Read it.

To ensure that the tissue structures of biological samples are easily recognizable under the electron microscope, they are treated with a staining agent. The standard staining agent for this is uranyl acetate. However, some laboratories are not allowed to use this highly toxic and radioactive substance for safety reasons.

A research team at the Institute of Electron Microscopy and Nanoanalysis (FELMI-ZFE) at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) has now found an environmentally friendly alternative: ordinary espresso.

Images of the samples treated with it were of equally good quality as images of comparative samples, which were prepared with uranyl acetate. The researchers have published their findings in the journal Methods.

You Can Build a Mainvrfame From the Things You Find At Home (Bill Sutton)

The Foundry.

In recent years, many parents have begun questioning long-standing assumptions about traditional education. Concerns about bureaucracy, one-size-fits-all curricula, and institutional failures have eroded confidence in the public school system for many families.

Some parents are also increasingly wary of ideological instruction in public schools, particularly when it comes to gender ideology and sex education.

While debate over education is healthy in our society, a growing number of families believe the system has become less responsive to individual needs and more influenced by political and administrative pressures.

It is little surprise, then, that parents are looking for alternatives. For many families, homeschooling has moved from the margins to the mainstream.

Michael Sartain: “Hating is free. That’s why broke people do it.”

Read it.

This post on X from a former special forces warrant officer indicates that what we see in MN is classic modern insurgency.

Read it.

The circular stone-cast tablet was discovered in the late 1800s from the 650 BC King Ashurbanipal ‘s underground library in Nineveh, Iraq.

Data processing, which was long believed to be an Assyrian tablet, mirrored the sky over Mesopotamia in 3300 BC and proved to be much more ancient Sumerian origin.

The tablet is the first astronomical instrument, the “Astrolabe.” It consists of a segmented, disk-shaped star chart with marked units of angle measure inscribed upon the rim.

Unfortunately considerable parts of the planisphere on this tablet are missing (approximately 40%), damage which dates to the sacking of Nineveh. The reverse of the tablet is not inscribed.

The Atlantic, a Voice of the Crust.

to hear some Silicon Valley insiders tell it, California is on the verge of economic suicide. This November, Californians will likely vote on a ballot initiative that would levy a one-off tax on the wealth of about 200 of the state’s richest residents. Garry Tan, the CEO of the start-up incubator Y Combinator, posted on X that the measure would “kill and eat the golden goose of technology startups in California.” Investors and tech executives are threatening to leave the state. Governor Gavin Newsom, who has been angling for a centrist presidential pivot, has vowed to “do what I have to do” to stop the initiative.

Sure, I believe that.

Many progressives, however, see the billionaire tax as a long-overdue effort to finally force the ultra-wealthy to pay their fair share. Senator Bernie Sanders, for example, calls it a “model that should be emulated throughout the country.” In their telling, hyperbolic claims about the death of innovation and entrepreneurship in California are a smoke screen for the fact that billionaires simply don’t want to pay higher taxes.

They keep bloviating about ‘their fair share’ but none of them will give you an exact definition of what ‘fair share’ means—they’re just sure that what’s now is not it. They also won’t explain why the current ‘share’ is not ‘fair’.

The essence of the progressive ideology is that progressives ought to be able to spend your money whether you like it or not. Progressives are thieves, pure and simple.

The unfortunate reality for progressive backers of the wealth tax is that what billionaires think about the policy, and how they react to it, will determine whether it succeeds. If voters approve the tax, they will be making a huge bet on billionaire psychology. That would be a very high-stakes wager indeed.

And the more they are assholes about it, the more billionaires will leave. Progressives are, in a free society, their own worst enemies.

the california wealth-tax idea originated as a response to a federal tax cut. Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act lowered taxes for corporations and rich individuals and paid for those cuts in part by reducing Medicaid spending. That left a roughly $20 billion annual shortfall in California’s health-care budget. If left unfilled, that could cause 1.6 million low-income Californians to lose their health care, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. In response, one of the state’s largest health-care-employee unions teamed up with a group of progressive economists and lawyers to come up with a way to make up the difference: impose a one-off 5 percent wealth tax on California’s billionaires.

