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Lee Ladett

@exspectator.bsky.social
291 followers 2.3K following 514 posts

Bibliophile. Amateurish on keys and woodwinds. Engineer. Lapsed writer. And so on. Still finding my way through the tangled woods.

PostsRepliesMedia
Reposted by Lee Ladett
ceej @ceej.online · 02/10/2026
incredible news: we’re having the same arguments over and over for the rest of time
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Kyle Reed 🟥 @kylereed.bsky.social · 12/04/2026
Someone should check in on the rational actor assumption. Seems like it has had a hell of a week/month/year/decade.
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Brian Dusablon | Duce | Drifter Life @drifterlife.com · 30/01/2026
"The night before, Ebeling and other Morton Thiokol engineers tried to convince NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, that launching in cold weather could be disastrous." www.npr.org/2026/01/25/g...
npr.org
40 years after Challenger: Lingering guilt and lessons learned
Forty years after the Challenger disaster, NPR explores the engineers' last-minute efforts to stop the launch, their decades of guilt and the vital lessons that remain critical for NASA today.
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Robert "The Bobby Yaga" McNees @mcnees.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
Felix Klein lectured “On Hilbert’s first note on the foundations of physics" at the Mathematical Society of Göttingen #OTD in 1918. He included excerpts from letters in which he and Hilbert give priority to Emmy Noether’s results on conservation of energy in general relativity. (1/n) 🧪 ⚛️ 👩‍🔬
Black and white photograph of Emmy Noether. She is standing just behind an ornate chair, wearing a white striped blouse with puffy shoulders, a fluffy bow at her neck, and a heavy long skirt cinched with a belt. Her dark hair is pulled back and she is looking a bit to the photographer's right.
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Olga Nesterova @onestpress.onestnetwork.com · 10/01/2026
And despite it all, this is Tehran 🇮🇷
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Brian Highsmith @bhighsmith.bsky.social · 24/11/2025
🚨We analyzed 138 million geocoded property tax records to quantify how municipal boundaries spatially overlap onto economic segregation in every US metro area—creating disparities in localities’ ability to fund public goods. And we made an interactive map of our results! [1/16]
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Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 23/11/2025
Impossible how good reading is. You mean I just point my face at the paper for a bit and it does a whole update on my brain?
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Author Myron J. Clifton @deardean22.bsky.social · 23/11/2025
Watch /listen to Boston’s mayor Michelle Wu live her dream.. Playing with Yo Yo Ma.. 🥰
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Andy Moore @aaandmoore.bsky.social · 21/11/2025
Attempt number seven at uploading this video of intermediate filaments in an enormous COS7 cell. I have a feeling the BlueSky compression will not do it any favors.
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William Shakespeare @shakespeare.lol · 11/09/2025
The evil that men do lives after them
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Josh Luke Davis 🏳️‍🌈 @joshlukedavis.com · 03/09/2025
woah this is genuinely, utterly WILD Ant queens of one species produce males of another species, so she can then mate with them and produce hybrid workers! This is so gloriously weird I can't quite compute it 🤯🧪🐜 www.nature.com/articles/d41...
nature.com
‘Almost unimaginable’: these ants are different species but share a mother
Ant queens of one species clone ants of another to create hybrid workers that do their bidding.
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Steven Strogatz @stevenstrogatz.com · 03/08/2025
What a fantastic accomplishment -- and what a fantastic story! www.quantamagazine.org/at-17-hannah...
quantamagazine.org
At 17, Hannah Cairo Solved a Major Math Mystery | Quanta Magazine
After finding the homeschooling life confining, the teen petitioned her way into a graduate class at Berkeley, where she ended up disproving a 40-year-old conjecture.
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Eoin Higgins @eoinhiggins.bsky.social · 11/07/2025
Killing MIT seems dumb to me
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William Shakespeare @shakespeare.lol · 05/06/2025
A plague a’ both houses!
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Jo Wolff @jowolff.bsky.social · 03/06/2025
"The magnitude of [the stakes of new technology], taken together with the insufficiency of our predictive knowledge, leads to the pragmatic rule to give the prophecy of doom priority over the prophecy of bliss." Hans Jonas
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Dani Rodrik @drodrik.bsky.social · 23/05/2025
Three things made the US a rich and powerful nation: the rule of law, its science & innovation system, and openness to foreign talent. Remarkable how Trump has taken a sledgehammer to all three. No enemy of this country could do more.
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Jo Wolff @jowolff.bsky.social · 19/05/2025
Heinrich Heine says good morning.

