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The Quondam Bifurcator

@quondambifurcator.bsky.social
678 followers 536 following 91 posts

Cranky Science Dude. He/Him/"Cynical Bastard"

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Reposted by The Quondam Bifurcator
Jessica Price @delafina777.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
every last high school girl out there, unless you know for a fact that she has committed murder or rape, will do more good for the world than a boy or man who has committed sexual assault stop treating rapists as valuable
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Nick Pettigrew @nick-pettigrew.bsky.social · 08/02/2026
I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.
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s. e. smith @sesmith.lol · 03/10/2026
Talking about the trades? Read this instead of The Atlantic!
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Jake Wright @bcnjake.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I don’t wanna hear SHIT about woke run amok when protesting genocide gets you banned from campus and sexual assault gets you an apology letter.
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Micah @rincewind.run · 26/09/2026
you know what? I agree with him my moral and ethical story about how we live together in this moment is we throw all of these assholes out of office and then we put them in jail
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molly conger @socialistdogmom.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
it literally could not be easier to run against an opponent who is fixated on a microscopic minority that isn’t actually harming anyone! focusing on imaginary threats posed by trans people instead of the world burning down around us is bad politics! point that out! loudly!
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molly conger @socialistdogmom.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
i pledge my sword to the politician who just says: let’s leave trans people alone, i don’t know or care what a hasan piker is, and i condemn the genocide in gaza. stop hiring consultants that make you say weird stuff that nobody likes.
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Small Robots @smolrobots.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
I am deadly serious about this btw. Decades of compromise-as-political-savvy have legitimately brainwashed career politicians into believing, as a central plank of their moral calculus, that you *must* achieve consensus with opponents in order for anything to "count".
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c3rmen @c3rmen.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Losing my mind while doing some research for my creature design lecture that the closest relative to the maned wolf is the bush dog. Like there has gotta be a fable where the maned wolf took all the leggie from its cousin
Maned wolfBush dog
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Walker Bragman @walkerbragman.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
The response to these questions about trans kids playing sports is very simple: “Stop bullying literal children, you freaks.”
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Evelyndroid's Aperture Science and Bugge-Finding 🏳️‍⚧️🕷️ @apsciencebylyn.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Owlfly babies fresh out of the egg, hungry like baby birds with the normal number of legs
Silly black fuzzy creatures with giant black mandibles spread wide in anticipation of snacks, all stacked in a row on a dry stalk where they just hatched
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DreadwoodGirl @redwoodgirl.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Again I'm reminded that fiction is bound by what's plausible but reality is not.
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Dr. Genevieve Guenther (she/they) @doctorvive.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
In honor of the new UN climate report, which spreads the entirely unsubstantiated myth that we can remove and sequester enough carbon from the atmosphere to cool the whole planet down again, here’s a paper that looks empirically at one component of this myth. And it’s not pretty. #EndFossilFuels
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Jonathan Howard @joho.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
If we shouldn’t have feared Covid in October 2020, why should we fear any infection today, or really anything at all?
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Garrett M. Graff @vermontgmg.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Fun fact — and reminder: For all their focus on “officer safety” and arguments about aggressive tactics being necessary, no ICE officer has ever been killed in the line of duty. It is more deadly in the US to be an elementary school student than an ICE officer.
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Claire Willett @clairewillett.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
like the reason Dolly feels like an exceptional human being is because all the things we're talking about today in her lifetime of philanthropy trace back to just .... having empathy and we live in the era of "I Don't Know How to Explain to You That You Should Care About Other People"
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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 24/08/2026
If you’re not potty trained by now you don’t get to be in the pool with the rest of us and we’re not gonna have a civilized debate about it while the water fills up with your filth.
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The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
“Ok you weren’t saying it but I could obviously read you that way if I assumed you *were* saying it, so you need to apologize for *that*” is a thing I’ve seen a lot.
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headfallsoff @headfallsoff.com · 20/08/2026
if a white supremacist says anything you should assume every single word is a lie unless completely independently verified by an entirely unrelated source. if they say it is thursday you should ask an expert on days of the week. this should be the bare minimum standard in this media landscape
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Ian Fay @ianfay.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
This shit is why you can't separate continuing to financially support the Harry Potter IP (whether by buying the games, merch, watching the new TV show when its out) from the consequences of what JK Rowling does with that money She's become so stiflingly powerful that even private docs arent safe
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Clara Jeffery @clarajeffery.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Even if you think you know all the damage that Elon Musk and DOGE did, when you read it in one place, it'll melt your brain. By @michaelmechanic.bsky.social www.motherjones.com/politics/202...
motherjones.com
Elon Musk’s DOGE promised savings, but it's cost us a fortune
A new report from the Government Accountability Office misses the point entirely.
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The Author, Séamas O'Reilly @seamas.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Not to be some wild-eyed innocent, but I think it should be slightly bigger news that The Lancet have crunched the numbers and found that Musk's USAID cuts will kill 14 million people. And that's just by 2030. That's 9,600 people a day, every day, until the next world cup rolls around.
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Kevin Collins @kwcollins.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Birthdate and name matches are causing US Citizens to get arrested in error by ICE as they board airplanes. This is the same level of rigor they're bringing to claims of fraudulent voting, and is obvious as an error-prone method to anyone who has taken an introductory stats class.
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Nash @radiodeadair.com · 10/08/2026
Why are we still pretending that executive orders are in any way legally binding to anyone outside of the executive branch? Everyone can just keep abiding by the normal childhood vaccine schedule. The states have their own ways of handling it. Executive orders mean diddly in that context.
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Radley Balko @radleybalko.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
They're just coming right out and saying it. When body camera footage makes them look bad, no one sees it. When it serves a proagandistic purpose, everyone sees it.
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The Girl of Lemongrab @mc-hesher.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
Trump said on national television in summer 2016 that the whole point of outlawing abortion was to punish women and the wide reaction was that of course that was hyperbole, nobody actually intended anything like that and we should be used to his off the cuff riffing
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Smooth Dunk @smoothdunk2.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
4 panel comic

