Graphic designer. Science fan. Space geek. Opinions & politics mine, not my employers'. Evidence matters. Resistance is not futile.
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It’s significant to note that, however useful these tools might be, they genuinely have no actual understanding of what they are doing. Sometimes they generate useful output. Sometimes they generate pure undiluted nonsense. AI does not know the difference.
The text-based "AIs" are really large language models (LLMs), but I'm not sure what the corresponding term for the image generators would be. But neither one uses any actual intelligence, just brute-force number crunching that's blowing up our electric bills and rapidly heating the climate.
Trump and Republicans attack unions because they know organized workers are powerful. But let’s be clear: workers built this country—not billionaires. (1/2)
If only he could talk to the president who was in charge during the vaccine’s development and whose administration oversaw the rollout. :: checks notes :: Oh. Well, then. This is awkward. truthsocial.com/@realDonaldT...
Special agent April Dancer checking in on her friend, Two Tone!
I work for (mostly) good people whose legitimate business interests are often at odds with mine. I need strength in my corner to ensure that my equally-legitimate interests aren't trampled. That's why I joined IATSE Local 800, the Art Directors Guild @ADG800
Climate change: A timeline by @semi_rad via Greenpeace UK.
"Don't fight back. fight forward." -Ola Obisanya, a character in Ted Lasso
The Republican Congress is going to try to rewrite the history of RFK Jr.’s confirmation as HHS Secretary. “We didn’t know” “Nobody told us” “He promised he wouldn’t…” This thread will be about the warnings from thousands of scientists and HCW who loudly and publicly opposed his confirmation.
Link to this article from Feb 5, 2025. I hate posting it because of my giant head. tucson.com/opinion/colu...
He NEVER should have gotten the fucking job GOP SENATORS, his hands blood is your hands BLOOD
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t... You cannot now trust the #CDC. It’s now Trump’s CDC where decisions on public health will not be influenced by science or data but by political ideology & data manipulation or no data at all. This is the message from the CDC’s vaccine chief who resigned this week.
🗽We all know that there's no blame on you brave men and women in uniform! We, who've served know you have to go where they tell you to go. But! You do not have to do what they are "inevitably" going to be ordering you to do! There's a reason you don't feel right about it! "THAT BEING THE CASE"👇
CW: Sexual assault Women are being kidnapped and assaulted by men who impersonate ICE agents. This is one of many reasons why we can’t have a masked, unaccountable secret police force roaming the streets. Urge your elected officials to take action today: www.bluestatedefianc...
Prayer, without following up with action, is wishful thinking at best and more often just plain hypocrisy. Especially when it comes from lawmakers who have the power to protect our children, but refuse to act because they've sold their souls to the NRA for a few pieces of silver.
Old Soviet joke for today: A man walks into a newsstand every day, looks around, and leaves. After a long time of this, the owner says “Can I help you find something?” “I’m looking for the obituaries.” “The obituaries are in the back of the newspaper, comrade.” “Not the one I’m looking for.”
There's a good reason why the First Amendment explicitly prohibits the government from promoting any particular form of religion. Or any religion at all. Because my "closely held religious beliefs" are probably different from yours, even if we're both good people.
“Banning books is just another form of bullying. It’s all about fear and an assumption of power. The key is to address the fear and deny the power.” ― James Howe
The fact that the Supreme Court once lent its weight to a deliberate, patently absurd semantic distortion of the Second Amendment does not make it right. “Pro-life,” my ass.
The Second Amendment of the United States Constitution is not, nor has it ever been intended as a license to commit mass murder. We must elect Democratic candidates, who will enact sensible gun safety laws. The radical Republican right has sold their soul to the NRA. "Pro-life," my ass.
I’ll take things that never happened for $500.
For those wondering if the National Guard would ever fire on American citizens, the answer was made terrifyingly clear in May 1970, when four unarmed college students were shot and killed and nine others wounded by the Ohio Nat'l Guard during a protest against the Vietnam war. [Photo: John Filo/AP]
For those wondering if the National Guard would ever fire on American citizens, the answer was made terrifyingly clear on May 4, 1970, when four unarmed college students were shot and killed and nine others wounded by the Ohio Nat'l Guard during a protest against the Vietnam war.
The terrible thing about the gaudy, tasteless travesty being visited on the Oval Office is that Donald Trump is in the Epstein files.
