The image is cool, too, but today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day title — “Shadows of a Martian Robot” — is amazing. It sounds like a noir-pulp treatment of the psychological torment of a veteran of the War of the Worlds.
Category: humor
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Week of 2026-0208
Thursday 2026 February 12
- Rebecca Solnit at Meditations in an Emergency: “Auspicious Omens and Excellent Insubordination“
Saturday 2026 February 14
- Paul Krugman: “No, AI Doesn’t Justify Lower Interest Rates“
- Paul Krugman: “The Banality of MAGA Evil“
- Paul Krugman: “Talking Again with Jon Gruber“
- Ryan Mancini at The Hill: “Trump floats executive order on voter ID if SAVE Act stalls in Senate“
- G. Elliott Morris at Strength in Numbers: “Democrats have the leverage in the shutdown over ICE“
- Stephen Nessen at Gothamist: “Mamdani to revive Bronx bus lane killed by ex-Mayor Eric Adams“
- Timothy Geigner at Tech Dirt: “UK Supreme Court Affirms Ruling That Oatly Can’t Use ‘Milk’ In Its Almond Milk Branding“
- Tori Noble at Tech Dirt: “Copyright Kills Competition“
- Karoun Demirjian, Kate Kelly, Eric Schmitt, and Tyler Pager at The New York Times: “Inside the Debacle That Led to the Closure of El Paso’s Airspace” (gift)
- Howard Altman at The War Zone: “Navy’s Top Admiral Previously Said He Would “Push Back” Against Extending USS Gerald R. Ford’s Deployment“
- Howard Altman at The War Zone: “Airspace Closure Over Laser Weapon Use A Glaring Example Of Drone Defense Policy Struggles“
- Doug Muder at The Weekly Sift: “Uncooperative Responses“
- Doug Muder at The Weekly Sift: “Non-Cooperation“
- Doug Muder at The Weekly Sift: “Dying in Broad Daylight: The Washington Post“
- Jason Guerrasio at Business Insider: “Religious freedom group says US military members were ‘pressured’ by commanders to see ‘Melania’“
- Claudia Sahm at Stay-at-Home Macro: “A Year With No Jobs—But No Recession“
- David R. Eichenthal at Vital City: “An Underutilized Tool in the Fight for Good Government“
- Wes O’Donnell: “Russia Just Shot Its Own Radio Operator: Telegram Gets Throttled“
- Margaret Sullivan at American Crisis: “Yes! THIS is how it’s done, New York Times“
- Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo: “Thinking Clearly About the Global Authoritarian Movement“
- Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo: “More Thoughts on the Authoritarian International“
- Nathan Goldwag at Goldwag’s Journal on Civilization: “From Undiscovered Country to Nemesis: How Star Trek Reflects Society“
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I like programmers with a sense of humor…
dropbox is one of my favorite “cloud” utilities. It keeps a directory synchronized across many computers, allowing remote access and automatic backup. Whenever you set up dropbox on a new computer, all of the files need to be copied across. As you might imagine, this can take some time. Usually, dropbox pops up a little balloon telling you how many files are left and about how long it will take. But if you are syncing a huge amount of data…
… well, you get the message below.
🙂
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Political snark of the day
Regarding the fact that Fox News will now have a front-row seat at the White House briefing room:
Fox News is a propaganda outlet, a detail everyone seems to know, but which is apparently impolite to say out loud. The network’s proponents will likely argue a front-row seat is warranted because Fox News has a lot of viewers. Perhaps. But Milli Vanilli sold a lot of records, and success didn’t make them legitimate recording artists.
The quote comes from Steven Benen at Political Animal; the emphasis is mine.
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Political snark of the day
I stole the tagline from a commenter at Political Animal and the picture from a public domain image at Flickr, and put it together using the motivational poster generator at Big Huge Labs. -
A little political humor, a little late
As soon as I read John Boehner’s characterization of financial regulation reform, I was inspired to make the following. Unfortunately, this-and-that kept me occupied until today.
Here’s a link (https://adfinemfidelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/poster.jpg) since Facebook inexplicably strips images(!) from imported RSS feeds…
I made the poster using a tool located at Big Huge Labs. I had wanted to use the similar took at despair.com but it did weird things to the scale and I couldn’t seem to make it work.
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Lego-mania
This is a mostly-pointless TED talk that celebrates the vast Lego culture … It’s fun even if it isn’t all that deep.
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The first truly honest campaign ad of the season
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gwr8KJO0Fc
I possess a sort of socialpathic narcississism.
… in this beautiful state that I’ve grown to love, since I moved here… 18 months ago.
All of my motives are ulterior.
Vote Clint Webb!