“Hold still while we pick your pocket.”

Read it.

Mainstream media outlets rushed to paint Alex Pretti as a blameless ICU nurse gunned down by heartless Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis on Saturday. They highlighted his work caring for veterans and seized on video snippets showing him holding a phone. The New York Times ran with that angle, running the headline “Man Killed by Federal Agents in Minneapolis Was Holding a Phone, Not a Gun,” and claimed that footage captured Pretti only with his phone in hand, insisting that agents had no reason to believe he was armed during their encounter.

Media outlets are also quick to point out that Pretti held a valid Minnesota concealed carry permit and legally owned the gun, as if that absolved him for his actions against the Border Patrol agents.

Others point out that he had no criminal record, just traffic tickets.

This, they argue, proves he was an innocent victim, not an agitator.

But what the mainstream media isn’t telling you is that Pretti wasn’t just some random bystander.

According to Jeanne Massey, a neighbor, Pretti was part of a “Signal ICE” group chat of volunteers who organized a sophisticated operation to track ICE activity in real time and alert each other when agents were in the area.

These folks patrol streets, blow whistles, alert residents, and film operations to disrupt arrests.

That puts him not on the sidelines but plugged into the very network that coordinated responses to federal enforcement operations.

Mother Jones profiled the group just last week.

The New Neo.

There is nothing simple about this case. I’ve been mulling it over and watching videos, and the only thing that’s clear to me is that the situation is murky and (as is often the case) people tend to see what they want to see or expect to see or what conforms to their pre-existing notions. I’ve read many things about it already that turn out to be untrue – or seemingly untrue.

Despite the plethora of videos, none of them show enough to come to a definitive conclusion. We don’t know exactly what led up to the confrontation, or exactly what Pretti was doing with his hands during it, or what was seen and understood by whom, or whether as the officer removed Pretti’s gun it misfired and that set off the fatal shooting in response to a misperception, or many of the most important things we would need to know to come to a strong conclusion about guilt or innocence.

I watched the following video to the bitter end, and although the speakers don’t come to any definite conclusions and it is extremely long, I think it’s valuable to watch at least some of it because it illustrates how very confusing the various videos of the shooting are. One thing that seems to be true is that whether Pretti’s weapon accidentally discharged (in the hands of the officer) as the first shot of the series is of great importance, because if that were the case it probably would absolve the officers of criminal although not civil liability.

Time to review the Chris Rock video, “How not to get your ass kicked by the police.” Minnesota could use some of that wisdom.

Read it.

Pork accounts for more than a third of the world’s meat, making pigs among the planet’s most widely consumed animals. They are also widely reviled: For about two billion people, eating pork is explicitly prohibited. The Hebrew Bible and the Islamic Koran both forbid adherents from eating pig flesh, and this ban is one of humanity’s most deeply entrenched dietary restrictions. For centuries, scholars have struggled to find a satisfying explanation for this widespread taboo. “There are an amazing number of misconceptions people continue to have about pigs,” says archaeologist Max Price of Durham University, who is among a small group of scholars scouring both modern excavation reports and ancient tablets for clues about the rise and fall of pork consumption in the ancient Near East. “That makes this research both frustrating and fascinating.”

Read it.

I had come here expecting that we would find ruin and neglect, toxicity and destitution. I expected Centralia to be an exemplar of the eerie: A place where once there had been a town, place of thriving life, and instead now was only absence, an emptiness, a void.

What we found instead, strangely, was beauty. Centralia, despite everything I’d been led to expect, was thriving.

Visitors find a similar situation at Chernobyl. Nature has ways of compensating for human ineptitude.

