Monkeytime

@tmorman.bsky.social

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queer, easily distracted Baltimore, MD, earth the anti-trans folks are coming for you next

Text screenshot: Today’s investigators have an opportunity to demonstrate that this investigation deserves public confidence. Trust is not something the government gets to demand. Trust is something the government earns through transparency, professionalism and a willingness to follow the evidence wherever it leads. Transparency does not require releasing every piece of evidence while an investigation remains active. It does require honest communication, respect for grieving families and a visible commitment to finding the truth.
...the federal judge in the copyright lawsuit from authors against Anthropic, William Alsup, found that Anthropic’s creation of digital copies of the books was legal specifically because the books were destroyed. “Here, every purchased print copy was copied in order to save storage space and to enable searchability as a digital copy,” Alsup wrote in his ruling. “The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other. And, there is no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, shared, or sold outside the company.” This, Alsup said, was “clearly transformative” and therefore qualified as fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act.
But the false positive isn’t really the problem. The issue is how that result was unceremoniously dropped onto the agency’s website without enough context. (We should also wonder whether the FDA rushed its initial conclusion amid a high-pressure outbreak, rather than taking a beat to double-check its work — a possible misstep that’s now giving the company some cover for its potential role in the outbreak.) On Monday afternoon, the agency explained what happened: The US has ramped up produce screening at the southern border, and one of those samples came back positive for cyclospora on Saturday. Regulators chose to publicize the result because the lettuce wasn’t part of the active recall, Donald Prater, the FDA’s acting deputy commissioner for food, told reporters. A subsequent quality check led the agency to backtrack. But by the time that explanation arrived, the phrase “false positive” had already dominated the morning news cycle. It understandably made people wonder if Taylor Farms was exonerated — again, to be crystal clear, it was not —
One crucial thing to understand is that the false positive doesn’t mean Taylor Farms is in the clear. Evidence from infected people still points to its iceberg lettuce as the likely source of at least part of the nationwide outbreak of cyclosporiasis, which has sickened thousands with “explosive” diarrhea. Taylor Farms hasn’t walked back its recall.
Text screenshot: For Nolan’s Dakhla shoot, he appears to have neither sought our consent nor considered the ethics of in effect helping to prop up and legitimise Morocco’s occupation, thus making the space even more unsafe for Sahrawis living under it. He is actively participating in a state-sponsored PR campaign designed to legitimise an illegal occupation. In a non-self-governing territory – which Western Sahara is, according to the UN – using the material or immaterial resources of the land without the explicit consent of its Indigenous people is not just unethical; under international law, it is illegal. Our land, our culture, and our heritage belong to us. Morocco weaponises cinema to whitewash its occupation of our land. By courting foreign film crews to shoot in Western Sahara while denying the Sahrawi the right to film and express themselves, Morocco...
Text screenshot: Health officials also determined that Taylor Farms was also at the root of a 2024 E. coli outbreak linked to slivered onions on McDonald’s Quarter Pounder hamburgers. According to the Food and Drug Administration, 104 people were sickened in 14 states in that outbreak. Nearly three dozen were hospitalized, four people, including at least one child, developed severe kidney problems. One person, an older adult from Colorado, died.
Map showing Baltimore area EPA monitoring stations as purple, with Dundalk and Catonsville stations showing very dark purple indicating hazardous air quality. Columbia is not shown in this screenshot but has an air quality index of over 400 right now.
Text screenshot: This was the summer the U.S. had gone all in for. They had spent millions on a high-profile coach with a glittering European résumé. They had assembled a team eight years in the making. And, at every step of the tournament, they would have the swelling support of playing on home soil. What the Americans learned instead was that they could still be stopped in their tracks by a middling European side with its stars on the bench.
Text screenshot: American allies have begun pushing the gas pedal on an unprecedented experiment in de-Americanization. Authorities from France to the Netherlands are quietly removing American tech from their systems, adopting European open-source software and urging civil servants to no longer use Microsoft Teams or Office. Belatedly, they are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to try to boost Europe’s own private space firms, AI companies, and data centers, to avoid leaning on U.S. juggernauts. Europeans are running studies on where they would store their data or process their payments should friction with the U.S. escalate,
Four firefighters with hoses spray water on a large grass hill on a city corner. 90% of the hill is charred black instead of the green it was before the fire.
