RJ Troy

This photo of Earth is EXTRA spectacular for a good reason... let me explain. Most images you see of Earth from space are the daylight side of the Earth, and it's obviously very bright (see my last image), this means stars are too dim to be seen with that bright exposure setting (low ISO, high shutter and / or stopped down aperture). BUT this image taken by the Orion crew looks so incredible because you can see the sun is BEHIND the earth, meaning it's night time on the side of the earth facing the crew in this image. So how do you expose a night time earth from space? Same way you do on Earth! A mixture of opening up the aperture (F4 in this case), cranking the ISO (51,200 here), and using a relatively long exposure (1/4 of a second). We can see the settings used by looking at the exif data from the camera. What this means is our camera is also sensitive enough to see stars in the background of Earth, leading to an extraordinary image!!! GREAT WORK!!! These are the kind of images I've been so excited to see!

@itspractitioner Lmao it’s lame as fuck!

Not really understanding the hate for this honestly. Look at it from the perspective of the kind of people who would normally attend UMF. This is exactly the intro into DnB folks in that crowd would accept and tbh if thats the first steps for them into DnB, im all for it.

@DoctorLemma Hiring this guy to sit on the couch during the afters so no one is tempted to lay down

In 2018, a man in Tokyo, Japan was fired from his office job for doing nothing. So he turned doing nothing into a career. His name is Shoji Morimoto. He posted a single message on social media offering to rent himself out to anyone who needed a person present but not involved. He would show up. He would not initiate conversation. He would not give opinions or advice. He would simply be there. The requests that came in revealed something quietly extraordinary about loneliness. People hired him to sit across from them while they ate alone in restaurants. To wave goodbye from the platform as their train departed. To stand at the finish line of a marathon. To sit in the corner of a cafe while a woman served divorce papers to her husband, just so she would not be completely alone when she did it. One person hired him to be video called while they cleaned their room. One person has hired him over two hundred and seventy times. He has handled over four thousand sessions. He charges whatever his clients feel is fair. Last year he earned around eighty thousand US dollars. His former boss told him he was useless. He said doing nothing was not a skill. Morimoto now has half a million followers, a television series based on his work, and four published books. "People do not have to be useful in any specific way," he said. What is something you would actually pay someone to simply show up for?

@JWhitebread1 I think the technical details in the book help contextualize Graces decisions and makes it more dramatic but I do think the movie was great

Project Hail Mary is an exceptional film. Great adaptation of the novel. Go see it. Anything I could criticize about it would be nitpicking. ... BUT HEY! THAT'S WHAT THE INTERNET IS FOR! SO LET'S DO THIS! NITPICKS AWAY! If you loved the parts of the novel of where Grace "sciences" his way out of problems, a hallmark of Weir's writing, you aren't going to get much of that out of this film. They chose instead to focus on the relationship between Rocky and Grace, which was the right call. It's mostly a story about a man finding his courage through an unlikely friendship. Still, there are hints to those problem-solving scenes in the movie. One of my favorites is near the end of the novel where Grace uses the spin-drives on the Hail Mary as an improvised IR LiDAR to find Rocky's disabled ship. If you look at the displays, you can tell that's what he's doing, but they never explain it, it's more of an Easter Egg to fans of the book to let us know, hey, we love that part of the book too. Still, the movie has a LOT of musical montages, and long cinematic scenes where nothing much happens other than gorgeous visuals. They are beautiful, but, they could have cut a few minutes of those and put a LITTLE more of the science into the movie, I think. Overall, very great film though, great performances, great sets and visuals and really heart-warming.

@anishmoonka Idk.. I read James Michener’s Hawaii on my iPad and it’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever read, i read books on my phone all the time on the go and love it. I love being able to download any book any time anywhere. I can take my whole library with me everywhere.

Went down the rabbit hole on this. Your brain treats a physical book like a landscape. It builds a spatial map of the text, the same way it maps trails, rooms, and city blocks. When you scroll on a phone, that map breaks apart. Seven large-scale research reviews and direct brain scans confirm what you already feel. A 2023 study in PLOS ONE attached brain-activity sensors to children’s heads while they read the same text on paper and on screen. Paper reading produced fast brain waves, the pattern linked to focused attention. Screen reading shifted the brain into slow waves, the pattern linked to mind wandering and daydreaming. Same kids. Same words. Measurably different brain states. A separate 2022 study from Showa University in Japan scanned the front of the brain, the area that manages focus and comprehension, during phone versus paper reading. Smartphones sent that region into overdrive, meaning the brain was straining just to keep up with basic processing. Paper reading produced a moderate load that triggered natural deep breathing, which helped regulate brain function and sustain focus. The phone suppressed that breathing pattern entirely. Since 2017, researchers have published seven major reviews combining hundreds of individual studies. Six of seven reached the same conclusion: people understand less on screens. A 2018 review of 54 studies and 170,000+ participants, literally titled “Don’t throw away your printed books,” found paper outperformed screens across the board for non-fiction. A 2024 follow-up with 49 more studies confirmed it. The gap has grown steadily every year since 2001. Being a “digital native” doesn’t help. The best explanation is how your brain tracks where you are. Your short-term memory can only juggle about 7 things at once. A physical book gives you constant location cues: the weight shifting from right hand to left, where a paragraph sits on the page, how thick the remaining pages feel. Your brain hands off the “where am I in this text?” job to those physical signals, leaving more room for actually understanding what you’re reading. On a phone, every screen looks identical. Your brain has to track position and process meaning at the same time, and something gives. A Norwegian eye-tracking study analyzing 25,000+ individual eye movements found screen readers processed text more shallowly. The students had no idea they were reading differently. In 2019, nearly 200 reading scientists from 30+ countries signed an open letter warning that screen reading was degrading deep comprehension. Since then, Scandinavian countries, among the most digitized school systems on Earth, have started putting physical books back in classrooms.