Locals see the story a little differently, though their version borrows from similar themes. Phil, a tour guide at Pioneer Tunnel in neighboring Ashland, pointed out that while the grim toil of the mines claimed many human lives, their closure left the valley with little else to offer. He explained how the families that didn’t leave Centralia were harassed, as government forces tried to drive them off their land. Those that stayed had to go to court to defend their right to live on this abandoned land, all because they wanted to keep the mineral rights to their property. So now, people like Phil assume that the government is just waiting them out. Once they’re gone, putting out the fire will be easy enough. “They’ll take all that red hot coals, but also they’re going to get that rich anthracite coal,” he told us. “And I’m sure they’ll sell that. But are the people or the relatives going to get anything? It’s very doubtful. It’ll probably go to the federal government. Or the coal baron, maybe?”

People have been carefully trained over my lifetime that when the government is here to help, it usually means they are her to help themselves to whatever you’ve got.

Read it.

Working retail is a great way to lose faith in the collective intelligence of our species.

Ah, those were the days….

Watch it.

Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) reviews the growing cultural clash that approaches.

The Register.

Gee, I wonder why.

But, the researchers found, there are roughly 6.1 million workers who “face both high exposure to LLMs and low adaptive capacity to manage a job transition.”

Paper-pushers who don’t actually make things that people need, and who can’t do that kind of work (“administrators”).

“Many of these workers occupy administrative and clerical jobs where savings are modest, workers’ skill transferability is limited, and reemployment prospects are narrower.”

This, in turn, means that they are more likely to face longer job searches, less chance of actually finding new employment, and “more significant relative earnings losses compared to other workers.”

And, if you haven’t guessed it, “Of these workers, 86 percent are women.”

Called it.

Read it.

While many Denver office tenants went remote or fled to Cherry Creek or the ’burbs in recent years, law firm Ballard Spahr did the opposite.

It stayed downtown, though it swapped out its old headquarters for a newer spot a block away at 1800 Larimer in August.
“It was more about the amenities,” said Damon O. Barry, office manager partner, as he listed features like a full gym with towel service, a green space on the second floor, proximity to Union Station and lobby security. “My goal was to have a space that folks want to come into.”

But a sign of the times was that the company opted for leasing less space. Its new 19,000-square-foot office is one-third smaller than its prior home at 17th Street Plaza. No, the 60-person company isn’t shrinking, Barry said. It’s growing. There’s hybrid options and “hoteling” desks, available to whomever is in the office that day. This is about efficiency.

Yeah. Efficiency. No mention of how many may be relocating to less Woke Red states.

Read it.

NATO General Secretary Mark Rutte and EU leaders from the Arctic bordering states hold a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. As NATO General Secretary Rutte outlines the reality of the situation with a full defense of President Trump’s position, he remarks to the audience, “I’m not popular with you right now because I defend Donald Trump, but I really believe we can be happy that he’s here”.

Quillette.

Over the long arc of modern history, technology has been one of the most effective engines of women’s liberation—independently of the attitudes or intentions of the mostly male people who built it. From washing machines and telephones to reproductive technologies such as IVF, technological changes have expanded women’s autonomy by enabling their education, paid work, entrepreneurship, and personal freedoms. By reducing the burden of physical labour needed to enable a household to survive and function, these advances have loosened the link between sex and economic dependence. In emerging economies grappling with energy poverty, the pattern is even starker: electrification has proven to be among the few reliable forces capable of freeing women from gruelling labour, while sharply reducing the risks of childbirth, early childhood mortality, and maternal death.

The scale of this transformation is difficult to overstate. For most of human history, 1–2 percent of women died as a result of pregnancy or childbirth, making reproduction one of the leading causes of female death. Today, in many high-income countries, maternal mortality has fallen to under one death per 10,000 births. Child mortality shows a similar pattern. Globally, the share of children who die before the age of five has fallen by more than half over the past few decades alone, largely due to advances in sanitation, vaccination, antibiotics, and neonatal care. These declines were not driven by shifts in attitude or ideology, but by technological interventions that made survival routine rather than exceptional.

