Clive Thompson

Trump absolutely believes water naturally flows "down" from north to south. He has said this many times.

niiiiiiice

LA Times: "'It backfired,' said one senior administrator at UCLA, reflecting the sense of whiplash. .... 'Within hours of announcing our settlement, the DOJ was on our back.'

WHO COULD'VE SEEN THIS COMING

www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/0ypqo...

A Chrome browser error page displays the familiar “Aw, Snap!” message, indicating that something went wrong while loading a webpage. A pixelated frowning file icon with Xs for eyes appears at the top left. Below, the error code reads “Out of Memory,” suggesting the browser ran out of system resources. The page includes a “Reload” button in blue on the bottom right

behold the "HTML bomb"

It's a counterattack for AI companies that persistently scrape and rescrape your web site, even when you tell them not to

when a scraper grabs it, it becomes a 10-gig HTML page and 💣 goes the scraper

Item #6 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter: buttondown.com/clivethompso...

right??

Sundays are for chilling and reading. For the reading part, I highly recommend this by Clive 👇🏻

I Responded to One of the Spam Texts From a “Recruiter”—Then Took the Job. It Got Weirder Than I Could Have Imagined. The story of “Cathy,” my scammer.

You know those spam text messages you get, saying it's a recruiter with a job for you?

what ... how does the scam work?

@alexsammon.bsky.social took one of the jobs, and the story is *fascinating*

Go check it out: slate.com/technology/2...

a solid take

they literally called it "Syn57"???

brought to you by the folks behind Ice 9, I guess

Screenshot of an article. The headline is "Synthetic E. coli with compressed DNA outsmarts viruses in radical genetic leap", and the subhead is: "Syn57 is the most radically recoded organism to date, engineered to unlock new materials, resist viruses, and redefine life." The date is Aug 01, 2025 and the author is Neetika Waltert. There's a small headshot of her in black and white; she is a smiling woman with her hair pulled back. Neetika Walter

wow does this headline ever read like the opening scene in an end-times body-horror movie

interestingengineering.com/science/reco...

A well-dressed server is slicing cured meat at a lavish buffet table filled with an array of artfully presented appetizers. The spread includes trays of skewered olives with lemon slices, tomato-topped bruschetta, and small paper bowls filled with seafood and vegetable bites. A stack of clean white plates sits ready for guests, while a large floral arrangement and baskets of bread add elegance to the rustic wooden table. Natural light filters in, suggesting a festive and upscale gathering, perhaps a wedding or formal reception.

Fun: @ethanz.bsky.social crunched data on restaurants in 340 American cities ...

... to see which towns have "statistically improbable" cuisine

i.e. which towns have unexpected concentrations of Lebanese food?

Item #3 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free here: buttondown.com/clivethompso...

lol

A historical document from the U.S. Senate dated July 29, 1912, shows the introduction of a bill by Mr. Lodge, referred to the Committee on the Judiciary. Bold text in the center declares it as “A BILL,” and a highlighted subtitle below states its purpose: “To prohibit the making, showing, or distributing of fraudulent photographs.” The text beneath begins the formal legislative language, setting the stage for the proposed law. The layout is official and minimalist, typical of early 20th-century government documents.

In 1912, the Senate tried to pass a law that would criminalize what were -- for the time -- deepfakes

criminals were making fake nudes of women, and pics of themselves with President Taft

item #11 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free to read here: buttondown.com/clivethompso...

oh my goodness

that is ... truly something to behold

What if "bicycle street, cars as guests" were the starting point for all streets?

A screenshot of an interactive web tool that pairs words with percussion sounds in real-time as text scrolls by. At the top, dropdown menus and sliders allow the user to select a literary work ("Little Women"), adjust scroll speed, and set excerpt size. Below, a section titled “Word-Sound Rules” shows that the words “the,” “of,” and “and” are linked to a bass drum, snare drum, and hand clap respectively. In the lower portion, a passage from Little Women is displayed, with the trigger words highlighted in yellow, visually cueing when a corresponding sound would play during the automated reading

A drum machine -- created by @maxy.bsky.social -- that plays patterns based on word-occurrence in classic literature

Item #2 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free to read and subscribe to here here here: buttondown.com/clivethompso...

Screenshot reading: The DOE report’s summary states that CO2-induced warming “appears to be less damaging economically than commonly believed, and that aggressive mitigation strategies could be more harmful than beneficial.” Many of the arguments reflected in the new DOE paper, mainstream scientists told WIRED, have been debunked over and over for years. “I’m a bit surprised that the government put out something like this as an official publication,” Zeke Hausfather, the climate research lead at tech company Stripe and a research scientist at the climate nonprofit Berkeley Earth, told WIRED in an email. “It reads like a blog post—a somewhat scattershot collection of oft-debunked skeptic claims, studies taken out of context, or cherry-picked examples that are not representative of broader climate science research findings.” The DOE says that it is opening the report up to a public comment process. In an email, Department of Energy spokesperson Andrea Woods said that the questions WIRED sent over about the use of research in specific portions of the report were too complex for the agency to answer thoroughly on a short turnaround, and encouraged scientists who spoke with WIRED to submit a public comment to the federal register.

