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troisoiseaux) wrote2025-07-11 09:38 pmA Brief History of Montmaray - Michelle Cooper
( Footnotes (100% spoilers) )
ranunculus) wrote2025-07-11 04:39 pmUpdate
yourlibrarian) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
common_nature2025-07-11 04:19 pmBonneville Dam
After returning to the 84/30 we ended up at the Bonneville Dam in search of a bathroom! It was a good stop though as the view (and sound) of the dam was impressive. ( Read more... )
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bruce_schneier_feed) wrote2025-07-11 09:04 pmSquid Dominated the Oceans in the Late Cretaceous
New research:
One reason the early years of squids has been such a mystery is because squids’ lack of hard shells made their fossils hard to come by. Undeterred, the team instead focused on finding ancient squid beaks—hard mouthparts with high fossilization potential that could help the team figure out how squids evolved.
With that in mind, the team developed an advanced fossil discovery technique that completely digitized rocks with all their embedded fossils in complete 3D form. Upon using that technique on Late Cretaceous rocks from Japan, the team identified 1,000 fossilized cephalopod beaks hidden inside the rocks, which included 263 squid specimens and 40 previously unknown squid species.
The team said the number of squid fossils they found vastly outnumbered the number of bony fishes and ammonites, which are extinct shelled relatives of squids that are considered among the most successful swimmers of the Mesozoic era.
“Forty previously unknown squid species.” Wow.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
cosmolinguist) wrote2025-07-11 10:06 pmAh, but we respect the old ways
"I wasn't expecting you to know the words to a song that I don't at Goths on a Field!" D just said.
I wasn't either. I'm here because I love doing anything with him and I didn't want to be away from him all weekend (especially after I was away the precious two days!). But I don't like camping and I don't like a lot of goth music.
But this evening has been a lot of folk and vaudeville kind of things. The song I knew, sung so amazingly by The Midsommars, I know as "Magpie" from the amazing Unthanks album Mount the Air.
squirmelia) wrote2025-07-11 09:13 pmMudlarking - 30 - Unicorn and ladybirds
A man asked me what I was looking for and I told him just bits of pottery and showed him the piece in my hand and he showed me the pipes he'd collected and said he's like a child, has to pick things up, but then doesn't know what to do with them. I told him I'm making a mosaic. I later found his collection of pipes abandoned on the foreshore, so I suppose he decided to leave them.
Wildlife on the foreshore included a fluffy big chick of some kind, maybe a baby seagull, and a ladybird, as well as a unicorn.
Of course, the day after that, ladybirds took over London and halted cricket matches and the skies were dotted red with a loveliness of ladybirds.
musesfool) wrote2025-07-11 03:20 pm
the read on the speed-meter says
So we'll see how this goes on Tuesday. Keep your fingers crossed that it doesn't completely wreck my kitchen!
Speaking of wrecking my kitchen, my current HGTV viewing is "Help! I wrecked my house!" which I'm enjoying, but oh my god, the sheer hubris of some of these mediocre white men, who think they can demo a kitchen or a bathroom down to the studs and then figure out how to put in a new one, and then have to call Jasmine because of course they can't. I don't understand these people, tbh. There is nothing wrong with asking a trained professional to come in and do that kind of work, especially if you're not particularly handy. (And even you are handy in the "can change a washer in the faucet" variety, what makes you think you can install a shower from the ground up??? WTF?) On the other hand, I am really sympathetic to the folks who did hire a contractor who turned out to be shady and didn't do the work properly and stiffed them of their money to boot!
In other news, I am now on vacation and very excited about it! Except shit, I forgot to set up my out of office message. I will have to log back in and do that.
*
oursin) wrote2025-07-11 07:40 pmThat There Dr Oursin was at a conference again
This time it was online, in Teams, and worked a bit better than some Team events I've attended, or maybe I'm just getting used to it.
A few hiccups with slides and screen sharing, but not as many as there might have been.
Possibly we would rather attend a conference not in our south-facing sitting-room on a day like today....
But even so it was on the whole a good conference, even if some of the interdisciplinarity didn't entirely resonate with me.
And That There Dr oursin was rather embarrassingly activating the raised hand icon after not quite every panel, but all but one. And, oddly enough, given that that was not particularly the focus of the conference, all of my questions/comments/remarks were in the general area of medical/psychiatric history, which I wouldn't particularly have anticipated.
conuly) wrote2025-07-12 01:52 pmTrying to read Dogs of War
bruce_schneier_feed) wrote2025-07-11 04:06 pmTradecraft in the Information Age
Long article on the difficulty (impossibility?) of human spying in the age of ubiquitous digital surveillance.
