Amy goblue

she/her

[Jamie Bonkiewicz @JamieBonkiewicz]

I’m gonna be so fucking pissed if I survived all this bullshit just to die from diarrhea lettuce.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

There's a bacterium whose name roughly translates to "craves copper." It just took part of a Wyoming city's water system offline. And it came from a data center that hasn't even switched on yet.

Cupriavidus gilardii lives in soil and groundwater, usually harmlessly. What sets the whole genus apart is metal tolerance: these bugs thrive in copper and cadmium concentrations that kill almost everything else. So of all the places for one to bloom, it picked the freshly built metal cooling pipes at Meta's $800M Cheyenne campus.

Here's the step most people don't know data centers have. Before the cooling loop gets sealed, crews run water through it to flush out debris. Fill-and-flush. Meta's contractor discharged that flush water into the city sewer, and it carried Cupriavidus into Cheyenne's reclaimed-water system.

That reclaimed system is the reuse supply that irrigates parks and golf courses. Tap water was never touched, which is why zero people in Cheyenne got infected.

The scary figure going around is a 31% mortality rate. Real, but read it carefully: that's across roughly 32 documented human infections worldwide since 2009. A rare, drug-resistant bug that mostly threatens people who are already immunocompromised. Tiny sample, big percentage.

The detail worth sitting with: crews found it during routine testing for fecal contamination. Nobody was looking for it. The state lab had to work to even identify what it was.

Cheyenne revoked the contractor's discharge privileges in March, then banned fill-and-flush discharge from every data center on city water.

And that's the quiet lesson for every town courting these campuses. Closed-loop cooling gets sold as the water-saving option. The loop still has to be filled and flushed once, through new metal pipe, and that one-time commissioning water is wastewater nobody put in the brochure. The facility isn't online until 2027. It already rewrote the city's discharge rules.

[Molly Ploofkins @Mollyploofkins]

The rigging of the midterms is happening in real time.

[Mr G @DeputyGrocott]

School trips don’t just ‘happen’ by chance. The amount of organisation before hand and the amount of stress on the day is a lot. I’m sure sometimes people think they are a jolly. We don’t do them because we want a ‘day out’. We do them to enrich the children’s learning.

[University of Illinois @UofIllinois]

⚽ As the 2026 World Cup reaches the quarter-finals, players from England and Spain are competing in Adidas Predator cleats powered by friction technology developed at #ILLINOIS. Breakthrough research, global impact. ▶️ https://t.co/2vuRcgpkZO

[Ryan Hart @thisdudelikesAI]

A network engineer solved a problem in a single night in 1984 that every other engineer said was impossible. Then she wrote a 10-line poem about it. That poem is now printed inside a US patent, and the algorithm underneath it quietly keeps every office network on Earth from collapsing.

Her name is Radia Perlman.

She hates the title the industry gave her. They call her the Mother of the Internet, and she has spent decades telling people to stop, because she says no single person invented the internet and the title makes no sense. The problem is that the thing she actually built is so foundational that the exaggeration keeps sticking to her anyway.

Here is what happened.

In 1984 she was working at Digital Equipment Corporation. Her manager walked into her office and asked her to design a box that could connect one local network to another and move data between them automatically, without the computers on either side having to know anything about it. The catch was brutal. If you wire real networks together, you inevitably create loops. Cable A connects to B, B connects to C, C connects back to A. The moment a loop exists, data starts circling it forever. Every message multiplies as it goes around, and within seconds the loop floods the entire network with infinite copies of itself until the whole thing chokes and dies.

This failure has a name. A broadcast storm. In the early 1980s it was the nightmare that made large networks nearly impossible to build. One accidental loop could take down everything.

Her manager told her the box had to prevent this on its own. It had to use almost no memory. It had to work without any central controller. And it had to configure itself, because no human could be expected to manually map every connection in a growing network.

Most engineers considered the combination impossible. You cannot police every possible loop in a network without knowing the whole shape of the network, and knowing the whole shape was exactly the thing she was told she could not require.

She went home. That night she woke up with the answer fully formed.

The insight was to stop thinking about the network as wires and start thinking about it as a tree. A tree is a shape with no loops. Every branch connects back to a single root, and there is exactly one path from any point to any other. If you could take a messy tangle of network cables and force the switches to agree on a single loop-free tree hiding inside that tangle, the storms became impossible. The loops would still physically exist in the cabling. The switches would simply agree, automatically, never to use them.

