December 19th, 2025:
- Fascinating piece on how cussing can make you stronger. It can apparently (though I remain skeptical) alleviate the immediate pain caused by bashing your shin on the coffee table or other immediate trauma. Forcing back dirty words reduces your ability to combat the pain and other possible threats in more complex crises.
- Could this be another term in the Drake Equation? Given how many satellites now orbit Earth (most of them comm constellations like Starllink) a single Carrington-level solar storm could cause countless chaotic collisions in near space that could create a layer of debris all around the planet. It’s called the Kessler Syndrome. Such a cloud would be risky to try and poke through, especially with manned spacecraft, and could set back space travel for a thousand years or more. (Hmmm. I smell an idea for an SF story or five.)
- Related: Estimates of half a million satellites in orbit by 2040 suggest that sunlight reflected from the satellites could reduce the quality of images taken by both ground-based and orbiting astronomical telescopes.
- Here’s a passel of safety tips I expect never to need again.
- I recently discovered an interesting piece of music by Josef Suk, who also composed the wonderful “Towards a New Life.” It’s called “Fantastic Scherzo,” and it’s a sort of high-energy gonzo waltz with peculiar interstices that qualify as scherzo cubed.
- I do this in private and always considered it just another facet of my legendary eccentricity. Turns out it actually helps you remain a functional human being. I guess it’s the vocal analog of journaling (i.e., writing about your emotions by pen or keyboard) and that mechanism helped me a great deal after Coriolis caved in.
- What happens when a 2,000 pound bison dies in Yellowstone National Park? Besides requiring heavy equipment to move, the carcass is taken to a top-secret location. It’s peculiar, but it all makes sense when you get the full story.
- Yet another AI hazard: Google AI is summarizing similar recipes, causing a significant dip in recipe site ad traffic. Although a given text description of a recipe is copyrightable, sets of steps are not. An AI can change the wording of a set of steps comprising a recipe and deliver an equivalent recipe to an AI user as a result of a query like “How do I create a coconut cream pie?” At some point people won’t bother looking up recipes on recipe sites—they’ll just let ChatGPT etc. do the work.
