tobychev @tobychev@social.cleverlibre.org

From Jay Storz, the biologist who found mice at altitudes where no mammals had previously been known to life:

“It just boggles the mind that any kind of animal, let alone a warm-blooded mammal, could be surviving and functioning in that environment. When you experience it all firsthand, it even further impresses upon you: How in God’s name is anything living up there?”

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.22.537927v1.full #life #nature

My daughter is baking cookies, Silent Night is playing, I've got some last minute food to pick up despite some frustration about the lines and rising costs at the grocery store. There's a party tonight at my cousin's. Christmas Eve is in full swing. On my Instagram feed an 8 yo #Gaza boy bleeds out from his neck in his mother's arms as she wails for mercy. May we never get used to this. #2023 #contrast

So, what makes a good theory?

One answer comes from Larry Loudan, who said that "science is essentially a problem-solving activity", and "the first and essential acid test for any theory is whether it provides satisfactory solutions to important problems."

@kallekn https://westcountryvoices.co.uk/polish-explainer-what-is-the-kerfuffle-about-the-polish-public-broadcaster-about/

I think that's the newest I could give you. Everythins is still in on the move, I am not even trying to predict how the things will settle.

However the whole Polish media scene will probably need to reorient itself

When it comes to TV stations, we had three major media conglomerates: TVP, TVN, which is very critical of PiS and Polsat, that aimed to position itself as the impartial one, but recently was growing closer and closer to PiS.

2023 Headline of the Year nominee (September)

I’m struggling to deal with this version of the internet, where hosts are removing people for voluntarily nudity, but not removing nazis.

And a big part of that is because banks & credit card processing companies won’t allow nudity and sex stuff but are totally ok with hate speech.

From a risk perspective this is asinine - very few people have ever died as a result of naked tits, while we’re watching people be murdered in hate attacks daily.

Everything is fucked and backwards.

The courts vs democracy? Frankly, I find all this “let the people decide” talk remarkably backwards. The people decided, Trump lost, and attempted an auto-coup. January 6 was the anti-democratic part. In Colorado, the system didn’t conduct a pre-emptive strike – it responded. 8/

Mathematical physicist Cécile DeWitt-Morette was born #OTD in 1922. She made foundational contributions to the study of Feynman functional integrals, organized the first American conference on general relativity (playing an indirect but important role in the eventual detection of gravitational waves), and started the Les Houches Summer School.
Images: UT-Austin

😡

Cool tool! MastodonContentMover

'a command-line tool that downloads your posts from one Mastodon instance, saving them as a set of files on your computer, and then re-posts them on any other Mastodon instance.

[so that] Mastodon users [can] move content they value when migrating from one instance to another, which is not currently possible within Mastodon itself.'

https://mastodoncontentmover.github.io/

Oral sex is the offspring of democracy. Fortunately, God protected Russians from this scourge by creating a throat cancer virus that is transmitted specifically during oral sex. https://t.co/pcMbSuze69

The internet is a big place. We can all have our own fedi. Each of us can have whatever kind of experience, community, connections, etc, we want here.

That’s the beauty of this place. There is enough room for everyone.

Be wary of anyone who tries to force you to be in community with them because of their myopic view of what online spaces should be.

We can make different decisions. We can make better decisions.

Water gets in cracks in rocks, freezes, breaks them open. Maybe our grief - our covid grief, our genocide grief, our climate grief, our ecocide grief - is like this.

#GhostApples - It's an unusual phenomenon where freezing rain coats rotting apples before they fall, then when the apple turns mushy it eventually slips out and leaves the icy shell still hanging on the tree

Here's a photo I bet you haven't seen before.

Buran test article OK-ML1 lifted by the mate-demate device at the Zhukovskiy airfield before being attached to the Myasishchev VM-T Atlant (seen in the background).

After mating, the Atlant will ferry the orbiter to Baikonur.

source: "The Energia blasts off", Mashinostroyeniye, 1990

Title slide for a talk I'm giving tomorrow, because why not.

🎄 Die Hard är ingen julfilm. Bruce Willis smyger runt i ett torn på natten och undviker Alan Rickman. Det är en Harry Potterfilm. 🎄

If you are serious about giving an intellectual a prize for their work, and then you don't like something they write, you should value your own former judgment enough to consider it might be you, not them, that is wrong. "Masha Gessen’s Hannah Arendt Prize has been canceled because of their essay on Gaza" https://lithub.com/masha-gessens-hannah-arendt-prize-has-been-cancelled-because-of-their-essay-on-gaza/

Thoughtful commentary here from Dr. Radchenko. Make sure to read to the end, lest you be triggered by something in the beginning or middle. (Come to think of it, that’s good advice for anything longer than an unexpanded tweet.) https://twitter.com/DrRadchenko/status/1734592206181134714

Abelardo captured on camera at least three soldiers firing into the ground near civilians. The army denies this.