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Reposted by Steam Elephant

Simon McGarr

@tupped.bsky.social

“Expecting someone to have [one new thoughtful opinion] per week, let alone per day, is unrealistic. Worse, it depletes their intellectual resources, turning them into opinion machines, wandering through the world looking for things to publicly have opinions about.“

David Quinn, Shirley Temple, and The Milkman’s Cheery Whistle

www.tuppenceworth.ie

May 15, 2025 at 6:29 AM

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Joanna Bagniewska

@joannabagniewska.com

Hardly new info, but BSky should know:

Warsaw's water quality is monitored by eight clams with magnets attached to their shells. If contamination in the water causes the clams to close, the magnets trigger an alarm and shut off the city's water supply.
Thank you, little guardian molluscs.

🧪🌏🚰

A clam with a spring attached to the shell. The spring has a magnet placed above a sensor.

February 7, 2025 at 12:39 PM

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Edward Vogel

@mathartforall.bsky.social

"There is no way to run out of ideas that need clarification."

What a wonderful way to live with mathematics.

A partial page from "Mathematica" by @davidbessis.bsky.social. Bill Thurston is the "he" here.

yalebooks.yale.edu/978030028328...

Page 239 from Mathematica by David Bessis regarding Bill Thurston's perspective of mathematics as social activity

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/9780300283280/mathematica

January 10, 2025 at 5:08 AM

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Gerard Cunningham

@faduda.bsky.social

Lookit, there's already been a definitive Odysseus...

A still from O Brother, Where Art Thou, featuring Tim Blake Nelson, George Clooney and John Turturro.

December 25, 2024 at 12:11 PM

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Saloni

@scientificdiscovery.dev

Many people talk about the "Golden Age of Antibiotics", but I hadn't seen it visualized properly.

Just how many types of antibiotics were discovered during that time?

So, I visualized it myself!

A timeline titled "The Golden Age of Antibiotics" shows when each antibiotic drug class was first available for medical use, with example antibiotics labeled. Classes are color-coded by their source: actinomycetes, other bacteria, fungi, or synthetic. Milestones include the first antibiotics (arsphenamines in 1910), as well as the discovery of many actinomycetes-derived antibiotics, such as streptomycin, and sulfonamides, penicillins, and tetracyclines. Data: Hutchings, Truman, Wilkinson (2019). Created by Saloni Dattani for Our World in Data.

December 23, 2024 at 10:09 AM

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Sue

@cameratrapsue.bsky.social

Happy Winter Solstice!

These photos were taken with a pinhole camera I made from a beer can and left out from Summer to Winter Solstice - a 6 month exposure.

Bottom line = Winter Solstice. Top line = Summer Solstice.

The lines are the Sun moving across the sky w/some reflections. No line = clouds

A pinhole camera photo taken from Summer to Winter Solstice. It's a bit blurry as the aperture was made with a tiny needle and no focus mechanism. There are yellow to green lines across the photo, that's the Sun moving across the sky over the course of a day. The top line is from the Summer Solstice, the bottom line from the Winter Solstice. Cloudy days don't have any lines or broken lines as the Sun was obscured by clouds. There are some trees on the left, right and in the background.

A pinhole camera photo, a 6 month exposure from Summer to Winter solstice. There are trees on the right side and background. A house with two cars in the drive are visible almost in the center of the photo. The lines are made from the Sun moving across the sky with the bottom line being the Winter Solstice and the top line the Summer solstice. On cloudy days the lines are broken or not visible as the sun was obscured by clouds. The lines show some reflections from a tree trunk. The lines are mostly a white color with some hints of blue, green and yellow in places. Some of the colors could be from rain or snow staining the paper I was using.

December 21, 2024 at 2:01 PM

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Dan Hassler-Forest

@danhf.bsky.social

In 2010, anti-copyright activist Aaron Swartz hanged himself after being prosecuted to the full extent of the law for making copyrighted academic publications freely available. Today, academic publishers are insisting those copyrights be lifted to feed the corporate AI slop machine.

Please Follow the Official Guardian Account @guardian-world-rss.bsky.social · Jan 8

‘Impossible’ to create AI tools like ChatGPT without copyrighted material, OpenAI says

Pressure grows on artificial intelligence firms over the content used to train their productsBusiness live – latest updatesThe developer OpenAI has said it would be impossible to create tools like its groundbreaking chatbot ChatGPT without access to copyrighted material, as pressure grows on artificial intelligence firms over the content used to train their products.Chatbots such as ChatGPT and image generators like Stable Diffusion are “trained” on a vast trove of data taken from the internet, with much of it covered by copyright – a legal protection against someone’s work being used without permission. Continue reading...

www.theguardian.com

December 18, 2024 at 1:25 PM

Steam Elephant

@steamelephant.bsky.social

The Esquire list is really good.

N. K. Jemisin @nkjemisin.bsky.social · Jul 12

The heck? Both Esquire and the NYT have put out "best books" lists, and THE FIFTH SEASON is on both! Is there a holiday coming up or something? Anyway, yay! Esquire's is SFF-specific (#4) and the NYT's is this-century specific (#44). www.esquire.com/entertainmen...
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...