Text screenshot: Perhaps the tech consultancy and services giant speaks from experience. Last month, research outfit GPTZero claimed a forensic review of KPMG's October 2025 report, "Total Experience: Redefining Excellence in the Age of Agentic AI," found that only five of its 45 citations pointed accurately to the cited source. The rest contained errors ranging from misleading or invented details to references that were too vague to verify. KPMG later removed the report from some of its websites and issued a statement. "KPMG International takes the accuracy and integrity of its published content seriously. The report has been removed and we are reviewing the circumstances surrounding its publication. We expect all our people to follow our guidelines on the responsible use of AI, including human oversight to validate content and verify independent sources," a spokesperson said.
Text screenshot: What SPF should I use? The numbers on a sunscreen’s SPF label can be a bit misleading. At SPF 30, a sunscreen already blocks 97% of UVB rays. Going up from there, the difference becomes very slight—SPF 50 is just 1 percentage point more protection at 98%. SPF 100, despite the name, protects against 99% of rays. No sunscreen truly protects the skin at 100%. Some studies suggest that SPF 100 does provide a meaningful leg up on SPF 50 sunscreens. Other health advocates have argued that the label creates a false sense of security for consumers, who might not reapply frequently enough as a result.
Beautiful, dense hanging collage from Anthony Smith
Colorful Afro-futurist collage portrait of a Black woman seen in profile, with flowers and machine parts in the mix
An abstract Miró painting with black circle, lines, sun and washes of color
One of 23 "Constellations" painted by Miró, colorful circles, stars, eyes and other shapes fill the canvas, connected by black lines.
Text screenshot: "Earlier today in an all-staff meeting we were informed that Scientific American was being sold to LabX Media Group. We are shocked by this news, which comes just three days before the NLRB will count our votes on unionizing—a vote we know we won by an overwhelming majority. We are also deeply saddened by the news that LabX Media Group wants to say goodbye to 15 of our hard-working colleagues, including 12 unit members—nearly one-third of our unit and 60% of our organizing committee. Everyone played a role in the success of the publication. We should call this action what it is – blatant union-busting. But there’s worse: we also have reason to believe that the sale was motivated by fear within Springer Nature that our attempts to doggedly report on the crisis facing science in America today would lead to repercussions from the Trump administration. On multiple occasions the company has sought to quash or tone down political or sensitive stories that were journalistically sound."
Text screenshot: On OpenRouter, a platform that helps developers direct tasks to different AI models, those from DeepSeek, Tencent, Minimax, and Xiaomi are now the four most popular. Vercel, another AI service provider, said DeepSeek’s share of token usage jumped from under 1% to 17% in May, although its share of revenue stayed near 1%. Tokens are the units of text or data that AI models process.
A man plays small hand drums on a stand in front of a DJ under a tent on a stage
Text screenshot: Some of the issues that have emerged are more serious. A few studies have tied the use of these medications with a slightly increased risk of developing a very rare eye condition, though it isn’t clear yet whether GLP-1s directly cause that condition. Doctors have also seen the drugs dial down appetite so extremely that some patients develop nutritional deficiencies. And the drugs have also been linked with a slight increase in risk for pancreatitis, though that remains extremely rare. Patients also frequently lose muscle mass on the medications. Many young, healthy patients have been able to recover muscle, or preserve it in the first place, by strength training and eating plenty of protein, doctors said. But they have seen older adults become more frail on these medications, making them more prone to falls.
Smiling woman in a green jumpsuit and green helmet with a whistle in her mouth points to the adorable little terrier enjoying the ride in a caged basket on the back of her bike, with smiling bikers watching behind her.
Black-and-white photo of a sign next to the dressing room door of a jazz club. Text says, "PLEASE DON'T ASK FOR PASSES FOR YOUR FRIENDS...IF THEY WON'T PAY TO SEE YOU WHO THE HELL WILL"
POLITICO will shut down Capitol AI Report-Builder, a tool that produced branded policy reports for POLITICO Pro subscribers without any editorial review, despite generating glaring factual errors. It also will not revive the “Live Summaries” AI feature, which generated error-riddled unedited coverage of major political events, including the 2024 Democratic National Convention and Vice Presidential Debate. Both uses were found by an arbitrator in November 2025 to have violated PEN Guild’s collective bargaining agreement.