Feminism is a political movement, while technology is a set of tools. Yet, over the past two centuries, the most reliable driver of women’s autonomy has not been ideological persuasion or legal decree. Technology has accomplished what moral exhortation rarely can: it has changed the incentives. Modern technologies—particularly those that reduce physical strength requirements, expand access to information, and automate domestic labour—have done more to advance women’s bargaining power than most explicitly feminist political movements, precisely because they alter the underlying constraints of human life rather than attempting to moralise them away. Moral attitudes fluctuate, laws can be ignored, and cultural norms can resist change. Constraints, once relaxed, can rarely be tightened again. Feminist outcomes are best measured, then, by the extent to which women gain real autonomy, safety, and choice in their daily lives.

Daily Record (UK).

We’ve all experienced being greeted by our loud alarm clock what feels like 20 minutes after we’ve shut our eyes. But whilst it’s normal for us to wake up every now and again during the night, many of us do not know what’s normal and what’s not.

Research published in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research discovered that we’re more nocturnal than we might imagine, with a third of people fully waking during the night at least three times weekly. Meanwhile, separate research indicated that nearly a quarter of people wake at least once nightly.

However, our internal body clock naturally shifts as we age – resulting in more frequent night-time awakenings. Typically, we experience brief micro-awakenings approximately 20 times each night, though these are usually so fleeting that we don’t recall them.

Country Squire Magazine (UK).

Look around you. Cast your eye across the sclerotic state of our nation – the rudderless ship of government, the suffocating blanket of nanny-state regulation, the timid hand-wringing in the face of genuine threats, and the sheer, unadulterated dullness of it all. We are governed by managerial technocrats, men and women whose greatest ambition is to navigate a focus group, whose boldest vision extends to a new cycle lane or a tax on meat. They speak in sanitised platitudes, their spines seemingly replaced by polling data. In this landscape of the mediocre, one’s soul aches for a figure of verve, of audacity, of sheer chutzpah. We need, in short, a Sir Francis Drake.

We in the U.S. suffer from the same mealy-minded ruling class, but we actually have Trump, who is as close to a Sir Francis Drake as the modern world is capable of producing.

Read it.

1. People communicate most honestly through jokes. Pay attention to them.
2. If you can’t refuse something, it owns you.
3. Fear of being cringe will stop you living fully. Get over it.
4. Don’t take criticism from someone you wouldn’t take advice from.
5. Expect no applause for telling the truth. Sometimes doing the right thing costs you – friendships, comfort, peace. But always pay the price without question.
6. Whatever scenario you’re in, just act like you belong.
7. The lazy person works twice as hard.
8. Curiosity is a superpower.
9. Honesty without kindness is brutality. Default to kindness. Though know when to be firm.
10. Life never meets your youthful expectations. As an adult, you need to learn to find joy nonetheless.

….

The Register.

The UK government is investing in a defense-focused degree course to train both civilian students and soldiers to become drone technology specialists. However, it’s only targeting a small number of people.

According to the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the Department for Education (DfE), this new course will open for enrolment at the New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering (NMITE) in Hereford in the west of England from September this year.

The degree course forms part of a broader effort to deliver on the aspirations outlined in the Strategic Defence Review, published in mid-2025, to enhance the capabilities of the British Army through AI, drones, and autonomous systems.

By building a pipeline of homegrown talent with specialized science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) skills, the MoD hopes to address critical workforce gaps while aiming to push the UK’s expertise in next-generation military capabilities.

As is often the case with much-trumpeted initiatives, the actual amount of funding made available – a £240,000 (about $322,000) investment from the British Army – hardly seems commensurate with the government’s ambitions for it.

The three-year course aims to train 15 civilian students and up to five soldiers each year to become drone technology specialists.

British degree programs, unlike those in the U.S., ordinarily take three years.

Hereford is where the headquarters of the Special Air Service is located.

Read it.

