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“When people ask me if a god created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the big bang, so there is no time for god to make the universe in. It’s like asking directions to the edge of the earth; The Earth is a sphere; it doesn’t have an edge; so looking for it is a futile exercise. We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is; there is no god. No one created our universe,and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization; There is probably no heaven, and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.”
― Stephen Hawking

12/

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One of my favorite papers is a paper by Milnor "On manifolds homeomorphic to the 7-sphere" from 1956.
scribd.com/document/75338163/J
It's only 7 pages long (8 with bibliography). Milnor showed that there exists a smooth 7-manifold homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to the 7-sphere. The proof is absolutely beautiful and has influenced much of the development of high dimensional topology to this day.

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People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do. 
Isaac Asimov

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"You live and learn. At any rate, you live." - Douglas Adams

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At this morning’s Executive meeting at Apple, someone will tell Tim that nobody likes the iPad ad and I imagine he’ll look very similar to how he looked when Ricky Gervais roasted Apple at the Golden Globes.

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The Heritage Foundation is determined to destroy America/democracy. They’ve aided and abetted Trump at every turn, and so much more.👇🏼

Doug Klain:

🚨The guardianhas learned a major anti-#Ukraine conference will be held in Washington, DC tomorrow.

Heritage Foundation will bring together Hungarian President Viktor Orbán’s team & Republican congressmen to strategize how to end US support for Ukraine.

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Hey MSM, Stop calling Mike Johnson 'charming', 'friendly', 'a nice guy', or 'personable' — he's extreme. He voted to overturn the 2020 election. He's a theocrat. He's dangerous AF.

If you can't spot a wolf in sheep's clothing, you're middle school level naive or feigning so — get the hell out of Journalism.

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1/ Russian sources say that as many as 70-90% of all Russian deaths on the battlefield are caused by bleeding, rather than fatal wounds. An effective collapse of the Russian army's combat medical care means that anything more than a light wound is likely to be lethal. ⬇️

classic Trump

Laffy  
Via Jennifer Bendery #Trump's latest fundraising email says he's facing more than 700 years in prison and asks, "IS PRESIDENT TRUMP GUILTY?" and th...

@helvetica Knotwords standard and tricky puzzles number 2 for September are the same.

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My two cents on the aftermath of Prigozhin’s death is that while this may temporarily stabilize Putin’s position domestically, it was still a forced move, a result of Putin (if we assume he approved it) choosing between three uncomfortable options: deal, prosecution and murder.

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I really do like Texas but man how many plagues am I supposed to endure.

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Someone should tell #GoTransit that while we appreciate the provision of Wifi on the train, it is considered traditional to put some Internet on the other end of it. #Toronto

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Here’s the story of how a 37-follower Twitter account seeded a propaganda narrative about Hawaii that made headlines around the world, thanks to a network of right-wing influencers — and amplification by both Russian and Chinese state media.

My latest — a very deep dive into a coordinated campaign:
#socialmedia #disinformation #propaganda
open.substack.com/pub/weaponiz

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I first noted this campaign on Twitter a week ago, when I saw an unusual number of tweets not just expressing the same idea, but using the same specific phrase (“fund Hawaii not Ukraine”) to do so. So I decided to look into it.

While I was doing that, right-wing media picked up the narrative…. Then Russian state media started amplifying it… And then a few days later, Chinese state media joined in, too.

At that point, I knew I was looking at something interesting…

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Expect another migration.

Muskrat: Block is going to be deleted as a “feature”, except for DMs

#Twitter #X #Xitter

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@queensparktoday

"Ford's argument is basically that corruption is okay if it gets houses built."

#onpoli #ontario
@david_moscrop

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If you are not alarmed about the direction this province is heading you need to be.
NOTHING is out of bounds or untouchable for the thugs in charge at QP.
It is not just healthcare that will be unrecognizable when these sociopaths are finally tossed out of power.

very good news.

Roni Laukkarinen  
Oh, the search feature is coming to Mastodon after all: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/26344 This clearly seems to follow up the VyrCros...
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Oh, the search feature is coming to Mastodon after all: github.com/mastodon/mastodon/p

This clearly seems to follow up the VyrCrossont's idea of the extended search feature that finds public posts.

Gargron: "It is my decision to unite all discovery features in one setting, because all of this stuff is an expected part of a social network and splitting it up into different settings that everyone has to opt-into one by one just to get the same behaviour they get by default on other social media seems like a bad user experience. Also, discoverable is already a federated attribute." #Mastodon #Search #OpenSource

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