They'd have got away with it, if it wasn't for those meddling kids.
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Don't worry, Sam, SpaceX won't ACTUALLY launch 7,000 satellites! (There are currently 10,296 Starlink sats in orbit)
Don't worry, SpaceX said they'd get their satellites fainter than magnitude 7! (They have not ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/link_gat…)
Don't worry, they won't actually start Kessler Syndrome! outerspaceinstitute.ca/crashcl…
Don't worry, they won't actually launch a million AI data centres into orbit!! theconversation.com/a-new-spac…
This is the fucking worst I-told-you-so apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.ht…
Planned ‘megaconstellations’ of satellites could cause unforeseen harm to the ozone layer and climate systems. Global regulation is needed before it’s too late.The Conversation
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Googly eyes are apparently one of a gull's biggest fears.Ed Cara (Gizmodo)
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So, were the birds which fell for the googly eye trick especially gullible?
I‘ll see myself out.
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"Platty joobs", "genny lec", "menty b" & co.: I wrote about this British slang fad
stancarey.wordpress.com/2026/0…
#slang #language #words #phrases #hun #linguistics #wordplay
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A comment on my post describes users of this slang as lazy simpletons with a limited vocabulary. (I was having none of it.)
I see linguistic shortcuts – abbreviations and the like – more as efficiencies. They're the verbal equivalent of desire paths, which no one sees as "lazy".
But the characterization shows the social baggage that language has accumulated. It's a scapegoat for broader anxieties and prejudices.
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Oh, excellent.
"Moose dropped on a parabola" 🫎
youtube.com/watch?v=pjnFsk5b8X…
3000 randomly distributed point masses initialized to be confined to the interior of a moose-shaped contour are released under gravity to scatter off the fun...YouTube
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NEW
Trying to make sense of the nonsensical decision to drop the Chinese spying prosecutions
How the positions of neither the CPS nor the government stand up to scrutiny
By me
Substack
emptycity.substack.com/p/tryin…
Personal blog davidallengreen.com/2025/10/tr…
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The World Health Organization (WHO) today announced that the 21 Pacific island countries and areas that are part of the WHO Western Pacific Region have collectively been verified as having eliminated measles and rubella.www.who.int
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@hpcchris it's all Geek to me.... (sorry)
Good job it's not the Linear Model A, I've never been able to understand the manual for that one.
Stop convincing yourself that you need to all of the thing to make it worth doing any of it.
Put on 1 song, tidy, clean, draw, or whatever for the length of that song. When it's done, you can be done.
Doing something is better than nothing
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If you've heard of Tor lately but
aren't sure how it works and how it can help you to stay safe,
I wrote this article explaining how Tor works, who it is for, and how it can help you in a very accessible way.
No technical knowledge needed.
I hope this helps you to stay safe 💜 
privacyguides.org/articles/202…
You might have heard of Tor in the news a few times, yet never dared to try it yourself. Despite being around for decades, Tor is still a tool too few people know about. Today, Tor is easy to use for anyone.Privacy Guides
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And now for something light and fun:
A friend sent me this--and I cannot stress this enough--*PEER-REVIEWED* article on transfeminine puppygirl culture because it includes comics (one NSFW).
And yall
This thing is a wild ride. But it's also kinda great.
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Honestly, this seems like work that either winks toward or outright engages a lot of the frankly-odd shit that (especially white, but overwhelmingly well-educated) trans folks get into: things that yearn for ways to sever our humanity, personhood, intellect, or all three at once, in the fantasy of Getting Out of that awful double-bind, where we're helpless front-row spectators to, well, *gestures vaguely at the structures of the white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy* all that crap.
Anyway, this is neat, and got my noodle cooking. Thought some of y'all might enjoy it too.
wow I did not expect to be this called out by an academic paper on a subculture I'm not even in. I wish I had the emotional capacity to dig into the lit beyond a paper here or there...
"most trans women know that their perception of themselves, that their own ideas of their self, are not always trustworthy. In a society built on foundational trans-antagonism (Stanley 2021), and suffused with narratives of trans femininity as inherently fraudulent (Bettcher 2025) and unloveable (Guadelupe-Diaz 2019) it simply hard for a trans woman to feel secure enough to be the source of her own affirmation." 🫣
"the enticing anxiety surrounding desires that we may fear as much as we want them, which, once again, is a deeply trans feeling (Lavery 2023)" 😯
(Ok and it's slightly distracting the number of times "is" is missing from the phrase "it is" in the paper, but oh well)
Oh my this paper is DELIGHTFUL.