Apparently there is a furor over something Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said regarding inflation. It seems she recommended that Americans eat a “three dollar meal” and gave an example consisting of chicken, broccoli, a corn tortilla and one other item. The internet went crazy – when doesn’t it – suggesting this was impossible. Even the harpies on The View said so. ( I guess they asked their personal chefs) I know that Bidenflation pushed prices up 21%, but $3 seemed very doable. I popped open the app from my local grocery store here in NJ – Shop Rite. Let’s see.

Quillette.

Hitler left blood. Richard III left bones. Lenin left an entire body, preserved like a specimen.

For centuries, historians and biographers have understood the powerful by scrutinising their words and letters, dissecting their decisions, and weighing the testimony of those they governed. But the recent rise of ancient DNA research has opened unsettling possibilities for analysing the actions of our rulers both past and present on the basis of their biology. This new perspective complicates but does not replace traditional interpretation; it could challenge old assumptions or further reinforce them. More significantly, however, genetics offers a tantalising—and possibly distorting—shortcut to understanding the minds that have shaped, or are now shaping, our world.

Ancient DNA (aDNA) analysis has moved far beyond tracing human ancestry and patterns of migration. Over the last decade, it has become a tool for detailed personal reconstruction, revealing previously impossible information about past individuals, including their health, diet, relationships, and physical appearance. And aDNA can now increasingly provide clues—sometimes surprising ones—not just about the bodies of the long-dead, but also about traits linked to neurological or behavioural tendencies.

BBC, a Voice of the Crust.

Some 100,000 of these small dives are hidden in plain sight across Japan. Now, travellers are finally discovering these locals-only hangouts – and the beloved “mamas” who run them.

I didn’t plan on having my fortune read by a matchmaking “mama” on my most recent visit to Tokyo. But after climbing to the second floor of a cozy sunakku (snack bar) called Aeru in the Shinbashi neighbourhood, the proprietress and owner, Urara, smiled coyly as she pulled a Knight of Wands from her tarot deck.

“You’re craving passion and protection… in a man,” Urara told me, as I nibbled chilli-flavoured rice crackers and deep-fried dough sticks slathered in brown sugar.

“I’ll be sure to let my husband know that,” I replied with a wry smile.

Read it.

Around 2,000 strange tunnels have been found around central Europe. These aren’t like the well-known catacombs of Paris or Rome. Known as the erdstall, these passages are extremely narrow, never more than two feet (60 centimetres) wide nor high enough for an adult to walk in, and sometimes the passages become seemingly impossibly narrow, as small as 16 inches (40 centimetres) in diameter. Determining their age and purpose is made difficult by the fact that almost no archaeological evidence has been found inside any of them. A ploughshare was found in one, millstones in a couple others, but apart from that the erdstall are eerily empty. Carbon analyses of coal and pottery fragments found within point to construction dates of around 900 to 1200 AD, but no written records from the Middle Ages mention the erdstall’s existence.

Read it.

On the western flank of the Hoover Dam stands a little-understood monument, commissioned by the US Bureau of Reclamation when construction of the dam began in 01931. The most noticeable parts of this corner of the dam, now known as Monument Plaza, are the massive winged bronze sculptures and central flagpole which are often photographed by visitors. The most amazing feature of this plaza, however, is under their feet as they take those pictures.

The plaza’s terrazzo floor is actually a celestial map that marks the time of the dam’s creation based on the 25,772-year axial precession of the earth.

Read it.

President Donald Trump drew cheers Monday night as he attended the College Football Playoff National Championship game between Indiana and Miami.

Trump was spotted in a suite during the pregame festivities with his daughter Ivanka Trump and several of his grandchildren at Hard Rock Stadium in South Florida.

As the national anthem was performed, the president waved to the crowd, prompting applause from fans inside the packed stadium.

Daily Record (UK).

A woman who adopted her niece after her sister was jailed for seven years has been praised online for changing the child’s name as soon as the adoption was finalised

Read it.

Well, first time that they know about it, anyway….

