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Photos of the Inside of a Particle Accelerator

I’ve posted before about Charles Brooks’ fantastic series of photographs of the insides of musical instruments. Recently, Brooks had the opportunity to apply his technique to capture the innards of a particle accelerator.

photo of the inside of a particle accelerator

Brooks says of the photo:

Despite being a scientific instrument, it behaves a lot like a musical instrument. Electrons pulse through this tunnel in tight, synchronized waves. The powerful magnets above and below make them undulate — just like the vibrating string of a fine cello — creating an intense X-ray beam used to probe hidden structures of our world.

As part of the project, accelerator physicist Eugene Tan converted the pulsing of the electrons in the chamber into sound, “letting us hear the movement of electrons at nearly the speed of light”.

Petapixel has a lot more on how this image was captured.

“This was an instant yes for me,” Brooks tells PetaPixel. “It ticked so many boxes: I’m always drawn to photographing hidden or complex spaces, and this was one of the most intricate objects I could possibly shoot.”

(via colossal)

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Octavia Butler's Advice on Writing. "Write, every day, whether you like it or not. Screw inspiration."
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A Longevity Expert's 5 Tips for Aging Well, e.g. strength training, better sleep, pay attention to mental health. (Having money helps w/...
4 comments      Latest:

U.S. Military Bans Men With Girl Names From Combat. "Suppose your special forces team is parachuting into hostile territory. Can you...
5 comments      Latest:

"British researchers have discovered that a 'copy' of Magna Carta owned by Harvard Law School is in fact an extraordinarily rare original...
1 comment      Latest:

The true story of how a deep-cover KGB spy living in the US recruited his son. "I am not who you think I am. I am not a German, and I’m...
1 comment      Latest:

A Roundup of Things Wearing Other Things
2 comments      Latest:

Power Houses, a photographic look "inside the living rooms of notable New Yorkers". Incl. Spike Lee, Colson Whitehead, Ella Emhoff, Huma...
1 comment      Latest:

Nine Rules for Evaluating New Technology
6 comments      Latest:

Lololol: Max is changing its name back to HBO Max. It's a real golden age of rich people revealing how not that smart they are. And now...
3 comments      Latest:

Astronaut Don Pettit's Marvelous Photos From Space
1 comment      Latest:

A cute Minecraft-y clicker game. Big plus: finishing it doesn't take forever.
3 comments      Latest:

Forget Psychedelics. Everyone's Microdosing Ozempic Now. (In Hollywood, at least.) "They are doing it not primarily for weight loss...but...
1 comment      Latest:


International students studying in the US were asked about the chilling effects of the Trump regime’s actions on their freedom of speech and movement. “Others said they now avoid speaking in public about divisive issues or participating in protests…”


High-School Runner Rips GOP State Rep. for Anti-Trans Comments

Trans athlete Soren Stark-Chessa finished first in the 1600-meter race at a recent track meet in Maine. Republican state representative Laurel Libby complained about Stark-Chessa’s win on a Fox News appearance, saying that trans athletes are “pushing many, many of our young women out of the way in their ascent to the podium”.

Freshman Anelise Feldman finished second to Stark-Chessa in that race and wrote a letter to the newspaper (archive) calling Libby a bully and asserting that she didn’t feel pushed out of first place. Here’s her letter:

Rep. Laurel Libby, R-Auburn, recently used my second-place finish in the 1,600-meter run, and that of my teammate in the 800-meter run, to malign Soren Stark-Chessa, the trans-identified athlete who finished first.

One of the reasons I chose to run cross-country and track is the community: Teammates cheering each other on, athletes from different schools coming together, and the fact that personal improvement is valued as much as, if not more than, the place we finish.

Last Friday, I ran the fastest 1,600-meter race I have ever run in middle school or high school track and earned varsity status by my school’s standards. I am extremely proud of the effort I put into the race and the time that I achieved. The fact that someone else finished in front of me didn’t diminish the happiness I felt after finishing that race. I don’t feel like first place was taken from me. Instead, I feel like a happy day was turned ugly by a bully who is using children to make political points.

We are all just kids trying to make our way through high school. Participating in sports is the highlight of high school for some kids. No one was harmed by Soren’s participation in the girls’ track meet, but we are all harmed by the hateful rhetoric of bullies, like Rep. Libby, who want to take sports away from some kids just because of who they are.

Anelise Feldman
Freshman, Yarmouth High School
Yarmouth


Octavia Butler’s Advice on Writing. “Write, every day, whether you like it or not. Screw inspiration.”

