Bill Clinton Praised Jeffrey Epstein's 'Childlike Curiosity' in Birthday Letter: WSJ (David Gilmour/Mediaite)
https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/bill-clinton-praised-jeffrey-epsteins-childlike-curiosity-in-birthday-letter-wsj/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250725/p25#a250725p25
A post from the archive 📫:
Curiosity unbounded
#musings
@… Out of curiosity which radar app is that?
Musician YATTA on going towards the unknown https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/musician-yatta-on-going-towards-…
Related to understanding firearms, "rifles" and hand guns tend to be rifled. Rifling is grooving that runs in a helical pattern down the barrel. When purchasing a firearm, it's important to check the rifling.
First check that the firearm is unloaded. Empty or remove the magazine, cycle the weapon. Next, check again that it's unloaded by looking both down the barrel and into the magazine. Now, shine a light down the barrel and look down it. In the absence of a light, you may be able to reflect light off your thumbnail.
Rifling should look as though it's drawn on with a sharp pencil, and the barrel should look otherwise completely smooth and clean. If the rifling looks like bumpy mountains, then the owner probably used corrosive ammo and didn't clean it enough. It will probably still shoot, but not at all accurately.
Both the rifling and the pin can be used in forensic analysis to match a bullet to a gun. I don't honestly know how accurate this is because a lot of forensic "science" is just made up stuff that relies on the CSI effect and doesn't actually work as advertised.
However, not all firearms are not all rifled. Shotguns are "smoothbore" firearms, meaning they lack rifling. It is not possible to perform forensic analysis of a smoothbore firearm. It *is* possible to check for powder on the hands of someone who has used a firearm within the last few days, but it's not possible to distinguish between firing inside and outside a range.
I've been gathering all kinds of tidbits like this, partially just out of curiosity and partially because I've been wanting to write a story about a revolutionary group fighting a modern authoritarian society. I'm always happy to learn other bits, if anyone has anything else I could throw in my narrative (whenever I finally get back to writing it).
Studies: women are 25% less likely than men to have basic digital skills, are more likely to be in automation-threatened jobs, and use ChatGPT less at work (Isabel Berwick/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/7f0fbd7d-011a-448d-9d23-8a8db2006df4
The Carrollian Kaleidoscope
Arjun Bagchi, Aritra Banerjee, Prateksh Dhivakar, Saikat Mondal, Ashish Shukla
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16164 https://…
I’ve been doing an unholy amount of weeding recently and keep seeing these little spiders fleeing my progress. Many are carrying a tiny white ball and so I looked them up out of curiosity.
Apparently they are “Rabid Wolf Spiders”, which sounds like they themselves got to pick it out and sought something impressively terrifying so that humans would leave them alone. It’s certainly a misnomer since spiders cannot be rabid.
The white ball is an egg sac.
"We’re doing all we can to drive the enemy from our land! We’ll strike them at sea, in the air and on land. If necessary, we’ll get them from underground," the SBU writes in a Telegram post.
From underground...
#Ukraine