It was a late Sunday afternoon like any other on San Francisco’s Alcatraz Island. The day was winding down, and Aidan Moore, a guest relations employee for Alcatraz City Cruises, was at the dock of the tourist attraction helping visitors disembark. Suddenly, one of the tourists approached him, wide-eyed: They had just seen a coyote swimming to shore, something that has never been recorded before.

Read it.

n May 2017 a sculpture was displayed at the Moscow Higher School of Economics, believe it or not, in honour of the great secular-rational god Peer Review. The sculpture takes the form of a die displaying on its five visible sides the possible results of review — “Accept”, “Minor Changes”, “Major Changes”, “Revise and Resubmit” and “Reject”.

Peer review. What is it? Why does it matter? Where did it come from? How old is it?

A fairly solid academic article – Noah Moxham and Aileen Fyfe, ‘The Royal Society and the Prehistory of Peer Review, 1665-1965’, published in The Historical Journal 61 (2018), pp. 863-889 – begins with an untruth stated by the House of Commons committee on Science and Technology in 2011.

In one form or another, peer review has always been regarded as crucial to the reputation and reliability of scientific research.

Always? Fact-check: False. It’s a lie, or an error. Apparently, many people think that peer review was invented in the 17th century. Not so.

Read it.

The rise and spread of AI brings along endless discussions of what constitutes intelligence. A debate which, even if we limit ourselves to computer science, goes back not just to Weizenbaum’s Eliza, but to Turing and von Neumann.

It is also a debate that technical people should not abandon to others. Scientists and engineers are often wary of philosophizing, preferring problem-solving and action. The risk, however, is to relinquish the discussion to people who do not necessarily understand the technology. Current discussions of AI put this phenomenon on display. A typical example is the definition of intelligence. As I will discuss in this post, in the hope of helping to clarify and focus current debates, the source of many disagreements is that people rely, often implicitly, on two radically different notions of “intelligence.”

Read it.

When researchers at Emory University in Atlanta trained mice to fear the smell of almonds (by pairing it with electric shocks), they found, to their consternation, that both the children and grandchildren of these mice were spontaneously afraid of the same smell. That is not supposed to happen. Generations of schoolchildren have been taught that the inheritance of acquired characteristics is impossible. A mouse should not be born with something its parents have learned during their lifetimes, any more than a mouse that loses its tail in an accident should give birth to tailless mice.

If you are not a biologist, you’d be forgiven for being confused about the state of evolutionary science. Modern evolutionary biology dates back to a synthesis that emerged around the 1940s-60s, which married Charles Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection with Gregor Mendel’s discoveries of how genes are inherited. The traditional, and still dominant, view is that adaptations – from the human brain to the peacock’s tail – are fully and satisfactorily explained by natural selection (and subsequent inheritance). Yet as novel ideas flood in from genomics, epigenetics and developmental biology, most evolutionists agree that their field is in flux. Much of the data implies that evolution is more complex than we once assumed.

Some evolutionary biologists, myself included, are calling for a broader characterisation of evolutionary theory, known as the extended evolutionary synthesis (EES). A central issue is whether what happens to organisms during their lifetime – their development – can play important and previously unanticipated roles in evolution. The orthodox view has been that developmental processes are largely irrelevant to evolution, but the EES views them as pivotal. Protagonists with authoritative credentials square up on both sides of this debate, with big-shot professors at Ivy League universities and members of national academies going head-to-head over the mechanisms of evolution. Some people are even starting to wonder if a revolution is on the cards.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck is grinning from beyond the grave.

Read it.

If you’re of a certain age, you probably remember the essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The TL;DR was that old open source was the cathedral of exclusive developers and groups. Then the Bazaar showed up (which was the Linux Kernel for example) and that freed us from the shackles of the cathedral.

Except if we look at how things evolved, it wasn’t actually a bazaar. It was a bunch of roadside churches that are now megachurches. But there is still a bazaar, and it’s holding up our modern infrastructure.

