Best description of latest on Mar-a-Lago raid
Best description I’ve heard so far about the FBI raid on Trump’s quarters at Mar-a-Lago: EmptyWheel has a nice write-up on how what we know so far lines up with the Espionage Act.
Tales from Loon: The Quasi-biennial oscillation
One of the things I loved about working at Loon was that we pulled together experts from a wide range of disciplines, so I was constantly learning about things well outside my usual wheelhouse. One of the more unusual things I learned came from Rob, our resident atmospheric scientist, who introduced us to the Quasi-Biennial …
First images from the James Webb
Check out the first images from the NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Folks have also put up some zoomable full-res versions, a slidable comparison of Hubble vs. James Webb images.
A simple defense of the right to abortion
A few days ago Kevin Drum lamented that the conservative attacks on Roe vs. Wade are much easier to understand than liberal arguments defending it: Conservatives say, “Abortion isn’t mentioned anywhere in the Constitution and it was illegal almost everywhere before 1973.” In response, liberals stutter and stammer and reel off a few hundred incomprehensible …
Where exactly is the line now?
So now if Christian Scientists gain a supermajority in a state legislature, can they outlaw all medical procedures? Or is it only Catholic dogma that gets to do that?
Trying to make stained glass with DALL-E-2
Scott Alexander’s A Guide To Asking Robots To Design Stained Glass Windows has some great examples of both the stunning images that OpenAI’s DALL-E-2 system can produce and some of the issues it still has. Some of the problems are fairly straightforward (like text will often come out as well-rendered gibberish) but the most interesting …
Live hearings on the January 6th insurrection
Quick reminder that the House public hearings on the January 6th insurrection will be streaming live at january6th.house.gov starting today at 5pm PDT. You can also get your pick of full live hearings plus commentary from pretty much every national news outlet except Fox News (naturally), who says they’ll only the hearings “as news warrants.”
Why Pebble failed
Pebble was an early smartwatch company that launched with a successful Kickstarter back in 2012, with a focus on providing a customizable wearable front-end for apps that ran on your phone. They had pretty good success for the first few years, but then started running into cash problems, and eventually ran out of money and …
Understanding what happened in Bucha
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has flagged articles from Der Spiegel and the Wall Street Journal that together paint a grim picture of how the Russian occupation of Bucha, Ukraine started as a simple occupation but quickly devolved into hellish war crimes against the civilian population. Sounds like a combination of an undisciplined occupying …
Check out Hugo short story finalist “Unknown Number”
I just learned about “Unknown Number”, a short story by Blue Neustifter that was just named as a finalist for this year’s Hugo Awards for Best Short Story. The story is told as a chat history, and was published on Twitter last summer as a series of screen shots (if you use Twitter’s default web …
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