Another reminder that “trust me” just isn’t good enough for the privacy and security of your personal information. We need strong legal and technical requirements for privacy and for security of personal data, with heavy penalties for those who violate our trust. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/u...
At a understaffed store with undertrained employees, the employees seemed to have a strategy: They would never admit they didn't know where a product was located. Instead, they'd send you to the far end of the store. By the time you went there and came back to ask again, they were gone.
Privatization of vital public services is touted as the key to more efficient, better service. But it's just a scheme for greedy middlemen to skim a fat profit margin from an already-underbudgeted necessity. Result: Costs soar as quality of service plummets & capacity vanishes.
Retailers warned that raising wages would "force" them to raise prices and to use automated checkout. Fed min wage remained flat, but they raised prices & used automated checkout anyway. Result: Workers got even poorer as customer service plummeted while prices & profits soared.
Land doesn’t vote. People do. Infographic by @observablehq
They're still my favorite castaways, even though I can't figure out how they can make it to Vegas and back, when they can't patch a hole in a boat.
Still on a mission from God: The Blues Brothers, aka Tyler Habiger and William Conlin, paused for a moment to take a photo with us at STLV, obviously on their way to the Palace Hotel Ballroom at Lake Wazzapamani.
Here's new cover art for THE ART OF STAR TREK: LOWER DECKS, coming in March from IDW Publishing Preorder: www.amazon.com/Art-Star-Tre... #StarTrek #LowerDecks
"It is not always on the great or the important that the balance of the universe depends." -Madeleine L'Engle (1918-2007) A Wind in the Door
AI is nowhere near sophisticated enough to prevent motivated bad actors from sabotaging results. Imagine a healthcare insurance company manipulating test data so AI will reduce the number of diagnoses, thereby reducing their payouts for treatments for that disease.
It should be illegal for corporations and venture capitalists to buy up private homes. Wall Street wants to deny workers the American dream of home ownership, instead forcing them to become lifelong renters, an evergreen profit center, subject to eternal rent hikes.
AI is nowhere near sophisticated enough to prevent motivated bad actors from manipulating results. Imagine a healthcare insurance company manipulating test data to reduce the number of diagnoses, so they can reduce their payouts for treatments for that disease.
It's generally pretty easy to see who is actually curious, and who is being deliberately obnoxious.
23 August 1888 | Italian Jewish woman, Enrica Coen, was born in Ancona. She was deported to #Auschwitz from Roma on 18 October 1943. She was most probably murdered in a gas chamber after arrival selection.
NEW! Enter today to win a copy of @titanbooks.bsky.social newest behind-the-scenes hardcover, STAR TREK III: THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK — THE MAKING OF THE CLASSIC FILM! #StarTrek blog.trekcore.com/2025/08/tita...
23 August 1942 | A transport of 1,000 Jews deported from Drancy arrived at Auschwitz. SS doctors selected 892 of them to be murdered in gas chambers. Among them was Majta Rubin. She was a Polish Jewish woman who had emigrated to France. She was killed together with her daughters: Bella & Micheline.
From @noelcaslercomedy.bsky.social: There was a time in American history where if a POTUS showed up in the Oval Office wearing a hat referring to himself in the third person saying he was ‘right about everything’ it would have been his last day in the White House. Now, it’s just a Friday.
Ooh, look. When we covered the climate impacts of machine learning (“AI”) on Rare Earth in June we found it really frustrating that none of the tech companies would tell anyone the water and energy costs. Now Google has made at least some of it public. More of this! (and preferably raw data too).
23 August 1925 | Jewish boy, David Karmazyn, was born in Luxembourg. He emigrated to Belgium. He was deported to #Auschwitz from Kazerne Dossin in Mechelen on 4 August 1942. He did not survive.
"I'm genuinely curious" or “just asking questions” is often code for "I'm going to try to waste your time with semantic, pedantic nonsense, and I'll use your answers to spread misleading disinformation and outright lies." This isn’t always true, but if I think you're doing it, you're gone.
Performative AND dangerous
Just because he said it on Fox News doesn’t mean it actually happened.
Question: Are people in the Trump administration smarter than a 13-year-old? Answer: No!
As people who care about climate, we should push to phase out fossil fuels ASAP. However, we should never forget the importance of Haber-Bosch to saving billions of lives.
Food and vaccines save lives.