Panel 1:
A post from “kavishj9611” that reads: 

“All the people who are anti-Al or want to slow Al progress, I have one question:
If Al disappeared tomorrow, could you still get through an entire workday without ChatGPT, Claude, or any other
Al tool?
Imagine Al was suddenly banned.
Would you actually be willing to give it up?”

Panel 2:
And Orange Guy and a Pink Guy are standing in a room that has two pipes in it. Both pipes are pumping raw sewage into the room. The characters are waist deep in it.
Orange Guy says smugly “Ok Mr “I don’t want to be in a room that’s filling up with raw sewage” let me ask you this”

Panel 3:
The sewage has reached their chests. Pink Guy is gagging. Orange Guy smugly continues “If all this sewage disappeared right now, could you get through the day without it?”

Panel 4:
The sewage is almost up to their eyeballs. Orange Guys says “Look at that shit floating past your face. Are you willing to give that up?”
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Deacon Blues @kaibutsu.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
It's fun to watch their brains tie themselves in knots then watch the frayed ends fight each other.
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Andy Scollick @andyscollick.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
The penny drops. Climate change will break our economies. Fragment our societies. Undermine our governance. And erode our security. "Ecosystem services" are our life support processes. Destroying them destroys the foundations of human civilisation.
theguardian.com
ECB official warns climate crisis poses growing threat to ‘core financial stability’
Exclusive: As wildfires rage across Europe, Frank Elderson tells the Guardian nature loss poses a growing risk to the global economy
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Comfortably Numb @numb.comfortab.ly · 02/08/2026
wtf kind of framing is this? "Arsonist predicted the town will burn to the ground if he doesn't stop setting houses on fire."
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Ryan Marino, MD @ryanmarino.bsky.social · 25/07/2026
Important www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....
PERSPECTIVE
"A clinician who cannot reason independently through a clinical problem has no internal reference against which to judge
AI output."