The part that made it genius was how little each switch had to know. No switch needs a map of the network. Each one only needs its own ID and the cost of reaching its immediate neighbors. From nothing but that local information, the entire network self-organizes into one agreed-upon tree, elects a root, and shuts off every redundant path that could cause a loop. If a cable fails, the tree silently rebuilds itself around the damage.

She wrote the full specification the next day. It ran six pages. It was clear enough that the engineers who had to build it implemented it directly from her description with no confusion.

Then she had almost a week left before her manager came back from vacation, and too much nervous energy to work on anything else. So she wrote a poem about the algorithm, modeled on Joyce Kilmer's famous poem Trees. A colleague named it Algorhyme.

It opens with the line every network engineer eventually learns by heart. I think that I shall never see a graph more lovely than a tree.

Years later, when she filed a patent for an improvement to the protocol, she included the poem inside the patent's background description. It is very likely the only software patent on record that contains a poem.

The protocol she invented that night is called the Spanning Tree Protocol. For decades it ran inside effectively every network switch on the planet. When you plugged your computers, printers, and servers into an office network and the data simply flowed without the whole system melting down, that quiet reliability was her algorithm running underneath, deciding in the background which paths to use and which to silently ignore.

She has said the most valuable thing she brought to the problem was a kind of ignorance. She had not been in networking long enough to absorb the assumptions everyone else had lived with for years. She could look at the impossible list of requirements and see a simple answer precisely because nobody had trained her to believe it was hard.

The people who change a field are rarely the ones carrying the most expertise into the room.

Sometimes they are the ones who never learned which walls they were supposed to respect.

[Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1]

BREAKING: The Trump White House just ousted all three sitting members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission — hamstringing the bipartisan agency ahead of the midterms.

The EAC helps state and local officials run elections, including by certifying election equipment. https://t.co/DBaRuFaWJB

[Headquarters @HQNewsNow]

Cyclosporiasis, the parasite causing the current explosive diarrhea outbreak, is at a level 20x higher than its yearly average.

This comes just 1 year after the Trump admin removed a cyclospora tracking mandate from the 'Foodborne Disease Active Surveillance Network.'

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

RFK Jr ;

CUT Ebola research. Now theres a huge outbreak

SCRAPPED the unit dealing with cruise ship outbreaks. Then Hantavirus happened

DISSOLVED the CDC dept for Parasitic Disease. Now there's a huge outbreak of cyclospora - parasite that causes diarrhea.

He's a menace

[Michael @Socdem_Michael]

If Mitch really is fine mentally and talking on the phone, Andy Beshear should be able to make a call to McConnell’s chief of staff to arrange a phone call. If he can talk to Scott Jennings, he can do a 5 minute call with the Governor of his state to prove that he’s doing ok.

[Jack Hopkins @thejackhopkins]

A stomach parasite doesn't care about politics.
It cares about weak safeguards.
As Cyclospora cases surge across multiple states, Taco Bell is pulling fresh ingredients while investigators trace the source.
Food safety isn't optional…it's public health.
Beginning in July 2025, under the Trump administration, the CDC dramatically scaled back FoodNet.
Instead of actively monitoring eight major foodborne pathogens, it now requires surveillance for only two:
Salmonella
Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC)
The six pathogens no longer routinely tracked through FoodNet include:
CYCLOSPORA… (the parasite causing cyclosporiasis) along with the following…
Campylobacter
Listeria
Shigella
Vibrio
Yersinia

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

In 1934, at the height of the Great Depression, a 26-year-old artist from upstate New York published a small book about birds. Publisher after publisher had rejected it.

The one that finally said yes, Houghton Mifflin, printed 2,000 copies and worried about selling them during an economic collapse. They sold out in two weeks.

Before Roger Tory Peterson's A Field Guide to the Birds, identifying a wild bird required either a specimen in hand or access to large multi-volume scientific tomes written for researchers, not ordinary birders

What Peterson did was deceptively simple: he illustrated birds the way you actually see them in the field, in natural postures, and added small arrows pointing to the specific visual features that distinguish one species from another.

A flash of wing pattern. A stripe above the eye. The shape of a bill. He called them field marks, and the system let someone standing in their backyard with no scientific training identify what was in the tree in front of them.

