My piece in today's @IrishTimes on why State supports for Irish companies aren't working. irishtimes.com/opinion/2025/…

"Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it" - Mark Twain

OTD in 1938 Hitler gave a speech demanding the Sudetenland be handed to Germany. He said his countrymen were being mistreated and needed protection. Also promised it was his last territorial demand. He was lying. Imagine that happening today.

I could watch these clips all day. Brilliant writing.

I'm not. Neither is Tommy Robinson.

Almost all Chinese components (US also) and used every day to murder Ukrainian civilians. But Trump fawns over Xi, invites Putin to the G20, and complains Zelenskyy won't make a deal.

Let's be very clear on this one point. The President mocking a former President in front of the communist leader of China is the most un-American thing an American president has ever done.

Antivaxers are aware that the manufacturer of Ivermectin said it doesn't work for COVID-19 or Cancer (only in vitro), right??? merck.com/news/merck-stateme… merckmillipore.com/BA/en/tec…

Denmark trolling Trump epically.

Holy shit I’m dying 😂 JD Vancho ☠️

Every French🇫🇷 passenger train, on an ordinary Tuesday, from first departure to last

Trump said Nevada has 250,000 noncitizens voting. So DHS went through the list of voters. Guess how many they found. 250,000? No. 2000? Nope. 200? Wrong. They found ZERO noncitizens. Epstein is not a hoax. Affordability is not a hoax. Illegals voting is a big fat orange hoax.

Given Lance Armstrong is trending, it’s probably worth reminding people of this splendid bit of Australian humour.

"Natural immunity" to measles comes with a risk of pneumonia, encephalitis, blindness, and a rare fatal brain disease that can appear years later. The vaccine gives you the immunity without any of that.

A nursing home boss stole his workers' Social Security and Medicare money. He got 18 months and $4.4M restitution. A Mar-a-Lago dinner erased it. If pardons go to whoever can afford a plate, workers get robbed twice: once by him, once by the system. #TrumpsCorruptCongress #DemsUnited

Wish I was in Dublin for this. Wait... look at all the crowds, you'd swear from X everyone in Ireland hated U2.

Yes. Air is composed of chemicals. ~78% nitrogen. ~21% oxygen. ~0.9% argon. ~0.04% carbon dioxide.

In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Pygmalion sculpts a woman from ivory, then prays to Aphrodite to give it life. In Homer's Iliad, Achilles fights with Scamander, a powerful god who takes the form of a river as if it were a person. In the Egyptian Pyramid Texts, we read of the ceremony of the opening of the mouth, a ritual that reanimates corpses or statues so as to embed them with a soul's life force. In Jewish folklore, there is the Golem, clay animated by inscribing it with the Tetragrammaton, the unpronounceable name of God. In Hinduism, the Vedic ritual of Pran Pratishta places the life force in an other wise inanimate object. Among the Pueblo people, native to the southwestern United States, an individual house and the village itself are seen as sentient entities through which the breath of the cosmos flows. In our time, we see some who project consciousness and perhaps even sentience into AI, artifacts that are formed from artificial neural networks which themselves are abstractions that execute on symbolic von Neumann machines that in turn run on cunningly designed fragments of silicon flecked with certain rare earth minerals and etched with intricate patterns that channel lightening. In each of these cases, we humans - undeniably sentience creatures of exquisite complexity and capable of curiosity and wonder and love and hate - project sentience on to a multitude of distinctly non-sentient artifacts. The fact we have done this throughout our history and in our mythology and religion and even our casual daily lives tells us much about ourselves. Each of us seeks to know and be known, see and be seen, and so I suspect that much of why we do this is because we desire a connection. To quote a line from Sagan's Contact, "You're an interesting species. An interesting mix. You're capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other."

Parents in the 1950s closed swimming pools and kept their kids home all summer because they were scared of polio. Today's parents get their kids vaccinated and carry on . That's progress.

The greatest trick science ever pulled was making miracles boring. Clean water. Antibiotics. Vaccines. Safe food. Electricity. Anaesthesia. We stopped calling them miracles because they work.

Elle s'appelait Nettie Stevens.⠀ Née le 7 juillet 1861 à Cavendish, Vermont, dans une famille sans fortune. Sa mère meurt quand elle a deux ans. Elle grandit, elle étudie, elle devient institutrice. Pendant une décennie, elle enseigne et économise — chaque mois, chaque salaire, chaque centime mis de côté pour un seul objectif.⠀ Elle entre à Stanford à 35 ans.⠀ Ce n'est pas une rattrapage tardif. C'est un plan. En 1903, elle obtient son doctorat au Bryn Mawr College, en Pennsylvanie. Elle a 41 ans. Elle n'a plus de temps à perdre.⠀ En 1905, elle publie une étude sur les cellules reproductrices du ver de farine. Ce qu'elle observe dans son microscope, personne ne l'a vu de cette façon avant elle. Les cellules femelles portent vingt grands chromosomes. Les cellules mâles en portent dix-neuf grands et un petit — ce que la biologie appellera plus tard le chromosome Y. C'est lui qui détermine le sexe masculin. Elle le démontre. Elle le nomme.⠀ La même année, Edmund Wilson, à Columbia, travaille sur le même sujet. Mais Wilson ne peut examiner que les testicules — ses techniques de coloration ne lui permettent pas de traiter les œufs. Il ne conclut pas. Stevens, elle, a travaillé sur les deux. Elle conclut.⠀ En 1906, une conférence scientifique réunit les chercheurs qui travaillent sur la détermination du sexe. Wilson est invité. Morgan est invité. Stevens ne l'est pas.⠀ Elle continue. Elle publie. Entre 1900 et 1912, elle produit environ trente-huit articles. Elle ne ralentit jamais. À Bryn Mawr, elle reste « associate in experimental morphology » — le titre le plus élevé qu'on lui accordera jamais. Jamais professeure. Toujours associée.⠀ Le 4 mai 1912, elle meurt d'un cancer du sein à Baltimore. Elle a 50 ans. Bryn Mawr venait de lui proposer un poste à la hauteur de son travail. Elle n'a pas eu le temps de l'occuper.⠀ Six mois plus tard, son directeur de thèse, Thomas Hunt Morgan, publie son nécrologe dans la revue Science. Il salue sa « single-mindedness » — sa ténacité, son application. Il lui attribue « une part dans une découverte importante ».⠀ Une part.⠀ En 1916, Calvin Bridges, doctorant de Morgan, publie une étude fondatrice sur les chromosomes. Il remercie « Dr. T. H. Morgan », « Dr. A. H. Sturtevant », « Dr. H. J. Muller ». Quand il mentionne Stevens — elle qui avait obtenu son doctorat sous la direction de Morgan lui-même — il écrit « Miss Stevens ».⠀ En 1933, Thomas Hunt Morgan reçoit le prix Nobel de physiologie ou médecine pour ses découvertes sur le rôle des chromosomes dans l'hérédité. Le domaine qu'elle avait ouvert en 1905, depuis un laboratoire de Pennsylvanie, au microscope, seule.⠀ La mémoire ne se transmet pas toute seule.⠀ Elle s'appelait Nettie Stevens.