Longtime Bad Things On Collision Course observer & fuzzy critters poster to balance it out. Same handle @ bsky, https://xitter.cf/t.co/vY4oDDnefy & tumblr
Beyond the blackwall, mostly
Joined December 2018
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You can now find me on these sites:
• Bluesky: @[email protected]
• Mastodon: @[email protected]
• Tumblr: @horrorbatsbite
I’ll continue to post here until it’s absolutely DeadDoveDoNotEat.gif.
🫡💕
ghost ([email protected]) retweeted
Most decaf coffee is made with methylene chloride. It's the solvent that used to be in paint stripper.
The green beans are steamed, then washed in methylene chloride, which pulls out the caffeine and not much else. The beans are steamed again to drive off the solvent and then roasted at over 400F. FDA allows up to 10 parts per million. When a lab tested 24 decaf brands in 2020 it found the solvent in 10 of them at about 0.05 to 0.1 ppm, around 100 times below the limit. The industry calls this the European method.
There are 3 other ways to do it. Ethyl acetate, a solvent that can be made from sugarcane, which the trade calls the natural method. Carbon dioxide under pressure. And the Swiss Water process, which uses hot water and carbon filters and no solvent at all. Peet's says all of its decaf is water process. Starbucks has told reporters most of its decaf is the direct contact method, meaning solvent.
EPA banned most uses of methylene chloride in 2024, but food is FDA's job, so decaf wasn't part of it. A petition to pull it from food has sat at FDA since December 2023. FDA reopened comments on it in May and hasn't decided. If the bag says Swiss Water or water process, no solvent touched it. If the bag says nothing, you don't know.
ghost ([email protected]) retweeted
a real piece of shit who has done nothing but harm to the world, helped meta spread COVID conspiracy nonsense, really evil man
Meta's Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan -- a longtime top adviser to Mark Zuckerberg -- is leaving the company after a decade and a half:
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
ghost ([email protected]) retweeted
romance scammers of the world REJOICE
ghost ([email protected]) retweeted
The cashier I met at a sandwich shop asked me and my three friends to write down the names of the bands on our shirts on his copy of the receipt and said that he listens to every band he sees on a customer's shirt. So far that's the best music discovery method I've ever heard of.
ghost ([email protected]) retweeted
This has been building for years. The logic of MAGA and Christian nationalism has always depended on the distinction between "our good Christian pedophiles" and "their bad secular pedophiles."
Hard to overstate how much the Amy Acton Mom ad is what the modern GOP is about. All these anxieties about how people (especially women and children) might use their agency to break bonds of filial duty and free themselves, rather than be subject to control and abuse.
We sort of satirize them as the “you can’t groom my kids, that’s MY job!” Party, but this ad is very nearly that explicit argument. They don’t want schools to empower young people to find the autonomy to come out as gay or trans, they don’t want colleges to teach young adults about the breadth of the world and the human dignity of people from diverse backgrounds, they don’t want women to have financial independence and jobs and no-fault divorce.
At the heart of the GOP is this very straightforward premise: “there are some people whom it is my right to abuse. They are my property, and they owe me total obedience; freeing themselves from my abuse is a betrayal of natural hierarchy and divine law. You are trying to take my victims away from me, and I’ll do anything to stop you.”
ghost ([email protected]) retweeted
"We don't need weather balloon launches because our satellites are so good."
Not so fast. The next generation program was cut from six satellites to four. Only two will cover CONUS, one east and one west, instead of the planned east coast, heartland, and west coast coverage.
Three instruments that fly on today's GOES were also eliminated:
• Lightning mapping
• Air quality monitoring
• Ocean color and current/temp monitoring
But
there is a big reason for the switch in the 2030s: the GeoXO Sounder (GXS). On paper, this is probably the best thing to ever happen to forecast data gathering and input.
Wx Satellites today featuring Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) which is a broad band (16 band) radiometer with limited ability to profile the atmosphere vertically. GXS will use more than 1,550 spectral channels to produce precise vertical profiles of temperature, moisture, and wind, refreshed *hourly*
Hourly soundings should sharply reduce initial condition errors in regional mesoscale models, which boosts short term forecast accuracy. Feed those thermodynamic and wind profiles into rapid refresh models with better dynamical cores and AI enhancements, and we could see remarkable convection allowing model (CAM) performance when these go into orbit in 2032.
The catch is that this only works if the satellites stay healthy/operational. We would be relying on just two of them for the entire country, plus one backup which is much less redundant than what we have now.
The Trump administration’s cuts to weather satellites will set the country back nearly a decade, experts say. The loss of data used to observe, forecast and research extreme weather could prevent the US from making major advances in weather prediction in the coming years. cnn.it/4k6eD4o
ghost ([email protected]) retweeted
I cannot believe this. The 2024 NHS pandemic plan states the following generic assumptions:
“it will not be possible to halt the spread of a new pandemic virus, and it would be a waste of public health resources and capacity to attempt to do so.”
england.nhs.uk/long-read/fra…
ghost ([email protected]) retweeted
I think it's a good idea for us to demystify journalism and show our work/behind the scenes as much as possible. So much of the public doesn't understand how journalism is done and that's on us, tbh.