Bookmark, cackle, send to therapist For Science.
fun feature of HRT:
- you start to look like a woman
less fun feature of HRT
- that woman is your mum
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(originally by twitmericks in 2014, but bears repeating:)
As traffic control out of Swanwick
Is now by and large electranwick
A technical glitch
Is more than a hitch -
The chaos ensuing is chranwick
Source (
): twitter.com/twitmericks/status…
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Three of these pieces may be combined to form a cube. This dissection is based on Hashimoto’s bucolic cube, which is a cool puzzle. - A third of a cube - 3D model by robinhoustonSketchfab
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Inflatable slide rules safety notice Printed and Laminated Size - A3 (297mm by 420mm) Other sizes available A4 & A2. 3mm Foamex board, Strong & durableBouncy Signs
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When the problem involves more than 2 hat colors it does not appear to me to resemble a hypercube graph and when it involves more than 2 people it does not appear to have the simple isomorphism with edge orienting that you have described.
Have I misunderstood?
@mjd it's true that with k>2 hat colours the problem stops resembling a graph. Instead you have to generalise to a k-uniform hypergraph, i.e. graph edges are replaced by sets of k vertices instead of sets of 2. But you still keep the rest of the properties: every hyper-edge is a set of exactly k vertices, all agreeing in the same n−1 places but covering every possibility for the remaining place, representing a situation in which one player sees one particular layout of hats on the other n−1 players but could have any choice for their own hat.
And an 'orientation' of a hyper-edge involves nominating exactly one of its endpoints, which probably isn't the right generalisation of orienting a graph in all situations, but it's the one that works for this problem.
But with k=2 but >2 players it still seems like a graph orientation problem to me.
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The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.
[...]
Client implementations SHOULD NOT be a place of honor. Client implementations MUST NOT commemorate highly esteemed deeds.
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Minesweeper on my DXY-885 plotter. A project that took longer than expected!
Uploading partly to test video-embed from mastondon.social.
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yoooo! thank you! 
i didn't expect you to go out of your way for a mistake on my part, but i really appreciate it either way!
Sometimes, I receive questions which leave both me, and the person asking, bamboozled.
> Your website loads so quickly! What CDN do you use?
There is no CDN. It is just really small and simple, mostly text.
> Sure, but is that Cloudflare, or...?
None. It is a tiny website, just a few kilobytes per page, on a tiny server, at my home, connected to the Internet via my ISP, Andrews & Arnold.
> But are you / they in the cloud?
No. The webserver is in Newbury, in my garage.
> Neil, please can you pass my questions to your technical person? I don't think you understand, your website cannot be in your home. It must be in the cloud or have a CDN.
*Neil puts on glasses and false nose and moustache*
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Labour have proposed a transphobe, Mary Ann Stephenson for next chair of the EHRC. The Women and Equalities Committee of the House of Commons will want to scrutinise this appointment. Help them understand why she’s a bad pick by signing this letter! #UKpol
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It is time, once again, for me to tap the sign.
"Ant-ee-far" is a profoundly un-British pronouncation of "Anti-Fah", and is used by plastic "patriots" for precisely one reason - to obscure the fairly obvious question: "Who are the Fah that these people are opposed to?"
Likewise, the UK does not have "DEI" and never has.
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Male friends (I have male friends here right?) - have you heard of Ask for Angela?
(A man in The Archers didn’t know of it and I was wondering how likely it is for men to be aware of it.)
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stuart yeates
Unknown parent • • •Yeah, but a single EMP can't take out a million cell towers because the cell towers have the mass to have slightly decent insulation.
wraptile
Unknown parent • • •MacCruiskeen
Unknown parent • • •smiddi
Unknown parent • • •@Brokar
All that shit burning in our atmosphere (over time), is another big problem.
@sundogplanets @wraptile
CosmicCactus
Unknown parent • • •Savera
Unknown parent • • •@Brokar @wraptile I’ll have you know that I’m not the malicious type.
I wonder if these sats are protected against laser mischief makers. You know like they used to do with airplanes.
ToroidalCore
Unknown parent • • •@wraptile I meant to post this as a reply:
masto.hackers.town/@toroidalco…
ToroidalCore
2026-04-27 20:45:25
lp0 on fire
Unknown parent • • •Barry Schwartz 🫖
Unknown parent • • •The scab I had on my knee that my parents had to debride lest I die from sepsis was beautiful in its way. Nevertheless, when they told me I would die if they did not let me rub it off of me, I let them rub it off of me. And, as always, I took my penicillin. Being a kid in the 1960s who got his tonsils out in the 1960s, when they didn’t take out tonsils regularly anymore, I took a lot of penicillin.
Tell that to the people who say that.
Brian Gordon
Unknown parent • • •I certainly have thought that a good dose of Kessler Syndrome would put the tech bros and unregulated capitalism in their place, but apparently KS could mean no more space flights...for hundreds of years. Prof, is there more, and worse?
"Kessler Syndrome is extremely bad for everybody, don't hope for it (though on my grumpier days I can definitely understand that perspective)"
Future generations are not going to respect their ancestors, and I don't blame 'em
#kesslersyndrome