Featured Links - May 26, 2025

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Crooked Creek, our favourite garden centre

• The rise of a new form of germ theory denial. "Outright denial of germ theory is still a fringe idea: very few deny that viruses and bacteria exist. Rather, it’s the effect of germs—whether germs are the true cause of an illness—that is increasingly being called into question."
  
• The Travers Take. Peter Travers, longtime film critic for Rolling Stone and celeb interviewer for ABC’s Popcorn, lets it rip on movies, TV, streaming, awards and the best and worst of pop culture. And he's ready for a fight.
• AI Slop PR's are burning me and my team out hard, anyone else experiencing this? "Lately there has been a huge push for teams to adopt tools like Cursor, the problem is that while yes they can generate code, it is just lately rapidly becoming an endless stream of AI slop."
• Why does Elon Musk love this socialist sci-fi series? "The broligarchs share a favorite author, but they might be missing the point entirely."
  
• An unearthly spectacle. The untold story of the world’s biggest nuclear bomb. "The Tsar Bomba is not just a subject for history; some of the same dynamics exist today. It is not just the story of a single weapon that was detonated six decades ago, but a parable about political posturing and technical enablement that applies just as acutely today. In a new era of nuclear weapons and delivery competition, the Tsar Bomba is a potent example of how nationalism, fear, and high-technology can combine in a fashion that is ultimately dangerous, wasteful, and pointless."
• Beware SVG graphics used to Bypass Microsoft 365 Security Measures. "SVG and invisible Unicode is being increasingly used to hack Microsoft 365 and Google/Gmail users even with multi-factor authentication (MFA).  It’s possible because of significant enhancements in the Tycoon 2FA platform." 
• Thousands of enormous holes discovered on the seafloor, evenly-spaced with  eerie regularity". "For now, the Sur Pockmark Field stands as the best‑charted seafloor province on North America’s west coast, a natural laboratory where wind‑farm planners, geologists, and marine ecologists share common ground. What they’ll find next is anyone’s guess."
• Covid-19 vaccines, what just happened at the FDA, and why it matters. "This is not how vaccine policy should be made." People will die needlessly because of this decision.
• Physicists confirm the incredible existence of 'time mirrors'. "A team led by Dr. Hussein Moussa from the Advanced Science Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center (CUNY ASRC) in New York City has now confirmed that these mysterious events actually exist. They pulled off a successful test by changing the properties of a device in a quick, uniform way so that signals reversed direction in time." Modern physics is getting really weird.
• Nobody’s Finished, We Ain’t Even Begun: The Guitar Players Keeping the Dead Alive. "Three decades after the final Grateful Dead performance, Jerry Garcia’s sound continues to cast a long shadow. Guitarists Jeff Mattson of Dark Star Orchestra, Tom Hamilton of JRAD, and Bella Rayne explain how they interpret Garcia’s legacy musically and with their gear."