22 August 1897 | Pole Stanisław Tokarski was born in Krakow. Engineer of roads and bridges. In #Auschwitz from 19 September 1942. No. 64611 He was shot in the camp on 25 June 1943.
Just blocked a fool who could recite a few "facts," but had absolutely no understanding of the context of that information, and therefore demonstrated no understanding. Not worth the time.
Alarmed by Republicans’ deep cuts to health care and restrictions on reproductive rights, advocates are supporting California’s effort to counter gerrymandering in Texas. From @kffhealthnews.org:
Bits #4K Review – @billhuntbits.bsky.social spins Eleanor Coppola, Fax Bahr & George Hickenlooper’s legendary HEARTS OF DARKNESS (1991) documentary on the making of APOCALYPSE NOW in #UltraHD from Studiocanal UK! @thedigitalbits.bsky.social thedigitalbits.com/reviews/item...
Happy now? “Natural immunity” (aka getting infected) is literally thousands of times riskier than vaccination. Getting vaccinated is not only FAR safer than getting infected, but unlike catching a disease, vaccination creates virtually no risk of spreading a deadly virus to everyone you meet.
While that may be technically correct, it’s not significant in this context: It does not offer any understanding that's useful in this situation. It merely serves to obfuscate.
It's been shown repeatedly that tax breaks to the very rich don’t grow the economy because they just hoard the cash. Reaganomics is still a lie. However, money in the pockets of the working class does bring economic growth because it is quickly spent on the necessities of life.
I once had a classmate who seemed really smart. He used lots of buzzwords, but actually said very little. Finally, he said something that showed me he had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. I think of him when I hear an anti-vaccine advocate or a climate change denier.
Why is Wall Street so hot to "privatize" Social Security? So they can gamble with our money, even as they suck a fat profit margin in fees and commissions from our retirement savings. Spoiler alert: If this happens, we’ll end up with less money when we retire.
@mikeokuda.bsky.social Vaccinations are NOT LIVE VIRUS Disease is live virus 100% Vaccine discussion resolved = 9 words 🌿☮️🌿
No one said "no risk."
Significantly less, and with significantly less severe illness. Spreading of vaccinated people often stems from unvaccinated people infecting them. Vaccinations were always a collective means, and if too many people don't get them, they do not work as well.
Immunological memory is one of the most extraordinary natural biological phenomena, and vaccines just take advantage of the mechanism it provides to prevent illness and death. And yet the anti-vax crowd who claim to care about natural things are clueless about it, with no interest in learning.
Want to know what "natural immunity" looks like? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Al...
Again, the risk incurred from "natural vaccination" is literally thousands of times greater than any risk from vaccination. And vaccination not only reduces your risk of infection, but it helps to protect everyone around you.
22 August 1911 | Pole Edward Dudek was born in Czermina. A bank clerk. In #Auschwitz from 30 July 1941 No. 19805 He perished in the camp on 22 November 1941.
MAGA through and through.
Because of their religious principles, pacifistic views & their organization’s international connections Jehovah’s Witnesses were persecuted in Nazi Germany. Listen to our #podcast about the fate of some 400 Jehovah’s Witnesses in #Auschwitz: youtu.be/VhxXs59bqIs
“Natural immunity” (aka getting infected) is literally thousands of times riskier than vaccination. Getting vaccinated is not only FAR safer than getting infected, but unlike catching a disease, vaccination creates no risk of spreading a deadly virus to everyone you meet.
"Pro-life," my ass. If the radical right truly wanted to prevent abortion, they'd fund sex education, and they'd make birth control widely available. They'd also provide child care support. Republicans' utter failure to do so shows they don't care about life, only about control.
US lifespan in 1900 was 47.3 years, due in large part to infant mortality. Widespread vaccination has nearly eliminated many deadly childhood diseases. US lifespan now an incredible 30 years longer because of reduced infant mortality. What fool wants children to suffer and die?
“Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” - George Santayana
21 August 1904 | A Czech Jewish woman, Hilda Grünfeldová, was born in Ostrava. She was deported to #Auschwitz from #Theresienstadt Ghetto on 6 September 1943. She did not survive.
Target is likely banking on being able to make up their losses during the holidays so even if you haven’t been boycotting, consider skipping them in November and December.
