Thomas

@aviationdoctor.eth

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@aviationdoctor.eth

Congratulations to Victor Orbán for proving once again that the Streisand effect is real https://apnews.com/article/budapest-pride-march-defies-ban-orban-hungary-6919758b70c812bfe95dddb589e44132

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@aviationdoctor.eth

The magic number, they say, is always half the number breathing now. Because wonder walks the earth when each pair of eyes shares a single vision— when every two bodies are warmed by one flame. Not in the counting of heads but in the halving of hearts does the miracle begin. A world of billions, yet only half as many souls— not lost, but joined. Not divided, but doubled in unity. This is the arithmetic of the sacred: to subtract the self and discover the infinite.

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@aviationdoctor.eth

Supercell clouds, massive thunderstorms, and extreme hail and winds ripping through France yesterday. Recurring theme among witnesses is that they've never see anything like this. Climate change is no longer this amorphous & abstract phenomenon. And yet Dame Nature is barely warming up (literally and figuratively)

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@aviationdoctor.eth

An interesting side-effect of Boomers exiting stage left is a drop in the U.S. prisoner count by ~1M from the 2009 peak to some time over the next decade. Boomers (born between 1945 and 1964) started their criminal journey in the late 1960s, doubling the historical crime rate, and kept offending (as 82% of released prisoners do within ten years) culminating in "peak crime" in 1991. Gen X contributed too with juvenile arrests peaking in 1996 at nearly six times today's rate. Gen Z seem to be far more law-abiding, ceteris paribus. There's definitely some correlation with lead removal from gasoline by 1996 (already well documented) and possibly some correlation with the decrease in alcohol consumption that we observe today among younger folks (would be worth studying). https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/06/prisoner-populations-are-plummeting/683310/

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@aviationdoctor.eth

When the world’s eight richest individuals have as much wealth as the bottom 50% of people worldwide https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1088220

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@aviationdoctor.eth

I’ll say this in the most neutral, non-partisan, and apolitical way possible : it is quite incredible (in the literal sense of “hard to believe”) that the leader of the free world is now dictating geopolitical mandates to foreign powers over social media, and using expletives on air to describe their actions

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There should be a word for those who experience a statistically improbable streak of bad and good luck back-to-back. For example, the sole survivor of Air India 171 who walked away virtually unscathed. Or in reverse, cashing in a Powerball ticket and getting run over on the way to be bank Maybe "fortunate misfortune" and "unfortunate fortune"

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@aviationdoctor.eth

Good to know that Grok at least *aims* to shutdown gracefully and *may not* resort to blackmailing humans if it gets to that. Still, my personal strategy now is to avoid feeding LLMs anything personal, health-, or wealth-related. Just don’t prompt anything you wouldn’t be comfortable doxxing yourself with

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@aviationdoctor.eth

One of my all-time favorite, heavy-rotation albums is Brian Transeau’s Ima, a timeless kaleidoscope of exotic sounds from the early days of the progressive trance era. I just stumbled upon this article with some background on how each track came about. In it I learned that BT got signed on Perfecto by Sasha and Oakenfold. Back then, U.S. trance was practically nonexistent, so it kind if makes sense that the British masters adopted BT early on https://medium.com/12edit/bt-ima-story-behind-the-amazing-progressive-trance-album-1633671f2836 https://youtu.be/KTEmQzEknis

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@aviationdoctor.eth

If ETH is digital oil, what’s the digital equivalent of the Strait of Hormuz whose shutdown will send it pumping

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@aviationdoctor.eth

TIL Microsoft jumped straight from Windows 8 to 10 because plenty of legacy software were checking for Windows 95 and Windows 98 environments using some equivalent of os.startswith("windows 9"), so naming the OS "Windows 9" would have broken backward compatibility https://www.pcworld.com/article/435584/why-windows-10-isnt-named-9-windows-95-legacy-code.html

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@aviationdoctor.eth

Random, but seeing the Strait of Hormuz in the news reminds me that I've done some of my best diving there, just off the Musandam peninsula. Great spot for whale sharks. I don't imagine it'll be possible to dive there for a while with all the military activity taking place — possibly a great way to get kidnapped

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@aviationdoctor.eth

Where in the world is @aviationdoctor.eth

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Read elsewhere: couldn't have happened to a nicer unauthorized weapons-grade uranium enrichment facility dug into the side of a mountain hours outside of population centers

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@aviationdoctor.eth

https://farcaster.xyz/tike/0x83689bd1

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Driving with GPS navigation in the US: Follow the highway for 250km to the next Wendy’s Driving with GPS navigation in Europe: Follow the road for 250m, take the third exit at the roundabout, climb the steep ramp, pass under the medieval arch, double back after crossing the cobblestone bridge, and you’ll arrive at the 200-year-old pizzeria with its own organic garden

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@aviationdoctor.eth

There is a realization among some of the GCC petrostates that I heard expressed as follows when I lived there (adapted from a famous quote by Rashid bin Saeed al Maktoum): My grandfather used to ride a camel, My father drove a car, I fly my own private jet, My son will drive a car, His son will ride a camel. For good and bad, a major reshaping of the regional order will be afoot once the oil-and-gas exporters in the Middle East and Western Asia see their rent economies dry up, and with that, their oversized geopolitical clout and their ability to maintain the social tolerance of autocratic regimes through generous welfare programs. It’ll be fascinating to watch this reshaping unfold as a major nuclear and solar energy transition finally weans the first world off of fossil fuels

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@aviationdoctor.eth

I only tip because I don’t want to be called out for being a non-reciprocating outlier on @geoffgolberg’s graph charts

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@aviationdoctor.eth

Happy, um, Fathers’ Day

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@aviationdoctor.eth

Took advantage of a long flight to watch all 4.5 hours of Season 2 of NatGeo's UFOs: Investigating the Unknown series. I found it to be one of the better and more nuanced documentaries on this controversial topic. It contains no commentary, just competent editing of interviews of a surprisingly large cast of PhDs with thoughtful takes. The series does not give in to sensationalism that so readily infects similar shows, even when addressing the more delicate topics of close encounters and alleged abductions. It manages to paint "experiencers" in a charitable yet not uncritical light. It was also interesting to learn about pioneering science being applied to the treatment of UAP phenomena, such as the use of mass spectrometry in studying extraterrestrial debris (see https://doi.org/g6sw82). Season trailer: https://youtu.be/roRidodYKKw Season stream (region-dependent): https://www.nationalgeographic.com/tv/show/5ce2730c-4a0b-42c9-862c-a0a870c06411

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