xkcd made a fun pairwise comparison chart for shielding against a variety of external entities such as gamma rays, sharks, and toxic dust with things like air, lead, water, and a shark cage. It’s very silly but a quite interesting.
How machine learning is helping seismologists understand earthquakes and predict them more efficiently
Literally groundbreaking.
Ocean waves and the maths behind them
What’s the Italian for “surf’s up, big kahuna?”
Bloomberg on the scale of Hurricane Melissa's destruction in Jamaica
“Chuck Watson, a disaster modeler at Enki Research, estimates economic losses at almost $7.7 billion, or about 39% of the island’s gross domestic product.”
Researchers from three US universities recently published a study on three new species of snailfish found off the coast of California. Our discovery of not one, but three, new species of snailfishes is a reminder of how much we have yet to learn about life on Earth and of the power of curiosity and exploration.
(via; h/t clover)
Estampa created a cartography of generative AI, showing all the inner workings of the technologies behind way too much online activity right now: What set of extractions, agencies and resources allow us to converse online with a text-generating tool or to obtain images in a matter of seconds?
(via)
FlowingData posted about Bloomberg’s network diagram showing how Nvidia and OpenAI have a ton of circular deals with lots of multi-billion dollar enterprises, funneling money amongst themselves each other. It’s remarkable (derogatory).
Nelson rules
No, Nelson Muntz did not pay for me to write this.
Country names and the periodic table
Some countries are very radioactive!
tektite.cc is a tool to help you migrate to a Blacksky PDS. I did it with my Bluesky account and it was so easy.
Web performance consultant Harry Roberts went on the look out for low and mid-tier mobile devices that real people are using in 2025 as a way to more accurately measure different experiences of the Web for people without iPhones and high-end Android phones.
TIL: The first digits of the powers of two appear to follow a pattern:
1, 2, 4, 8, 1, 3, 6, 1, 2, 5…
7 and 9: always the sheep, never the shepherd.
Dr Abeba Birhane on AI for Good Summit censoring her keynote speech at the last minute
It’s all infinite possibilities until someone says something they don’t like.
A reinforcement learning agent beat Pokémon Red
Risk and reward; Team Rocket could learn a thing or two.
piman finds out if a GPT model can play Pokémon Crystal
What happens next won’t shock you.
TIL: magnitude 0 earthquakes exist and they can go lower than that!
Did you feel that? Probably not.
Sun Clock: a 24-hour clock that tells more than just the time
It’s solar time!
Researchers have found a way to describe “crowd hydrodynamics” that doesn’t assume the behaviours of the crowd itself: The physicists focused on cohorts of runners at the beginning of a marathon, as they are guided to the starting line by a row of organizers in successive sequences of walking and halting. This protocol creates a periodic and controlled disturbance similar to the stimulations that are typically used to probe the mechanical response of fluids.
Look, it's a 3D-printed bee hive!
Un-bee-lievable!
megalog_ posted the files to 3D-print your own skateboard on Printables. It’s almost completely 3D printed including the trucks and the board and judging by the comments, it’s a decent finish with some adjustments needed.