Abraham Quiñones

If I could have a Boston Creme everytime Phillipians 4:13 was quoted in a Bio, I would need to quote that same verse to get through them all.

[Abraham Quiñones @aburnedham]

Lighting candles to extend my policy https://t.co/u9SVwwMzTM

[one dozen rats at a keyboard @PanasonicDX4500]

I know it’s become pretty cliche and cringey to talk about at this point but if you’re under like 25 I cannot stress enough how one time Obama wore a tan suit and people spent a week arguing over whether or not it was demeaning to the Oval Office and they were serious about it.

[Rebekah Allen @rebekahallen]

3/ Hyperscale data centers coming to Texas are bigger and more resource intensive than data centers of yesterday to support AI.
@ApurvaMahajan_ shows us how much space would the 8 data centers proposed in Hood County take up?

[Alejandra Martinez @alereports]

8 data centers. Over 7,600 acres.

Developers promise economic gains. Locals don’t want them.

Hood County is becoming a test case for whether local government has any authority to protect their communities amid an AI boom. @TexasTribune #txlege
https://t.co/HbUxIHFvNv

[cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic]

UTOPIA (2013–2014) still feels unlike anything else on television. The striking color palette gets most of the attention, but it’s the combination of paranoia, conspiracy, and total unpredictability that makes the show so unforgettable.

[NFL Memes @NFLMemes]

Jared Verse being told by his agent that he just got traded from LA to the Cleveland Browns

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Half of all male lions die before they turn one. Most who survive never make it to old age. The starving lion in this photo did the rarest thing a male lion can do. He got old.

Being born a male lion is brutal from day one. In his first year, hyenas, snakes, sickness, and plain hunger kill about half of all cubs. The biggest danger is other lions. When a new group of males takes over a pride, they kill all the cubs the previous males fathered, which gets the mothers ready to have new cubs sooner. That one thing causes about a quarter of all cub deaths.

Get past that, and at around age three you get kicked out of your family to wander alone. You drift along the edges of land run by bigger, older males who want you dead. Most of these young drifters never see ten.

If you live, you fight to take over a pride of your own. Win, and you keep it for just two or three years before a younger gang shows up and takes it from you. Lose that fight, and you're thrown out again, older now, your teeth worn down, hunting on your own.

So the normal way a male lion dies is young and bloody. Killed in a fight. Gored by a buffalo. Most often, killed by people: poisoned by farmers for killing cattle, shot, or caught in a wire snare. In Kruger, where this lion lived, the number of lions in the north has dropped fast from poaching and fewer animals left to hunt.

He got none of those endings. He grew old instead. Stronger males pushed him off his land, the way almost every old king gets pushed out, and his teeth were too worn to catch food anymore. A photographer named Larry Pannell found him lying under a tree, his chest barely moving, and sat a few feet away so he wouldn't die alone. Pannell has photographed people who lived through earthquakes and fires, and he said he had never seen anything sadder than this. One last twitch of an ear, and the lion was gone.

The photo looks like pure loss. A king brought down, starving, alone. But growing old is the hardest thing a male lion will ever do. It means he outlasted the cub years, the years alone, the pride fights, the buffalo, the snares, and every younger lion that ever came to kill him.

He didn't dodge the fights. He just won enough of them to die of nothing but time.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A studio boss watched the director of the original Top Gun blow an entire day filming shirtless guys playing beach volleyball in baby oil, and he said out loud, "I'm gonna fire him." That goofy scene went on to become the most famous two minutes in the movie.

So when Tom Cruise made Top Gun: Maverick 36 years later, he wanted that magic back. He gave the new cast a beach football scene as a tribute, and he would not let it go.

The original volleyball scene was almost an accident. In the script it was one paragraph. Paramount only asked for it because they wanted the movie to feel less like a war film and more like a sports movie. Director Tony Scott took that one paragraph and spent a whole day on it, oiling up Cruise and the others and filming them in slow motion against a bright blue sky. He later admitted he was just trying to make soft porn. The studio was furious. Then it became the part everyone remembers.

