As a pilot who has now and then made an utter fool of himself, I will share a way of remembering that conversion of UTC or Zulu time to local time is 4 hours in the summer and 5 hours in the winter (at least for the eastern time zone in North America).

"The hour change is short when the days are long, and long when the days are short."

That is, it's 5 hours (longer) when days are short (winter) and 4 hours (shorter) when days are long (summer.) This was told to me by a fellow pilot when I got it assbackwards one time. Rather than make fun of me, he told me this.

It really works great and I hope it helps you, too!

How an advanced civilisation vanished 2,500 years ago.
The Tartessos were a Bronze Age society that flourished in the Iberian Peninsula in southern Spain some 3,000 years ago. They were a near-mythic civilisation, rich in resources and technologies. But the advanced society vanished mysteriously some 2,500 years ago. Researchers are now looking into how and why the Tartessos disappeared.
#globalmuseum #history

Carlo Ratti, writing about the new electric Ferrari in the NY Times, called the Tesla cybertruck "an ungodly wedge of aluminum." His use of "ungodly" made me laugh because it has the letters u-g-l-y in it. Whether he meant to do this or not, it's quite funny.

"America is just the country that shows how all the written guarantees in the world for freedom are no protection against tyranny and oppression of the worst kind." -- Peter Kropotkin

(from a speech on September 26, 1891)

Holy fuck. The Baltimore area is forecast to have two days in a row next week of 104F or 40C temperatures. I've lived around here for more than forty years and never, never have I seen anything like this. My guess is high temps around here have jumped more than 10F or 6C from a couple decades ago.

Something about a Tesla getting taken out by a train with pride flags makes a good Friday

https://www.reddit.com/r/baltimore/comments/1ugctcc/light_rail_accident/

It's a bit startling that even as much as people are talking about AI, I know almost nothing about it. Yet, suddenly, it's everywhere. I, for one, will keep reading PG Wodehouse, Dashiell Hammett, Charles Portis, and Raymond Chandler novels in physical, paper and ink book form. As far as I can tell, these have not been infected with AI.

People on here, some scientists, some not, keep putting up maps, diagrams, and charts showing how bad the heat crisis is getting. As the old commercial asked, "What's a mother to do?" This is a worldwide and monstrously huge crisis, agreed, but it's hard to see how anything much is going to get done about it other than the very helpful turning more and more to solar and wind power and, also, to nuclear power. As far as EVs, wouldn't it take about a 90% EV/10% ICE vehicle ratio to really cut way down on CO2?

South Australia: "Dead birds to be tested for H5N1 bird flu after washing up on remote SA coast"

"Three dead seabirds have been collected and are being tested for the H5N1 bird flu virus in South Australia"

Source: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-23/dead-seabirds-near-sa-border-tested-for-h5n1-bird-flu/106830690

I just learned that Mountain Monday is a thing, so here's a mountain photo from when we were driving the Sognefjellet route in Norway two years ago.

#MountainMonday #Sognefjellet #Norway #PhotoMonday #Landscape #LandscapePhotography #Travel #TravelPhotography

Ludovico de Varthema on people in the Banda Islands: "There is no need for law enforcement here, because these people are so foolish that if they wished to commit a crime, they would not know how to do it." Around 1505 CE.

After charging 15 people with "Antifa" crimes for participating in rapid response networks, federal agents are pepper-spraying people outside the Federal Courthouse in the Twin Cities right now. The only route to safety is resistance. #ice #maga #fascism #law #trump

For the people forced to wear the pink triangle the arrival of the British, American, and Soviet armies wasn’t the end of a nightmare. It was just an intermission. While other survivors were wrapped in blankets, treated in field hospitals, or sent home, many gay men were loaded into military transports under armed guard and driven straight to “regular” German prisons to finish serving their sentences.
https://medium.com/prismnpen/wwii-why-the-allies-never-liberated-homosexual-men-6998f70573f4?sk=f1d38cac8989575c5ce48d6e17b198a3

#LGBTQ #QueerHistory #WWII

Sophie Scott-Brown who has written and spoken quite a lot on consensus-based decision-making aka anarchy gave a speech not long ago at the London School of Economics. At the end of her talk she said, given the sheer scale of the climate disaster, it must be asked whether or not anarchy, which she acknowledged is rather slow in its decision-making, is simply not able to deal with something this big happening so quickly now. In an earlier talk, though, she also pointed out that having a jumble of nation-states as we do now, each controlled by people who only care about their own enrichment and empowerment is likewise not able to deal with a planet-wide threat because it cannot work as a group to do that.
I have no answer to this, and I cannot think of what might be done here. But I am old and feeble-minded and perhaps it is best to let younger people look for ways to handle this huge threat?

First firefly!

It is really something to read Phillips O'Brien's take on the "Memorandum of Understanding" between 47 and the fascist regime in Iran. When are enough people going to wake up and see that 47 is a total screw-up? Someone in his first "term" said that 47 being president was like letting a 4-year-old run a nuclear submarine. Even if you favor having a "president" and a "government," this is just unbelievable. On top of everything else, 47 is a murderer because his decision to start a war with Iran led directly to 2 Tomahawk missiles being fired into a school filled with more than 150 young girls and their teachers in Minab, Iran. Those girls would still be alive if 47 hadn't ordered those missiles to be fired.

It's lovely to see the crescent moon and Venus nearly side by side this evening!

I am absolutely convinced that only a small minority, a very small minority, among men, are seriously reached and profoundly moved by our propaganda of criticism, of doubt, of rebellion, of free investigation, of independent research. On the other hand, it is clear that our first interest lies always in seeking to increase this minority; to keep it, under all circumstances alive, active, refreshed. Our own happiness depends on it.
-- Emile Armand

#anarchism #quote #bot

Last night, I got a station on the radio that I wanted but it wasn't too clear. Then this song starts playing with a woman singing it and there's something really exciting about it. It was hard to hear but at first I thought it was a black woman singing. All I could think is she is really good. Then I heard the lyric, "Try just a little bit harder" and it hit me it was Janis Joplin. Wow. It was kind of like listening to that song with new ears. I could really understand how she had listened to the great black women blues singers and was doing the same thing except her way.