Steuard Jensen

really one of the strangest media cycles in history, where mainstream media actively hid the fact that the columbine killers were popular upper class preppy kids with full on neo-nazi ideologies and instead pretended they were victims of bullying

Picture of Marjane Satrapi alongside a quote from her. The quote reads: The world is not divided into countries. The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don't know each other, but we talk together and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same... - Marjane Satrapi, Iranian-French graphic novelist

Thinking about this quote from Persepolis creator Marjane Satrapi again.

For people who still care about this sort of thing, here's James Madison writing from 1793 (6 years after the delegates in Philadelphia signed the Constitution) about why the power to make war was vested in the legislature.

press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/doc...

[I'm quite tempted by the idea of having this raft of legislation ready to go as soon as the next Democratic President is elected, and making it clear to Republicans that the new President will gladly sign those laws, but until then they will unilaterally reshape government just like Trump did.]

I hope that someone somewhere is already putting together detailed plans for what the replacements for all that should look like. This is a vast amount of work, and whenever there's finally a Congress prepared to act on it, they will need as much of a running start as we can give them.

It's also clear that SCOTUS has invalidated the core premise of a huge amount of 20th century legislation that established independent agencies to have nonpolitical experts shape policy: unless those decisions are reversed, that entire structure needs to be scrapped and rebuilt from the ground up.

I've been uneasy for years about the many "emergency" powers Congress has given to the executive. (A memorable grad school lunch conversation was "Could the President just wake up and nuke Cuba?") Between Trump and SCOTUS, I'm getting convinced Congress should revoke them *all*, despite the risks.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH

I wonder what strategy will actually work. I desperately want laws to prevent gerrymandering, but the GOP was dead set against them as long as they were the main ones doing it. My hope now is that if both sides see it as a danger, they might fix it.

Maybe executive power needs the same thing. Ugh.

Callers to Washington state hotline press 2 for Spanish and get accented AI English instead Callers to Washington state’s driver’s license agency who select automated service in Spanish are instead hearing an AI voice speaking English with a strong Spanish accent.

Callers to Washington state’s driver’s license agency who select automated service in Spanish are instead hearing an AI voice speaking English with a strong Spanish accent.

This is an excellent article about the value and purpose of genre fiction *and* it also neatly summarises how literary fiction works and what it doesn't address.

An array of giant chocolate bunnies stacked in boxes

Instructions on how to eat the bunny.

Slice: warm a serrated bread knife, dry fully, and cut gently. Ears or feet first is up to you.

It is my great privilege and delight to announce that Costco is selling Pete the Easter Bunny, a $140 10lb chunk of molded chocolate begging you to slowly saw off its legs.

Another MAGNIFICENT Oatmealy comic. SO worth your time and laughter and amazement.

The screenshot of the release notes reads: A new version of TeX Live Utility is available! TeX Live Utility 1.55 is now available-you have 1.54. Would you like to download it now? Release Notes: Changes Since 1.54 • Fix bug 137, homepage link in Help Book. • First release in a long time, since I don't use TeX anymore and resent the very idea of paying Apple annually for the privilege of giving away free and open-source software. Also, I'm really lazy. Please accept my apologies for all the annoying issues you've encountered in this mission-critical software. • Updated mirror list, which was three years out of date. • Added missing legacy mirrors, which was even more out of date. • Added an alert on startup when user tries Homebrew's lobotomized MacTex, because those lunatics left timgr but removed its database. Thanks for nothing, guys. Bug 142 and 144. • Use a custom user-agent to work around the Anubis bot trap on texlive.info. Can't wait to see what else breaks because of this, thanks to the profusion of degenerate Artificial Insemination fetishists scraping websites to feed their models. • Lists of countries in Repository/Continent are now sorted. No idea how you people let me get away with that one for the last fifteen years.

There's a "is anyone even reading this" sort of honesty you get in the software update release notes from a project that's been around for a long time.

Wait, really? I've never paid to publish in high-energy physics or in physics education. (And particle physics even has a collaboration SCOAP3 that's negotiated for the main journals to be fully open access, too: libraries of big institutions pay for that instead of for individual subscriptions.)

YouTube video by JULIA AKS JANE AUSTEN'S PERIOD DRAMA / 2026 Oscar®-Nominated Short Film

This Jane Austin parody is delightful and well done.

Aletheia tackles FirstProof autonomously We report the performance of Aletheia (Feng et al., 2026b), a mathematics research agent powered by Gemini 3 Deep Think, on the inaugural FirstProof challenge. Within the allowed timeframe of the chal...

Pretty wild Ai result, that will probably get less press than the latest Ai boyfriend article: arxiv.org/abs/2602.21201

A benchmark was created with professional mathematicians, using problems naturally encountered in their research and not publicly released. Aletheia solved 6/10 autonomously.

A wall full of mugs arranged in such a way that it looks like the mugs are repeating themselves, creating an uncomfortable illusion

Woe, wall of astigmatism be upon ye

This is what I need cis folks to understand.

It's been a decade.

Imagine living TEN FUCKING YEARS watching as a blatant, artificial campaign to erase your personhood, your identity and your safety chugs along, increasing in power every single day, and most people don't care or dismiss it

Your car’s tire sensors could be used to track you - IMDEA Networks Researchers at IMDEA Networks Institute, together with European partners, have found that tire pressure sensors in modern cars can unintentionally expose drivers to tracking. Over a ten-week study, th...

This is not the dystopia I was promised in movies from the 60s and 70s

networks.imdea.org/your-cars-ti...

Amazon Change Means Wishlists Might Expose Your Address Amazon is allowing gift senders to choose items from third-party sellers, which could open recipients up to new privacy risks.

NEW: Amazon is telling people who use its wishlists feature to switch to post office boxes or non-residential delivery addresses if they want to ensure their home addresses remain private, as part of a change in how it processes gifts bought from third-party sellers.

How to stop a dictator I spent months studying how authoritarians like Trump lose. The answer is shockingly simple.

I have spent the past several months studying the cutting-edge research on modern democracies that have defeated authoritarian leaders.

I've learned that the conventional wisdom on the topic is wrong — in ways that have clear implications for the US going forward

THREAD www.vox.com/politics/479...

This is true in rougly the same sense that a guy on the subway reeking of urine, screaming, and waving a knife around is “feared.”

Well, if anything was in bloom, we wouldn't have known it: our whole time there was in the dark. 😄

I just took my niece and nephew (and their parents) out to the very dark skies of Joshua Tree National Park and gave a tour of a bunch of constellation stories. They even had a nice little telescope I used to enhance some stories. The moon was too bright, but they LOVED it in the telescope. So fun!

It's just so weird! This is a person who knew your site was there, once, and visited regularly! Their mental model of "the internet" has just *changed* even though the old one is still relevant for anyone who wants it to be.

I can only think, and fume, about what a slap in the face this is to every person who fought and/or died for the right to learn, who were attacked or killed because they demanded to learn. people who would do anything, anything, for the privilege of a homework assignment

what even is the fucking point

I'm clearly Very Old, because I still don't fully understand. Are they saying that all their Internet Free Time is now used up by endlessly scrolling Reddit/etc. so they no longer think to visit other sites? (Maybe there's a subreddit/??? they could follow that would include it in their scroll?)

He dances in a way I have only seen horses dance. He possesses a power and majesty we will never know.