Cruise had not forgotten. For the sequel, the cast trained for weeks, filmed the new football scene, and went out that night for milkshakes and beer to celebrate. A week later, Cruise told them it was not good enough. Everyone went back to the gym, day and night. Glen Powell went so hard on the first play that he hurt himself.

And that was just one scene. The same all-or-nothing drive built the entire film. Cruise put the actors through a homemade flight school. They started in a tiny propeller plane, moved up to a stunt plane that crushes you with eight times the force of gravity, then a small jet, then the Navy's actual F-18 fighters. The crew bolted six giant IMAX cameras inside the cockpits to catch the actors' faces while that force squashed them with about 1,600 pounds, roughly a small car sitting on your chest. The Navy charged around 11,000 dollars an hour to borrow the jets, and still would not let Cruise touch the controls.

The first Top Gun turned a 15 million dollar budget into 357 million. Maverick turned 177 million into 1.5 billion, the biggest hit of Cruise's entire career. Both films are in theaters again right now, 40 years on.

A producer once tried to fire a man for wasting a day on a silly beach scene. Forty years later, that same scene is why a whole cast was back in the gym at midnight.

[El Guarromántico @Guarromantico_]

El esfuerzo de hoy es el reflejo del mañana.

[NYTPitchbot @DougJBalloon]

Trump's theft of $1.8 billion from the Treasury raises new questions about Hunter Biden's finances.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Three things in this video are working on the babies sleeping in it. The birds are slowing their nervous system. The sunlight is teaching their developing brains to tell day from night. The open air carries far fewer viruses than the air inside a daycare classroom.

The human nervous system has two settings: fight-or-flight, which keeps you alert, and rest-and-digest, which winds you down. Birdsong tips the body toward rest-and-digest mode. In 2017, researchers at Brighton and Sussex Medical School put 17 adults in MRI scanners and played them bird recordings or city noise. The bird recordings shifted their bodies into the calmer mode. Heart rate variability went up, a sign the nervous system was handling stress well.

Newborn babies don't have an internal clock yet. They don't know day from night. The hormone that makes you sleepy at night, melatonin, isn't produced until around 3 months old. Cortisol, the hormone that wakes you up in the morning, takes 2 to 9 months to develop a daily rhythm. Sunlight on the baby's eyes is what teaches the brain when those hormones should switch on. A baby napping under trees gets that signal every day. A baby napping in a dark indoor room misses it.

Outside air is also cleaner than indoor preschool air. Dozens of kids share the same indoor space for hours, breathing the same germs back and forth. A 1990 Swedish study found preschoolers who got 6 to 9 hours outside per week at daycare got sick less often than kids with under 5 hours. In 1997, a follow-up compared regular preschools to outdoor "forest schools" where kids spend the whole day in nature. Same pattern: forest-school kids got sick less. Outside, the same germs disperse instead of recirculating in a closed room.

There's a more extreme version of this in Finland. About 95% of Finnish families put their babies outside to nap in prams, sometimes in below-freezing weather, starting at two weeks old. Researchers at the University of Oulu surveyed 116 families and found these outdoor naps lasted 1.5 to 3 hours. The same babies napping indoors only managed 1 to 2 hours.

Italy has been opening schools that do exactly this. The first one, called asilo nel bosco (Italian for "forest kindergarten"), opened near Rome in September 2014. Kids spend the whole day outside, including nap time. The model was borrowed from Germany and Scandinavia, where forest schools have been running for decades. The Italian network grew quickly after COVID.

So while these kids are sleeping in the video, four things are happening at once. The birdsong is calming their nervous system. Their internal clock is being trained by the sunlight on their faces. Outside, the germs they're breathing are diluting in open air instead of piling up in a closed classroom. And the nap, if the Finnish data is any guide, is probably running longer than the indoor version.