A Department of Energy report drops, and climate denialism is official fed policy

the report: www.energy.gov/sites/defaul...

Here's Wired, noting that it "reads like a blog post" full of cherry-picked half-truths: www.wired.com/story/scient...

Unpaywalled Wired, just in case: archive.is/2MixX

truly

I have never bought a Celcius energy drink before

actually I've never bought *any* energy drink before

but now that I've learned Celsius is, like, *randomly filling cans accidentally with vodka* ...

... I'm kind of intrigued

Am I wrong or is the discourse around this entirely manufactured? I keep seeing claims that "the left is melting down" and the evidence is two people on tiktok. It's like they need wokeness so bad they have to invent it

Yep -- that latter point was something that I always worried about; changes in both directions (an alteration to make a post suddenly creepy, or vice versa -- starts creepy, then is altered for gaslighting)

that said, in actual practice -- Mastodon anyway -- I haven't encountered either problem

(Sorry, had to repost this after deleting it -- I had the wrong link in

o how I wish Bluesky had an edit button like on mastodon, it's sooooo useful)

A hawk perches on a thick metal wire against a clear, vibrant blue sky. Its feathers are sleek and well-defined, with a light brown chest and darker gray wings. The bird gazes to the left

A hawk figured out how to use a traffic signal ...

... to help it hunt

"a remarkable intellectual feat for a young bird," writes the scientist who watched this transpire in a small New Jersey town

item #7 in my latest Linkfest newsletter, free riiiight here: buttondown.com/clivethompso...

omg no, that's amazing, thank you!

will put him in the next Linkfest

Korean Scientist With Green Card Detained for a Week and Denied Access to His Lawyer | Common Dreams U.S. legal resident detained without explanation for a week, denied legal representation.

"If the Constitution doesn't apply to somebody who's lived in this country for 35 years and is a green-card holder... the Constitution doesn't apply to anybody who's been in this country for less time than him," said an attorney representing the scientist.

www.commondreams.org/news/korean-...

A striking modernist building with a mix of curved and angular architectural elements stands atop a rocky cliff, rising dramatically above a dense forest of pine trees. It has a pale exterior which catches the golden light of the setting sun. There are expansive windows and cantilevered balconies -- it's a futuristic look, like something from a Star Wars movie

Frank Lloyd Wright died leaving plans for many unrealized buildings

Now David Romero is bringing them to life ...

... digitally

item #1 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter ("the opposite of doomscrolling", as I call it 😅), free to read/subscribe here: buttondown.com/clivethompso...

Biologist folk (especially in evolutionary biology and/or ecology, but it don’t matter):

Can you give me your favorite examples of trade offs in biology? Organism or system don’t matter. Primary literature or reviews preferred.

DHS Declares Abrego ‘Will Never Walk America’s Streets’ Hours After Judges Order His Release

Here's how you know the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case represents something fundamentally broken in government accountability: within hours of two federal judges ordering his release and explicitly warning the…

Artwork that depicts the boot screen for Microsoft Windows XP home edition. The logo and name of the software is in the center of the screen, and the screen itself is black. Beneath the logo is a small progress bar showing how the software is loading, and in the bottom corners are the copyright information and the logo for Microsoft. The painting is incredibly corroded and messed up, because it appears to have been painted on what looks to be stone or parchment, with many parts of the screen worn off, exposing the stone or parchment below. It looks like something that was buried in the earth for 100 years and then pulled out again

A picture of an artwork. It is a painting of an iPhone screen that crudely shows what appears to be map directions “to home, from my location”. The two options are "one hour and 35 minutes" and "one hour and 44 minutes". The blue lines on the map seem to glow faintly. The painting is very distressed, as if it had been painted on some cracked and broken surface, like stone.

Behold the sculptor Seth Steinman's "post-internet artifacts" ...

... in which he paints various famous software UIs onto stone

the result is spookily weird

Item #15 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free to read and subscribe to here: buttondown.com/clivethompso...

‘You Could Throw Out the Results of All These Papers’ RFK Jr.’s vaccine-safety investigator has previously used government vaccine data to publish research with glaring flaws.

A good -- if predictably sobering -- piece on the anti-vaccine guy that RFK has appointed as a vaccine-safety investigator

www.theatlantic.com/health/archi...

unpaywalled: archive.is/FsfGe

I appreciated the walkthrough of why this guy's research into vaccine-autism links is so risibly shoddy