Niall Murphy

Believing in evolution.

Fire extinguisher next to a statue of Joan of Arc

Hell of a thing to put next to a statue of Joan of Arc. (h/t David Pilling)

Louvre Thieves Given Immunity After Confirming Jewels Stolen For Purpose Of Training AI Software FRENCH POLICE have immediately ended all efforts to recover priceless Napoleon-era jewellery from the Louvre taken in a daring heist after it emerged the jewels were merely stolen for the purposes of ...

“When we realised these jewels were only stolen to inflate the share price of a company whose entire value relies on the wholesale theft of other people’s art, we had no choice but grant immunity,”

Genius from @waterfordwhispers.bsky.social

waterfordwhispersnews.com/2025/10/20/l...

Astronomer Ejnar Hertzsprung was born #OTD in 1873. 🧪 🔭

H-R diagram:

🔵 🟦 🟥
🔵 🟧
⚪️ 🟨
⚪️
🟡🟡
⚬ ⚬ 🟠🟠
⚬ ⚬ ⚬ 🔴
⚬ 🔴
⚫️

The Physics Nobel goes to John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis for a discovery that paved the way for quantum computers. Our reporters dive into the science

Un-frigging-believable. I have waited for something like this for so long!

A stacked area chart of the renewable electricity generation mix on the island of Ireland. There are seven fuel types: pumped storage, biomass, waste-to-energy, hydro, solar, wind, and gas. The y axis indicates the percentage of demand being met by each source. Footnote reads: All-island figures. Excludes domestic solar. Source: EirGrid, SEMO

It doesn't get much greener on the Irish grid: up to 6pm, renewable generation today has equalled 83.1% of electricity demand. Only a dozen or so prior days have done better. With lower weekend demand, there's a chance we'll see an all-time low for daily carbon emissions.

#StormAmy #SpeirGorm

A stacked area chart of the electricity generation mix on the island of Ireland. There are eight fuel types: pumped storage, biomass, waste-to-energy, hydro, solar, wind, oil, and gas. There is also a black line showing electricity demand. Footnote reads: All-island figures. Excludes domestic solar. Source: EirGrid, SEMO

Renewable generation and pumped storage equalled 65% of yesterday's electricity demand, with a peak of 77% at 00:00. Fossil fuel generation (mostly gas) equalled 32% of demand. 2% of generation was exported, 5% of demand was met by imports.

Taken high above Jupiter's southern subtropics, this picture shows various of its cloud bands with numerous storms and swirls and very distinct colour patterns, the area closest to the south pole being notably bluer than the rest.

A bit of #Jupiter (NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS / "Peitho-54")

Calvin & Hobbes is such an incredible body of work and it never feels locked to the era of its creation.

When you think of the middlebrow award winning films, plays and novels from the time the strip was being written (Out of Africa, Driving Miss Daisy) it is stark how well it has held up.

Me: i’m Autistic

Them: Oh you take things literally

Me: No that’s kleptomania

Screenshot: Statement by the Chairman and CEO of Aena, Maurici Lucena, on the announcement by Ryanair It would be hard to find in contemporary business history another case such as Ryanair where the dissonance between a company’s operational excellence and the dishonesty of its communications policy is so striking. Ryanair's impertinence and uninhibited public demands on democratic governments in countries where it operates its flights with the aim of obtaining economic advantages, shed light upon two deep-rooted and unedifying characteristics of this airline company. The first is that Ryanair has a disturbingly plutocratic idea of the political system, i.e. it seeks to intimidate public opinion by slashing its flights, calls for the resignation of ministers from half of Europe and the president of the European Commission, mocks democratically elected politicians, and calls for laws to be changed in its favour because it believes that government decision-making should bend to the interests of the most economically powerful companies such as Ryanair, instead of protecting the "general interest". The second characteristic is Ryanair's communications and institutional relations policy, which is in permanent and deliberate conflict with objective facts and truthfulness. Here are a few examples:

It sounds like Spanish national airport operator AENA is very much over Ryanair and MOL.

Haven’t seen something this… forthright in quite some time, and goodness me, forthright it is.

www.aena.es/en/press/sta...

"In Our Time" is the best radio show in the English language. More than 1,000 episodes archived and available online.

I cannot get tickets on eventbrite, is the event at capacity?

But you know that it was only made up in the 19th century to amuse, and attract, tourists? Before that it was just another Llanfair "Mary's Church".

This impressive crest of #Mirasaura had densely overlapping individual appendages with feather-like contours. But our work shows these are unlike true feathers and indicate an independent evolutionary origin 🦎🪶

the feds threatened aaron swartz with 35 years in prison for downloading j-stor, hounding him til he killed himself

now tech bros burn ridiculous amounts of energy and plagiarise EVERYONE'S work to make search engines that are wrong all the time and pictures that look like garbage

A Snakelocks anemone (Anemonia viridis) in a lowtide rockpool.
County Clare, Ireland.

Evidence for a sub-Jovian planet in the young TWA 7 disk  - Nature Using the James Webb Space Telescope's Mid-Infrared Instrument, a study reports evidence for a direct detection of a cold, sub-Jupiter-mass planet in the disk of the star TWA 7. 

Wow! For the first time ever, the James Webb Space Telescope has revealed an exoplanet by directly imaging it. The newfound world has a mass similar to Saturn and orbits inside the debris disk surrounding a very young star just 111 light years away. via @nature.com

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

500 songs: a look back Episode 142: “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys

It was a pleasure to share a planet with you, Brian Wilson.

Today we’re revisiting Episode 142: “God Only Knows” by The Beach Boys, where Andrew attempts to do one of Wilson’s greatest contributions justice.

Listen on Spotify, Apple and via the website: 500songs.com/podcast/epis...

Episode 146: “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys Episode one hundred and forty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys, and the history of the theremin. Click the full post to read liner n…

Please listen to this podcast about Brian Wilson, Good Vibrations, the theremin, the Cold War, contingency, creativity, the senses, and ~everything~, because I promise—I promise!—you will be glad you did. By @andrewhickey.500songs.com 500songs.com/podcast/epis...

In honor of Brian Wilson's passing, here are the four categories of Beach Boys songs:

1. surfing is great, you should try it
2. I have a good vehicle
3. I reach beyond myself into the ineffable, and that's where I find you, my love
4. sloop john b

YouTube video by The Beach Boys - Topic God Only Knows (Remastered 1996)

God Only Knows.

God and Brian Wilson. RIP

www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0lj...

YouTube video by The Beach Boys - Topic Heroes And Villains (A Cappella)

RIP Brian Wilson - so much pleasure and wonder. This is my favourite Beach Boys track with vocals isolated to get its full splendour www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOQQ...

UPDATE: white smoke has *also* been spotted in the city center of Avignon,,, bad news folks!!!

We must return to the glory days of a pair of Housing Consuls.

A possible EU product energy efficiency label for phones showing battery life, recharge cycles resistance to drop damage, water resistance and repairability.

EU to require phone to have decent support and repair options, and energy efficiency ratings. energy-efficient-products.ec.europa.eu/product-list...

Hey. The fragmentation of the social media landscape has been hard on indie #scicomm 🧪 projects

So if you'd like to follow a podcast that's enthusiastic about #linguistics, could you check out @lingthusiasm.bsky.social?

And if you think your followers might like to, could you give this a repost?

And a time lapse to complete the 🔭 observations! It's a little wobbly as we set up on a picnic table.

a discord is not a forum. I don't want to join your product's community; I want to read the solution to my technical problem from two posters who worked it out 4 years ago