Jonathon Marsden

Smart! A Raven doing Raven things.

Redemption: A Game of Tactics and Consequences. A sci-fi tactical rpg and the best effort yet to wrap a soft narrative layer around a crunchy tactical core. Setting leans toward military focused stories a la Battlestar Galactica, but allows for other styles. Needs high player skill to run well.

Screenshot of the first page of the contract between van Diemen and Sultan Hamza. Dutch and Ternate text arranged in two columns with Dutch being on the left and Ternate on the right. Ternate is written in Arabic script.

In 1638, van Diemen made a contract with Hamza, Sultan of Ternate. This contract is the oldest extant text in a Papuan language. I briefly talked about it in the episode on Ternate of the A Language I Love Is... podcast with @dannybate.bsky.social 4/4

shows.acast.com/a-language-i...

As of this week, there is nobody left on Earth who witnessed this moment live.

Extinct birds, in order of left to right
1. Kauaʻi ʻōʻō 2. Cuban Macaw 3. Whēkau
4. Carolina Parakeet 5. Great Auk 6. Passenger Pigeon
7. Labrador Duck

'Ur mom' but it's a demographic in ancient Mesopotamia

Unlocking maps of Aboriginal ‘sky country’ The emerging field of Cultural Astronomy is unravelling how Indigenous understandings of the night sky is linked to navigating "songlines".

Unlocking maps of Aboriginal ‘sky country’ cosmosmagazine.com/space/astron...

We've hit 750 CoPower Gas customer members! ✊🎉 This milestone means that we now have a $15,000 democratic budget to allocate to initiatives to help our CoPower Gas customer members reduce their energy use and where possible, get off gas. 1/3

Yes, you can store data on a bird — enthusiast converts PNG to bird-shaped waveform, teaches young starling to recall file at up to 2MB/s Who needs Starlink when you've got an actual starling

Ok but does it run DOOM

www.tomshardware.com/pc-component...

Helsinki goes a full year without a traffic death A city traffic engineer credits the success to lower speed limits and smarter design.

“Helsinki has not recorded a single traffic fatality in the past 12 months, city and police officials confirmed this week.”

City engineer credits lower speed limits and smart design.

I agree. #Helsinki #VisionZero

Photo of Tom Lehrer

My last living musical hero is still my hero but unfortunately no longer living. RIP to the great, great Mr. Tom Lehrer.

From Cartography to Code: Architectures of Power at the Venice Biennale 2025 STIR speaks to Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler on their Silver Lion-winning 'large scale visual manifesto' traversing history, colonialism, militarisation and technology.

#cartography #history #empire

A photo of a TV where a woman dressed as a ghost for the Eras Tour is interviewed by local news. The caption reads “Woman hides identity because she called in sick to work.”

Unlike CEOs and other executives, individual contributors understand concert OPSEC

1) We’ve changed our name to ME/CFS Science!

We hope to keep sharing in-depth analysis of ME/CFS research, focusing on data and methodology, trying to separate hype from real progress.

The Doctor (as in Who) should get a cat. It would love it, running around inside the TARDIS. The Doctor could fit a cat flap to the TARDIS door.

I’m petrified about today’s science news. Genetically modifying crabs to have cheetah genes? This could go sideways fast.

Get your tickets for the special 20th anniversary screening of The Call of Cthulhu (2005), 9pm 26 June at the Sun Theatre in Yarraville 🇦🇺.

Intro in person by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society's Andrew Leman (director) and Sean Branney (producer/co-writer).
🎫 suntheatre.com.au/wp-cinema/mo...

A graph titled "Cost of Transport" showing the relationship between body weight (in kilograms) and energy consumption for distance traveled (calories per gram per kilometer) for various animals and machines. It highlights that a person on a bicycle ranks first in efficiency.

A person on a bicycle is by far the most energy-efficient among animals and machines per distance traveled relative to body weight. The bicycle is magic.

www.jstor.org/stable/24923...

Taken from an NPR article on this topic, and I'm citing the photographer at the end of the thread. A dark-skinned man in a polo shirt has his hand up in a loose fist, and a bird that resembles a very large sparrow with buff cheeks and a pink bill seems to lean into the area of the man's face. The coloration on the bird is monochromatic: dark flight feathers and 'beard'. lighter chest shading to white. "Honeyguide birds in Tanzania and Mozambique discriminate among honey-hunters' calls, responding much more readily to local than to foreign calls. " Credit: Claire Spottiswoode

Let's learn about the Greater honeyguide (Scientific name: Indicator indicator 😀). They're cousins to the woodpeckers & live in Sub-Saharan Africa.

They have a special partnership with humans: they guide us to wild beehives. We get the honey, they get the high-calorie larvae & wax.

YouTube video by The B1M The Race To Fix The World's Most Isolated Mega-Port

Good explainer on the new rail facility at the Port of Melbourne

Schwabinger Holzensemble - Studierendenwohnheim in München von hirner & riehl architekten nbsp;

hirner & riehl's new mass timber student housing in munich...

note the egress - point access block w/ scissor stairs.... allowing daylight into the corridors.

also note the amount of land for trees/community/nature around it

www.baunetz.de/meldungen/Me...

I for one am appalled that nobody has published a double-blind placebo-controlled trial on the efficacy on parachutes.

Meet the Short-eared Owl—known for its piercing gaze and silent flight. A true master of open landscapes. 📸 lydebug

A group of nine Short-billed Dowitchers and one Dunlin wading in shallow water. The Dowitchers are cinnamon-brown shorebirds with long, straight black bills, densely patterned white and brown bellies, and a dark eyestripe. The Dunlin is a slightly smaller shorebird with red-brown feathers, and a white belly with a large black spot.

I had to lowcrawl through stinky tidal mud for this one so please say nice things about it

A diagram depicting a bust of a crow and a bust of a raven. Both are corvids with black feathers, grayish beaks, and black eyes. The crow has a narrow straight beak, smooth head feathers, and short throat feathers. The raven has a stout curved beak, raised head feathers, and long throat feathers.

Happy #InternationalCrowandRavenAppreciationDay !
Wow that's a long hashtag. Anyways, here's a quick study I did on the morphological differences in head shape between our two lovely corvids! 🐦‍⬛

[ 🎨 #art #birdart #sciart #birds #corvid #crow #raven ]

issuu.com/iwso/docs/iw...
#melbswest

A photograph taken from the third row of the ground floor of the Williamstown Town Hall showing an illustration of the characters on Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and their corresponding orchestral instruments.

A joyful and transporting performance by the Inner West Symphony Orchestra of Prokofiev’s Peter & the Wolf, narrated by Mr Adrian McEniery.

ruby pearmain apples, painted by mary daisy arnold, 1916

ruby pearmain apples, painted by mary daisy arnold, 1916

NASA's Dragonfly nuclear-powered helicopter clears key hurdle ahead of 2028 launch toward huge Saturn moon Titan "Passing this mission milestone means that Dragonfly's mission design, fabrication, integration and test plans are all approved, and the mission can now turn its attention to the construction of the s...

NASA’s Dragonfly mission passed Critical Design Review and is on track for a 2028 launch to Saturn’s moon Titan. Dragonfly is a nuclear-powered rotorcraft designed to fly between multiple sites across Titan’s surface.
#NASA
#Dragonfly
#Titan
#Astrobiology
🧪🔭