www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/o...
Let's hope we can
06.10.2025 17:46
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We have now seen 3 interstellar objects passing through the solar system--and each is distinctly different.
Comet 3I/ATLAS is by far the biggest, fastest & oldest: probably older than our solar system, making it the most ancient object we've ever seen up close. 🧪🔭
bigthink.com/starts-with-...
The Queen of the Night (Epiphyllum oxypetalum) blooms once a year at night.
Potential CME en route with impact 2025-6-12 at 12 UTC. I’m not expecting much from this impact, IF we even see it at L1 at all, but just so you are aware, we may see some solar wind enhancement.
#heliophysics
Climate change is driving up peak summer temperatures across the country. Las Vegas broke temperature records last summer. Now, the region is fighting the heat with a simple solution: more trees. via @knpr.org
I ran an experiment, simultaneously posting articles on Bluesky and X, and then testing to see how many people actually clicked and read them. The numbers on Bluesky are higher, both because the X algorithm downranks journalism, and because Bluesky attracts readers, not just shitposters.
Agencies from Social Security to the IRS store sensitive data on millions of Americans. Here's what the government knows about us – and what's at risk as DOGE seeks access to the data.
Donold is now classifying protests at Tesla dealerships as ‘domestic terrorism.’
Protest at a Tesla dealership and you get arrested as a terrorist.
But attack the Capitol and you get a pardon.
“I said NO Picture 📸” 😅
45% waxing crescent Moon, photographed on 2024 01 17
Nikon D800, Skywatcher 200P
Processed in GIMP to bring out the mineral colours; blue for titanium deposits, red for iron.
Yet more evidence that people can’t accurately detect well-prompted AI writing (and AI can’t accurately detect well-prompted AI writing, either). arxiv.org/pdf/2407.08853
The smallest versions can run on my laptop. This is a pretty big leap, because the only reasoning (test-time compute) models so far have been from Google and OpenAI. You can try it: chat.deepseek.com
It's fun to see the internal monologue of a reasoning model in full
Trump Boys Take Turns Shouting ‘Penis’ At Inauguration
Trump Boys Take Turns Shouting ‘Penis’ At Inauguration
Today, honor a King, not a Felon. #mlkday2025
Trump Rolls Onto Capitol Steps In Bulletproof Sphere
Trump Rolls Onto Capitol Steps In Bulletproof Sphere
Comet, Aldebaran and Mars over Stonehenge ✨💫☄️
A spiral galaxy with a wide, oval-shaped disc. It has a shining spot at the centre from which two curving, pale red spiral arms emerge, wrapping once each around the galaxy. They’re surrounded by a whirl of bright threads and patches of dust, with spots of star formation scattered throughout. The glow of the disc fades smoothly into the background where some patches of dust can be seen, as well as foreground stars.
Image of a galaxy on the black background of space. The galaxy is a very oblong, blue disk that extends from left to right at an angle (from about 10 o’clock to 5 o’clock). The galaxy has a small bright core at the center. There is an inner disk that is clearer, with speckles of stars scattered throughout. The outer disk of the galaxy is whiteish-blue, and clumpy, like clouds in the sky. There are different colored dots, distant galaxies, speckled among the black background of space surrounding the galaxy.
Two spiral galaxies take the shape of a colorful beaded mask that sits above the nose. The galaxy at left, IC 2163, is smaller, taking up a little over a quarter of the view. The galaxy at right, NGC 2207, takes up half the view, with its spiral arms reaching the edges. IC 2163 has a bright orange core, with two prominent spiral arms that rotate counter clockwise and become straighter towards the ends, the left side extending almost to the edge. Its arms are a mix of pink, white, and blue, with an area that takes the shape of an eyelid appearing whitest. NGC 2207 has a very bright core. Overall, it appears to have larger, thicker spiral arms that spin counter clockwise. This galaxy also contains more and larger blue areas of star formation that poke out like holes from the pink spiral arms. In the middle, the galaxies’ arms appear to overlap. The edges show the black of space, including extremely distant galaxies that look like orange and red smudges, and a few foreground stars.
A large spiral galaxy takes up the entirety of the image. The core is mostly bright white, but there are also swirling, detailed structures that resemble water circling a drain. There is small white and pale blue light that emanates from stars and dust at the core’s center, but it is tightly limited to the core. The rings feature colors of deep red and orange and highlight filaments of dust around cavernous black bubbles.
jwst’s recent images 🌌
Separated from the Orion Nebula (M42) by only a dark lane of dust, M43 was recognized as a distinct nebula by the French astronomer Jean-Jacques d’Ortous de Mairan in 1731. A massive star is illuminating M43 and sculpting its landscape of dust and gas with its radiation. Astronomers call the area a miniature Orion Nebula because of its small size and the single star that is shaping it.NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (Space Telescope Science Institute/ESA) and the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team
Messier 43 is a neighbour of Orion nebula
Credit:Nasa,ESA
Ever wondered why walking around museums is weirdly tiring? At normal speed our legs act like pendulums, swinging forward from the hip & saving us a huge amount of energy. In "museum shuffle" our muscles must do ALL the work of constant readjustment. So cake in the cafe is scientifically justified 🥳
The Phantom Galaxy (M74) is a mesmerizing spiral galaxy located roughly 32 million light-years away.
M74 is called Phantom because of its low surface brightness.
This staggering spiral galaxy is home to around 100 billion stars, and is nearly identical in size to the Milky Way.
📸 Credit: ESA/NASA
Full disk images of earth managed by NOAA:
www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/index.php
Engineering is the ultimate LEGO set.
Piece some unit processes together, add sensors and a PCB to control them, break a few molecular bonds and train a neural net to run the whole thing, and don’t forget your economics so you can keep going.
Is anything more fun than this!? 😀
Compiler Explorer godbolt.org via @compiler-explorer.com
This is such an amazing tool when you want to explore both code gen and code efficiency
This is a very cool integration of LLMs + Bayesian methods.
LLMs serve as *likelihoods*: how likely would the human be to have issued this (English) command, given a particular (symbolic) plan? No generation, just scoring :)
A Bayesian agent can then resolve ambiguity in really sensible ways
Do you need any help with AI infra?
The closest known black hole to Earth is just 1,560 light-years away.
Just used Claude to make a "long video summarizer" app I've been dreaming about for a year (it converts videos to mp3s, transcribes them using Whisper, and uses Llama 3 to summarize the transcripts) in 20 minutes without writing a line of code, feeling absolutely drunk with power