“Mine is a most peaceable disposition. My wishes are: a humble cottage with a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, the freshest milk and butter, flowers before my window, and a few fine trees before my door; and if god wants to make my happiness complete, he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees.”
— Heinrich Heine (c.1835),
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lauren @lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com · 03/05/2025
watching other anglosphere nations elect uninspiring technocrats
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Satan @thedevil.bsky.social · 04/04/2025
The road to fascism is paved with bitches telling you “it’s not that serious”
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Matt Pearce @mattdpearce.com · 03/04/2025
elder millennial here. just checking in for my annual “unprecedented times”
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Brandon Friedman @brandonfriedman.bsky.social · 22/03/2025
Americans are in denial about the implications here because they wish it wasn't happening. But this is the behavior of a dictator. It's the sort of thing that warrants secession or revolution. The Republic is over the second federal funding is withheld pending a governor's personal apology.
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Dr. Peter Paul Rubens @peterpaulrubens.bsky.social · 23/03/2025
The Tower of Babel, rising ever higher above the city, 1580. Giant Nimrod at right criticizing architect: it needs to be taller! Taller! By Hendrick van Cleve, whose day is today.
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Scott Shapiro @scottjshapiro.bsky.social · 19/02/2025
US Supreme Court rules 6-3 that poisoning your rival is an official act.
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Yilin (she/they) @ check out The Lantern and the Night Moths @yilinwriter.bsky.social · 18/02/2025
Lol this sign "Do not bring food into the library Food residue will attract mice Mice will acquire knowledge in the library Get into university Then replace you" 😂
請不要將食物帶入圖書館

