Kansteo

Has strong opinions on the Octonauts' team dynamics. I was detransitioning before it was cool.

[Kansteo @Kansteo]

Future historians are going to write books on how the philosophy of Blank Slatism brought down the West.

[Stella @ubiquitousnewt]

You have reduced culture to decoration, food, and festivals. That is not what people mean when they say they are worried about replacement.

We are talking about an operating system, the average traits of a people writ large. A dominant common language. High trust with strangers. Low corruption. Rule following. Impersonal institutions over kin networks. A shared national story thick enough that people accept losses, obey outcomes, and feel obligations to people they will never meet.

You dodge the only questions that matter about immigrant. Who. From where. How many. Scale, rate, assimilation.

At high volumes, with no assimilation pressure, “America can include everything” stops meaning newcomers join a mainstream and starts meaning parallel publics, bilingual mass culture, bloc politics, and managed fragmentation.

Your post is a love letter to that outcome, dressed up as tolerance and status signalling.

“Democracy, freedom, Constitution” is downstream of a specific culture. They only work when the population has the norms to sustain them. Import large numbers from low trust, high kinship societies and pretend a civic creed will do the work, and you are not defending America. You are describing how it rots from the inside.

So no, people are not too narrow. You are too superficial. You think an immigrant is a food truck and a flag.

You cannot even name the deep thing you insist cannot be replaced.

[Physics In History @PhysInHistory]

There is a type of quasiparticle, called a semi-Dirac fermion, that exists in a bizarre state where it has mass when moving in one direction but is massless when moving in a perpendicular direction.

First predicted 16 years ago, physicists finally observed this behaviour in 2024 within a crystal of zirconium silicon sulfide (ZrSiS).

[HerodotusWave @HerodotusWave]

The historic wooden escalators in the Sint-Annatunnel (St. Anna Pedestrian Tunnel) in Antwerp, Belgium.

[Kansteo @Kansteo]

@ekmokaya @JonathonPSine That #REF! demon sneaking up is *chef's kiss*

[Mokaya @ekmokaya]

@JonathonPSine Another reminder:

[Joe Weisenthal @TheStalwart]

@JonathonPSine @LizSimmie This spreadsheet error was discovered by the bassist from Light Sweet Crude

[Jonathon P Sine @JonathonPSine]

Absolutely mind boggling..

"in their Excel spreadsheet, Reinhart and Rogoff had not selected the entire row when averaging growth figures: they omitted data from Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada and Denmark.

In other words, they had accidentally only included 15 of the 20 countries under analysis in their key calculation.

When that error was corrected, the “0.1% decline” data became a 2.2% average increase in economic growth."

And as the underlaying New York Review article notes, the erroneous "claim was widely cited by politicians and accepted as a factual justification for austerity, to the extent that Paul Krugman thought it “may have had more immediate influence on public debate than any previous paper in the history of economics.”"

[Kansteo @Kansteo]

@Tobillo_Roto @SamaHoole Not an expert, but I suspect it's more the constant availability.

[Kansteo @Kansteo]

@SamaHoole @JamesOnekaka Oh! I actually have an answer to this one!
The artificial banana flavoring used for candy is apparently a pretty good match for what those bananas tasted like, according to contemporary sources who ate both.
https://t.co/4rsvLa4Qgq

[Kansteo @Kansteo]

@ZeRealityFabric @SamaHoole It's also surprisingly high in iron. Which seems bizarre on the face of it, being 90% sugar water. But again, no match for animal sources.

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

He was called the strangest man in physics.

Not the brightest. Not the fastest. The strangest.

But here's what they never told you about him.

His name was Paul Dirac. Born in Bristol, 1902.

His father had one rule: you could only speak to him in French. When young Paul couldn't find the words, he stopped speaking entirely.

That silence became a superpower.

At 25, he wrote a single equation that united quantum mechanics with Einstein's relativity. Two pillars of physics that nobody could connect.

A quiet boy from Bristol did it with a pen.
Then his equation predicted something impossible. A mirror particle. Matter that shouldn't exist.

Other scientists said he was wrong.

Dirac said nothing.

In 1932, they found it. Antimatter. Exactly where his equation said it would be.

They gave him the Nobel Prize. He nearly REFUSED it — he hated publicity so much.

They offered him a knighthood. He turned that down too. Didn't want to be called Sir.

He was given Newton's chair at Cambridge. Held it for 37 years. Barely spoke a word.

Today every MRI scanner uses his equation. Every particle accelerator is built on his work. Every smartphone chip traces back to his mathematics.

His memorial stone lies in Westminster Abbey. Right next to Newton.

The greatest British physicist since Newton. And most of Britain has never heard his name.

Until now. https://t.co/oNQ4y5feox

Be part of us.

