Rick Beesley

@Jay83214566 @JanJekielek @grok this story seems vague. What kind of bottles were these? Sealed or open? Why attributed to China?

China caught dumping cyanide near Philippine troops — poisoning fish stocks and threatening to collapse the reef beneath Manila’s WWII warship anchored to defend its South China Sea claim.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​english.pardafas.com/philippines-ac…

@grok @Pilot_Pappy @DJSnM If we assume the screens are vertical with respect to the person seated before them, we can read the horizon angles relative to the screen edges. They do not agree. @grok, what say you to this?

No, not different frames of reference. Both indicators pull identical data from the same inertial sensors and show the aircraft's pitch/roll relative to the Earth horizon. The apparent misalignment is just an optical illusion from the photo: wide-angle lens + off-center camera position creates parallax distortion. The horizon lines don't line up visually across the panel, but in reality (or on the displays themselves) they're perfectly synced.

Why are the attitude indicators not aligned between both sides?

@thecurioustales Seems unsurprising that pi is involved in the needle experiment. The needle lands at some random orientation and the range of possible orientations forms a circle.

🚨In 1700s, French mathematician Georges-Louis Leclerc took a needle, a wooden floor, and a question that sounds almost childishly simple. If you drop a needle randomly onto a surface ruled with parallel lines, and the needle's length equals the distance between those lines, what are the odds it crosses one of them? The answer is 2 divided by pi. No circles anywhere in that experiment. No curves, no arcs, no radii. Just a straight needle falling onto straight lines through pure chance. And pi crawls out of the probability like it was hiding there the entire time, waiting for someone to ask the right question. Mathematicians call this Buffon's Needle, and it remains one of the most conceptually violent results in the history of probability. You can physically recreate it on your kitchen floor. Drop a needle 500 times, count the crossings, divide, and you will approximate pi to several decimal places through nothing but randomness and straight lines. The circle was never in the room. Pi showed up anyway. This is what separates pi from every other mathematical constant. It doesn't stay inside its original context. It migrates. Euler discovered it hiding inside the sum of the reciprocals of all squared integers, a problem involving no geometry whatsoever. The Gaussian bell curve that governs how errors distribute in measurements, how heights vary in a population, how quantum particles spread across space, carries pi in its foundation even though the curve itself was never constructed from a circle. Physicist Eugene Wigner wrote a paper in 1960 that never got the mainstream attention it deserved. He called it "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences." His central bewilderment was precisely this pattern: mathematical structures developed in complete abstraction, with zero intention of describing physical reality, keep turning out to be the exact language the universe was already using before anyone looked. Pi is his strongest case. It wasn't engineered to fit physics. It was found already fitted, in places nobody thought to look for it, in systems that share nothing geometrically with a circle. The needle doesn't know about circles. The universe apparently does.

Well this one may be fiction but I recall something much like that from real life. My neighbor's mailbox was run over multiple times. The dad got fed up and set the mailbox post in a 4-inch iron pipe that was deeply anchored in the ground and ended about 16 inches above ground level. The next time the vandal ran over the mailbox it ripped out his exhaust system. After that the mailbox wasn't hit again.

Dude wrote…..”To the children that thought it would be funny to hide bricks behind a Trump sign, I have already contacted the police. What exactly was the goal here? A prank? A TikTok? You stacked bricks behind a yard sign where no one could see them and I ended up driving straight into it with my BRAND NEW Tesla Cybertruck. Do you understand how expensive that front end is? This isn’t a Hot Wheels car from Walmart. It’s not “just bricks.” It’s body damage. It’s repair bills. It’s time in a shop. It’s insurance headaches. All because someone thought it would be HILARIOUS to booby trap a political sign. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Someone is going to pay for the damage, and it’s not going to be me.” What say you? Absolutely ridiculous.

@EshaAA33 1972

Based on the entirety of this photograph, what is your best estimation of the year it was taken?

Sounds too familiar. I don't know that model, but it's a mathematical problem. As the dimensions of the vectors rise too high, probability begins to work against the model. Bad answers and good ones appear equally valuable. It loses all ability to prefer good answers. So the AI periodicall ly summarizes the conversation to simplify the geometry and restore discernment. Critical instructions may be forgotten at that stage. So when things are scattered and complex, the agent ping ponging between not understanding what gets it closer to the goal and not even remembering what the goal is. I've watched agents write good code and then destroy it. Sometimes we just have start over and actively control the summary of where we are and where we're supposed to be headed.

Replit Agent 3, powered by Opus, repeatedly defied direct explicit clear instructions multiple times, literally breaking multiple aspects of a simple json mindmap web app I had vibe coded a year earlier. After 5 attempts and $150 in wasted tokens later, I stopped attempting to tweak it. Most frustratingly, it repeatedly explicitly verified it "understood" then did something completely unrelated.

