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  Starting to hit aurora season...we're on the declining side of the Sun's activity cycle right now, but should still be some fairly good displays now that it's actually getting dark. (Timelapse vid from 2024, the thing darting around is a military helicopter doing tracer-fire training.)

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  Flight Lieutenant, did you really submit your flight plan with the callsign "Biggles'); DROP TABLE Airports;"? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/12/military-aircraft-reportedly-blamed-for-uk-air-traffic-control-outage

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  Don't get me wrong, machine learning is an incredibly useful tool in many fields, but I don't think it can mitigate the LLM based "no, seriously, intelligent" economic crash that's coming.

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  Today I learned.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYdXa_yp0fc

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  Just play it cool, nobody's noticed so far, blending right in, you've got this...

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  Realised complete scans of Dr Samuel Johnson's original 1755 dictionary are available free on Wikimedia Commons. So, of course, the first thing to check is whether he included "Sausage". And he didn't, although "Saucisse" sounds like it's closely related. Messrs. Curtis and Elton (Blackadder The Third, 1987) nailed it.

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  Reminded of this, because of one of J's projects: Mark Everett, of the rock band Eels, looks into the work of his dad, Hugh Everett III, the proposer of the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Quite bittersweet in places, goes into his father's early death. https://vimeo.com/58603054

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  Higher Physics students (so ~16yo) arguing over quantum gravity today. That's way, way beyond what we teach. Nice. The main thread was whether theories that we have no idea how to test count as real science. Also nice. (My take is that it never hurts to have a self-consistent theory with no testable predictions in your back pocket, but you still need to go outside and catapult water balloons at technicians from time to time.)

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  Northern Highland #Scotland folk: if you live near a beach it could be worth looking for fulgerite tomorrow, patches of sand that have been hit by lightning. If you (very gently, they're fragile!) dig down you may find a branch-like structure where the lightning fused the sand into a kind of glass. Rare, special thing to find.

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  Tricky to film, I need to sit down and get a proper lighting/zoom/angle setup, but this gives an idea. The spikes form to balance the pressure created by the magnet pulling the fluid down, they basically follow magnetic field lines and the separation is down to viscosity/density. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u65e2UrdBWA

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  The mission patch for the lunar rover computations I'm funding* has arrived! This is going straight on my lab coat. Thanks @standupmaths, love it! *To the tune of £10 plus some more for the patch. As part of £150k to vet the code that will run on a small rover as part of a hundreds-of-millions mission. https://youtu.be/IY0pf0-Daew

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  Muppet skeletons are canonical, and not a human arm.

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  Cassie had a bit of a rough week recently, trip to the V.E.T. as she wasn't eating. Constipation turns out to be *expensive* when the NHS doesn't cover cats. But she's much happier now, and wolfing food again. #NotActuallyAWolf

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  Voted today. Three enterprising primary school kids had set up a little shop next to the polling station doing sweets, soft drinks and homemade bracelets. Genius. Bought several things I didn't want.

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  "So let me get this straight, you found our DNA, all 13 of us, on an old clay cup?" "The Grail, yes. You all shared it that one time." "And you made..." "Grew." "...grew copies of us? And now we all have to have dinner together every day because..?" "It's the biggest attraction at Jesusland." "What happens when we look too old?" "We start a new gen...

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  @Buster Our microbe, Which is basically everywhere, Saccharomyces be thy name. Thy kingdom Fungi, Thy phylum Ascomycota, On earth, as it is in the ocean. Give us this day our daily bread, And forgive us our infections, As we forgive those who gave us infections. For thine is the power, An- and aerobically, For far longer than us. A mould.

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  @csk If Erdös, Lemmy and Bacon are in there, everybody is implicated....

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  @gahlord@post.lurk.org Is "anti-resonance" or similar a thing? Noticing if I'm playing an open E and the A near the 12th fret it kind of deadens the A, bit like the sponge-under-the-bridge trick.

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  Any of my folks up for a knitting commission? How much would a Jayne Cobb hat cost me? (Yeah, yeah, can buy them cheap online, not the point!) [EDIT: Someone's offered, thank you :)]

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  RE: https://mastodon.com.br/@xkcd/116480390342730879 There's honestly a certain element of truth in this. A mathematician specialising in topology once got chatting to a lady who was knitting, fascinated by the parallels, of which there are many. He approached her, very excited, a week later, with a whole new way of doing it. "Yes, dear, that's called a purl stitch."

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  Going through *very* old stores at work as we prepare to move to a new school. Partly looking for interesting stuff for local museum etc. So I bring out the tawse I found buried in a desk drawer when I started. A leather belt, split into three, specifically for hitting children. Utterly, rightly, illegal to use these days. I think I missed its legality by a year or so as a schoolkid. We showed it to a class of ~14yr olds. Several wanted to be hit to see what it felt like 🤣

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  This one's going in my "But sir, physics is boring" playlist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eRHfnLKdbA

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  Another bit of old kit I'd like to display, but can't for reasons: Janitor: "Geoff, we found this in a store, your kind of thing?" I open a burlap case, maybe 1950s, device inside with a dial on top reading in Roentgens. That's for measuring exposure to gamma rays. That kind of thing often has a calibration source. "We're leaving now, locking this door all washing our hands A LOT and I'm going to get a Geiger counter.&quot...

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  If you're in to tech, or computer science, or music (🤘), comedy or nice quirks of reality, @dylanbeattie has been posting a lot of fun short(ish) videos the last few months. https://youtube.com/@dylanbeattie

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  Still need to drill the ventilation and power supply holes, but pretty much there on the #AllSkyCamera refurb after 6 years of constant abuse by Scottish weather, which is, shall we say, "non-trivial". Needs a new dome, simple purchase from https://allskyoptics.com , who sponsored the project via discounts and support. But a tough bit of amateur kit.

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  Remember the early days of Twittr when you'd repeat somebody's post by, through pure etiquette, posting "RT @sam Funny thing", and then they made it an official function because the community started it and liked it and it was good?

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  Finally got around to sorting J's "Engine Warning" light, which is for an open circuit on glowplug 2. No big deal, it'll start and run without it, but it'd be nice to turn the light off so if it comes on we know there's another problem. Got connector off, bunch of crap around plug that I really don't want dropping into the cylinder when I remove it. Half an hour clearing it with vacuum and squirty air. Then I go to plug a socket in to rem...

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  With all the toilet issues, I bet you somebody has insisted that any pee-bags etc have been stored in a very particular place to make sure the centre of mass of the spaceship remains the same as planned, #Artemis

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  Thing I learned from Kerbal Space Program: you have to jettison the stuff below the heat shield well before the atmosphere, cos otherwise the air pressure clamps it on. Also do it well before that so there's no chance it hits you on the way down.

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  Hate to say it, but KSP does a better simulation of a re-entering capsule than NASA is right now.