Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Christopher Berry

Thomas Beatty @tgbeatty.bsky.social · 12h

Reposted by Christopher Berry

Howard Lee @hlee.bsky.social · 9h

👀👀"...at least two cold climate intervals during the late Tonian Period, thereby providing novel insights into the evolution of global climate conditions in advance of the Cryogenian Snowball Earth" (preprint) ⚒️🧪❄️
www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-7...

Tonian glaciation in South China

Paleoclimatic conditions during the Tonian Period (~1000-720 Ma), preceding the Cryogenian Snowball Earth glaciations, remain ambiguous. While the apparent paucity of glacially influenced sedimentary ...

www.researchsquare.com

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Christopher Berry @cjpberry.bsky.social · 9h

Parties often offer their members spaces to have constructive discussions, productive conflict, over preference, position, and communications.

Parties package.

The real catastrophe lies in the joy that there are so many of us with voices.

Christopher Berry @cjpberry.bsky.social · 9h

I wonder about better ways.

Parties aggregate preferences. They eat good intentions, dreams, agendas, passion, ideals and money and excrete a communications package that must resonate with people who are barely spending any attention.

And it’s the best we got … when we have parties.

Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 12h

The research does suggest that competitive primaries hurt the party in high salience races like this one.

I'd bet that it's even bigger when party organizations like the DCCC fundraise for one side in the primary--half of the base will get really mad at that.

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Christopher Berry @cjpberry.bsky.social · 10h

All to say, you know yourself best. You do you in the creativity.

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Christopher Berry @cjpberry.bsky.social · 10h

Eh Cameron, I reckon it’s difficult to accurately assess the true state. Competitors have an incentive to over-display, over-pump.

It may be the case that you are under-differentiating. It would just be quite hard to tell.

The burn-light is a signal though. May be some wisdom embedded there.

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Christopher Berry @cjpberry.bsky.social · 13h

If you were an adult in the 20’s, radio was the killer app, because you didn’t have to go to a theatre.

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Christopher Berry @cjpberry.bsky.social · 13h

Tron has some nice art.

The variant I’d have preferred would have been directed by Paul Verhoeven. Or his spiritual successor.

Tron is Disney. The film isn’t going to challenge anybody.

Reposted by Christopher Berry

ℳatt @matttomic.bsky.social · 13h

A pilot out in Nova Scotia seems to have had some fun yesterday.

www.flightaware.com/live/flight/...

C-GZPT Flight Tracking and History - FlightAware

Flight status, tracking, and historical data for C-GZPT including scheduled, estimated, and actual departure and arrival times.

www.flightaware.com

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Christopher Berry @cjpberry.bsky.social · 14h

Assuming at the most optimistic he could retain 2 million, even if they’re all fully Roseanne’d.

Well. It’s river cruises. It’s ointment. It’s wine. The best margin would be gambling. It’s doable.

But he isn’t doing it.

Christopher Berry @cjpberry.bsky.social · 14h

IIRC, Dr. Phil inherited a portion of the Oprah audience? Which is loosely, women born 1940-1960. Out of 17 million women total, Oprah had a sizeable share, and he built his grift off ~5 million. Many are dead, and let’s say, generously, that half of that broke for Trump, for ~ 2 million.

Mrs. Betty Bowers @mrsbettybowers.bsky.social · 15h

Reading that cretin Alex Jones was put on blast by the conservative Supreme Court and "Dr. Phil" has had to declare bankruptcy on the same day? What an embarrassment of riches! Only one other breaking news story about another odious man would make things better.
www.rawstory.com/dr-phil-trum...

Dr Phil faces 'total collapse' after MAGA alignment backfires massively: report

Dr. Phil McGraw's attempt to transition from daytime television personality to a politically aligned media mogul during Donald Trump's second presidential term has been marked by spectacular failure a...

www.rawstory.com

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Reposted by Christopher Berry

Prof Sam Illingworth @samillingworth.com · 1d

🏺 Climate shift and the fall of a dynasty

Stalagmite records show a major drought and cooling event 2,800 years ago helped trigger the collapse of China’s Western Zhou Dynasty and mass southward migration.

🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s43...

#SciComm #ClimateHistory #Archaeology 🧪

Client Challenge

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Christopher Berry

Zack Labe @zacklabe.com · 1d

Monday ice update - #Arctic sea ice extent is currently the 10th lowest on record (JAXA data)

• about 120,000 km² below the 2010s mean
• about 1,440,000 km² below the 2000s mean
• about 2,540,000 km² below the 1990s mean
• about 3,080,000 km² below the 1980s mean

More: zacklabe.com/arctic-sea-i...

Line graph time series of 2025's daily Arctic sea ice extent compared to decadal averages from the 1980s to the 2010s. The decadal averages are shown with different colored lines with purple for the 1980s, blue for the 1990s, green for the 2000s, and white for the 2010s. Thin white lines are also shown for each year from 2000 to 2024. 2025 is shown with a thick gold line. There is a long-term decreasing trend in ice extent for every day of the year shown on this graph between August and November by looking at the decadal average line positions.