from “Crew Resource Management - Navigating Al's Automation Paradox" by R.-E.E. Abdulnour et al.
The NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL of MEDICINE
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Sarah McAnulty, Ph.D. @sarahmackattack.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
…bugs is shrimp.
A bug that looks SO much like a shrimp it’s crazy
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Cri 🕊🐝🐜📝🎭⚽😷 @crawlieswithcri.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
Periodical reminder that Many-plume Moths exist. And they always seem to end up on the inside of my bathroom window. And they pack a LOT of "amazeballs" into a teeny package - 1cm wingspan (just under 1/2") Montana six-plume moth (Alucita montana) #inverts #becurious 1/2
macro photo of a small moth with 24 spines covered in bristle-like scales forming their wings. they have a rusty brown, brown and white chevron pattern on the plumes.
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Evelyndroid's Aperture Science and Bugge-Finding 🏳️‍⚧️🕷️ @apsciencebylyn.bsky.social · 14/11/2025
Q: Why are Bugs so silly? A: Because they don't have a serious bone in their body *loud booing* Anyway here's Apache degeeri, a silly derbid planthopper
Pinkish red planthopper with large wings like a maple seed, and a pointy triangular snoot topped with wavy white lines
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Katie Martin @katie0martin.ft.com · 21/07/2026
Ooh I know this one. It's by BANNING THE PERVERT GLASSES
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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 18/07/2026
I like to say they are structurally indifferent to truth
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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
Every time they make it harder for foreign students to study here, they're just jacking up the tuition costs for American students and robbing America of incredible new talent too.
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Jay Rosen @jayrosen.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
Here's something I post from time to time. My answer to a reader who asked me: what could journalists do NOW to break with some of their more corrosive habits.
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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 18/07/2026
We didn't previously integrate wildfire-smoke costs into the supposed cost of climate change for the US, and it turns out to be bigger than all those other costs combined. Oops! Gosh I wonder if we're underestimating anything else. Probably shoulda done something about this. Ah well.
heatmap.news
What Worries Me Most About This Wildfire Smoke
We didn’t know days like this could happen. Then we learned how bad they really are.
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Dr Satoshi Akima, FRACP @toshiakima.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
The surgical mask shown in this article will do almost nothing to reduce particulate inhalation because it's just a splash guard. Wear a well-fitted respirator N95 or better
cnn.com
What you need to breathe easier when the air is full of smoke | CNN
Millions of Americans and Canadians are breathing bad air right now due to wildfire smoke. Here’s what you need to know masks, ventilation and staying healthy.
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Public Health Action Network @publichealthaction.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
All congregate emergency shelters should have adequate supplies of N95+ masks and air purifiers.
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Bob Kopp @bobkopp.net · 16/07/2026
Seriously, though, both heat and smoke extremes are major killers. Based on Ou et al 2026 and Climate Impact Lab work, heat- and smoke-related mortality are dominant among the quantifiable direct contributors to the US social cost of carbon
pnas.org
Valuing wildfire smoke–related mortality benefits from climate mitigation | PNAS
Human-induced climate change has increased wildfire risks, associated air pollution, and health damages in North America. Despite its large potenti...
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Hunter @hunterub.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
It was never clear what Republicans thought "communism" was but at this point it means promising to fix potholes and then doing that, a concept so foreign to these bribe-taking billionaire-humping con artists that they consider it close to devil worship.
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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
Four years ago, Biden gave a speech warning about the dangers to democracy and the networks refused to air it because it was "political." I wonder if Trump making a partisan case for relitigating the 2020 election and calling for his political opponents to be jailed is going to be "political" too?
As Biden warned about democracy’s collapse, TV networks aired reruns
While broadcasters typically air a prime-time address by the president, they determined that this speech was more ‘political’ than newsworthy for live coverage
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Micah @rincewind.run · 09/07/2026
trump's entire first term was hamstrung by a handful of folks who actually tried to approach their jobs with some level of professionalism and they made very sure in their vetting process for the second term that nobody would ever do that again anyone who made it through the vetting is unacceptable
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Paul Guinnessy @paulguinnessy.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
I assumed everyone knew this was predicted to occur when they sacked 50% of the NOAA staff and started canceling weather balloons that collect data last year; but if not. 👇
gizmodo.com
Here's Why Weather Forecasts Have Seemed So Inaccurate Lately
Meteorologists simply aren't able to gather as much data as they used to, and you're suffering for it.
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samihiggins @samihiggins.bsky.social · 04/07/2026
I saw a video from someone in Arizona saying they were being asked to conserve power and water. In 120° heat. So the data centers could run. Time to launch all the data centers directly into the sun.
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M. Belanger @sethanikeem.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
And I say this with my whole chest: The anti-trans movement is not about trans people. It’s certainly not about protecting children It is about legislating conformity It is about restricting bodily autonomy It is about erasing all free expression they find disagreeable —It is about control—
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