antisoppist) wrote2025-07-11 04:35 pmListened to some stuff
1977 by Sarah Wooley
Which is a play about Angela Morley composing the music for Watership Down. Before transitioning, Angela Morley had written and arranged music for the Goon Show and wrote the theme tune to Hancock's Half Hour, and the play begins when Malcolm Williamson, Master of the Queen's Music is overwhelmed with writing music for the Queen's Silver Jubilee and has totally forgotten he is supposed to also be writing the soundtrack to Watership Down. Several times in this play people say something like "Oh God, the rabbits!" Malcolm Williamson is really not in a good place and stops answering the door and then runs away to the Carmargue with his (male) publisher, leaving not very many minutes of not arranged music with the symphony orchestra and the recording studio booked for something like 10 days' time. And people go "oh shit" and "the only person who can do this is Angela Morley" and go and grovel and promise it's not going to be about her, it's all for the sake of the rabbits and persuade her to just watch the film, no strings, and of course she does it and it's brilliant.
Limelight: Pretender Prince
about Bonnie Prince Charlie and the 1745 Jacobite rebellion
This is part drama and part author (Colin MacDonald) telling us why he has dramatised it the way he has, and part interjections from historians, which worked much better across all the episodes than I thought it would the first time the drama was interrupted by the writer or the historians. Bonnie Prince Charlie doesn't come out of it all very well. The only Stuart history I did at school (in England) was James I to Civil War and death of Charles I (A-level) so all I really know about that bit comes from folk songs. So it was good and I enjoyed it.
As it's a Limelight drama it might be available as a podcast other than on BBC Sounds which now won't let you listen to it outside the UK. I've liked a lot of the Limelight ones, though they tend to be tense thrillers and not about Bonnie Prince Charlie, but I dislike the way BBC Sounds views all of them as a series and is now telling me to continue listening to my "next episode", which is about the CIA and not at all the same thing.
*You listened to a play. Now listen to another play that was on at the same time the next day.
marthawells) wrote2025-07-11 10:27 amTwo new interviews
https://psychopomp.com/fantasy/issue97/interview-with-world-fantasy-finalists-part-one/
And in Scientific American:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/were-light-years-away-from-true-artificial-intelligence-says-murderbot/
minoanmiss) wrote in agonyaunt2025-07-11 10:43 am
daily_otter_feed) wrote2025-07-11 12:12 pmWhat Is This Magic?
Via Seattle Aquarium - now, the aquarium didn’t want to just show you a cute picture, they wanted to tell you this:
If you’ve ever been to the Seattle Aquarium, you’ve seen the impact of policy that protects vulnerable species.
Sea otters (like Mishka here) were once on the brink of extinction with as little as 1,000–2,000 otters remaining in the U.S. population. Now, thanks to laws like the Endangered Species Act (ESA), sea otter populations are recovering—but that could change with recent threats to this vital legislation.
Currently, the ESA has saved 99% of species listed on it from extinction. Let's make sure it stays that way. Contact your federal legislators in both chambers of congress and urge them to protect and strengthen the ESA, not weaken it. We've made it easy with three simple steps and a template to follow when contacting your representatives.
I’ll contact my reps if you contact yours!
squirmelia) wrote2025-07-11 12:00 pmMudlarking - 29 - mud
There were quite a lot of tourists about, as it's close to the Tower of London. I watched one man skip over the muddy patches with more ease than I did, while talking loudly on his phone.
I found little bits of Bellarmine jugs and some combware and Westerwald stoneware, and some colourful sherds.
I didn't pick up a vape that said “Lost Mary” on it, nor a large chunk of a cup or a saucer or something, but I almost did.
Low tide arrived and I was getting hungry so walked to Blackfriars, passing Queenhithe where there was a man on the foreshore and I watched as his foot plunged into the mud far deeper than mine had and he swore loudly and pulled his foot out, his shoe entirely covered in gloopy mud. The tide had come in far enough then that I wondered how he was going to get back to land, maybe over a fence or through the water.
andrewducker) wrote2025-07-11 12:00 pm- ai,
- art,
- china,
- epicfail,
- europe,
- fantasy,
- funny,
- games,
- glasgow,
- graffiti,
- incompetence,
- links,
- ohforfuckssake,
- photos,
- regulation,
- scifi,
- security,
- sign,
- solarpower,
- technology,
- viaswampers
Interesting Links for 11-07-2025
- 1. Everything tech giants will hate about the EU's new AI rules
- (tags:ai technology regulation Europe )
- 2. Photos: The Scale of China's Solar Power Projects
- (tags:solarpower photos china )
- 3. What kind of video games do different fantasy races make?
- (tags:games funny fantasy )
- 4. Fake signs and graffiti, frequently science-fiction related, from Glasgow
- (tags:Glasgow scifi graffiti sign art funny viaSwampers )
- 5. The Marks & Spencer hack was down to TCS having *terrible* security processed on their helpdesk.
- (tags:security epicfail OhForFucksSake incompetence )