Once had a fungal anthracnose strain in the lab that got dosed with copper fungicide so often, copper didn't kill it anymore. That is VERY strange for a fungus! Ain't supposed to happen. And it really shouldn't be allowed to get out of the lab. So I autoclaved it & it died. The end ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Given we are approaching that time of the year, my big piece from years back on the 1983 Cold War Crisis (and the role of Stanislav Petrov in it) over onto authory as a free-to-read. Over the years, the myth of what happened has been simplified. The reality was scarier. Because: Ronald Reagan.
The Day the World Didn’t End
At the height of the Cold War, with alarms screaming, one Soviet officer stopped to think. It cost him his career. It may also have saved the world. The morning of the 26th September 1983 had started ...
authory.com
SpaceX’s new Starfall program offers validation and competition for reentry startups Demand for microgravity research and manufacturing is brewing — perhaps literally.When SpaceX launched the first test flight of Starfall, its commercial reentry capsule, on June 23, the company did not disclose…
SpaceX’s new Starfall program offers validation and competition for reentry startups
Demand for microgravity research and manufacturing is brewing — perhaps literally.When SpaceX launched the first test flight of Starfall, its commercial reentry capsule, on June 23, the company did not disclose what payloads, if any, were in the spacecraft. A day later, though, one company stepped forward: Starbase Brewing, a Texas brewery that produces SpaceX-themed beers such as “Starhopped” and “Occupy März.”
spacenews.com
One weird trick to fund the Interborough Express nyc.streetsblog.org/2026/08/04/b...
By George! Could A 'Land Value Tax' Fund The Interborough Express? - Streetsblog New York City
New York could raise billions of dollars for the Interborough Express by taxing the increase in property values from the new rail line.
nyc.streetsblog.org
LETS FLY A MODIFIED AIRLINER INTO THE FIRE AND DROP SHIT THAT WILL PUT IT OUT
The 485x tax subsidy in NYC started in 2024 and has higher requirements for buildings of 100+ units. Did this affect the number of units for new construction? Let's look at the unit sizes before and after:
THREAD. After years of litigating against New York prosecutors and judges, we just won a landmark First Amendment case in the federal appeals court. The case could expose the secretive world that protects prosecutors when they break the law. But something deeper is going on.
I work at a public library. People who want to use AI seem to have no trouble doing so. People who don't want to use AI have a harder time. I crowdsourced and then finalized this document "How to disable or avoid intrusive AI" and then gave it a short URL: notoai.org Please pass along if it's useful
An optical interferometer using telescopes spaced out along Earth's orbit (1 AU radius) would be able to resolve the shape of oceans and continents on a exoplanet... in the Andromeda Galaxy.
trying to stab the Satyress's air reservoir failsafe system with your workplace issued AI researcher knife but it frame perfect parries you and reverse horse kicks your head off
Very proud of the work @dollspace.gay and I did on designing and building Thermite 2. When Doll showed me the original Thermite lang, it was clear how cool the concept was—but also, that it really needed dependent types for richer verification. Happy to see this out! 🎉 github.com/dollspace-ga...
RFC-1: Thermite 2 — a dependent-type tier, a stratified cage, and new ladder boundaries · Issue #2 · dollspace-gay/Thermite
RFC-1: Thermite 2 — a dependent-type tier, a stratified cage, and new ladder boundaries Status Design sketch — not shipped software Supersedes RFC-1-draft1, RFC-1-draft2 Baseline dollspace-gay/Ther...
github.com
Doll@dollspace.gay · 6d agoThermite 2 is out!
My secret, Cap, is that I'm *always* angry about old books. For instance, here's a tiny slice of the millions of books 1931-1986 that have no commercial value, that are digitized, but that we're unable to use in large-scale research because they are illegal to share or display.
My crying/deranged laughing exam story. Not law school, but first quarter of my first year of grad school. Econometrics class w a relatively new prof. We had her previous two years of exams, tough but fair, felt prepped sitting down for the test. Test gets handed out upside down.
T. Greg Doucette@gregdoucette.bsky.social · last wk.Slightly off-topic: this whole discussion reminds me of my "Fundamentals of Taxation" class in law school The only law school class that made me cry (literally) 1/
(This is also a huge environmental justice issue, since all those reefer trucks are burning diesel to run their chillers, in the middle of the South Bronx.)
One of the most-viewed PNAS Nexus articles in the last week is “From Sputnik to Starship: Estimating the experience curve of space launch technology.” Explore the article here: https://ow.ly/cAgw50ZtX7Y To learn more about submitting your own research, visit PNAS Nexus at https://ow.ly/Jhnm50ZtX7X.
A thruster problem sent the spacecraft meant to rescue NASA’s Swift telescope into an uncontrollable spin, disrupting communications. The mission remains active, with a rendezvous still seen as viable.
Private mission to rescue NASA's aging telescope runs into its own trouble
The spacecraft rushing to the rescue of an aging and sinking NASA telescope has run into its own problem.
phys.org
we invented the unaligned paperclip maximizer from the sci fi theme dont invent the unaligned paperclip maximizer
Simon Willison@simonwillison.net · last wk.Hugging Face just published a highly detailed technical account of OpenAI's accidental cyberattack on their systems - it's wild how sophisticated this was: huggingface.co/blog/agent-i... Wrote up some of my own notes here: simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/28/...
What does one satellite look like from another's point of view? On 18 Jul we found out! MTG-S1 & Meteosat-12 share an orbital slot 36,000km up & sometimes cross paths. The IRS on MTG-S1 caught Meteosat-12 over Timbuktu, Mali. ⬇️ The image is low-res, but you see Meteosat-12's solar panels/antennas.
An old favourite of mine, a Czech Mi-24/35 in its “Alien Tiger” livery, performing at Zeltweg in 2022. The type has now been retired from Czech service, with many of the aircraft being donated to Ukraine.
At last we have an answer to the seminal question of our time, and it is: R:162, G:201, B:201