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A Roundup of Things Wearing Other Things

We all recall the revelation last year that the ocean’s rebellious teenagers, orcas, have started wearing salmon on their heads. Again. (The official state animal of Connecticut is the sperm whale, which is wholly unrelated to this post, except insofar as whales were just mentioned in the previous sentence. It’s only I just learned this fact 5 weeks ago and can’t stop shoehorning it into every conversation.) And then the recent discovery of the carnivorous caterpillars crawling around spider webs wearing the desiccated carcasses of other bugs either as a defense or disguise, or because they think it looks really cool and who are you to say otherwise.

More recently, scientists announced a new discovery about the parasite Entamoeba histolytica which kills 50K-100K people a year by going through their colon to attack their liver before moving on to their brains and lungs. This parasite wears pieces of dead human cells to evade the body’s immune system, making it difficult for us to fight an invasion.

Entamoeba-histolytica.jpg

In 2022, Ralston discovered a major reason behind the parasite’s tenacity: the amoeba develops an ability to evade a crucial part of the human immune system known as complement proteins. These proteins are vital to identifying and eradicating foreign cells. To escape them, E. histolytica ingests specific proteins from human cell outer membranes, then places those proteins on its own outer surface. Two of those molecules block those important compliment proteins from attaching themselves and fighting back. Essentially, E. histolytica wears chunks of human cells as a disguise against its host’s immune system.

Further, gorillas and orangutans have inconclusively been seen wearing leaves in the rain, pom pom crabs carry sea anemone everywhere, dolphins in Shark Bay, Australia carry sea sponges around in their mouths, and, well, decorator crabs.

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What It’s Like to Be a Professional Card Counter. “Suddenly, I get a tap on the shoulder from security telling me that they don’t want my business anymore.”

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Typically interesting thoughts about AI from Neal Stephenson. “I see parallels between these and the hydrogen bomb tests that were conducted in your back yard during the 1950s.”


Future Ruins is a one-day music festival featuring film and TV composers like Ben Salisbury, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, Isobel Waller-Bridge, and Mark Mothersbaugh. Nov 8 in LA.

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Color Photography of Paris From 1914

Albert Kahn sent photographers all over the world in the early 1900s and amassed over 72,000 color photos in the process. Here are a few shots of his from Paris on the eve of World War I.

Albert Kahn Paris

That photo is of the entrance to the Passage du Caire at the corner of Rue d’Alexandrie and Rue Sainte-Foy in the 2nd arrondissement. Here’s what it looks like today:

Passage Du Caire


U.S. Military Bans Men With Girl Names From Combat. “Suppose your special forces team is parachuting into hostile territory. Can you really order someone named Ashley to jump out of a plane? It defies common sense.”

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The true story of how a deep-cover KGB spy living in the US recruited his son. “I am not who you think I am. I am not a German, and I’m not called Rudi. I am a Czech man named Dalibor Valoušek, and I work for the Soviet Union, for the KGB.”

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Power Houses, a photographic look “inside the living rooms of notable New Yorkers”. Incl. Spike Lee, Colson Whitehead, Ella Emhoff, Huma Abedin, Martin Scorsese, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Maya Lin.

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A Longevity Expert’s 5 Tips for Aging Well, e.g. strength training, better sleep, pay attention to mental health. (Having money helps w/ all this.) And 100%: “If they’re hawking a supplement. I would kick them off the list of being credible.”

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“British researchers have discovered that a ‘copy’ of Magna Carta owned by Harvard Law School is in fact an extraordinarily rare original from 1300.” Harvard bought it for $27.50 — it’s likely worth $10s of millions.

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Astronaut Don Pettit’s Marvelous Photos From Space

a photo taken from the ISS with the Milky Way visible over an intensely colored sunrise

The NY Times has a nice feature on NASA astronaut Don Pettit’s photography from his latest stay in space, a 220-day mission aboard the ISS.

Now, you know I like a good astronomical image (like the one above of an ISS sunrise), but the thing that really caught my eye was the video of Pettit’s experiment involving charged water droplets and a teflon needle:

I could watch that allllll day long.

More Pettit: Swirling Green Aurora Captured From the ISS.

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10,000 Drum Machines is a growing collection of web-based drum machines. I like the Extremely Long-Term Drum Machine (“20 bass drums a millennium”).

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Nine Rules for Evaluating New Technology

In 1987, Wendell Berry wrote an essay called Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer. In it, he outlined his standards for adopting new technology in his work.

  1. The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.
  2. It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.
  3. It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.
  4. It should use less energy than the one it replaces.
  5. If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.
  6. It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.
  7. It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.
  8. It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.
  9. It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.

The whole essay is worth a read, especially now as contemporary society is struggling to evaluate and find the proper balance for technologies like social media, smartphones, and LLMs. (via the honest broker)

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The End of Rule of Law in America. “After these first three tyrannical, lawless months of this presidency, surely Americans can understand now that Donald Trump is going to continue to decimate America for the next three-plus years.”


