons of food?
SFGATE@sfgate.com · 6mo agoDel Monte Foods shuttered its Modesto and Hughson cannery plants in April.
You know what day it is? We almost forgot. Yes it’s your annual reminder that Yoda was infact a medieval monk. (Smithfield Decretals at the British Library). #maythe4thbewithyou #starwarsday
The Star Wars Day x Medieval Monday mash up that no-one asked for or wanted... May the Fourth be with you. All images available on Digital Bodleian: MS. Douce 178, fol. 049v; MS. Bodl. 264, fol. 79r; MS. Bodl. 264, fol. 21v; MS. Bodl. 264, fol. 79v #MedievalMonday
Are folks who were vaccinated decades ago overconfident in our own & herd immunity against the measles? I'm 58, I requested an MMR titer & it showed "equivocal" immunity against the measles & mumps. I thought I and we were safer. My doc recommended another dose, which I just received.
Reminds one of the legend of the doomed Queen Catherine Howard running down the hallway at Hampton Court Palace crying out to King Henry VIII for mercy.
The Wall Street Journal@wsj.com · 6mo agoHe waited more than an hour in the West Wing lobby to see if Trump would save his job, but to no avail. Inside the Navy secretary's sudden dismissal: 🔗 on.wsj.com/42ssUhS
1,600 years ago, someone went to the afterlife with a copy of the catalogue of ships from the Iliad. 🏺 It's got me wondering what written work, if any, I'd want to have tucked in my pocket when I go. www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a...
Archaeologists Unearth a Papyrus Fragment From the 'Iliad' Tucked Inside the Wrappings of a 1,600-Year-Old Egyptian Mummy
The excerpt from Homer's epic poem features his catalog of ships, a famous passage listing the Greek forces that sailed to Troy. It may be the first Greek literary text found in the context of mummifi...
smithsonianmag.com
Greetings and happy #420 from California! 🥬 I love a feel-good story about tech entrepreneurs using their power for good. “We just saw all these people wanted to buy weed, all these people wanted to sell weed, and it wasn’t working,” Lee said. “None of it worked.” www.sfgate.com/cannabis/art...
How 2 engineers quietly built a $1B California cannabis behemoth
"We essentially become this utility company."
sfgate.com
(Un)Happy #TaxDay in America! In 1944, LIFE Magazine's Alfred Eisenstaedt took pictures of stressed American taxpayers at an IRS information center in New York. The image below looks like a still from a movie about a woman who tried to beat Bette Davis at something. www.life.com/history/unha...
So many chickens! Malevolent, whimsical, surrealist, abstract, anthropomorphic, nightmare fuel...go on, click that chicken link.
Erika Hall@erikahall.bsky.social · 7mo agoTime to paint a chicken! You can behold the chickens here: chicken.pics I encourage you to send the link to anyone who just needs to stare at a wall of chickens for a while.
"...it invites us to embrace a deeper, 7-dimensional understanding of the very fabric of our reality." This feels like a good time to re-read The Doors of Perception. phys.org/news/2026-04...
The secrets of black holes and the Higgs mass could be hidden in a 7-dimensional geometry
One of the greatest mysteries of modern physics, the "black hole information paradox," might have finally found an elegant solution, and the answer could also reveal the origins of the mass of fundame...
phys.org
Rancho Gordo is a trademark bully, they are sending cease and desist letters to people who combine the generic words "bean" and "club". Acquiring trademarks for basic words has become abusive. They aren't THE bean club, they are a bean club. Story at quoted 🎁 link below.
MathIsLife@damianmolinari.bsky.social · 7mo agoGift article: www.sfchronicle.com/food/article...
Here’s a fun riff on the desert island actor game. Here’s your dilemma: If you only have a 5-year stretch of films starting with 41-45, then 46-50, and on to now (ending with 2021-2025), which clump would you pick? My final 3 would be 86-90, 96-2000, and 2011-15 But I’m going 2011-15.
March 20, 1413: King Henry IV dies in Westminster Abbey's Jerusalem Chamber. "It hath been prophesied to me many years, I should not die but in Jerusalem; Which vainly I supposed the Holy Land: But bear me to that chamber; there I'll lie; In that Jerusalem shall Harry die." 2 Henry IV 4,5