Back in the early days there was a person named esr. Don’t look him up, he’s not exactly role model material. [Eric S. Raymond—Who doesn’t know that?] He didn’t like some people who called themselves GNU. Which is an acronym for “Gnu’s not Linux”. The GNU project was also started by a person who isn’t role model material. [Richard Stallman] esr was big mad that GNU wouldn’t just take any open source contribution, you had to follow their rules. But in Linux there were no rules!!!

Well, except all the rules a person named Linus made up. History will probably remember him as LTT, “Linus The Torvalds”.

But anyway, so esr told us not using GNU was cool and we should all just create whatever we wanted. And this mostly happened because it’s what everyone was already doing. There is an obscene amount of open source. Most of it is on GitHub now, which is owned by Microsoft. Who we haven’t mentioned in this story, but they hated Linux more than a toddler hates naps. After being visited by 3 ghosts one evening, they decided to like Linux and open source. It’s a long complex story but it could be summed up as if you can’t beat them, join them. But that’s not important right now.

Read it.

It is harder to automate harvesting of lettuce than to send a human to the moon, to get any product in the world shipped to you within a few hours, to get vaccines for mumps, chicken pox, etc, to get a computer and connectivity in almost every person’s pocket, and many others.

I had the privilege to visit multiple harvesting operations during my visit to Yuma, Arizona, last week. I also had the chance to connect with other players in the ecosystem who have worked on various aspects of the problem.

These included forward-thinking Farm Labor Contracting (FLC) companies, local manufacturers, AgTech adoption services companies, research institutions, and, of course, many growers, shippers, and packers. Just as with any population, I encountered people with extremely strong opinions about how things should be done!

Harvesting lettuce (and many other specialty crops) is still very much a majority human-driven endeavor.

Watch it.

Apparently China has a “cosplay boyfriend industry”.

When Chinese girls say, “I don’t need no man”—well, maybe they don’t.

This all takes money, of course, but money talks louder in China (and always has), and what (really) can you do with money in a Communist country (if they let you have it) than consumption spending? It’s not as if you’re going to run for office.

Daily Record (UK).

After being inspired by the film ‘Crocodile Dundee’, an American model named Ginger Meadows decided to explore the Australian Outback for herself, a decision that tragically ended in disaster.

The 24-year-old from Snowmass Village in Colorado, a popular ski resort very different to the arid lands of Darwin in the Northern Territory.

On March 29, 1987, she and her friend Jane Burchett embarked on a journey to visit King’s Cascade aboard a luxury boat, the Lady G. After their Australian adventure, they planned to travel to Papua New Guinea.

The boat, captained by Bruce Fitzpatrick and a small crew, arrived at the stunning yet infamous waterfall known for its crocodile population. Despite warnings about the dangerous creatures inhabiting the water, Ginger and Jane chose to take a risk and go for a swim.

Evolution is a stone cold bitch.

Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten.

Thanks to everyone who sent in condolences on my recent death from prostate cancer at age 68, but that was Scott Adams. I (Scott Alexander) am still alive1.

Still, the condolences are appreciated. Scott Adams was a surprisingly big part of my life. I may be the only person to have read every Dilbert book before graduating elementary school. For some reason, 10-year-old-Scott found Adams’ stories of time-wasting meetings and pointy-haired bosses hilarious. No doubt some of the attraction came from a more-than-passing resemblance between Dilbert’s nameless corporation and the California public school system. We’re all inmates in prisons with different names.

But it would be insufficiently ambitious to stop there. Adams’ comics were about the nerd experience. About being cleverer than everyone else, not just in the sense of being high IQ, but in the sense of being the only sane man in a crazy world where everyone else spends their days listening to overpaid consultants drone on about mission statements instead of doing anything useful. There’s an arc in Dilbert where the boss disappears for a few weeks and the engineers get to manage their own time. Productivity shoots up. Morale soars. They invent warp drives and time machines. Then the boss returns, and they’re back to being chronically behind schedule and over budget. This is the nerd outlook in a nutshell: if I ran the circus, there’d be some changes around here.

Watch it.

hoe_math explains what’s behind the Renee Good situation.