Daniel Ethier

Northern lights above a few houses and trees. A band of green is just above the horizon, with some waviness and vertical pillars. There is some fainter red above the green.

Northern lights at about 8:20 this evening. Things had just picked up with the reds starting to appear above the green that had just become more wavy and active.

Bright red aurora rising diagonally above some trees and houses in the distance.

Bright red aurora above trees and houses.

Red aurora seems to explode from the center of the image, looking straight up into the sky.

The constellation Orion through bright red aurora that fills the field of view.

A few photos from the amazing northern lights tonight.

#aurora

View of the northern night sky above a suburban development, showing a curtain of greenish northern lights with some brighter pillars. On the right side is a pinkish pillar.

Panorama of tonight's northern lights. Handheld with my iPhone. Stitched two photos together using Panorama Stitcher.

#astronomy

First time I’ve heard one his speeches. This guy is really good!

No, SNAP Benefits Aren’t Mostly Used by Immigrants SNAP benefits are set to run out on Saturday. Far-right influencers and extremists are incorrectly claiming that immigrants are the main recipients of food stamps.

SNAP benefits are set to run out on Saturday. Far-right influencers and extremists are incorrectly claiming that immigrants are the main recipients of food stamps. www.wired.com/story/disinf...

This is amazing!

A spiral galaxy fills the center quarter of the image, with several brighter spots in each arm of the galaxy. The galaxy is set against a field of stars.

The Triangulum Galaxy. This is the result of almost 24 hours of imaging over 5 nights. This galaxy is about 2.7 million light years away. It is about 60,000 light years in diameter, a bit more than half the size of our Milky Way galaxy.
#astronomy

I can easily do that test and I’m 67.

Amazon DNS outage breaks much of the internet | TechCrunch The outage affected websites like Coinbase and Fortnite, and disrupted services like Signal, Zoom and Amazon's own products, including Ring.

It's always DNS. Except when it's AWS. (In this case, it was both.)

More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days. The government does not track how often immigration agents grab citizens. So ProPublica did. Our tally — almost certainly incomplete — includes people who were held for days without a lawyer. And near...

BREAKING from PP

We found immigration agents have held more than 170 *citizens*

The govt doesn't track citizens held. So we did. We tallied:

Nearly 20 kids, two w/ cancer

More than 20 citizens held for day or more, incommunicado

www.propublica.org/article/immi...

by @nicolefoy.bsky.social

Children can be systematic problem-solvers at younger ages than psychologists had thought – new research By cranking up the difficulty on the test task, researchers found that children are capable of finding systematic solutions to complex problems far earlier than psychologists had believed.

Young children are capable of finding systematic solutions to complex problems without any instruction, contradicting long-held assumptions about cognitive development, according to a psychologist
buff.ly/226VzMZ 🧪

Trump officials discussed sending elite Army division to Portland, text messages show A high-ranking White House official was indiscreetly texting about the Portland, Ore., planning last weekend, according to messages shared with the Minnesota Star Tribune.

The messages show high-level officials in the Trump administration discussing the possible deployment of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, an infantry force that has dropped into combat zones in both World Wars, Vietnam and Afghanistan.

A spiral galaxy fills the center of the image, a bright oval tilted from the upper left to the lower right. The center is a bright blob, surrounded by brownish rings circling the center of the galaxy. Many stars fill the background, with one bright bluish star at the center left of the image.

The Andromeda Galaxy. We had 6 consecutive nights of very clear skies, just beautiful weather, with the moon new to a thin crescent setting before imaging began. This is a mosaic of five individual images totaling about 25 hours.

Good pace!

There are a lot of issues with Tahoe and with iPad OS 26 too.

Serious scholars have examined what happens when we change the number of H1-B visas issued.

Cities that get more H1-B immigrants subsequently see the wages of natives *rise* substantially.

Skilled immigrants bring new ideas, fill labor shortages and make us all more productive.

Double harvest: Vertical solar panels and crops thrive side by side Imagine a field where solar panels and crops coexist—with no trade-off. It sounds like science fiction, but that's precisely what researchers from Aarhus University have now documented in a full-scale...

Vertical rows are the agrivoltaic winner!

“The vertical panels produce slightly less electricity—but with higher value, as generation peaks coincide with morning and late afternoon demand…The crops don't seem to mind the presence of solar panels and they like the wind protection they provide.”

Pigeons, you what to do.

The Untold Saga of What Happened When DOGE Stormed Social Security DOGE has ignored urgently needed reforms and upgrades at the Social Security Administration, according to dozens of insiders and 15 hours of candid interviews with the former acting chief of the agenc...

“DOGE, he said, began acting like “a bunch of people who didn’t know what they were doing, with ideas of how government should run — thinking it should work like a McDonald’s or a bank — screaming all the time.”

NEW: The Messages on the Bullets are From a Video Game The phrases engraved on the bullets found by law enforcement during the investigation into the shooting of Charlie Kirk come from a video game called Helldivers2

NEW: The messages on the bullets are from a video game called Helldivers2. My latest: www.muellershewrote.com/p/new-the-me...

How does AI affect how we learn? A cognitive psychologist explains why you learn when the work is hard Chatbots can facilitate ‘cognitive offloading,’ or taking shortcuts when learning. But emerging research on AI and cognitive science shows that learning is like a workout.

#AI in #education: Is it a brain booster or a brain drain?

A cognitive psychologist explains why genuine mental effort remains crucial for learning and mastery.

buff.ly/JViMka4

I’m reading it now. I think it’s very interesting! Gets me thinking.

Articles like this are why I follow you. Thanks for the calm details I don’t get elsewhere. It’s very helpful.

Minnesota churches are sharing land with homeless people. They say it’s the Christian thing to do. Believing community to be the key to ending chronic homelessness, the Sacred Settlement model uses religious land use law to overcome opposition.

Believing community to be the key to ending chronic homelessness, the Sacred Settlement model uses religious land use law to overcome opposition.

Trump Is Accusing Foes With Multiple Mortgages of Fraud. Records Show 3 of His Cabinet Members Have Them. The White House has targeted opponents, including a Fed governor, for having more than one primary residence on their loan papers. ProPublica found that, in one case, a Trump cabinet secretary got two...

NEW: Trump has targeted political foes — including Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook — for claiming more than one primary residence on their loan papers.

But ProPublica found that at least three of the president’s Cabinet members have done the same thing.

I did enjoy trying to imagine what annealing Greenland would look like though ...

Hint of purple and green northern lights low in the sky above several trees in the distance, with a few houses also in the distance. A few stars are visible in the sky above the northern lights.

Hint of the northern lights visible low in the sky from the Twin Cities this evening.

A oval nebula with the longer dimension vertical is in the center of the image. It is mostly blue-green with reddish colors on the left and right and a bit at the top and mixed in tangles through the nebula. The nebula is set against a dense field of thousands of stars, with one brighter star to the upper left.

The Dumbbell Nebula. This is about 5 1/2 hours of imaging over three nights. Very clear all three nights. This is the result of a star that exploded about 10,000 years ago. It is about 1360 light years away and about 2 light years in diameter.

#astronomy

Five rescaled maps of Minnesota on a Mercator projection map, covering 1) a large part of northern Greenland, 2) a large part of northern Scandinavia, 3) a part of central Europe, 4) a region of southern India, 5) a region of southeastern Australia.

A website that lets you select a country or state and move it around a Mercator projection map to yield better size comparisons.

thetruesize.com, created by James Talmage and Damon Maneice