Steuard Jensen

One remarkable thing about this to me is that Uranus passing Neptune like this only happens once every 171 years (playing out over about 40 years or so as shown). If Uranus had been discovered just a few decades later (than 1781), the next chance to discover Neptune this way wasn't until the 1990s!

The internet can be pretty gullible about tech products, but congrats to everyone who called exactly what this was going to be used for from the first moment they saw it.

This is interesting! As drawn, "light water" seems to be just a hydroxide ion: OH-. But I'd claim just taking out the proton isn't right: if you "remove a neutron from a proton", you should get a *positron* (& neutrino). So this should be water with a positronium in place of an H: pretty cool!

Farewell to Walter Koenig, who did an absolutely phenomenal job playing the mostly-villain telepath Alfred Bester on Babylon 5.

please please vote before election day, and tell your circles to. Republican mayors and governors are watching this unfold and getting ideas.

Bolsonaro-friendly mayors appear to be sabotaging public transport on Election Day. Buses aren’t running in Lula-friendly areas, flights and ferries mysteriously canceled. Traffic lights have gone out and people’s power cut in Salvador, indigenous people’s travel restricted

Kansas Dem Sen. nominee Adam Hamilton on trans rights: “I don’t think we should take a small group of people and bully them, pick on them, and hurt them. I understand one thing really clearly when it comes to transgender people, and that is Jesus told me I was to love my neighbor as I love myself”

OBAMA: He's got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory. It's gold everywhere.

This whole... poem? essay? musing? is really something. It's good. www.mattmoberg.net/available/i-...

As we approach the midterms, remember that the Alt National Park Service is a merch sales operation claiming without evidence to be a group of federal employees, and is not a genuine source of news about elections of any kind. Please get your election info from a local, reputable source.

Enormous news. A melanoma vaccine, one of the most deadly cancers out there. Science is good and helpful and there should be more of it. www.washingtonpost.com/health/2026/...

Once mass spam texts were made legal, younger donors vanished, leaving a grassroots fundraising machine that subsists on squeezing vulnerable seniors, some of whom give hundreds of times a day. It’s a horrific model. Consultants get generationally wealthy, and the party hollows out its future.

[P] This legit made me tear up a little bit; every single person in this story seems so damn nice

I continue to find Roger Ebert's love of movies inspirational. He of course loved good movies more than others. But he did not only love good movies. He loved movies, full stop. I try to extend that same grace to the things I love. They don't need to be perfect to be worthy of love. Neither do I.

"When idealism runs out, spite will keep you going until your wellspring of idealism can refill itself" is one of those things people don't appreciate enough, IMO

Remember Hoop-snakes? Well they found a species that actually does something similar in real life, and it's pretty amazing to watch (www.sciencenews.org/article/tiny...) This is from Science News, a magazine every reasonable person should subscribe to, sez I.

It’s :q! .

In their design of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1786), Jefferson and Madison declined to make Christian belief a requirement to hold office, and explicitly said that if a Muslim could get elected, there should be no barrier to their holding office.

Go to your camera roll and search "boat" and post one that you like

This is Tommy. Tommy had a question about my allegiances. Listen to the end to hear about his.

The part of this clip where he points out that gas was cheap the day before he started bombing Iran could be run on its own as an attack ad by the Democrats

When Grammy-winning musician Rhiannon Giddens begins playing “Old Corn Liquor,” a traditional Black American folk tune, acclaimed Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man recognizes similarities to Chinese pentatonic music and spontaneously joins in. The joy on their faces says it all.

Maybe we can stop pretending AI is useful for student learning “if used properly” and start focusing attention and energy on mitigating its massive educational harm? Call me crazy.

You know, the thing is, I had drafted this piece a month ago, and then never published it, because I thought maybe it was too mean.

perfect ad for the spooky season..

Ford Falcon

"They doxxed the Prodigy crab" is something that will forever live in my brain

I’m ok. Make no mistake: this is an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement. For ten years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation. I will not be silenced.

There is absolutely no viable path forward for this country that doesn’t hinge on extreme accountability for everyone involved in this administration. They’re going to whine about politicization and credulous media types will echo them, but the thing is, they’ve committed tons of obvious crimes!

why they doing so much saruman shit, i was told bad guys never think they're the bad guys but these days i'm really tested

You know what I'm going to say: do not watch video of someone being killed for any reason if you don't absolutely have to, and if you do *genuinely* have to, ie for reporting, use every psychological mitigation technique possible: synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/803314.html

OMG. This is so typical academia. Sigh. Donna Strickland was only an associate professor when she won the Nobel Prize in Physics. #AcademicSky

Okay so we have a number now: the Onion is officially 6 months ahead of reality.

🧵 Attention, Fellow SFF Artists and Authors -- here is my response to Must Read Magazines, after they presented an Asimov's art contract expecting me to waive all Moral Rights and Copyright to my art. And, I would strongly advise the following to my fellow pros…. 1/

Asimov's trying to grab all the rights to @donatoarts.bsky.social's work is egregious but it's not in isolation, either. Other publishers are attempting other rights grabs and restrictions that they weren't doing a couple of years ago. Why? Because fuck you, that's why. Remember the power of "no."

ah damn, RIP Margaret Hamilton. she took safety-critical software engineering seriously, and got people to the moon and back. news.mit.edu/2026/margare...

Also it is WILD to me that actually zero of the people of unknown gender were admitted. Just thinking about Mx19's college application process and uhhhhhhhhhh nonbinary people are not exactly UNREPRESENTED. Particularly at nerdy/neurodivergent colleges which, historically, was very much Chicago??

“In short, the degrees of male students are enhanced by the luster of a selective process to which they were not equally exposed.” 🔥

Just like that: poof & gone. RIP *all* of NSF social, behavioral and economic research (including psyc & cogneuro). I’m speechless.

We decided last minute to use new equipment for this week's physics lab. I took some sample data and wrote up the manual this morning. Frantic text from the prof teaching lab tonight: I didn't think to make sure the lab balance could measure the big new masses! My kitchen scale is now in the lab.

Reach out to your math friends and offer to get coffee. For real

One thing I find endlessly funny about the rise of AI is that it has revealed that there is a large number of people who believe that the reason they wrote essays at school or university is their teachers were desperately waiting for them to provide a definite answer to “Lear: what’s up with him?”

A fun fact about neutrinos is that they come in three “flavors” (types) and also in three masses and you would think that this means each flavor has its own mass and you would be absolutely wrong about that.