食物殘渣會引來老鼠
老鼠會在圖書館學習知識
考上大學
接著取代你
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Patton Oswalt @pattonoswalt.bsky.social · 17/02/2025
@juliusgoat.bsky.social
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Rick Wilson @therickwilson.bsky.social · 11/02/2025
If you’re wondering if you’re in a constitutional crisis and that the republic could collapse at any moment, you are.
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 08/02/2025
1. Today the NIH director issued a new directive slashing overhead rates to 15%. I want to provide some context on what that means and why it matters. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...
grants.nih.gov
NOT-OD-25-068: Supplemental Guidance to the 2024 NIH Grants Policy Statement: Indirect Cost Rates
NIH Funding Opportunities and Notices in the NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts: Supplemental Guidance to the 2024 NIH Grants Policy Statement: Indirect Cost Rates NOT-OD-25-068. OD
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Seth Cotlar @sethcotlar.bsky.social · 03/02/2025
As someone who speaks “far right wingnut,” I feel obligated to point out that the creation of the federal income tax in 1913 has been an obsession with such folks since the1950s. They mark it as the moment America went off track and started careening toward socialism, and they want to get rid of it.
Donald J. Trump
@realDonald Trump
Anybody that's against Tariffs, including the Fake News Wall Street Journal, and Hedge Funds, is only against them because these people or entities are controlled by China, or other foreign or domestic companies. Anybody that loves and believes in the United States
of America is in favor of Tariffs. They should have never ended, in favor of the Income Tax System, in 1913. The response to Tariffs has been FANTASTIC!
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Feb 02, 2025 at 6:37 PM
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Joseph Fink, we're going to win @planetoffinks.bsky.social · 02/02/2025
I'm glad that America is doing real classic end of empire stuff. A king who is visibly losing his mind declaring a war based on a dream he had. Greedy courtiers feuding over access to the treasury. Some looks are timeless.
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Joyce White Vance @joycewhitevance.bsky.social · 02/02/2025
This language describes a coup. You have to be a government employee, subject to the rules & procedures that bind gov employees, to do this kind of work. This is a blatant abuse of the public trust by the Trump administration, a true 5-alarm fire. www.wired.com/story/elon-m...
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Holger Hestermeyer @hhesterm.bsky.social · 02/02/2025
Spiegel reports that Musk now also has access to sensitive data of competitors with regard to their financial dealings with the government.
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Ben Casselman @bencasselman.bsky.social · 31/01/2025
A new analysis from the Tax Policy Center estimates that imposing a 25% tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico would reduce after-tax incomes by nearly 1% in 2026, costing the average household the equivalent of $930 in lost income. taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/25-pe...
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Beth Popp Berman @epopppp.bsky.social · 02/02/2025
I want to spell out the basic reason it’s so dangerous for Elon to have control of the U.S. payments system. It may seem like a technical matter, but the dynamics are simple. 1/x
nytimes.com
Elon Musk’s Team Now Has Access to Treasury’s Payments System
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave Mr. Musk’s representatives at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending.
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Sean Gailmard @sean-gailmard.bsky.social · 31/01/2025
This is as good a time as any to post a paper I've been working on with @LindseyGailmard: The Persistence and Fragility of Bureaucratic Capacity. We ask: what makes bureaucratic capacity persist, and what makes *threats* to bureaucratic capacity hard to reverse?
Paper abstract
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Jonathan Edward Durham @thisone0verhere.bsky.social · 17/01/2025
Sometimes you use a pen that turns out to write way better than you thought it would and oh man that’s the good stuff
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JRR Jokien (joshcarlosjosh) @www.jrrjokien.com · 11/01/2025
me when any program's AI assistant asks me if I want help writing:
Gandalf the White saying, "Be silent. Keep your forked tongue behind your teeth"
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Raffi Melkonian @rmfifthcircuit.bsky.social · 07/01/2025
Whatever you’re imagining, it’s going to be 4x dumber that that.
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Jaws Slayer 🎃 @jesawyer.bsky.social · 07/01/2025
It’s cool that humans have been eating bread so long that when we touch a loaf for a moment we can sense ah this is going to be awful bread. Like badgers sensing vibrations underground through their claws.
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Jonathan Portes @jdportes.bsky.social · 06/01/2025
Fascinating paper by Claudia Goldin on drivers of low fertility in advanced economies. Countries where economic progress outstrips social progress (in particular, gender equality in household division of labour) see the most rapid falls in fertility.. www.nber.org/papers/w33311
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Beth Popp Berman @epopppp.bsky.social · 03/01/2025
Please forgive a little earnest-posting. I’m finding the start of 2025 kind of hard and while there are obvious reasons to dread what’s coming, I think it’s more than the new administration. A lot of my ground truths have been unsettled in a way that makes it hard to know what to do next.
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Matt Salomone @matthematics.com · 01/01/2025
Once any space becomes less than 40% male, (straight) men tend to cede it entirely while shouting about how it “went woke”. Fascinating read:
celestemdavis.substack.com
Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping?
We would rather talk about literally everything else.
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Ola Olsson @oolsson.bsky.social · 30/12/2024
In a new wp "The Political Economy of Bread and Circuses", we examine the tradeoff in early states between productivity-enhancing infrastructure (like irrigation systems) and non-productive architecture (stelae, altars, etc) by studying the Classic Maya (250-950 CE). 1/5 dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...
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Maggie Smith @maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social · 30/12/2024
Lucille Clifton, always.
“i am running into a new year” by Lucille Clifton 

i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twenty-six and thirty-six
even thirty-six but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me
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The New York Review of Books @nybooks.com · 24/12/2024
Growing up in the Caribbean, C.L.R. James told Stuart Hall in 1976, “you get a certain comprehensive view...a microcosm of society on the whole. We—not me alone—Fanon had it, Césaire had it, Padmore had it.”
buff.ly
A Microcosm of the World | C.L.R. James, Stuart Hall, Phoebe Braithwaite
In May 1976, the Jamaican-born cultural theorist Stuart Hall sat down in the BBC’s studios in West London to interview the Trinidadian-born intellectual
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Evan @evansmithhist.bsky.social · 24/12/2024
"you'll be visited by three spirits" The three spirits
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Andrea Love, PhD | Biomedical Scientist @drandrealove.bsky.social · 21/12/2024
Since 1983, we’ve developed new vaccines for more diseases. Since then, we also developed: Antiretroviral therapy Statins First cancer immunotherapy Laparoscopic surgery tools Transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) ECMO (Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation) & more. 1/
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