[Nature Unedited @NatureUnedited]

These two giant tortoises have been fighting each other for over 120 years. According to the zoo, one tortoise stole the other’s food 120 years ago, and from that day on they became enemies. There hasn’t been a single day where they haven’t fought for a while

[DJB @Skinwalker5110]

Remember when people wore a long sleeve tshirt under a short sleeve tshirt and it meant you liked music.

[Abraham Quiñones @aburnedham]

@BladeoftheS "...find a way to love it..."

[Everton Bailey Jr. @EvertonBailey]

Jason Kidd out as Dallas Mavericks coach after five seasons | @SportsDayDFW: https://t.co/ilMvEylPSo

[Lauren McGaughy @lmcgaughy]

Ken Paxton was charged with fraud.
He was impeached by his own party.
His wife is divorcing him for alleged infidelity.

Through it all, how has Paxton stayed not only politically viable but highly popular with his base? @michaelkruse + I tackle this in the @nytimes Great Read.

[Matt Braynard @MattBraynard]

We're so back.

An entrepreneur is restoring Pizza Huts to their former glory.

[RG 📷 @RyanGreeneDNVR]

Broncos vs. Seahawks Week 6 on Thursday Night and football fans deserve this uniform matchup:

[Richard @RichardUpTheBiz]

@RobertMSterling Wife: "Really!!!! YOU GAVE HIM CHOCOLATE PUDDING AFTER I GOT HIM DRESSED"

Husband

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

An Ohio 16-year-old once lifted a 3,000-pound car off his neighbor's chest. The most he could lift in the gym was 400 pounds. The car weighed almost eight times that. He couldn't do it again the next day, or since.

It has a name. Hysterical strength. And scientists have a pretty good idea why a kid can suddenly do something no trained athlete can match.

Your brain controls how much muscle you are allowed to use. Even when you push as hard as you can on a normal day, you are using only a fraction of what your muscles can do. The rest is locked away on purpose. If your body fired everything at once, you would snap your own tendons and burn through your energy in seconds. When your brain decides someone is about to die in front of you, it stops holding back.

The part of your brain that watches for danger lights up first. It tells another part to flood your bloodstream with stress chemicals. Adrenaline is one of them. Adrenaline alone is slow though. By the time it reaches your muscles, the emergency might already be over. Adrenaline has a faster cousin called norepinephrine. It fires straight from nerves already wired into your muscles. It hits in about a second. Your heart pounds. Blood rushes to your arms and legs. And your brain briefly lifts a safety limit it normally keeps on your body.

South African scientist Tim Noakes named this limit the "central governor." Think of it like a speed limiter in a car. In an emergency, the limiter switches off.

The biggest, fastest muscle fibers fire all at once. Endorphins block pain so well that you can tear muscles, dislocate joints, and crack bones without feeling a thing. In 2006, a 41-year-old mother named Lydia Angiyou took on a polar bear, unarmed, to save her 7-year-old son in northern Quebec. Seven years later, two sisters in Oregon, aged 14 and 16, lifted a 3,000-pound tractor off their pinned father. In 2015, a 120-pound Air Force Academy student named Charlotte Heffelmire lifted a burning pickup off her dad in Virginia, then drove it out of the garage on three wheels before the gas tank could blow.

People are not lifting these cars and trucks completely off the ground. Most carry more weight up front, where the engine sits. Rescuers usually pry up one end while the other stays planted, lifting maybe 40 percent of the total weight. USC exercise scientist Robert Girandola has done the math. A spike of fear does give you extra strength. The boost is in the hundreds of extra pounds, not thousands.

And it only works once. Many find out hours later that they tore something or broke a bone during the rescue, and never felt it happen.

Jack Kirby, the comic book artist, once watched a mother lift the back of a car off her child in 1962. That moment gave him the idea for the Hulk.