Text screenshot: Anastasia Karneeva, the pavilion’s commissioner, published a video on Instagram on Monday saying that she would “very much like art to be the only voice” in Venice. Closing pavilions shuts off dialogue and means “nothing can grow,” added Karneeva, who runs the exhibitions company Smart Art, which she founded with Ekaterina Vinokurova, a daughter of Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov.
Text screenshot: Yarnell asked whether Eastland had reported the deaths of the children to state health regulators within 24 hours, as required by state health code. Eastland said she still had not reported them. “So you’re applying for a new license because you want to reopen camp next summer, right? But you still haven’t reported the deaths that occurred the last time you had a license” to the Department of State Health Services (DSHS)? Yarnell said. “Don’t you think you should update your DSHS application?” “I guess so,” Eastland testified. “I don’t know, I’m not the one that’s been doing the application.”
Banksy's new statue: a man in a suit confidently marches over the edge of the platform he's on while confidently holding the pole of a huge flag that is blowing back to completely cover his face, blinding him as he marches forward to a big fall.
Steny Hoyer, a very old man in a gray suitjacket and tie wearing an American flag lapel pin, talks out of a very crooked mouth.
Marti Stevens and Paul Harris in formal wear sit on stairs and talk behind metal bars that look like a jail in the black and white film All Night Long. They're in the Desdemona and Othello roles in the film's retelling of the Shakespeare play.
Graph showing a much larger and earlier number of visits to Emergency Rooms for tick bites this year compared to the previous four years.
Text screenshot: But 50 years of consistent research findings show that sports venues don’t generate a financial windfall for host cities. The overwhelming evidence regarding the limited economic benefits of stadiums has produced a strong consensus among economists that sports venues are not worthwhile public investments. It may seem counterintuitive that stadium events fail to boost local economies, because fans clearly do spend vast sums of money attending games. But most of the spectators in the crowd are locals, who reallocate their spending from other area merchants, rather than generating new commercial activity.
John Milton's handwritten note on a page of the First Folio, recreating the prologue to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, at the bottom of the previous plays ending, with an intricate abstract illustration.
Bar chart showing total prices for grocery store staples from 20 Baltimore-area grocery stores, with Aldi the cheapest and Sprouts the most expensive.
Screenshot showing an image from the ThamesStreetNightHerons Instagram account. Photo shows a white bird with black markings on its head flying with outstretched wings, with a small tree branch in its beak.
Antique illustration of a skeleton seen from the chest up; the skeleton is pressing its right hand against the side of its skull in a gesture that says "good lord what is happening?" There are yellow stars surrounding the skull.
Text screenshot: The public defenders proposed legislation earlier this year — it was made moot by the moratorium — that would have closely regulated the use of AI report writing technology. Among other things, it would have required police to clearly label AI generated reports and required officers responsible for the reports to review, sign and attest to the accuracy of every page. The proposed legislation also would have required police agencies to retain all drafts of AI generated reports, a procedure that would allow examiners to track the correction of computer-generated errors.
In a move to increase transparency, the commission updated its energy efficiency directive in 2023 to oblige datacentre operators to report data on key performance indicators. In further guidance, it proposed publishing “aggregated” environmental metrics. But during public consultations in January 2024, tech companies pushed to classify all individual information on datacentres as confidential, citing commercial interests. The demand means the data cannot even be accessed through freedom of information requests.
Twitter screenshot: In the best case scenario, Trump struck a deal to reopen a Strait that was open before the pointless war he started, with the IRGC demonstrating its control over the Strait and potentially extracting fees plus sanctions relief. Thousands of innocents - including hundreds of children - dead in Lebanon and Iran for no reason. U.S. troops killed and wounded. U.S. embassies and bases in the Middle East badly damaged. U.S. standing in the world obliterated. U.S. munitions badly depleted. Hundreds of billions spent. Prices up everywhere. More global economic fallout to come. Putin strengthened and enriched. Just a catastrophic situation even in the best of circumstances. A profoundly shameful episode in American history no matter what happens next.
Two bright orange plumes of hot lava shoot up from a shallow slope of a volcano against a blue sky with white clouds, with black lava cooling in the foreground
Photo of a partial fossil showing imprints of a reptile leg, foot and tail, with the words "cloacal vent" pointing to a fairly nondescript small ridge among other ridges on the tail.
