Matthew Robbins

[Wylfċen @wylfcen]

Everyone needs to know the origin of the word “rune.” When ancient Germanics formed their own alphabet, they called the letters *rūnōz or “whispers,” because as your eyes followed them, they spoke to you, silently. Reading is magic to a people at the dawn of literacy, who haven’t yet learned to take the miracle for granted.

[Wall Street Apes @WallStreetApes]

These are the brand new disguised Automated License Plate Reader cameras in Arizona

The large yellow plastic barrels are camouflaged housings designed to look like construction equipment

They are being deployed in remote desert areas along highways

These new camouflaged cameras are a partnership between Flock and law enforcement and the plan is to use them extensively to track vehicle movement and broader surveillance

We are witnessing the surveillance state being established in America… this only ends in mass surveillance

[TeeTee @InfragilisTee]

God forbid we have fun sometimes

[Elias Al @iam_elias1]

Her Apple Watch battery dropped to 78% after just one year.

She wore it daily. She charged it overnight. She used it like every other Apple Watch owner she knew.

Yet her battery had degraded faster in 12 months than her iPhone had in 3 years.

She took it to the Genius Bar, expecting them to confirm it was defective.

The technician ran every diagnostic.

"Your watch isn't broken. It's just been running 24 hours a day doing things it doesn't need to do. There are 4 default settings on every Apple Watch that hammer the battery overnight. Apple knows. They've known since the first Series 1 launched. They don't change the defaults."

She asked why.

He gave the same answer Apple Store employees have learned to give silence.

Then he opened the Watch app on her iPhone and walked her through everything.

Here's what he showed her. 🧵

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Finnish scientists trucked in real forest dirt and grass and laid it over the gravel at four daycare yards. They let the kids dig around in it for a month. The blood tests came back with changes the researchers hadn’t expected to see so fast or so clear.

The study ran at ten daycares in two Finnish cities with 75 kids aged three to five. Four of the yards got the forest treatment: about a tennis court worth of soil and grass laid over the gravel, plus planters and peat blocks the kids could dig and climb on. Three others stuck with their normal gravel yards. The last three were daycares where the kids were already visiting real forests every day.

After one month, the variety of bacteria living on the kids’ skin shot up, and the kind that helps train the skin’s immune defenses jumped the most. Their gut bacteria started to look like the gut bacteria of the forest-visiting kids. Their blood showed more of the immune cells whose job is to keep the body from freaking out at harmless stuff like pollen and peanuts, and overall inflammation dropped. The kids on the plain gravel yards showed none of this.

Childhood asthma in the US doubled between 1980 and 1995. Food allergies in kids jumped 50 percent between 1997 and 2011, then jumped another 50 percent between 2007 and 2021. And peanut allergies in one-year-olds tripled between 2001 and 2017.

The Finnish researchers think one of the reasons is simple: kids today don’t get dirty enough. 37 percent of American preschoolers now spend an hour or less outside on a normal weekday. Their immune systems are getting trained in environments stripped of the bacteria humans have always lived around.

Aki Sinkkonen, who led the study, put it in plain words: “It would be best if children could play in puddles and everyone could dig organic soil.” The Finnish government is now helping pay for daycares across the country to make the same changes.

[Washingtons ghost @washghost1]

Your official guide for bees this summer

[Save Standard Time @SaveStandard]

🚨 US House Energy/Commerce Committee today amended the Sunshine Protection Act into the Motor Vehicle Modernization Act. If approved by Congress, it would mandate permanent Daylight Saving Time in all states that don’t self-exempt in advance, with no option for exemption after taking effect. 🧐 Permanent DST is a mandate to start work/school an hour earlier than Standard Time in unnatural darkness all winter. It would put sunrise in most states past 8am for 3+ months, and past 8:45am for 1+ weeks. It chronically deprives sleep, decreases productivity (by 5%), and increases illnesses and accidents (by 20%). It was last implemented in the US in 1974 and repealed the same year following deaths and disruptions to commerce. 👉 Tell your US House reps asap to amend MVMA (H.R.7389) to remove SPA (H.R.139) or to reword for nationwide restoration of permanent Standard Time with a clearer option for the minority of states to choose unhealthy/unsafe permanent DST by advancement of their own time zones if so strongly desired (though why DST proponents don’t simply start their own days an hour early remains boggling).

[BuccoCapital Bloke @buccocapital]

Levie’s Law of AI Psychosis:

The farther away you are from the actual work the more confident you are that humans are no longer needed

I like it

[Andrew McCarthy @AJamesMcCarthy]

This is probably the best look at the shockwaves I’ve seen from the latest Starship flight.

Captured from a GoPro I clamped onto a proper camera to record simultaneous video. (I’ll show you the photo the better camera took in the reply)

[Farzad 🇺🇸 🇮🇷 @farzyness]

The most batshit crazy video I’ve ever seen.

HOLY MOLY CANOLI.

[Aviation Archive - Tim Farmer @aviationarchive]

Man, Remco nailed it in the 60's when they asked themselves, "What do boys really want?"

[Angry Staffer @Angry_Staffer]

Party of fiscal responsibility, my ass

[Brad Lemley @BradCLemley]

Here is a huge positive to modern life that gets no press.

I have an old 2009 Toyota, and the AUX port crapped out about a year ago. Went to YouTube. Young, enthusiastic guy explains how to fix it.

It is not obvious - involves taking the dashboard apart in a counter-intuitive way, but once you see it, it's a 15 minute fix.

There are actually dozens of videos showing how to do this, and they collectively have well over 200k views.

Had this happened in 1995, I would have just lived with it. But the combo of the replacement AUX jack available from Amazon and the video of the simple (but not obvious) fix, I fixed it.

I HAVE DONE THIS DOZENS OF TIMES. Replaced the control panel of my dishwasher. Replaced the ice maker in the fridge. Fixed a wonky sanding head on my drill press. Mastered a bandsaw technique that I use for my sculpture. On and on and on...

I think it is likely no exaggeration to say billions of fixes and skill upgrades have been performed worldwide that would not have been performed if it were not for the instruction freely given peer-to-peer on YouTube.

Take a moment to be happy about this. The busted item keeps performing, rather than going to the landfill. The person learning and doing the fix gains a sense of mastery and saves money. It's an unmixed blessing.

Stop doomscrolling. Think of what is busted in your house, find the YouTube video on how to fix it, and fix it.

[Godzilla Ganker @2Josher]

lmao awesome

[NYT Wirecutter @wirecutter]

After finally drafting a will, writer Rose Maura Lorre took her end-of-life prep up a notch and got a kit called a Nokbox: a box of worksheets that you file away for any next of kin tasked with managing your earthly to-do’s after you’re gone. Here’s how it went: https://t.co/OvP8JEXcQg

[Simon Kuestenmacher @simongerman600]

Finland, what are you preparing for?

[Ryan Scholl |-/ @WxScholl]

No this is not a timelapse, this is what I’m seeing in real time right now near Lyons, NE… #newx

[Paul @WomanDefiner]

Today I learned the people who make pure silicon are basically the Samurai sword makers and master blacksmiths of our era and that even if China gets Taiwan they wont be able to make chips anywhere near as good as the US can because we have the purest quartz in the world.

[planefag @planefag]

Okay, ONE more

[Shalom Esparza @SHALOMEDAHOMMIE]

@BohuslavskaKate That is the hardest combat patch ever. What does it say??😂