#ScribesAndMakers Jan 4
"And the face of Jess Viscosie
Turned a whiter shade of pale."

"A Whiter Shade of Pale" by Procol Harem.

@RickiTarr
Congratulations on your well-earned successes. It took me many years to learn that small changes are easier to make permanent than big ones. I love your insight that one change can lead to more changes, with a cascading effect. Woo-hoo!! 🎉

#today 27 Jigsaw puzzle end game. Sky pieces sorted by shade and partially by shape. Chaotic water flowers sorted by shape and oriented with tall, spiky leaves vertical. No clear patterns remain. It's a search for one piece at a time.

#jigsaw #puzzle

"Tarmac," a word much more popular in Britain than the US, is a shortening of tarmacadam, a word much less often used. That's a portmanteau of "tar" and "macadam." Now you might think that macadam is someone's name, and you'd be right. John Loudon McAdam was a Scottish engineer who invented macadam, which is essentially a packed gravel road.

It took humans almost a century to realize that gravel roads, though cheaper and easier than cobblestone, are garbage. Anyone who's driven down a poorly-maintained gravel road can tell you that. But don't blame Mr. McAdam too much, as the tar which binds tarmacadam together wasn't as readily available without the coal tar industry, which wasn't really as much of a thing in the early 19th Century when he was inventing his road surface. Ironically he supplied coke to Britain's first coal tar factory. He also believed that it was better for the road to drain than to hold together.

Tarmacadam was invented in 1902 by the Welsh Edgar Purnell Hooley, who must have been pretty miffed that the road wasn't called a hooley, but what can you do? Apparently he saw a stretch of macadam road where a barrel of tar had been spilled and one thing led to another. Tarmac isn't actually just tar and mac, which wasn't unknown at the time. People had tried pouring tar on macadam roads, but apparently no one had thought to mix the two and then lay the road with a steamroller. Hooley also figured out some things to add to make the road more durable.

Then the petroleum (itself a portmanteau of "petri" for "rock" and "oleo" for "oil") kicked into high gear and started producing large amounts of bitumen, which supplanted coal tar as the prime binder for macadam, and while bitumen can also be called "tar," according to Wikipedia in the UK they can use "bitmac," the portmanteau of "bitumen" and "macadam," as well as "tarmac" to refer to what many Americans would call "asphalt," a word itself derived from the Greek for natural bitumen, and still used in many parts of the world to do so.

For whatever reason, the most often used meaning of "tarmac" is to refer to paved areas of airports, most often the apron. Oddly, at least according to Wikipedia, tarmac is actually often concrete. I guess "the passengers descended to the concrete" sounds wrong somehow.

@intransitivelie
"descended to the apron" is even more fraught.

Thanks for the story. Nice work!

Asgard archaea might be the precursors to all eukaryotic life on Earth. And the proposed process is so simple, it suggests the galaxy is teeming with complex life! 🦠

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/cells-origin-of-life-asgard-archaea

#science #microbiology #life

#WritersCoffeeClub 12.17 — Give a shout-out to a resource or site you think more writers should know.

Here's a great site! You can enter a word, phrase, description, or pattern to find synonyms, related words, and more. I'd be lost without the OneLook Thesaurus.

https://onelook.com/thesaurus/

#Writer #WritingCommunity #AmWriting

Any time I can get the chance to see that colony I run over there. They are like an old friend.

You notice things about them if you visit more than once... they have good days and bad ones, they sometimes move the queen but I don't know if anyone has caught this happening.

They are at war with their keepers (like all ants) they keep little compost piles to make soil to block openings and reduce light. You can always find one ant who has gotten over the mote.

I love them.

@_L1vY_
and "Incompetently"

Holographic Metasurface Nano-Lithography is today's new buzzword.

It describes a way to package and interconnect multiple IC (integrated circuit) chips in a single step. The optical mask projects a precision hologram into a hybrid metal-polymer liquid. The result is a custom selection of chips sintered into one circuit.

https://news.utexas.edu/2025/12/03/3d-printed-chip-packages-could-supercharge-semiconductor-manufacturing/

#science #engineering #electronics

@TheServitor
I was thinking of the internet black hole, not a literal black hole, but yes, it would silence speech. 🤔

I want fewer "mathy maths" (the gas-guzzlers formerly known as generative AI) and more predictive AI, please.

Point a predictive AI at scammers, spammers, and malware mobsters, and make them go poof!!

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/15/1129179/generative-ai-hype-distracts-us-from-ais-more-important-breakthroughs/

#AI #predictiveAI #utopia

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/15/1129179/generative-ai-hype-distracts-us-from-ais-more-important-breakthroughs/

@hosford42 "Mathy Maths"!!! I really want to see that replace AI in the popular parlance!

For #MountainMonday - Osprey Mountain and surrounding peaks reflecting on Katzie Marsh in Pitt Meadows, British Columbia, Canada.

#Landscape #LandscapePhotography #LPW #Mountains #Reflection #BritishColumbia #Photo #Photography #Canada

@michaelrussell Gorgeous! Thanks.

Scientists generate electricity from Earth's rotation, without violating any physics laws (always a good thing).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR1Fd4RZndQ

#science #germany #usa

Wooo it's up! New paper alert! I will write a summary thread about this paper tomorrow morning when I'm not quite as mentally exhausted!

"An Orbital House of Cards: Frequent Megaconstellation Close Conjunctions" by Thiele, Heiland, Boley, & Lawler https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09643

Not recommended for reading right before bed. It's real bad up there in Low Earth Orbit, folks.