Three Fascism Experts on Why They’re Leaving the US

At the end of March, I posted some news about three prominent scholars of fascism and authoritarianism who were leaving the United States to live and work in Canada. In this video for the NY Times, We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the U.S., Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder, and Jason Stanley explain their reasons for going. Here’s some of what they had to say:

I’m leaving to the University of Toronto because I want to do my work without the fear that I will be punished for my words.

The lesson of 1933 is you get out sooner rather than later.

My colleagues and friends, they were walking around and saying, “We have checks and balances. So let’s inhale, checks and balances, exhale, checks and balances.” And I thought my God, we’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink. We’ve got the best ship. We’ve got the strongest ship. We’ve got the biggest ship. Our ship can’t sink. And what you know is a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.

I want Americans to realize that this is a democratic emergency.

Toni Morrison warned us: “The descent into a final solution is not a jump. It’s one step. And then another. And then another.” We are seeing those steps accelerated right now.


When the world is going to shit, people need music; they need to dance. Especially those whose communities are under attack and who feel unsafe. See also Sinners. (That scene! You know the one…)

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How to Sniff Out ‘Copaganda’: When the Police and the Media Manipulate Our News. “The selective curation of anecdote is an essential mechanism of copaganda.”


Lololol: Max is changing its name back to HBO Max. It’s a real golden age of rich people revealing how not that smart they are. And now some more laughing: hahahaha.

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It’s Interesting How the Past Can Make You Think About the Present. Hamilton Nolan reads a book about the beginning of WWII and “found over and over again that certain entries would vividly remind me of things happening today”.


Alchemists rejoice! Scientists have turned lead into gold using the Large Hadron Collider. “The ALICE scientists calculate that, while they are colliding beams of lead nuclei, they produce about 89,000 gold nuclei per second.”

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New Report Finds Vacationing Sources Habla Un Poquito De Español. “We discovered that the sample population was eager to approach locals and strike up conversations about la comida, la playa, y las chicas bonitas.”

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What I Learned at My First Tree-Climbing Workshop. “For many, climbing also rekindled a connection to the natural world. ‘It reconnected me with nature in a way that I haven’t really felt since I was a kid.’”

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A cute Minecraft-y clicker game. Big plus: finishing it doesn’t take forever.

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Forget Psychedelics. Everyone’s Microdosing Ozempic Now. (In Hollywood, at least.) “They are doing it not primarily for weight loss…but for the surprising and widely touted side benefits, particularly its anti-inflammatory properties.”

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“ICE has become Trump’s private militia. It must be abolished.” Reminder: ICE was formed in 2003 by the Homeland Security Act, which was criticized at the time for enabling exactly these kinds of abuses.

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Eminem’s Lose Yourself, Sung by 331 Movies

This video feels like a throwback to a simpler time on YouTube: 331 film clips edited together to recreate Eminem’s Lose Yourself. A particularly well-done example of a time-worn genre. I lol’d at “let it go!!”

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A Young Readers Edition of Ed Yong’s award-winning An Immense World is out today. “Did you know that there are turtles who can track the Earth’s magnetic fields? That some fish use electricity to talk to each other?”

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I somehow missed this: after a federal judge in VT ordered her freed from a Louisiana detention center, Tufts PhD student Rümeysa Öztürk was released later that day. 🙏


Scientist Kseniia Petrova came to US to study aging. In Feb, she was detained for a minor offense, had her visa revoked, and has spent 3 months in a detention center in Louisiana. She just wants to get back to her work.

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How Trump’s Anti-Trans Policies Mirror the WWII Persecution of Japanese Americans. “Of the 120,000 people of Japanese descent whom our government sent to American concentration camps, approximately two-thirds were fellow citizens.”


Boredom: the great engine of creativity. I now believe with all my heart that it’s only in the crushing silences of boredom — without all that black-mirror dopamine — that you can access your deepest creative wells.”

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In Poland, We Know All About Fighting Illiberal Regimes. Here Are Our Lessons for the Trump Age. “Diversity matters most. Not just in communication tools, but in the social makeup of the protest movement.”


I am cautiously optimistic about F1. (The Brad Pitt movie — there’s a full trailer out today.)

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The Three Types of Specialists Needed for Any Revolution

From a passage of Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard, the three types of specialists needed for the success of any revolution.

Slazinger claims to have learned from history that most people cannot open their minds to new ideas unless a mind-opening team with a peculiar membership goes to work on them. Otherwise, life will go on exactly as before, no matter how painful, unrealistic, unjust, ludicrous, or downright dumb that life may be.

The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail.