Text screenshot: These claims follow the Qatari Ministry of Defence’s rare public confirmation that a US-operated AN/FPS-132 Block 5 Upgraded Early Warning Radar (UEWR), installed in 2013 at a cost of approximately US$1.1 billion (RM4.18 billion), was destroyed in a separate Iranian strike, underscoring both technical vulnerability and political exposure. Collectively, the reported neutralisation of a second THAAD battery, its ground-based radar in the UAE, and the AN/FPS-132 Block 5 UEWR in Qatar constitutes a sequential dismantling of the United States’ integrated air and missile defence (IAMD) network in the Gulf, with cascading implications for force posture, logistics resilience, and strategic signalling.
Screenshot of a tweet I posted in February 2021: "All I want is a half-buried inflatable moon house with a 3-D printer to make equipment and a crew of 2 supported by tri-monthly supply runs that take 3 days. Instead we get a lunatic billionaire sending cars into space and planning an absurd Mars colony 6 months away. Stupid."
2 posts on Twitter from Oct 2021. First is Elon talking about using his money "to get humanity to Mars and preserve the light of consciousness", second is me saying "Why are you not helping humanity go to the moon first? You know, try out life in space 3 days from home for resupply, rescue, etc, instead of 7 months from home? Fine-tune our experience on the nearby moon first. Your plan is so much less efficient."
2 posts on Twitter from February 2022: Wired magazine asks "What would you ask Elon Musk?" and I reply, "Why have you leapfrogged past the moon, a 3-day resupply mission away, as a long-term test site for human habitation in space, and insist you'll be able to land and supply a settlement on Mars, which is a 6-month trip? How does that make any scientific sense as a next step?"
Text screenshot: The quiet scene comes after federal immigration agents have hit the development repeatedly, carrying out at least half a dozen raids there in recent months, builders said. The most recent was a few weeks ago. Some eight workers were arrested in a chaotic scene of laborers running away from federal vehicles racing through the three-street subdivision at high speed, the builders said. The result? Homes are months behind schedule, and contractors face an uphill battle to recruit more workers to finish them. “They hear Monte Cielo and say, ‘No, no. You can pay me whatever you want, but I’m not going to go work there,’” Alejandro Garcia, one of several builders with homes under way in the development, said of the challenges in trying to hire workers.
Text quote: “I’m among the hundreds of people laid off by The Post,” race and ethnicity reporter Emmanuel Felton wrote. “This comes six months after hearing in a national meeting that race coverage drives subscriptions. This wasn’t a financial decision, it was an ideological one.”
Protest sign in a big crowd under a traffic light says "First they came for..." with multiple smaller signs under those words for folks targeted by Trump, like federal workers, judges, trans kids, refugees, USAID and more, with "Then they came for ME" at the bottom. The word "ME" is on a big red arrow pointing down to the sign holder.
Article excerpt: Technically, paying the president-elect’s wife this much money – Melania reportedly pocketed nearly $30m of Amazon’s initial $40m outlay – was legal, because the first lady isn’t part of the government. She’s just a private citizen who happens to be married to the president and happened to receive a multimillion-dollar check from a company with many government contracts through its web services and other divisions. Healthy democratic stuff!
Article excerpt: Like every other engineer in the conference room at Morton Thiokol on that day four decades ago, the 31-year-old Russell opposed launching because the bitterly cold temperature at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center threatened the O-rings that sealed the rocket boosters. Their managers initially supported this view, but Russell listened in dismay as they reversed themselves under pressure from NASA officials and senior company officials and signed off on the launch.
Many minerals are essential for China’s economy now, and it has worked hard to ensure that it has access to them, from both domestic and foreign sources. But China has also been tremendously innovative and managed to find ways to reduce its reliance on products from abroad. Its massive transition to clean energy is the most visible case. But to take another important example, lithium has been an essential component in the batteries used in electric vehicles and to store electricity. But China has been working to develop alternatives. Already, CATL, the world’s largest battery manufacturer, is marketing sodium-based batteries as an alternative to lithium batteries. Unlike lithium, sodium is cheap and plentiful. It also is much less environmentally destructive to mine. Perhaps in Trump’s vision he will have shut off China from access to lithium in ten or fifteen years. He might consider that a great victory, but in ten or fifteen years, China likely will not need lithium. The same will likely be the case with most of the other minerals Trump might hope to monopolize. Who knows if this is really his vision, but if it is, it is one that doesn’t make much sense.
