We’re starting up Astronomy on Tap Sydney! Join us for our kickoff on 8 September, 6:30pm at the Endeavour Tap Rooms on the Rocks for astronomy talks and beer! Admission is free but tickets are limited - sign up at events.humanitix.com/astronomy-on...

Astronomy on Tap - Sydney Kickoff

Fun talks about astronomy at the Endeavour Tap Rooms in the Rocks! Learn about how stars are born and die, and drink beer while you do it!

events.humanitix.com

Spellcheck just asked me to change Voigtländer to Herringbone.

Even by Astronomy Picture of the Day standards, this photo of "fire rainbow" is a stunner. apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap26080...

The overwhelming right wing sentiment is that COVID was an engineered bioweapon that was also harmless. Trump overreacted to it by shutting down the country, then engineered a drive to create a vaccine that was the real bioweapon that killed millions, and it's Joe Biden's fault.

I’ve seen a lot of my colleagues’ interactions with Claude working on research problems & it would be easier for me to accept it as a serious scientific tool if it didn’t end every single response with the LLM equivalent of “you want fries with that?” — constantly trying to goad you into asking more

Seattleites: I'm in your town tomorrow night to host a screening & discussion of Buster Keaton's The General (w/ live organ accompaniment!) as part of the Silent Movie Mondays series at the wonderful Paramount Theatre. There are tickets left, but not many. Come out! www.stubhub.com/silent-movie...

Silent Movie - Mondays Tickets

Silent Movie - Mondays tickets - Buy and sell Silent Movie - Mondays tickets at StubHub

stubhub.com

Good grief, this hits home.

In honor of #nationaltreeday, here's what Google Photos showed me when I asked for a picture of a tree.

it's national tree day today #watercolour #nationaltreeday

you're telling me a kekius maximus meme generator has zero value www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

SpaceX at $100 Would Imply Zero AI Value, Says Morgan Stanley

The selloff in SpaceX shares has driven the stock near a level that would imply investors are assigning no value to its artificial intelligence business, according to analysts at Morgan Stanley.

bloomberg.com

I think this is a big gap in software design culture. There's lots of commentary on visual design and micro-interaction, but remarkably little explicating conceptual and structural design. This section from Magic Ink is lodged in my mind. buff.ly/Bl9JwTv

part of an upcoming animated short short

@robpike.io

oh jimothy #art #graphitedrawing

Someone literally just came up to me and said “you guys should do quiz bowl again!”

Along with being one of the greatest racers of all time, Italian cycling champion Gino Bartali carried forged exit visas hidden in his handlebars and seat to Jews in hiding during WWII, & ultimately helped save an estimated 800 Jews from the Nazis. Happy #BicycleBirthday, Gino! July 18 (1914-2000)

Billionaires having much more success making Earth like Mars than the other way around

Paul Byrne@theplanetaryguy.com · 3w ago

Left: Venus, 1 March 1982 Centre: Titan, 14 January 2005 Right: Boston, 15 July 2026

Congrats we just made it impossible to come here for a PhD www.bostonglobe.com/2026/07/16/m...

Trump administration limits student visas to four years, changing longstanding policy - The Boston Globe

The new rule, which also restricts the international students’ ability to transfer schools or change majors without approval in their first year, will go into effect in mid-September.

bostonglobe.com

Robert Caro says that power doesn't corrupt, it *reveals*. AI's still-hypothetical power already reveals which jobs decision makers don't respect or value, don't believe are worth human effort or time, and don't believe require actual human judgement. Today's example: teachers.

Mashable@mashable.com · 3w ago

AI company Realbotix is piloting STEM robots for rural schools.

Nolan's "The Odyssey" is totally wrong. The real Polyphemus didn't look like that. The nerve of that man, I tell you!

Another historical inaccuracy from Nolan—IMAX had not yet been invented in the Mycenaean period, so this is not the aspect ratio that people saw in! Smh

My selfie with Sam Neill. What's interesting about this picture is that it's not a selfie with Sam Neill.

My latest @newscientist.com cartoon

I agree with Peter Gray’s criticism of Jonathan Haidt’s work. Kids today are very restricted in what they get to do by themselves or with friends. They barely go to the mall, adults supervise their sports and track their locations. Social media is all they have. Now adults want to take that too.

Can we divert 2% of the money being spent on various AI things that nobody asked for and work on making it so that I can copy and paste from a PDF without the formatting being absolutely absurd?

No serious person with any interest in the wellbeing of our species would ever consider approving this monstrosity of a constellation.

Meredith Rawls@merrdiff.bsky.social · 4w ago

Thanks, I *do* hate it www.pcmag.com/news/fcc-app...

OpenAI is one of the absolute most problematic companies of our time. The whole business model is based upon theft. Theft of intellectual property. Theft of concepts, art, music, etc. And the problem is: Once an idea goes into the matrix, provenance becomes very difficult. But you know its stolen.

CNN@cnn.com · 4w ago

Apple has sued OpenAI, accusing the company of using stolen trade secrets to develop its own yet-to-be-unveiled AI gadgets. https://cnn.it/4eXWUJO

I haven’t been social media-ing much these days, but today is this distinguished gentleman’s 12th birthday. He’s now spent 3 times more living a life of spoiled luxury than he spent at the racetrack, and I think we’re both grateful for that.

I frequently find myself explaining, often to people I don’t know, why it is that my online home is on #Mastodon, why I’m putting time and effort into building and running an instance, and why those are the best choices. So here’s my latest effort to pull all the arguments I use together in a […]