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Reposted by Christopher Berry

Jacob Edenhofer @jacobedenhofer.bsky.social · 2d

Quite simply devastating www.cgdev.org/blog/cholera...

Cholera in Africa: Rising Deaths, Shrinking US Aid

The United States—long the world’s largest provider of lifesaving assistance and the largest humanitarian donor to many countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa—saw a sharp reversal in early 2025. ...

www.cgdev.org

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Christopher Berry @cjpberry.bsky.social · 2d

It’s the Bathurst segment that I’m thirsting for. Legs are still fresh and I’m still smiling before the MGT and the slope at the Legion.

Christopher Berry @cjpberry.bsky.social · 2d

To the specific: JFC, be yourself FFS, not GPT. If you want them, then it’s the next day and in your voice. Pretty simple.

To the general: Like a book, ChatGPT generalizes. Unlike a book, the better you brief it, the better it can help you reason through your stance. He iterated. Fine.

C. Buckthorn @cbuckthorn.bsky.social · 3d

This is amazing. I laughed out loud www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

As 32-year-old Rich points out, though, "it's not like using ChatGPT guarantees success".
When he met someone in a bar one Friday night and swapped social media handles, he asked AI what his next move should be.
ChatGPT discerned that sending an initial message on Monday midmorning would set the right pace. "Then it gave me some options for what the message could be," says Rich.
"Keep it light, warm, and low-stakes so it reads as genuine interest without urgency," the bot advised. "Something like: Hey Sarah, still laughing about [tiny shared moment/reference if you've got one] - good to meet you!" Rich went back and forth with ChatGPT until he felt they'd hit upon exactly the right message ("Hey Sarah, it was lovely to meet you") but sadly she never replied, he says. "It's been two weeks now."

Reposted by Christopher Berry

Bryan Godbe @bryangodbe.bsky.social · 2d

"In our view, America's leadership in science and innovation depends on independent thinking and open competition for excellence... Therefore, with respect, we cannot support the proposed approach to addressing the issues facing higher education."
www.bbc.com/news/article...

MIT rejects federal funding deal with Trump administration

The deal would see universities cap foreign admissions, restrict protests and adopt a binary definition of gender.

www.bbc.com

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Christopher Berry @cjpberry.bsky.social · 3d

Let’s make it speak Ithkuil.

Morris Alper @malper.bsky.social · 4d

The number of languages in the world just got a lot higher! At least constructed ones.
Meet ConlangCrafter - a pipeline for creating novel languages with LLMs.
A Japanese-Esperanto creole? An alien cephalopod color-based language?
Enter your idea and see a conlang emerge. 🧵👇

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Reposted by Christopher Berry

Alex Degen (Magic Serple 2025) @adactivity.bsky.social · 3d

It’s all happening on x dot com where I do my banking

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Reposted by Christopher Berry

therealWokeKong @donkeykonga.bsky.social · 3d

American “entrepreneurs”: “I’m on that grindset baby, rise and grind! I even work in my sleep now! My AI for cats will change the world!”

Chinese public works employees: “we just built a train that travels at 300 mph and it runs on algae”

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Christopher Berry @cjpberry.bsky.social · 3d

If Canadians can do it better, cleaner, safer - then let’s do it. AFAIK, rare earth refining is dirty because it takes so much earth, and solvents, to extract the uh…rare material embedded in the rock.

I don’t reckon it can be ultra clean though. Earth is dirt. Which has the property of dirtiness.

Christopher Berry @cjpberry.bsky.social · 3d

A single monastery makes special precious stone that, when combined with other special rocks, and enchanted with an invisible force, cooled by water, chants words it cannot possibly understand and conjures illusions that fool people who have lived the longest.

What the fuck are we even doing?

Isaiah Bishop @isaiahbishop.bsky.social · 3d

Whole world balance hangs on Canadian mining shitcos

Financial illiteracy @sparticuszorro.bsky.social · 3d

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Reposted by Christopher Berry

T&E @transportenvironment.org · 6d

NEW: Biofuels globally emit more than the fossil fuels they replace, our latest study shows.

The first-of-a-kind study looks at global biofuels production today and the potential impacts of government biofuel targets.
🧵⤵️

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Reposted by Christopher Berry

Morris Alper @malper.bsky.social · 3d

I’m fascinated by the idea of a game like No Man’s Sky where infinite new civilizations could be generated dynamically with their own languages as the player explores the universe.

Morris Alper @malper.bsky.social · 4d

ConlangCrafter could potentially be used in pedagogy, typological and NLP work, and many entertainment applications. Imagine a video game where aliens can speak countless new procedurally-generated languages.

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Christopher Berry @cjpberry.bsky.social · 3d

John Ganz made a whole bunch of new connections for me in “When The Clock Broke”…

For instance, I had no idea that “neocon” was to the 80’s as “globalist” is to today. That was an oh wow. And I didn’t understand the Koch-Giuliani connection.

Thankful for the knowledge. Unhappier because of it.