@Miyhnea How did I never notice those two little enclaves of Oman up there?
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HeRocksInALab
9.2K posts
HeRocksInALab
@rocks_lab
Boardgames, fancy comic books, history. He/Him.
Capitol Hill Seattle Katılım Mayıs 2020
479 Takip Edilen243 Takipçiler
"How do the people who got them feel about the people they hate losing them?"
Its not high philosophy here
Anas Alhajji@anasalhajji
⭕️I wonder how Iranian monarchists feel about President Trump returning the three islands (Abu Musa, Greater Tunb and Lesser Tunb) to the UAE. ⭕️The three small islands sit right at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz. The last Shah ordered the Navy to occupy them in 1971. ⭕️The UAE has claimed them ever since, especially since Arab tribes inhabited the Greater Tunb and the others. ⭕️By returning them to the UAE, the US can establish a military base there and control the Hormuz Strait for decades to come.
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HeRocksInALab retweetledi
@dilanesper The abysmal average quality of maps, even for high officials in relatively modern times, is an underrated way in which the past was different. American officers in the Pacific where sometimes stuck with 19th century charts and even commercial tourist maps.
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that is the worst map i have ever seen.
Rina Lu🇷🇺@rinalu_
Truman acknowledged that his decision to recognize Israel in 1948 was difficult and met with opposition from both sides, stating he had to "take it in small doses" and that "Jews wanted the whole of Palestine. They wanted to drive all Arabs into the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers."
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@dilanesper Seems like the only hope is that the Iranians want it all to be over too, but it's not clear that's the case.
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we're screwed.
a whole lot of people are in denial about this, because it doesn't compute to them. but we're screwed. we attacked Iran, without a plan to secure the straits, and we're headed for long term economic disaster.
biggest US screw up in my lifetime.
Zachary Cohen@ZcohenCNN
The Strait of Hormuz is a major problem for Trump. And multiple sources say there isn’t a military option that — even if tactically successful — likely results in it immediately being re-opened, per multiple current & former U.S. officials AND (perhaps more importantly) sources in the oil shipping industry. Trump also faces a supply/demand- related shot clock on that particular issue.
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@moorehn Very good reasons to be skeptical about this story.
x.com/rocks_lab/stat…
HeRocksInALab@rocks_lab
@AriSchulman I would bet money that these were not actually drones. This is a whole series of data points that *don't* match the known characteristics of drones, and yet the conclusion is, "They must have been extra special drones!" There have been several previous false positive drone flaps.
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@TheMr_Cohen @EbrilSir @AriSchulman Not delusions, real lights in the sky being misidentified. The exact same thing has happened at multiple international airports in recent years.
x.com/MickWest/statu…
Mick West@MickWest
Remember all those "drones" in Denmark back in January? @ThomasH_Synth has analyzed all the available videos, and ... surprise, they were all planes. Drones are real, but these were planes. youtube.com/watch?v=TgBtBb…
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This should be the biggest story in the country right now.
Barksdale is the HQ for our B52 nuclear bombers, it's where Bush sheltered on 9/11, and the drones are reported as "far more sophisticated than anything seen in Ukraine ... and well beyond Iranian capabilities."
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@EbrilSir @AriSchulman What's more likely:
1. Unjammable drones with a four hour loiter time (those would sure be handy in Ukraine!) that come back day after day and yet can't be filmed, shot down, or spotted with the naked eye.
OR
2. People jumped to conclusions after seeing lights in the sky again.
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@rocks_lab @AriSchulman Idiots on the Internet with no knowledge of anything beyond their TV remote say things like this-
"I would bet money that these were not actually drones"
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@TheMopingOwl @AriSchulman Yup, very similar case in Denmark last year that was later definitively proven to be caused by misidentified aircraft lights. It's a very easy mistake to make, and you can't blame them for being cautious.
x.com/MickWest/statu…
Mick West@MickWest
Remember all those "drones" in Denmark back in January? @ThomasH_Synth has analyzed all the available videos, and ... surprise, they were all planes. Drones are real, but these were planes. youtube.com/watch?v=TgBtBb…
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@rocks_lab @AriSchulman In 2018 London's 2nd biggest airport was closed for 36 hours over alleged drone sightings that were never pinned down. Hundreds of flights cancelled.
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Imagine living in an isolated Neolithic farming village and one day your homie just shows you this and changes your brain chemistry forever
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@AriSchulman And lest you think mistaking a light in the sky for a drone sounds crazy, remember that experienced military pilots have tried to dogfight Venus on multiple occasions.
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@AriSchulman There is no way to tell how far away a light in the sky is, and if you've been primed to look for drones it would be easy to mistake a distant aircraft or even a star and report. It happens all the time. This article is completely credulous and irresponsible.
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Map game idea: Merchant Marine Commander. WWII battles are just happening without player input, and you can win them by shipping a sufficient number of ship loads of materiel to the ports that supply the battlefield.
Sandy Petersen 🪔@SandyofCthulhu
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@BlueRepublik I would like to think there are decisions that could have been made differently in the 2001-2008 time frame that would have led to things turning out better, but after 2015 I really think there was very little chance of victory.
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@BlueRepublik It was fundamentally a military defeat. The Taliban consistently outfought the Republic inch-by-inch, year-after-year. The only time they were ever really pushed back was during the surge, and those troops were supplied via Russia. It sucks, but that's the reality.
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I fundamentally disagree with how this keeps getting portrayed
Afghanistan wasn’t some completely lost cause, and it was only due to a significant populist anti-war propaganda campaign that you believed it was
Baudrillard Forever@GroovySciFi
Biden fumbled a lot of foreign policy issues but pulling out of Afghanistan was his best act as president. No way to lose in a clean way, you just have to rip the band aid off. Obama was too deferential to his experts. Biden had the backbone to say "I don't care".
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@AntigoneJournal Ah, I misread it as translate. Still, it seems like even pretty bad auto-transcription could improve searchability in many cases.
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@rocks_lab Transcriptions aren't translations, and if you need to check the accuracy of one in ten words, you are not off to the races. (Most of these texts are already known to scholars, so what matters for each manuscript is the precise words it contains, not its general subject matter.)
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This is a genuinely interesting story. Huge amount of automated work, potentially saving hundreds of thousands of human hours. BUT: with an error rate of 10%, and with the precise reading of *every* word mattering in such an exercise, it is meaningless, and for manuscripts of authority worse than useless, without a human checking every single word.
BUT: there simply aren't people, in 2026, with the expertise, the time, and the funding to check these 32,000 manuscripts at this level.
Welcome to Digital Humanities Slop.
Medievalists.net@Medievalists
Over 32,000 medieval manuscripts transcribed in four months using AI medievalists.net/2026/01/32000-… #medievalmanuscripts
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@opheliamoding Reminds me of when a girl I was making out with at a party in high school asked me to describe her breasts and my stupid ass came up with "multifaceted" and she immediately frowned and put her shirt back on.
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my tweets are indeed very much like my tits: they have both an esoteric and exoteric meaning
Abhishek Avtans अभिषेक अवतंस 🌐 Public Linguist@avtansa
When rest of the world was learning about erotica, Sanskrit literary theorist were discussing the semantic aspects of poetry by comparing them with bosoms of women from different regions of India.
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@Vibutler_ It really is. Let's get weird with it. I bet a sortition initiative could at least get on the ballot somewhere like Montana.
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The federal constitution only requires that states “have a republican form of government” what exactly that means is largely up for interpretation. The fact that 49 states have decided on near carbon copy bicameralism is sad
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