@rohithklv Unpopular opinion .. I’ve never gone to a regular movie and even thought once about what I’m missing at 70mm and the few times I have been to a 70mm I dont really care for the difference after the first 10 min.

Project Hail Mary on IMAX 70MM vs regular IMAX

“Practice any art… no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.” - McKellen reciting Vonnegut

@GShaneMorris The village has a great twist!

M. Night Shyamalan's "The Village." Eerie, soulful masterpiece brimming with symbolism and asking the deepest questions about human nature and the origin of evil. 10/10 score and acting. Hated for not being a twist gimmick or slasher (due largely to bad marketing).

@other_st_nick I can guarantee it’s absolutely free if you talk to your local librarian.

@NickZednik No way I’m going to see an avengers movie this year lol

Nolan. Spielberg. Villeneuve. Iñárritu. I prayed for times like this. We’ve all already won this year.

@9mmsmg There is no tomorrow. There’s only cake.

After watching quite a bit of this show, it's impossible not to notice something. Most of these people are ridiculously low IQ. Their families are nearly all as incredibly stupid and are often fat, too. This is an example of high time preference. There is only the now, there's no way to envision the future for them. A person of normal intelligence would think, "If I'm going to eat this whole cake, I'll get fat." These people can't possibly think about downstream effects. They simply don't have the cognitive function. This is a plague of those with IQs in the 80s. It impacts every aspect of their life. There is no tomorrow. There's only cake. Giving full agency to people below the curve generally ends in disaster. They can't help it.

@DudeWhoInvests Yesterday’s price is not today’s price!

Boomers realizing that they may have to actually lower the price on their ridiculously expensive home to sell it…

@aakashgupta I will be at dune 3 that weekend 100%

Villeneuve is releasing Dune 3 on the exact same day as Avengers: Doomsday. And he locked up IMAX exclusivity for opening weekend. Run the format math. Dune 3 is shot entirely on 65mm film stock, 15-perf IMAX for the big sequences, 5-perf 65mm for the rest. Villeneuve hired Linus Sandgren, the La La Land DP who won’t touch a digital camera, and went native film from day one. The IMAX prints originate on the negative. 18K equivalent resolution. No upscaling, no digital intermediary. Avengers: Doomsday is shot digitally. Standard practice for Marvel. Which means on December 18, Dune owns every IMAX screen in the US and Marvel can’t buy a single one on opening night. Disney spent somewhere between $500 and $600 million producing Doomsday. They need $1 billion just to break even. And they don’t have IMAX. Dune: Part Two cost roughly $190 million and grossed $715 million worldwide, with $145 million from IMAX alone. That’s 20% of total gross coming from a format Marvel can’t access on the biggest revenue weekend of the release. Warner Bros. claimed December 18 first. Disney moved Doomsday there from May 2026 after already pushing it from May 2025. Three release dates in two years. Villeneuve wrapped filming in November 2025 and hasn’t moved once. A $190 million film just bodied a $600 million film out of every premium screen in America before a single trailer dropped. The MCU is getting mogged by a guy in a stillsuit.

@Sykodelic_ I don’t think you’re considering time as a big enough factor. You’re looking at price and % but forgetting btc needs much more time to consolidate at lows before pushing up again. I do agree, we won’t go as low (because we didn’t go as high) as everyone thought.

It's pretty baffling to me. How so many people are expecting Bitcoin to just keep pushing lower. Bitcoin dropped to $60,000, below its previous ATH. The only other time it did this was in 2022, when it dropped to $15,000, which was 20% below the $20,000 ATH. But in 2021 Bitcoin pushed 3.5x above its previous ATH. In this cycle, we only pushed 0.7x above previous ATH. If we dropped to under $50k, that would be 30%+ below the 2021 ATH. So what you are expecting is the largest drop ever below a previous ATH, after the weakest price push ever? All at the same time as the Business cycle has started expanding again? It's not gonna happen. And this all comes from the fact that everyone is expecting the 4 year cycle to play out, because they cannot see beyond it. Many, many will be trapped.

Van Gogh's letters were the naked voice of the human soul.

Can’t pass these up I’m learning so much

@pelagiusreborn This song came out just last year, I wonder what the original commercial sounded like

Commercials used to make you feel like buying things

@4LovOfMoney No wayyyy how do you even

you gave this album a 6.4 you are not allowed to speak here

@RepLuna @GovRonDeSantis x.com/qthestormm/sta…

Attention pedophiles: Now, according to our new state law in Florida, if you rape a child you will be put to death. Keep your hands off our children. Thank you to the Florida legislature and @GovRonDeSantis for getting this done.

Tomahawk