Merideth [Ctrl-Alt-DeYeet]

Goddam why does 1918 go so hard

With context and without, this makes me wish I could pin a gif on my refrigerator.

A *173 page* footnote? 😯

A picture of the Voyager Golden Record with the symbols and meanings under it.

what the symbols on the voyager golden record mean ✨

Also, congratulations everyone who made something this year. A comic, a song, a film, a novel, a painting, a poem, a short story, a sculpture, crochet, embroidery, whatever it is. In this era of slop and theft, if you *make* something you are a shining jewel and I am so grateful for you.

Hello fellow migraineurs who are also readers! A friend who teaches at Portland State is doing a survey about our reading experiences and it would be great if you were interested in taking it. Survey and more info here: portlandstate.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_... 📚

Black and white photo portrait of Annie Jump Cannon. She is wearing a white blouse or shirt with a frilly collar that fades into the white background of the photo, and a dark choker around her neck. Her hair is pulled back and she is looking to the left of the camera.

Astronomer Annie Jump Cannon was born #OTD in 1863. She was a pioneer of stellar classification and co-creator of the Harvard Classification Scheme.

Over her lifetime she *manually* classified around 350,000 stars. (1/n) 🧪 🔭 👩‍🔬 ⚛️

Image: Harvard University, Radcliffe Archives

The Witch Head Nebula

The Witch Head Nebula! 🌌

This is my latest photo of the haunting Witch Head Nebula, captured through a small telescope under dark skies.

It's a reflection nebula that glows primarily by reflecting the light of the nearby bright star Rigel in Orion (you can't miss it!)

#astrophotography

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair, said the beetles who made these cylinder seals out of trees. 🪲 🌳

www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/exhibits/onl...

And a legend was born.

💀 🚙 💨

Happy Birthday to you, and thanks for sharing all the silly baby bug magic with us! Here’s to another year of appreciating the cool bug friends all around us the way they deserve. 🐛 🐜 🐞 🪲🕷

“What’s your most controversial dessert opinion?”

Cloves ruin pumpkin pie

Screenshot of Internet Roadtrip showing an Ikea parking lot

After a weeklong trek across central Nova Scotia, the crowd-controlled Internet Roadtrip has reached the Halifax area, and for some reason the first thing they voted to do was to visit IKEA neal.fun/internet-roadtrip

This sequence of scale is full of pleasant little moments of “oh, I didn’t realize.” And the illustrations are lovely.

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
- William Carlos Williams

a map shaped like a butterfly,it shows san francisco at the centre of trade etc

San Francisco at the center of the world, in an octahedral butterfly map by Bernard J.S. Cahill, 1922

I keep thinking this too. Without imagination you can only pretend to be a visionary. You can’t create any part of a better world, except by accident, in service of lesser motives. And you can have no empathy, no true understanding of others or yourself. Explains so much about the forces at play.

Ugh, so accurate. Parasitic “business genius” boardroom fantasy LARPing for the ethicless and egotistical, too gutless to be a fighter, too selfish to heal others, and too dull-witted to be a rogue. How boring.

That sounds fantastic. I’ll look again later, hope it turns up somewhere.

YouTube video by IndependentMarcus We Found a Frozen Empire! 🥶 Somali Explorers "Discover" Minnesota #funny

I would watch this documentary.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=BHgY...

YouTube video by IndependentMarcus We Found a Frozen Empire! 🥶 Somali Explorers "Discover" Minnesota #funny

Okay I HAD to go looking. Is it this? I would love if there’s a longer or other version somewhere, because this is amazing.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=BHgY...

I used it for a significant other when in the midwest, and started applying it more generally in FL. Now I most often use it with someone I consider a little brother, and he uses it back. My grandma still uses it for me too.

100%. Artists create new ideas out of nothing. Human conductors can react to new problems in real time and make decisions not limited to static datasets. But venture capitalists only strip the value of existing works/skills, then act like it belongs to them and they understand it. Exactly like LLMs!

Sometimes when I read ‘venture capitalist’ my brain replaces it with ‘vampire’ for some reason, and I have to say, it often works just as well. (Calculating, blood-sucking, socially stunted, vulture-like, contributes little or nothing to society, you really don’t want to get a drink with them, etc.)

Bronze plaque saying "A Letter to the Future. Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it. August 2019. 415ppm CO2"

TIL about a memorial ceremony in Iceland in 2019 to mark the end of a glacier, changing the place name from Okjökull to Ok (jökull = glacier). Uncompromising wording on the bronze plaque:
"This is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it".

Martian moon Deimos appears dark, framed by the brighter planet Mars behind it, in this visible light monochromatic Asteroid Framing Camera image, acquired by ESA’s Hera spacecraft during its gravity-assist flyby on 12 March 2025. The car-sized planetary defence spacecraft was approximately 1000 km from the 12.4-km-diameter Deimos moon when this image was acquired. Deimos orbits approximately 23 500 km from the surface of Mars and is tidally locked, so that this side of the dark moon is rarely seen. At the top of the image is the bright Terra Sabaea region, close to the martian equator, outlined by darker regions about it, with part of the 450 km-diameter Huygen crater seen to the right side of the image. To the bottom right corner is part of Hellas Basin, among the largest known impact craters in the Solar System with a diameter of 2300 km and a depth of more than 7 km. Hera’s 1020x1020 pixel Asteroid Framing Camera is employed for both navigation and scientific investigation.

3/4 Mars and Deimos viewed by Hera's Asteroid Framing Camera

Taken on: March 12, 2025
Credit: ESA @esa.int

#Mars #Deimos #Hera #ESA

Just look at this beautiful star that gives us life.

Instantly one of my all time favorite nuggets of science, ever.

I say this as someone who once accidentally befriended a colony of honey bees who came to visit me (3-4 at a time, at the end of every fine afternoon, all summer) on a docked boat… & who’s tried to befriend bees on purpose ever since.

“Which lines of poetry live rent-free in your head?”

Nothing must happen to you
No what am I saying
Everything must happen to you
And it must be wonderful