We're trying something new at @nytimes: "The Backstory," a newsletter digging into Times journalism and decision-making. We also talk to critics and skeptics of The Times in a segment called "Sound Off." You can read our first edition here: nytimes.com/2026/10/15/insid…
ghost ([email protected]) retweeted
FOLKS. It is NOT TOO LATE to sign up for @VotebeatUS's expert desk. We have 125 experts on elections waiting to talk to journalists on the record and IT IS FREE.
Take our sources. Use them in your reporting. No credit necessary.
ghost ([email protected]) retweeted
This story is getting way less attention than the Susan Collins one because Graham is well... dead. But the staffers that carried out Graham's corrupt scheme aren't. They're still in place! They're the ones puppeteering his incompetent sister as she seeks a 6 year term in office
New: An FBI anti-corruption team launched an investigation into whether South Carolina’s most powerful members of Congress were involved in a bribery scheme, ProPublica found. After Trump gutted the FBI and DOJ, the investigation went dark. propub.li/4yYJV1P
ghost ([email protected]) retweeted
this but it’s the midterm elections
ghost ([email protected]) retweeted
"The number of marine animals plummeted by about 60% in the years following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion...and those populations haven’t come close to recovering, the study found."
Marine life dramatically declined in Gulf of Mexico in years after BP oil spill, study finds apnews.com/article/fish-dead…
ghost ([email protected]) retweeted
“The system encourages exaggeration—right up to the line of deception. It can favor charismatic hucksters. If Theranos’ technology didn’t quite work yet, well, that’s a core tenet of Silicon Valley: Fake it till you make it.”
wired.com/story/how-elizabet…
ghost ([email protected]) retweeted
“I learned that — not to sound like a LinkedIn guy — what’s going on with chocolate is a parable for the modern world. That at this particularly bleak end stage of capitalism, everything we once treasured…will lose its essential essence and MrBeast will always be involved…”
🤌
This past Valentine’s Day, 71-year-old Brad Reese, proud grandson of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups inventor H. B. Reese, posted a scathing open letter to the manager of corporate brand and editorial at Hershey, accusing the company of unforgivably altering many Reese’s products by replacing real chocolate with compound chocolate — basically using vegetable oils instead of cocoa butter to lower costs and replacing real peanut butter with “peanut-butter-style crèmes.”
“And Reese wasn’t alone in feeling like everything was getting worse,” writes Rachel Handler. “Everyone in my life I spoke to agreed that something was amiss, that Reese’s — and commercial chocolate in general — didn’t taste the way it used to.”
Handler would spend the next several months tumbling down a chocolate vortex, encountering dozens of eccentric characters, all disagreeing about the fundamental question of what chocolate even is and who it should be for.
“I learned that — not to sound like a LinkedIn guy — what’s going on with chocolate is a parable for the modern world. That at this particularly bleak end stage of capitalism, everything we once treasured has or will lose its essential essence and MrBeast will always be involved somehow.”
For our cover story, Handler takes a deep dive into the molten belly of the chocolate world. Read it in full: nymag.visitlink.me/vKKky_
ghost ([email protected]) retweeted
William Shakespeare (who shares a birthday with my grandad)
“Are you sure That we are awake? It seems to me that yet we sleep, we dream."
And some of my favourite things in this picture - autumn leaves, a beautiful fox, magpies and golden ferns.
ghost ([email protected]) retweeted
Hard to overstate how much the Amy Acton Mom ad is what the modern GOP is about. All these anxieties about how people (especially women and children) might use their agency to break bonds of filial duty and free themselves, rather than be subject to control and abuse.
We sort of satirize them as the “you can’t groom my kids, that’s MY job!” Party, but this ad is very nearly that explicit argument. They don’t want schools to empower young people to find the autonomy to come out as gay or trans, they don’t want colleges to teach young adults about the breadth of the world and the human dignity of people from diverse backgrounds, they don’t want women to have financial independence and jobs and no-fault divorce.
At the heart of the GOP is this very straightforward premise: “there are some people whom it is my right to abuse. They are my property, and they owe me total obedience; freeing themselves from my abuse is a betrayal of natural hierarchy and divine law. You are trying to take my victims away from me, and I’ll do anything to stop you.”
ghost ([email protected]) retweeted
why am i 35 years old and only just now discovering that deer with vampire fangs exist? WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME THIS IS VERY RELEVANT TO MY INTERESTS
ALT Picture of a Chinese water deer which is a deer with large ears and 2 fangs coming out of their mouth instead of the usual antlers on their heads
ghost ([email protected]) retweeted
I am unwell
