Catherine Berry

In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud — 'The mud should sound perfectly awful, but it doesn't,' notes the exper... Who knew listening to a banana sounded so good?

It's settled: My next home audio system will use wet mud instead of cables. I'd prefer bananas, but you have to replace those at least once a week. www.tomshardware.com/speakers/in-...

The "pale blue dot" photo. It shows three or four colored beams of light – optical artifacts – passing from the left side of the image to the right. The background is dark, empty space. In the topmost light beam is a single pale blue pixel. That's Earth. Sagan's quote is printed on the image. It reads ""We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history..."

"That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives." —Carl Sagan

Voyager 1 captured the "Pale Blue Dot" image #OTD in 1990. 🧪 🔭 🔵

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

We had dinner at a fun little restaurant, then saw the 2008 remake of "The Day the Earth Stood Still". I picked that movie; amazingly enough, she didn't dump me as soon as we left the theater. 🙂💜

⏳ Timeless insight by Marcus Aurelius:

“When you arise in the morning, think of what a privilege it is to be alive — to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.”

Proposed new term: "Slopwashing" -- falsely attributing harmful or malicious actions to a (supposedly) independent "AI" agent in order to escape responsibility for those actions.

I'm so confused by all this. I've known I was female since I was 4 years old, and finally managed to express myself properly when I was 56. But I don't expect anyone else to care, or do anything special. Just let me be who I am. I really don't think my existence is all that worrisome.

My favorite thing about Steam + Paradox on my PC is that every time a game updates, there's a 75% chance it will die on launch because it's trying to write to file system paths that I've locked down. I then have to allowlist the new paths individually. No other software updates cause this problem.

Ouch. 🙃

At last, I've found my kink community! 🙃

I suggest the Grand Hilbert Cloud Computer, featuring Infinitely Elastic Scaling™️. "We put the 'curse' in 'recursive'!" (Offer void for non-countable continua. Convergent limits may apply. Consent to Axiom of Choice is required. Use only as bijected.)

Alison

Yep on all three points. Another example is "Allison" by Elvis Costello. It's so perfectly wrapped in sappy love song camouflage that nobody processes what he's actually hinting at. And the hints get pretty blatant. open.spotify.com/track/2HcE0U...

Thanks!

That's why it was essential for Chinese dynasties to establish and maintain the Mandate of Sound Administrative Practice.

...Though to be fair, it can be hard to distinguish Confucian Heaven from sound administrative practice. 😁

Proposed new term: "Slopwashing" -- falsely attributing harmful or malicious actions to a (supposedly) independent "AI" agent in order to escape responsibility for those actions.

That song is one of my stronger pieces of evidence that nobody listens to the lyrics.

BREAKING: NASA revokes scientific finding that gravity, atmosphere make spaceflight difficult and expensive from Earth, removing key obstacle from manned mission to Mars

David Brooks either has strange hypnotic powers or blackmail material on the entire commentariat.

Same situation in software engineering. Good senior people can do better than AI, at least for now. But junior engineers are using AI for everything, and thus won't develop senior-level skills. Our whole society is steering itself straight into a trap. 😞

I drive myself crazy trying to imagine the experience of binocular depth perception. I know all about it in theory, but I have no idea what it's like to look at an unfamiliar isolated object and know that it's about a meter away. And of course it's not "like" anything for you; it just is. 2/2

I've been blind in one eye my whole life, and yes, it's surprising how much depth information your brain can derive from things like lighting, shadows, occlusion, angular size vs. known actual size, and so forth. It's not anything close to what you two-eyed freaks get, but it's often enough. 1/2

That title has me quite intrigued. Alas, I'm on the wrong side of the continent to attend. 😞

The issue is less about winning votes in Congress than it is about rhetoric. When you have Dems saying (for example) that the problem is that ICE lacks training, it undercuts the horror and urgency of the situation. We need to do everything we can to avoid normalizing any of this.

I did to mine. 🙂

It's nothing so grand. If a button on a device fails to perform its advertised function through multiple attempts, eventually I'll give up on pushing it and look for a different solution.

My dad said that social hierarchies are like monkeys in a tree. The ones on top look down and see nothing but smiling faces. The ones on the bottom look up and see nothing but assholes. 🙃

Photo of a beautiful scrimshaw pie crisper made of aged ivory in the shape of a sea horse. Caption reads: Whaler made scrimshawed whale ivory Sea horse pie crimper, circa 1850. @tonyhawktruther replies "string of words your grandpa lets out when he stubs his toe"

Santa Clara is setting up ‘free speech zones’ for the Super Bowl. Here’s what you need to know The zone will be activated from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Super Bowl Sunday.

I remember back when every square inch in the USA was a free speech zone. The First Amendment doesn't have an "unless it's inconvenient for a sporting event" clause.

www.mercurynews.com/2026/02/05/s...

Paul Krugman tells a joke about the economist who is so good at forecasting that they've predicted 7 of the last 3 recessions. 😁

My dad said that social hierarchies are like monkeys in a tree. The ones on top look down and see nothing but smiling faces. The ones on the bottom look up and see nothing but assholes. 🙃

I imagine that the hideously amplified version of this experienced by celebrities and billionaires explains why so many of them become dangerously insane. Humans are social animals, and excessive power breaks all authentic social connections. 2/2