A nice news thing, for a change 

https://apnews.com/article/louvre-fedora-man-ap-photo-c0d59847ef5f836a0c5ac49de8bff441

Oh to have been that cool at 15.

This is an interesting slant ... embedded energy and "energy slaves".

To make 1 Big Mac ... It would take 1 human a total of 3 x 8-hour days of sustained labor to generate the necessary 10 MJ of energy.

https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/you-have-100-energy-slaves

Relevant comic (linked in the comments) - 

https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/energy-slaves/

Somewhat related to the above.

Many decades ago I read an article in Scientific American about the embedded power in a nuclear power station (they didn't call it 'embedded power', nut that is what it was). They made the point that it was more than the power station would ever produce.

This seemed a dubious claim but it was a reasonably reputable publication and the workings out seemed correct, even if I could not check the starting figures.

They rather lost all credibility, however, when they went on to say that, in fact, the same applied to all other power stations, thus claiming that power stations were effectively impossible.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

https://www.hcn.org/issues/57-11/heavy-metal-is-healing-teens-on-the-blackfeet-nation/

In response to youth suicides, teachers show students the power of headbanging at Fire in the Mountains festival.

This is such a good read. 

https://thatshubham.com/blog/news-audit

Interesting, and worrying.

I remember in 2000, when I was travelling back and forth between Cork and Heathrow, I was horrified at the size of the Aer Lingus booking page.

It was just over 128k!

Looking at the HTML code it was horrendously bloated.

Well, this is the weirdest thing I've read for some time !

https://historiamag.com/witchs-mummy-corpses-and-cure-alls/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_brown

4000 words on why the religious have been voting for Trump

[Gemini's take]

The article argues that the common critique of "religious hypocrisy" regarding white evangelical support for Donald Trump fails to understand the underlying anthropological function of religion.

Drawing on the "costly signaling" framework of Lyle Steadman and Craig Palmer, the author posits that religion is primarily defined by public behaviors and rituals that forge social bonds rather than private, internal beliefs.

In this view, affirming support for Trump despite significant secular criticism acts as a high-cost signal that reinforces communal identity and loyalty, suggesting that this political alignment is not an abandonment of faith, but a rigorous application of religious signaling where the object of the ritual has evolved.

https://complexsimplicity.substack.com/p/ten-years-of-religious-hypocrisy