Best Of

Happy Day 3 of Moscow oil refinery being on fire!

https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/2067482310006411769

Nice top hat on that storage tank.

I think the photo is worth sharing on here.


I would guess this photo will get used in plenty of places as the definitive image of Ukraine's campaign against Russian oil infrastructure.

It’s a pretty good picture, and there’s video too!

https://x.com/tendar/status/2067456010025918789
https://x.com/tendar/status/2067462120120189002

There’s at least four or five large fires at the site now, looks somewhat apocalyptic.

https://x.com/bohuslavskakate/status/2067449379816902726

Yes, and this refinery is only 16km (10 miles) from Red Square. Not far at all.

More at risk must be St. Basils, given the Russians trashed the Kyiv Cathedral.

The difference between the two sides, is that one side hits oil refiners and weapons factories, while the other hits churches and malls.

FPT

Good luck to Andy Burnham today.

We need somebody who can take on Reform and prevent them getting power.

Starmer is clearly not up to that task.

You reckon Burnham is ?

I hope he is but I just think he’s a more charismatic version of Starmer.

I don't think he's up to it. But Starmer has got to go.

Starmer is herpes.

Burnham is syphilis.

You don't really want either, but if you have to choose...

A mantra in my life is that there is a cure for syphilis but there's no cure for regret.

That cheery Christian existentialist Kierkegaard points out that there is no cure for regret because the moment we make a choice we wonder for all time what would have been if we had made the other one. Robert Frost puts it best:


Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;


https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44272/the-road-not-taken

This (phased array ultrasound full body scanner) is very cool, and seems to be entirely valid technically.
Sell your shares in MRI manufacturers.

amazing new medical tech from Midjourney

"This is a new kind of infrastructure. It’s Full Body Ultrasonic Computational Tomography. No such device has ever been built until now, and yeah, we’re calling it the Midjourney Scanner."

"Less than a dozen of these machines operating together at full speed can do more full body scans than every MRI machine together on Earth. Our goal is to build a fleet of 50,000 of these scanners, capable together of doing a billion scans a month—enough to bring full body imaging to everyone on Earth."
https://x.com/Dr_Singularity/status/2067459556809064863

I will wait and see an actual machine because to me this is Midjourney trying to find a purpose and accidentally creating Theranos mark 2

Yes. As someone who works in a related field, I'm sceptical. While slickly presented, Midjourney are making a lot of bold claims, and supplying very little evidence. The images they have released are Al-buffed images of phantoms - they haven't shown an image of a human. So far they have scanned "about a dozen" people.

The CEO statements are dripping in qualifiers and weasel words e.g. "aims for image quality comparable to MRI in many ways", which could mean pretty much anything. They are calling the machine "Ultrasonic CT" which is misleading, as it is an ultrasound machine (CT is generally used as a shorthand for X-ray computed tomography).

From this alpha level prototype, they think they can produce 50,000 machines in 5 years. That's in the region of the entire existing global install base of MRI scanners.

Trump favourably compares the president of Syria with Netanyahu (whom he also called "very much the junior partner"0.

“The president of #Syria. He’s done a tremendous job… He’d love to go in [to #Lebanon]… he wouldn’t knock down buildings every time he hears there’s someone there, he’d just go in with precision.”..
https://x.com/Charles_Lister/status/2067311287126647194

Of course this is (even for someone like me who thinks Julani/Ahmed al-Sharaa is, on balance, probably now a force for stability in Syria) objectively insane. But it shows which way Trump is leaning.

Bib has joined the Pantheon of those who Trump feels have personally betrayed him. Quite difficult to come back from that. Couldn't happen to a nicer bloke.

Haven't found the Tweet but some MAGA influencers want Trump to bomb Israel if Bibi betrays Trump over the Iran deal.

And their doppelgängers in Israel are raging about Trump's 'betrayal'. Time for Israel to go it alone and perhaps bust out one of their nuclear weapons (which they may or may not possess) in a relatively uninhabited area is some of what I've read.

If there is ever any point in Israel having nuclear weapons, it is to use them destroying their nemesis before thei nemesis can get them and use them against Israel.

Expect Israel to threaten Iran with nuclear destruction if they consider they are close to making a bomb.

Meanwhile, Iran has new-found economic clout (plus it took on and beat Israel and the US combined). Why do they need a bomb?