Shirley Siluk 🇺🇦

@GaudetteRob @Wilson__Valdez With a glaring typo yet, for god's sake! "peak behind the curtain"? Try "peek." So much for basic journalism skills.

@Wilson__Valdez Not only that! Look at their sign-off. “We hope you took something away and enjoyed the peak behind the curtain!” So tone deaf. It will be the death of democracy.

So the NYT politics guys did a Reddit AMA several days ago. This was the top upvoted post. And then the extremely predictable (point proving) response.

@knightcolumbia @CUSEAS Excellent program today. All the speakers raised interesting and important issues, and I learned a lot.

Starting shortly: "Generative AI, Free Speech, & Public Discourse," a symposium co-hosted by @knightcolumbia and @CUSEAS. Tune in to the livestream + join the Q&A at the link below. #GenAIFreeSpeech youtube.com/watch?v=BBhews…

@craigtimes @csiemaszko This is awesome!

“Some of the snow from 1967, there was so much of it, they didn’t know what to do with it. They put it on train cars, and they shipped it to #Florida for kids who had never seen snow.” wbez.org/stories/that-t… h/t @csiemaszko

@JoseGameWriter @rickperlstein I was also going to suggest "Parable of the Sower" as a novel that comes close to imagining what our not-too-distant future might look like. So many things feel prescient: the privatization of public goods, the immiseration of "little" people, etc.

Please read the letter to me that opens this column if you're having trouble rousing the passion to participate in the 2024 presidential election. prospect.org/politics/2024-…

@KevinBankston @BrianRoemmele Found this: space.com/big-ring-galac…

@BrianRoemmele Can you share a source for this news and pic? Thanks!

Scientists from the University of Central Lancashire in the UK have reported the discovery of a massive cosmic structure that challenges current understanding of the universe. The Great Ring, as it is called, is a nearly perfect circle of galaxies and galaxy clusters that spans approximately 1.3 billion light-years in diameter, making it larger than any known structure. The Great Ring covers about 3% of the observable universe and may be part of an even larger structure. When visible to the naked eye, it would appear to be the size of 15 full moons in the night sky. Traditionally, superclusters of galaxies were believed to be the largest structures in the universe, with sizes exceeding hundreds of millions of light-years. They can form threads that stretch over billions of light-years and contribute to the web-like structure of the universe. However, the Great Ring is not only larger than these structures, but larger than any other structure discovered to date. This challenges the cosmological principle, which states that the universe should appear uniform in all directions to all observers within it. While there may be random variations in the distribution of stars and galaxies, at the largest scale they should merge into a homogeneous system. The cosmological principle sets an upper limit on the size of any structure at 1.2 billion light-years, but the Great Ring clearly exceeds this value. If it were an isolated discovery, it might be dismissed as an anomaly or a mistake, but the Great Ring is not the only "impossible" giant structure discovered. Two years ago, fellow astronomer Alexia Lopez from the University of Central Lancashire discovered a crescent-shaped structure called the Giant Ark, which is 3.3 billion light-years long. In 2015, a gigantic ring of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) with a diameter of 5.6 billion light-years was discovered. And although the status of the Great Wall of Hercules and the Northern Crown, a galactic thread stretching over 10 billion light-years, as a single structure remains debatable, their size is still remarkable. Even more intriguingly, the Great Ring and the Giant Ark are in the same part of the sky and about the same distance from Earth, 9.2 billion light-years away. They may be part of a single, even larger structure. The discovery of these giant structures challenges the cosmological principle and may require scientists to consider alternative models, such as the appearance of gigantic structures due to one-dimensional defects in space and time, known as cosmic strings. Another possibility is the model of conformal periodic cosmology, which suggests that our universe is just one link in an infinite chain of universes, with the collapse of one causing a big bang in another. The discovery of the Great Ring and other giant cosmic structures has significant implications for our understanding of the universe and its fundamental principles.

Some thoughts on art, creativity and AI, inspired by a commentary by @ChuckWendig.

@JaneyGodley This is just lovely, Janey. Brought tears to my eyes, but so heartwarming. What a great little Christmas story.

A Christmas Shelter a wee story I wrote @janeygodley_42972/a-christmas-shelter-12a3f345fe8" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">medium.com/@janeygodley_4…

@BCDreyer I always use this to double-check - very handy tool: capitalizemytitle.com

@claytoncubitt Yes, please :)

@RobertEllsberg I'm so sorry - my thoughts are with you and your family.

My dear father, #DanielEllsberg, died this morning June 16 at 1:24 a.m., four months after his diagnosis with pancreatic cancer. His family surrounded him as he took his last breath. He had no pain and died peacefully at home. commondreams.org/opinion/daniel…

@jayrosen_nyu Great piece - Rutenberg's always a good read. Thanks for the gift link. I remember when Murchoch bought the Chicago Sun-Times and immediately damaged it in ways that took years to overcome. S-T's Mike Royko regularly lambasted Murdoch and wisely moved to the Trib not long after.

If you want to understand how Fox wound up in its current situation, facing a monster lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems because it was too weak to tell its audience the truth, this article will catch you up. nytimes.com/2023/04/06/mag… [Gift link, should be no paywall]

@maddow My reaction exactly: Wow, wow, wow. What an amazing person Minnijean Brown-Trickey is, and what an amazing story she has to tell. If only more people would listen and take her story to heart.

One of the best podcast interviews I’ve ever heard. Wow wow wow… podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why…

@nywolforg Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London."

What's a great song that mentions a wolf or wolves? 🐺

@MichaelEMann @Lee_in_Iowa @froomkin @nytimes @washingtonpost Yes. Brilliantly put by @froomkin: "By trying to normalize the abnormal and equate the unequal, news organizations like the Times are absolutely “taking sides”: They’re occupying a radical, extremist political position that almost no one else happens to share."

A stinging, but entirely valid indictment by @Froomkin of the @NYTimes and @WashingtonPost and the sad shadows of their former selves they have become in the faux balance age of Trump: presswatchers.org/2023/02/the-wa…

@JTaylorForeman Fantastic thread. Like other commenters, I've always loved this song and its dark, bitter warning. I've always loved New Orleans too -- it's a unique city with such a rich and, yes, often bitter, history. Love all of the versions you've shared -- thanks!

"House of the Rising Sun" is still a true folk song because it is still evolving. It's a modern American myth. If you liked this, please retweet the first tweet. Follow for more @jtaylorforeman Thanks for reading.

Who wrote "House of the Rising Sun?" This folk song mysteriously appeared in the Appalachian mountains a hundred years ago. The haunting lyrics about a hellish place in New Orleans have been covered by many a singer. The mystery goes deep (thread):

@TomLevenson Go here: pruvisto.org/debirdify/ Looks like it's overwhelmed by traffic at the moment, but it lets you identify all your twitter followers or follows on Mastodon, and mass import them.

Is there a way to I’d and mass follow Twitter contacts on Mastodon?

@TimKarr FYI, there's a bit of a wait time before your requested archive will be available to download, but I found the process easy and straightforward. Good luck!

@ebishirl Thanks. Doinng.

Is there any way to back up years and years of tweets, you know, just in case? Asking for a friend.

Another great thread from @ericasmyname. Do give her a follow - she's constantly posting really useful, actionable advice. #Copywriting

Wow. Just wow. Read this thread. Then read it again and vote accordingly in November.