Oh FFS. I hope it's painted right bakck. How much time, energy, money and karma is just wasted right now. And technically, what right did the state have to come in and overrule a city... on a memorial symbol? JFC.
Well that backfired.
This country will get rid of rainbows but not assault weapons
I urge all Californians to vote to redistrict our maps in response.
Preach your Ossoff, Senator!
On his birthday, remembering Clarence Williams III, who played Omet'iklan (a Jem'Hadar) in the #StarTrekDS9 episode "To the Death." He was asked to take the role by his friend LeVar Burton, who directed the episode. #TheModSquad #LincHayes
Truth: "Rich People" by Carsie Blanton youtu.be/pD_eZg70Ms0
Despite yelling about "fiscal responsibility," Republicans have exploded the deficit for the past 50 years. By contrast, for two generations, Democratic presidents have diligently brought down the deficit, only to have their work undone whenever Republicans seize power.
It was great getting together with our friends (and former art department colleagues), Doug Drexler and Geoff Mandel, talking about Trek design, along with Mike Overton in his LCARS Lounge podcast. www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y3M...
Once again, Trump's tariffs are a heavy new tax on American consumers. They're NOT paid by foreign nations or foreign companies. They're paid by you and me in the form of higher prices on a staggeringly wide range of products.
The latest update to the Roddenberry Archive includes four new videos delving into Star Trek Phase II, Nick Meyer, the further adventures of James Kirk, and Walter Koenig. PHASE II: youtu.be/JDmspn9k6Zg MEYER: youtu.be/8rQjlaEp2BQ SHATNERVERSE: youtu.be/P3pKl6ujOfA KOENIG: youtu.be/Z3vzNfxpgZ8
(Mike Fincke, along with fellow Astronaut Terry Virts, were guests of Scott Bakula on the set of Star Trek Enterprise, during which they both made cameo appearances as Starfleet engineers. During their visit, Scott asked me to give both of them a tour of the Star Trek sets at Paramount!)
I mentioned to Foster that Fincke's space adventures included a stint as an engineer aboard the Starship Enterprise, so Foster also prepared an alt gag version that included his NX-01 mission patch.
Today (Aug 20, 2025) marks astronaut Mike Fincke's 400th day in space! His friends in Mission Control celebrated the milestone by displaying a commemorative graphic on the big screen, courtesy of William Foster - Human Spaceflight Ground Control officer.
Here's new cover art for author Greg Cox's new #StarTrek TOS novel, IDENTITY THEFT, coming in December. Available for preorder now: www.amazon.com/Identity-The...
From Fiddler on the Roof: "Is there a proper blessing for the czar?" "Of course. 'May God bless and keep the czar - far away from us!'" youtu.be/8jZFnKZcids
August 19, 1987: Gene Roddenberry and Jonathan Frakes were feted by the TNG crew on their shared birthday with a quick party on the Enterprise bridge during a pause in filming of the episode, "The Last Outpost."
19 August 1879 | Jewish man, David Goldberg, was born in Vilnius (then Russian Empire, today Lithuania). In 1908 he emigrated to Norway. He arrived at #Auschwitz on 1 December 1942 and was murdered in a gas chamber after arrival selection.
Hey! I have two - yes! two! - books out today, being the new trade paperback versions of The Human Division and The End of All Things. This completes the repackaging of the first six books of the OMW series, with new covers and intros by me, ahead of The Shattering Peace coming out next month.
Truth: "Rich People" by Carsie Blanton youtu.be/pD_eZg70Ms0
I once had a classmate who seemed really smart. He used lots of buzzwords, but actually said very little. Finally, he said something that showed me he had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. I think of him when I hear an anti-vaccine advocate or a climate change denier.
Why is Wall Street so hot to "privatize" Social Security? So they can gamble with our money, even as they suck a fat profit margin in fees and commissions from our retirement savings. Spoiler alert: If this happens, we’ll end up with less money when we retire.
Latext expansion of the Roddenberry Archive website includes 10 new ships, plus 20 new explorable set re-creations (bringing the total to 90!) Plus four new documentary and interview videos. All available free. Hats off to the entire Archive/OTOY art team. home.otoy.com/thearchiveau...
It’s so frustrating to think about all the people who helped elect Trump by not voting for Harris. www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...
Jupiter’s North Temperate Belt during Juno’s Perijove 32 science flyby. flic.kr/p/2kEFcHL
