Bottomless Pit Supervisor, Esq.

the first commercial bank in the world, The Medici Bank, opened in this building in 1397 there's a zara store now

What's a video that defines Peak Cringe?

George Floyd died 6 years ago so we could have this video.

If you think about it... This is still absolutely insane.

Took the SL from Dulles to New Carrollton yesterday, and the amount of value-capture WMATA's leaving on the table by maintaining empty parking lots at most every station in MD & VA is legit the reason ppl think expanding service is only attainable via fantasy maps like this.

Pope Leo XIV on AI: “Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed. The word [disarmed] is strong I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention, awakening consciences, and indicating paths forward for humanity.”

A pharmacist in Taipei walked off a trail in 2022 and photographed a 1mm blue mushroom on a piece of wood. It turned out to be one of the smallest mushrooms ever described. The mushroom is now called Mycena subcyanocephala. It grows on decaying wood in Taiwan's subtropical lowland forests. Its cap is about 1mm wide, the whole fruiting body just a few millimeters tall. When young, the cap is intensely blue and fuzzy. As it matures, the blue fades to a pale whitish color. It has been formally documented in the wild only a handful of times. Eric Cho, the man who found it, is a working pharmacist in Taipei. His friend told him there was a "special tiny mushroom" on a trail in Shilin District. He went looking, found one on a piece of wood, took it home, and was initially disappointed because it wasn't glowing in the dark like he'd hoped. He posted the photos to iNaturalist anyway. The images went viral globally. Mycologists at Taiwan's Academia Sinica formally described the species in 2023, citing Cho's photographs as part of the documentation. Most new species described in the last decade have not been found by professional biologists in remote jungles. They have been found by amateur naturalists with smartphones, posting to platforms like iNaturalist, in places like trails behind suburbs in Taipei. The forest behind your house may still be full of things nobody has named yet.

Need a fence? What you really need is a deadhedge. It's a barrier made of dead branches stacked between two rows of posts. You feed it with branches, fallen limbs, and woody yard debris. Over a season it becomes denser than most commercial fencing. Over years, the bottom layers compost down and the top gets refilled with whatever you trim that week. Wrens, robins, and ground-foraging birds nest in the structure. Hedgehogs, field mice, frogs, and toads shelter in the base. Solitary bees, ladybirds, and beetles overwinter in the cavities. Germany has been planting deadhedges as wildlife corridors since the 1990s. The UK uses them for riverbank restoration. A wood fence costs thousands of dollars and supports no wildlife. A deadhedge costs nothing, gets denser every year, and provides habitat for dozens of species you want in your yard anyway.

growing up Mormon I always said it was great to have a living prophet to address the challenges of the day. I still think it's a good idea for a religion, but Mormons have added maybe three meaningful updates in 150 years while the Pope just put out a detailed AI encyclical.

Four visions of government

one of the things I love most about the dc metro system is how much they play with the architectural design station-to-station as needed