The ripple effect of that book is almost impossible to overstate. It created mass birdwatching as a popular activity in America. It changed what millions of people noticed when they went outside. It built the constituency that would eventually fund the conservation movement, lobby for the Endangered Species Act, and sustain organizations like Audubon and Cornell's Lab of Ornithology for decades.

Peterson spent the rest of his life expanding the system, field guides to western birds, European birds, wildflowers, insects, tracks, shells. He died in 1996 at 87, still working. The series he created has sold millions of copies.

The guide in your pack, or on your phone, or on your shelf is the direct descendant of a small rejected book about birds that sold out in two weeks during the worst economic crisis in American history.

[National Air and Space Museum @airandspace]

We are saddened to learn of the death of aviator and space traveler Wally Funk, who always strived for the skies and dreamed of space. After being the youngest pilot in the Lovelace Woman in Space Program in the early 1960s, Funk became the oldest woman to fly into space in 2021 at age 82. We reflect on her legacy: https://t.co/Sg2UoMqBRB

[Encyclopaedia Britannica @Britannica]

Orville Wright died on January 30, 1948.

Kenny Loggins was born on January 7, 1948.

That means the guy who invented flight and the guy who sang “Danger Zone” from “Top Gun” were alive at the same time.

[Mark Warner @MarkWarner]

Reports that the White House has dismissed the remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission — all of whom were unanimously confirmed by the Senate, including a commissioner appointed by President Trump himself — should concern every American, regardless of party, because the EAC was established by Congress as an independent, bipartisan body to help states administer secure and credible elections.

If these reports are accurate, removing every remaining commissioner just months before the 2026 midterm elections is an extraordinary step that demands an immediate explanation from the administration and raises profound concerns about political interference in the institutions that support our elections.

[Kentucky Girl @Notwokenow]

There are 23 current members of Congress age 80 and older.

Unbelievably, 9 of those are seeking reelection in November.

Here are the octogenarians seeking reelection, yet again:

-Jim Risch (D), 83, 17 years in Congress;
-Maxine Waters (D), 87, 35 years in Congress;
-Hal Rogers (R), 88, 45 years in Congress;
-Jim Clyburn (D), 85, 33 years in Congress;
-John Carter (R), 84, 23 years in Congress;
-Virginia Foxx (R), 83, 21 years in Congress;
-Doris Matsui (D), 82, 21 years in Congress;
-Rosa DeLauro (D), 83, 35 years in Congress;
-Jim Baird (R), 80, 7 years in Congress;

Why are taxpayers footing the bill for an elite nursing home?

We need term limits NOW.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

On a hot July day, a single mature tree in your yard pumps somewhere around 100 gallons of water up from its roots and out through its leaves as water vapor. A mature elm with 150,000 leaves can clear that in a day.

As that water evaporates off the leaf surface, it carries heat away with it, the same basic physics that makes sweat work. The air around the canopy drops measurably.

The cooling effect of a single large tree transpiring 100 gallons of water is roughly equivalent to two household air conditioning units running all day. Except it runs on sunlight and groundwater, costs nothing, and has been doing it since before your house was built.

A yard with mature canopy runs 5 to 10 degrees cooler than a paved or treeless yard next door. That's not a feeling. It's a physics difference you can measure with a thermometer. The urban heat island is real, and it gets worse one removed tree at a time.

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is this weekend, before another hot ass July like this one comes around.

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

RFK Jr dissolved the CDC Division for Parasitic disease

Now a parasite is causing huge outbreaks of explosive diarrhoea across the US

What a foolish move

[ᒪᗩᑎE @lanechanged]

Screw that flight instructor who jumped out of his own plane.

I wanna hear about the yng lady named Rosario who at only 850 ft had very little time to react, steady the craft, & establish 911 radio contact with a ground team. And yet heroically, SHE LANDED IT.

Respect, girl🙌

[Sean Davis @seanmdav]

Under paragraph 2 of Rule VI of the Standing Rules of the Senate, “No Senator shall absent himself from the service of the Senate
without leave.”

Rather than communicating through secret phone calls or anonymous sources, McConnell has an obligation to disclose to the Senate the reason(s) for his extended absence and to request permission of the Senate to grant him the privilege of continued absence.

Without that disclosure and request, and without explicit Senate approval for his extended absence (which I am sure the Senate would grant), McConnell has an obligation to resign. But he is required to make the request under the Standing Rules of the Senate.

These are the rules, and it’s long past time for senators to actually follow them.