Up and Out

How do you keep showing up when the Help Desk has completely destroyed your soul?

No one can last more than 2-3 years on helpdesk. I did it full-time and exclusively for around two years and if someone had put a red button that said “DESTROY ALL HUMANITY” in front of me after that stint in hell, I would’ve slammed that doom switch so hard I would’ve broken my hand.

You just experience the very worst and stupidest there. All day, every day.

People should be rotated out of that pit and those stuck there should do everything they can to advance their careers to get out of helldesk. It takes a huge toll on your soul.

It’s Her

Agreed. Damn you, Saoirse Ronan, why must you be such a blight upon my existence. First, you have the gall to have a difficult-to-pronounce name just to spite me and my girlfriend. And then I know it was you who is digging up my garden. I just know it. You sneak in there at night in a raccoon suit. It doesn’t even fit right.

I’m certain you’re laying hexes and sending me coded message of pure maleficence in every TV interview. That’s why I watch every single one to make sure. There is no evil to which witch Saoirse will not stoop. Something must be done!

Indifferent

Why are some people indifferent to cheating?

What does it have to do with me? I’m not the relationship police. I don’t know why people do what they do.

Why do I care one way or the other what other people in other situations get up to? It’s completely none of my business. The desire to pry into and pass judgment on other people’s private lives and decisions are a good part of what is wrong with the country and the world.

I’m mystified by people who think this is their territory. It’s just not.

Chinaโ€™s โ€˜Low-Human-Rightsโ€™ Advantage. People in the West say they must avoid a new Cold War without realizing that they are already in one โ€“ and China is winning.

Secret Documents Show Pepsi and Walmart Colluded to Raise Food Prices Across the Economy.

I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me.

America Is an Unserious Country Filled With Unserious People.

Cosmic-ray bath in a past supernova gives birth to Earth-like planets.

AI agents are starting to eat SaaS.

The Lost Generation.

Grim Jobs Report Delivers Black Mark to Trumpโ€™s Economy.

Ownership of the Means of Thinking.

After a Generation of Peace, Europe Tells Its People to Prepare for War.

How the New Deal Ran a Tight Ship, and Built Some Too.

New report finds the Arctic continues to warm faster than the planet as a whole.

Consumers are feeling gloomy about the economy. Hereโ€™s why theyโ€™re spending anyway.

Aired

French cancel NYE concert on Champs-ร‰lysรฉes as migrant violence grows.

It’s unfortunate that only the fairly-erratic New York Post will publish anything resembling the truth any longer.

The famed avenue has become a flashpoint of violence lately, with throngs of young, mostly Muslim migrants streaming in from Parisโ€™ infamous suburbs at night looking for trouble, looting lux stores, and brawling with Parisians and police.

The Paris police, which pressed the mayor to scrap the concert, cited security concerns such as โ€œunpredictable crowd movementsโ€ without going into details โ€“ but critics loudly blamed Franceโ€™s open-door immigration policies.

Europe has fallen — and without much of a fight, even. Too bad. Too damn bad.

Lunacy

Some real crankery at Phys.org this morning.

How did this nonsense get published? This is some wild stuff.

New models of gravity and cosmology could also be premised on Lษ…. In cosmology, the energy released from the gravitational energy of the entire universe due to Lษ… can function as Einstein’s original cosmological constant ษ…, preventing cosmic collapse into a singularity. Gravity can be modeled as just the flipside of this process.

No it definitely cannot and is not! What in the hell.

This clown treats โ€œenergy released from gravityโ€ (turned into heat/light) as if it could play the role of the cosmological constant. It simply cannot. As any Physics 101 book will tell you, heat and light is ordinary energy that thins out as the universe expands. On the other hand, the cosmological constant is a special kind of โ€œvacuumโ€ effect that does not dilute the same way at all. That’s why it’s called a frickin’ “constant!”

The article also assumes thereโ€™s a single, well-defined โ€œgravitational energy of the entire universeโ€ that you can draw down like a bank account. In standard general relativity for an expanding universe there isn’t this kind of energy bookkeeping, so this makes no sense right at the outset.

It also implies this process could act like a constant background term. But anything tied to the expansion rate and to the universeโ€™s changing mass distribution would vary over time, which is the opposite of what โ€œacts like the cosmological constantโ€ means for any observation.

And what the heck does, โ€œGravity is the flipside of this processโ€ mean? No! It really isn’t! That’s a cereal box slogan, not a theory. Unless itโ€™s backed by precise equations that reproduce what gravity demonstrably does (lensing, time dilation, gravitational waves, equivalence principle, etc.), it’s all absolute crap.

And then I looked the guy, Matthew Edwards, up. He’s a librarian. Not a physicist, not a cosmologist. And he has a whole passel of papers that are all absolutely lunatic.

Please keep this garbage out of Phys.org.

Race 90

Both race relations and feminism (riot grrrl!) were far better and more humane during the 1990s. It’s not even close. We were on the right path then; identity politics and the humorlessness of the Dolores Umbridge HR scolds did us in.

A Geologist Found The Oldest Water On Earth, And Then She Tasted It. Alrighty then.

In Northern Scotland, the Neolithic Age Never Ended.

America Cannot Win Alone.

Lockheed L-1011 TriStar.

Psychiatric disorders display high levels of comorbidity and genetic overlap.

Abdominal obesity and muscle loss increase the risk of death by 83% after age 50.

Americaโ€™s Drone Delusion. Why the Lessons of Ukraine Donโ€™t Apply to a Conflict With China. Yep. Not the same at all.

Why Germany Wants a Divorce With China.

Why more social interactions lead to more polarization in societies.

McKinsey plots thousands of layoffs in consulting slowdown.

A single mother colleague fell asleep on a teams chat at work and now everyone suddenly acts like she committed an act of terror.

This odd fish has 30 times as much DNA as humansโ€”a new record for animals.

Obamacare expiration will have โ€˜death spiralโ€™ effect on US healthcare โ€“ experts.

Rio de Janeiro's talipot palm trees bloom for the first and only time.

How NVIDIA Turned 'Gaming GPUs Go Brrr' Into 'Actually We Can Read The Language of Life Now.'

Generative Optogenetics.

The Measles Outbreak In South Carolina Is Growing.

The Billionaires Have Gone Full Louis XV.

Neutron star P13 shows dramatic X-ray variability linked to rotation velocity.

Firewood Banks Arenโ€™t Inspiring. Theyโ€™re a Sign of Collapse.