BFEMD @bfemd

Lol 😅🤣

@OlenaRohoza 12. And you can get there without any arithmetic, technically, since the area of the bottom right rectangle is given.

@JEFFY1979 This one made me snort-laugh coffee out my nose. Bravo!

An overlooked source of the literacy crisis is that many schools are dumbing down their curricula in response to the growing numbers of students who can’t read and won’t learn. There’s overwhelming pressure from parents and admins to pass every student. “Why are you teaching Beowulf / Shakespeare / Chaucer in high school?” they demand. One by one, books that every kid used to graduate knowing are being stripped from the syllabus. In time it becomes an education in name only.

alex lei @alexL_E_I

5 days ago

i do think we need to impose, like, way more rigorous schooling on kids. they should have to read books that challenge them. they need to learn at least a second language. they should be forced to memorize and recite poetry. idgaf

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Always have been always will be---Team Fauci.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: “There’s an intellectual scientific vacuum that is descending upon the US and that has consequences. If you’re okay with the US losing its scientific leadership, you will get the country you voted for. That country is one where we will no longer innovate. We will be less secure, less healthy, and less wealthy because some community of people who influence what this country is do not see the value of science”

🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world." My Take This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email. ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation." I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate. "We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline. Hedgie🤗

42 years ago today D. Boon with The Minutemen at 9.30 Club, Washington DC, July 26, 1984. Note the slightly oversized setlist 😆 Photo by Jim Saah. #punk #punks #punkrock #harcorepunk #theminutemen #dboon #history #punkrockhistory

The law should be: If the doctor is recommending it, it should be ILLEGAL for the insurance companies to deny it without appealing to a board of physicians. NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND

🚨WORLD WIDE HUMILIATION: Trump hands the World Cup trophy to Spain, then refuses to get off stage, despite Gianni Infantino trying to direct him off of it. This might be the most embarrassing thing I have ever seen.

We are so compromised.

Scott Stedman @ScottMStedman

3 weeks ago

Russian code is inside the White House app, which is now mandated on all government phones. The company behind the code is growing. Its founders bank at sanctioned Russian banks. And its accountant has a criminal history. My investigation:

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Sam Neill (2025): “It’s not a happy place, America, and I wasn’t happy there. I’m interested in the condition of America now. It beggars belief what’s happening there now. When you hear a slogan like Make America Great Again, it makes a sort of weird sense because America could be great again, but at community level. Not with sort of strange billionaires making weird decisions”

The Atlantic’s new cover story about the end of reading is absolutely frightening. Here are 5 concerning facts from it: 1) 51% of adults read 0 books a year: According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. 2) Reading for fun has gone from a mainstream hobby to a niche one: Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. 3) Everyone is reading less: The decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels. Even the demographics that traditionally read the most—retirees, women, and college graduates—have seen a collapse. 4) Books are getting simpler and shorter: New York Times best sellers today have sentences that are about one-third shorter than they were a century ago. 5) Kids are struggling to read and doing less of it: Fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores have slid for the past decade. From 1984 to 2025, the percentage of 13-year-olds who said they rarely or never read for fun rose from 8 to 29 percent. "Every year older a child gets, the less they like to read." For most of history, the biggest reading problem was illiteracy. People didn't know how to read books. But today the biggest problem is post-literacy. People know how to read books, but don't. A society that doesn't read loses more than just books. People lose the ability to think critically, focus deeply, and see life through multiple perspectives. The world needs you. Please consider picking up a book today. theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/…

Swiss farmers planted flowers between their crops and watched pest damage drop by over half. The UK is now running the same trial across 15 farms. The reason this works is embarrassingly simple. A Swiss study on winter wheat found that fields with wildflower strips had 40 to 53% fewer leaf beetle pests than fields without. Crop damage dropped 61%. The mechanism is simple. Wildflowers feed hoverflies, lacewings, parasitic wasps, ladybugs, and ground beetles. Those insects eat the aphids, beetle larvae, and caterpillars that farmers would otherwise spray for. A few meters of wildflowers hosts an unpaid pest control crew that would jump at the chance to whoop some aphid ass. In apple orchards where no insecticides had been used for five years, plots with wildflower alleyways had 9.2% damaged fruit. Control plots without flowers had 32.5%. The UK is now running a five-year trial across 15 farms placing 6-meter flower strips through the middle of fields, not just at the edges, because the beneficial insects can't reach the center of a large field otherwise. This works the same way in a backyard vegetable garden as it does on a commercial farm. Plant native flowering species near your tomatoes, beans, and squash. The pests still show up, but the predators show up too. Study doi: 20151369

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@HalfwayPost If I remember correctly from med school, this is the "get water up your nose in the wrong swimming hole and 48-72 hrs later you're dead" type of critter...

Every year insurance companies report record profits. Every year your premium goes up. Every year they say it’s necessary to keep up with rising costs. The costs they’re referring to are their own profits. You’re not paying for healthcare. You’re paying for shareholders to have a good quarter.

A really sad day….😔

Hend Amry @LibyaLiberty

2 months ago

The U.S. World Cup in one horrible photo:

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Scientists across the country are expressing alarm as the Trump administration dismantles another tool for understanding how the planet is changing. Starting this month, more than 900 deep-sea ocean sensors will be pulled out of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans off the coast of Washington, Oregon, Alaska, North Carolina, and Greenland. Researchers say these are critical ocean observation tools. William Brangham (@WmBrangham) explains.

You know that guy you’re arguing with in the comments…?

As the Trump DOJ mass-deletes government information about the Jan. 6 cases, reminder that you can still access NPR's database covering every single prosecution. We also provide access to hundreds of videos presented in court.