@cigitalgem Why are they being trained on data sets with confidential information??

I DECLARE BANKRUPTCY

@drskyskull Have you read their multi-volume history of RPGs? If not, google "Designers & Dragons." Well worth the cost, a super fun read.

@hendric @xris A+

Friends, who has a good microscope rec for 11-12 year olds? Reasonable price a plus, capable of viewing tardigrades a must.

Good evening.

These short days when it's dark by 4:30 are the pits. But at least the view out the office window is nice.

Chladni patterns – a natural pairing with Tolkien's musical cosmology – were the visual inspiration for the title sequence of the "Rings of Power" series on Amazon Prime.

Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni, a pioneer of the field of acoustics, was born #OTD in 1756.

He studied the mathematical theory of sound waves, the speed of sound in various materials, and eponymous complex patterns formed by vibrational modes of solid objects.

There are a gazillion versions of this song, passed down through families and musical lineages, with hundreds of distinct stanzas. It has 59 entries in the Vaughan Williams Library:

https://www.vwml.org/search?q=RN4456&collectionfilter=RoudFS;RoudBS&is=1

Just popped up on shuffle: "Shady Grove" performed by Takénobu (Nick Ogawa).

It's a traditional folk song from the Cumberlands that he reimagined for cello. I love this version, and stop whatever I'm doing when it comes on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyjZ1_4c_bk

“McCormack and Richard Tauber are singing by the bed
There's a glass of punch below your feet and an angel at your head
There's devils on each side of you with bottles in their hands
You need one more drop of poison and you'll dream of foreign lands.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/arts/music/shane-macgowan-dead.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

The cover of that book was my profile photo across social media for a long time!

Some blessed reddit user made a very high resolution scan of the John Berkey painting used as the cover for National Geographic's "Picture Atlas of Our Universe."

This specific spaceship absolutley lit my brain on fire when I was a kid.

Here is the post, with a few different resolutions and crops:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ImaginaryStarships/comments/b0fnl9/our_universe_by_john_berkey_5871x2763/

@ionisland 🤷

@simonbp lolll

@SarraceniaWilds Perfect

Taken two days apart.

Okay, let's make this an annual post.

Happy 56th birthday to pulsars, which were discovered by Jocelyn Bell Burnell.

Image Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Image warning: A very flashy (but very cool) gif of a pulsar.

Again, here's that thread from a few weeks ago about falling past a horizon, why you can't get back out, and a wormhole connecting two regions that are both “outside the black hole.”

https://mastodon.social/@mcnees/111410664694892538

In Henry Cavendish's famous paper "Experiments to determine the Density of the Earth," he opens by basically saying "Look, this was all Michell's idea, he just wasn't able to complete it before he passed away. I'm finishing what he started.”