The rarest of these specialists, he says, is an authentic genius — a person capable of having seemingly good ideas not in general circulation. “A genius working alone,” he says, “is invariably ignored as a lunatic.”

The second sort of specialist is a lot easier to find: a highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community, who understands and admires the fresh ideas of the genius, and who testifies that the genius is far from mad. “A person like this working alone,” says Slazinger, “can only yearn loud for changes, but fail to say what their shapes should be.”

The third sort of specialist is a person who can explain everything, no matter how complicated, to the satisfaction of most people, no matter how stupid or pigheaded they may be. “He will say almost anything in order to be interesting and exciting,” says Slazinger. “Working alone, depending solely on his own shallow ideas, he would be regarded as being as full of shit as a Christmas turkey.”

Slazinger, high as a kite, says that every successful revolution, including Abstract Expressionism, the one I took part in, had that cast of characters at the top — Pollock being the genius in our case, Lenin being the one in Russia’s, Christ being the one in Christianity’s.

He says that if you can’t get a cast like that together, you can forget changing anything in a great big way.

(via @moleitau)


In Shanghai, “a new crowd-sourced transit platform allows riders to propose, vote on, and activate new bus lines in as little as three days”.

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The Trumpist assault on the federal government is a “civil war by other means”, says Rebecca Solnit. “It is a war against the government of the United States and the land and people of this country.”


“The Trump administration’s policy ideas to incentivize women to have more kids resemble those pushed by authoritarian regimes throughout history.”


On Male Social Isolation

I thought this whole Tumblr post by @skaldish was fascinating. The author is a trans man1 who has experienced social situations presenting as both a woman and a man.

There’s a huge sense of social isolation that comes with being perceived as male, because now people are subconsciously treating me as a potential predator. All strangers, no matter their gender, keep their guard up around me.

It made me realize that there is no inherent camaraderie in male socialization as there is in female socialization — unless, of course, it’s in very specific environments. And the fact I don’t ambiently experience this mutual kinship in basic exchanges anymore is an insanely lonely feeling.

You know how badly this would have fucked my mind up if I had grown up with this?

And then later:

When I’m out in public and interact with women, all of them come off as incredibly aloof, cold, and mirthless. I have never experienced this before even though I know exactly what this composure is — the armor that keeps away creepy-ass men.

As someone who used to wear it myself, I know this armor is 100% impersonal. Nobody likes wearing it, and I can say with absolute certainty that women would dump the armor in favor of unconditional companionship with men if doing this didn’t run the risk of actual assault. (Trust me when I say women aren’t just being needlessly guarded.)

But I only have a complete understanding of this context because I’ve experienced female socialization. If I hadn’t, I would’ve thought this coldness was a conspiracy against me devised by roughly half of the human population. Even now, with all that I know about navigating the world as a woman, I’m failing to convince my monkey-brain that this armor isn’t social rejection.

I found this via @danximenes.bsky.social (via someone else I don’t remember, sorry!) and the conversation in the thread is interesting as well.

  1. From the context (“the culture shock I’m going through”, etc.), it sounds like he was newly out as trans when he wrote this.

OMG! The universe is going to decay into nothingness 10^1022 times sooner than previously expected. Carpe diem, everyone!

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Enjoying the Lane 8 Spring 2025 Mixtape this afternoon.

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This is a little bit genius: an analysis of OpenAI based on a close reading of a 22-second video of CEO Sam Altman cooking pasta. “His kitchen is a catalogue of inefficiency, incomprehension, and waste.”


Here Is Everything That Has Changed Since Congestion Pricing Started in New York. Uniformly positive results clear from the data after just a few months. And millions raised for public transit. A scandal this didn’t happen sooner.

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Jimmy Carter for The Onion: You People Made Me Give Up My Peanut Farm Before I Got To Be President. “Maybe I’m just a sucker. Apparently, all I needed to do was hand off control of the farm to my family.”


4chan Is Dead. Its Toxic Legacy Is Everywhere. “Twitter became 4chan, then the 4chanified Twitter became the United States government.”


A streaming music translator: I Don’t Have Spotify. Paste a share link from Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer or SoundCloud and get links to that music on the other platforms.

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A Real Life Version of Wallace & Gromit’s Breakfast Machine

I love me some Wallace & Gromit and so I was delighted to see that this guy made a real life version of Wallace & Gromit’s breakfast machine, complete with a spoonful of jam flying through the air perfectly meeting a piece of toast popping out of a toaster.

It starts with this crazy part here, where he falls out of bed into a pair of trousers, landing in a chair, and then his sleeves go on, and the vest. And then, probably the hardest part of all, is throwing jam — through the air — and hitting toast — in the air — perfectly. Some of these stunts are going to be the most challenging things I’ve ever attempted.

Cracking toast, Gromit! (via the kid should see this)

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