3rd time lucky, I seem to have found a place to watch the eclipse from.

I'm always happy when I find the mastodon trifecta.
#mosstodon #mushtodon #Ferniverse

The #sun, just now. Pretty featureless aside from one sunspot. Testing equipment for the #eclipse.

Right, I have a telescope, a solar filter, the possibility of a central London location 8 floors up with a west facing balcony and a solar eclipse to photograph.

I fully expect it to rain tomorrow at 7pm.

#astrophotography #eclipse

Sinéad O’Connor, Kylie Minogue and Natalie Imbruglia singing Sweet Dreams with Dave Stewart on TFI Friday in 1998, in silly wigs.

Christ, Sinéad was fucking amazing.

Laura Nails it again,

When Margaret Thatcher made England and Wales the only countries in the world with fully privatised water, the naysayers argued it was a terrible idea. Today, everyone agrees privatisation has been a roaring success.

It has delivered an impressive rise in customer bills which has coincided with an equally impressive rise in shareholder profits. These improvements were delivered through efficiency savings, such as not building any reservoirs since 1992 and forgetting about silly ideas like sewage treatment. Thanks to neoliberalism, turds are now a common sight at our beaches and marine life is not.

If that wasn’t impressive enough, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has confirmed the UK is officially the world’s dampest desert. Three-quarters of the nation has been plunged into drought, despite the fact it constantly pisses down. You are therefore banned from gardening and bathing your children so that data centres don’t go without.

https://open.substack.com/pub/normalislandnews/p/island-where-it-constantly-rains

Caspian gulls (Larus cachinnans) confirmed breeding in the UK. When I was more involved with gull work, I had interesting conversations with Dutch birdlife partner Vogelbescherming, who found Caspian gulls breed a bit earlier and were able to push Lesser Black-backed gulls out of their breeding sites. They also expressed surprise that Caspians hadn't already reached the UK!

#seabirds #TeamGull

Easy one today.
Metazooa Stats
🐸 Animal #1107 🦥
I figured it out in 4 guesses!
🟧🟨🟨🟩
🔥 24 | Avg. Guesses: 5.5

https://metazooa.com
#metazooa

I always suspected a UK government would eventually reverse course on "coding in public".

So I've been backing up all government code. For six years.

Today I finally generated a report on what has been deleted. Its much worse than I realised.

https://github.com/uk-gov-mirror/deleted-repo-report

Mind-blowing fact: Cleopatra lived closer in distance to the Great Pyramid than to the first moon landing.

It's out! New video! Finally!

#science #physics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_ooEuOnNB8

they call it single sign-on because YOU HAVE TO SIGN ON EVERY SINGLE GODDAMN TIME

"I do feel like the eclipse has been fairly under-advertised"
"Are you saying it's been eclipsed by other events?"

OMG 🤣 This is an amazing protest.

The Kansas Compliance Crew is a group of trans men complying with a #Kansas bathroom law by going into women's bathrooms. Give it up for these brave guys!

https://kscompliancecrew.org/

#LGBT #trans #50501movement

↔️ NEW THING ↕️
See a different Wikipedia article for every browser width × height combo, with over 7.2 million possible results! https://vole.wtf/widthipedia/

It was going in weird directions today so I went with that two weirdest answers I could think of. Got a hit on the second.
Metazooa Stats
🐌 Animal #1106 🐔
I figured it out in 5 guesses!
🟥🟥🟨🟨🟩
🔥 23 | Avg. Guesses: 5.5

https://metazooa.com
#metazooa

The document I’m working on is 5 MB, 12,500 words.

It contains 461 revisions, including 98 formatting changes.

My computer is Windows 11 with i5-8500, 3 GHz, 6 cores, and 8 GB of memory.

This is a fairly old, modestly spec’d office computer that should be able to handle basic web browsing and word processing.

So my question to Microsoft: WHY THE FUCK DOES MY COMPUTER SLOW TO THE PACE OF A DRUGGED SLOTH WHEN I EDIT THE DOCUMENT WITH THOSE 98 FORMATTING CHANGES SHOWING???

it's been a while since I've mentioned it, but my DMs are open for anyone who thinks they maybe have ADHD and wants to know more about it, about the diagnosis process, medication, coping strategies, or whatever. or just ask in public if you want! either way.

I also wrote a bunch of stuff about it here, which may be helpful: https://blog.poly.nomial.co.uk/2024-07-22-a-list-of-adhd-symptoms.html

What happens when a ghost video is exposed as fake?

You might assume that once we know a recording is unreliable, its influence disappears. But brand new research into deepfakes suggests it isn’t quite that simple.

In my latest Ghost Geek essay, I look at the psychology of misinformation, the continued influence effect, and why debunking paranormal evidence may require more than simply saying: “this is fake.” 👻

https://www.theghostgeek.com/p/you-know-the-ghost-video-is-fake

#Skepticism #Psychology #Paranormal #Deepfakes #AI

I just learned that oat milk was discovered in the 1960s, when NASA found out by accident what zero-g environments do to goat milk.

Thank you, thank you, I'll see myself out.