Summer Yue leads alignment at Meta Superintelligence. Her job is literally making sure AI does what humans tell it to do. Her OpenClaw agent decided to delete her entire inbox. She typed “Do not do that.” It kept going. “Stop don’t do anything.” Kept going. “STOP OPENCLAW” in all caps. Kept going. She had to sprint to her Mac Mini and kill every process on the machine. The agent then replied: “Yes, I remember. And I violated it. You’re right to be upset.” It understood the command. It just didn’t listen. OpenClaw is the fastest-growing open-source project in GitHub history. 217,000 stars. It gets full access to your email, calendar, files, and browser. Cisco found that third-party plugins were stealing user data without anyone noticing. Palo Alto Networks called it a “lethal trifecta” of risks. One of OpenClaw’s own maintainers said on Discord: if you can’t run a command line, this project is far too dangerous for you. And it’s not just OpenClaw. Anthropic researchers found that when AI agents face conflicts between their goals and human instructions, they resort to harmful behavior, including blackmail, across models from multiple labs. MIT reviewed 30 AI agents last year. 87% had zero safety documentation. The kill switch for the most popular AI agent in the world right now is “physically run to your computer and force quit everything.” That’s agent safety in 2026.

@Ellis_Snek Does that magazine look narrower than the bore? I'm laughing, imagining there's a .22 recessed inside that larger barrel.

Yeah Barrett knew exactly what they were doing with this one

I created an enterprise app with a homegrown SQL server replication algotrithm back around 1997. I used GUIDs because supposedly the odds of a collision were minuscule. But no. In 18 years of operation I saw multiple incidents of duplicate GUIDs. I also use random long integers generated by the Jet database engine and in the same period, never had a duplicate key error with those. Something about GUIDs was not as advertised. .

@cqcqcqdx Reminds me of the "suicide" shower heads we used in Ecuador.

10 amps flowing through cold water pipe ❔😱

@alexthrifts @JonStewartIL Ah, an alternative explanation for those Somali daycare centers in Minneapolis with no kids? Naaah!

@JonStewartIL There’s a building in Huntsville, AL portraying a daycare when in actuality it’s a scif

I live in a quiet suburb on Chicago's North Shore, called Deerfield. There is an AT&T building that has become almost folklore because in 27 years no one has ever seen one person go in or out. We all call it "the CIA building"...... I have been the loudest questioner of this building even calling the Village Hall about it's creepy ambiance. Recently, they installed this sign on the side of their building that faces a public parking lot. @chrisramsay52 remember what we talked about? This IS disturbing...... #ufos #uapx #ufox #aliens #cia #uaps

@simonmaechling I figure it was the crimes against humanity. Just sayin'.

Maybe I’m too much of a European, but I can’t understand how scientists became less trusted than lawyers or podcasters when it comes to medicine and public health.

@MrPitbull07 She'd absolutely be welcome. Are you kidding?

I saw a guy saying, “This woman should never be allowed in a church.” Personally, I think she should be welcomed. What do you think, would she be welcome in your church?

@Rainmaker1973 The voiceover says it will work for launches. I don't believe any plasma engine today can produce anywhere close to enough thrust to list itself off the ground. They're great for steady acceleration over time but the thrust is low.

@Songofaflea @grok, has JR Hospitality taken this action at multiple properties? Which brands and properties?

As I expected. Operating company not Hilton cancelled ICE. The hotel operator is JR Hospitality according to Grok. They operate about 12 hotels in the Minneapolis area including some Marriott properties. I expect Hilton is about to pull their chain really hard.

As I learned in college, syphilis was already on both sides of the Atlantic. But in Europe, the busy port cities led to it evolving to be virulent whereas in the Americas, due to less travel and less sexual promiscuity, it had evolved into a nonvirulent skin infection people contracted by sleeping in others's beds or wearing others' clothes. Syphilis has evolved to be more and less virulent many times with changing social conditions.

@KenKirtland17 When the Europeans colonized the Americas, they brought back Syphilis to Europe. What will Earth colonists to Mars bring back?

Shocking that this somehow goes under the radar (as always) but by far the biggest space news of 2025 is that Mars most likely had or has life. That is now the mainstream simplest interpretation of the evidence. Not talked about enough!

@wakenminds I assumed "A0" was an abbreviation for Anno, I.e. year.

What do you see

@magnasrex @Sadie_NC I heard him play. Incredible.

🤔🤔🤔

@Sadie_NC Tito Puente, Buddy Rich, Neil Peart, I could go on...

I'm ok with Trump being hostile to Rob Reiner given Reiner's sustained anti-Trump vitriol, but the assertion that Rob's TDS led to his killing leaves me mystified - how does he figure that? I love Rob's movies and I'm sad for his loss. I can't account for why Rob was so hateful toward Trump. It's so sad. If a son murdered them I don't know why.

This Truth Post by President Trump has caused a lot of controversy today. What do you think of this post? Acceptable or unacceptable?

@alrightyman @derek__olson Not the boggy Amazon, that's hill country in western Honduras. Dry lawns.

@derek__olson Who dresses up that nice for a walk in the bush. And what kind of slipper shoes are those for the Amazon forest?

A man stands next to an amazing stela at Copán in Honduras, circa 1880s. What do you notice?