Text screenshot: Perhaps the biggest wild card is the security apparatus itself. While observers saw few significant signs of defection at the leadership level, they said every round of protests sees more rank-and-file police and members of the Basij (a volunteer militia of regime loyalists) refusing to take part in a crackdown. “My own family is urging me to take off my uniform and leave this job,” the riot-police officer said, adding that he fears the moment his commanders order live fire. “If I disobey, they’ll kill me.” “I’m in the police force for the income,” he added, “not to kill people.”
Text screenshot: Dreier also lamented the many wasted hours spent planning by scientists and engineers to comply with the Trump White House’s budget proposal. “Those hours could have been spent running and analyzing data from these valuable missions,” Dreier said. “It created a lot of needless friction and churn at a time when NASA is being told it must remain competitive with China and other nations in space.”
Text screenshot: A search for “vaginal cancer symptoms and tests” listed a pap test as a test for vaginal cancer, which is incorrect. Athena Lamnisos, the chief executive of the Eve Appeal cancer charity, said: “It isn’t a test to detect cancer, and certainly isn’t a test to detect vaginal cancer – this is completely wrong information. Getting wrong information like this could potentially lead to someone not getting vaginal cancer symptoms checked because they had a clear result at a recent cervical screening. “We were also worried by the fact that the AI summary changed when we did the exact same search, coming up with a different response each time that pulled from different sources. That means that people are getting a different answer depending on when they search, and that’s not good enough.” Lamnisos said she was extremely concerned. “Some of the results we’ve seen are really worrying and can potentially put women in danger,” she said.
Text screenshot: She is highly critical of the VioGén system and says migrant women are at particular risk of falling through the cracks. "It is not possible for an algorithm to determine psychological, physical, or economic abuse, because the questions it generates are too general to be able to identify that psychological violence or even violence that happens continuously over time," she said. "What the system needs is not more technology, what it needs is more humans: more professionals specialised in violence against women, lawyers, social workers, psychologists, translators and interpreters. "That is not going to be complemented or replaced by artificial Intelligence", she said.
Text screenshot from the article: "If 95 to 98 per cent of the time, police are just pressing enter on the output. We saw that that was not really meaningful human intervention," she said. "Basically, the women were just facing an AI system that they had no awareness or control of." Her company offered to audit VioGén pro bono for three years, but the Spanish government refused. They launched their own investigation anyway. "None of the engineers ever had data on what happened to women after a risk score was given," Ms Galdon said. "So, if a woman's killed after being given a non-existent risk score, they don't know, they don't assess, they don't look at the system again to see what could have gone wrong."
Mashed avocado with spices on toast, with an over-easy egg on top cut open so the yellow yolk is spreading over it all
A group of Malaysian citizens in yellow shirts holding signs gather around 3 black-wrapped coffins on the ground, one with white flowers on top, with a yellow umbrella that looks like a hazardous waste symbol on the ground nearby. They are protesting an Australian mining company called Lynas with signs saying "People Has Decided: Lynes GET OUT!" "HEAVY METAL WASTE" and "Lynas will destroy our homes."
Text screenshot: "The Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Bureau has not stated how much they paid to have an outside for-profit company come and confirm that Philly indeed has good restaurants. But in 2024, Houston reportedly agreed to pay the Michelin Guide $270,000 for the privilege. Assuming Philadelphia paid a similar amount, if not more, that averages to about 100K per star."
A smiling young white man in white pants and shirt, black platform shoes, and a black jacket festooned with the same kind of hilariously tacky gold decorations Trump just installed all over the Oval Office; the man is Mark Guiducci, the new "global editorial director" at Vanity Fair.
"I grew up a little punk rock kid on the Dead Kennedys and the Dropkick Murphys. Hating Nazis has been something I have been into since I was about 12."
Colorful flyer for a free event this coming Thursday Oct 16th at Club Car in Baltimore: "Tales From the Pansy Craze: The Drag Balls of Jazz-Era West Baltimore". The talk will be followed by "an evening of drag with Stealya Manz and some of Baltimore's most talented queens!" Behind the words is a black-and-white archival photo of posing Black drag queens.