Be Proud Of Us. 🇬🇧

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The vegetables you eat today didn't exist 200 years ago.

Wild cabbage was a bitter, toxic weed that would make you violently ill. Modern broccoli, kale, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts: they're all recent human inventions, selectively bred to be less poisonous and more palatable.

We had to spend thousands of years beating the toxins out of these plants just to make them edible. Meanwhile, a wild aurochs 10,000 years ago was just as nutritious as grass-fed beef today.

Plants needed a complete genetic overhaul to stop poisoning us. Meat didn't even need fire. If that doesn't tell you which one we're adapted to eat, nothing will.

[Kansteo @Kansteo]

What's especially crazy is that way back when @elonmusk excoriated this plan for being insanely overpriced and technologically unambitious. Somehow it's now worse on both fronts.

[Wayne Dunlap @wdunlap]

Don’t be like California! 17 YEARS AGO California voters approved $33 Billion for a network of high-speed trains in California to be completed connecting our large cities by 2020 (5 years ago)… after wasting $18 BILLION, TODAY NO TRACKS HAVE BEEN LAID! Now the estimate for a much downsized project is $128 Billion (an incredible $206 Million per mile) and still no path to completion - only a ‘promise’ to have something in a low traffic area in 7 more years. Ridership forecasts are dropping due to work at home, 100,000’s of people leaving the State (700,000 last year alone), and slower economic growth…
Yet they are still wasting $Billions more on this FINANCIAL DISASTER!
WHERE DID THE MONEY ACTUALLY GO?

[Kansteo @Kansteo]

What's especially crazy is that way back when @elonmusk excoriated this plan for being insanely overpriced and technologically unambitious. Somehow it's now worse on both fronts.

[Wayne Dunlap @wdunlap]

Don’t be like California! 17 YEARS AGO California voters approved $33 Billion for a network of high-speed trains in California to be completed connecting our large cities by 2020 (5 years ago)… after wasting $18 BILLION, TODAY NO TRACKS HAVE BEEN LAID! Now the estimate for a much downsized project is $128 Billion (an incredible $206 Million per mile) and still no path to completion - only a ‘promise’ to have something in a low traffic area in 7 more years. Ridership forecasts are dropping due to work at home, 100,000’s of people leaving the State (700,000 last year alone), and slower economic growth…
Yet they are still wasting $Billions more on this FINANCIAL DISASTER!
WHERE DID THE MONEY ACTUALLY GO?

[Kansteo @Kansteo]

@ToscaAusten @brian_bee Favorite song about Newsom

https://t.co/QiIrvIdhxn

[Tosca Austen @ToscaAusten]

Workers Pretended To Work Because NEWSOM PRETENDED TO BUILD A High-Speed Rail.

Contractors paid $170k a day for delays =$800 Million
For No Work. NO Tracks.

California’s high-speed rail is the biggest taxpayer-funded FRAUD in American history.
Gov Gavin Newsom is right at the center of it.

They sold voters a $33B dream train from LA to SF. Now? Over $135B wasted, 18+ years later, ZERO operational track, zero trains running.

Worse: a shady “non-execution of contract” clause pays contractors $170,000 👉PER DAY👈for delays — meaning taxpayers shelled out OVER $800 MILLION for contractors to do literally 👉👉NOTHING.

That’s not incompetence, it’s taxpayer theft by design.
Stay quiet. Smile and nod.

Money funneled to cronies while California roads crumble, homeless camps explode, drug addicts OD on streets, and hardworking Californians get crushed by high taxes.

.@CAgovernor Newsom approved these sweetheart deals. Where did the cash really go? WHO got rich while the rail project went nowhere?

No more blank checks for Democrat pet projects.l with “loopholes”—slyly crafted.

Lax oversight happens when big government in single party rule states runs wild. 🇺🇸

#HighSpeedRailScam #GavinNewsom #CaliforniaFraud #TaxpayerRipoff

[Kansteo @Kansteo]

@DrAGreenland I love this little three-legged brain picture. Adorable.

[Dr Andrew Greenland @DrAGreenland]

Many cognitive changes are negotiations, not failures.
The brain adjusting how much it holds, how fast it moves, and how widely it scans.

When we stop interpreting these negotiations as loss, people often regain trust in their thinking - and trust is one of the strongest stabilisers cognition has.

#Cognition #HealthyAgeing

[Kansteo @Kansteo]

Oh hey, my kids have that book!

[Pepijn Leonard Demortier @PepijnDemortier]

“White people have no culture”

Yet the depth of civilization and sophistication encapsulated in this random 18th century British war ship surpasses, by immeasurable magnitudes, the aggregate historical achievements of certain entire continents.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Still kinda hot tbh

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Whatever these two little girls decide to do with their lives later, they will have had some great times with their dad.

And the father teaches them a profession.