h2g2bob @h2g2bob@mastodon.dbatley.com

Beavers are really important.

After the huge wildfires in Oregon in 2022, a biologist went out to survey the damage. Not only were the forests blackened, thriving trout populations in the streams were gone, choked to death by ash. “I was in total shock. It just looked like devastation.”

Then he stumbled upon something even more surprising: roughly five acres of pristine greenery in an otherwise burned-out area! At the center were eight active beaver dams.

But this was more than a refuge from the fire. While fish had disappeared upstream of these dams, the downstream water was crystal clear — and trout were thriving as though the fire had never happened! The beaver dams were acting as a water treatment plant.

[Paraphrased from this article: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/beaver-dams-help-wildfire-ravaged-ecosystems-recover-long-after-flames-subside/]

This post by Bruce Schneier contains so many thoughtful soundbites:

> The question is not simply whether copyright law applies to AI. It is why the law appears to operate so differently depending on who is doing the extracting and for what purpose.

> Like the early internet, AI is often described as a democratizing force. But also like the internet, AI’s current trajectory suggests something closer to consolidation.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/01/ai-and-the-corporate-capture-of-knowledge.html

One of my favourite memories was when I met up with a Spiderman cosplayer on the London Underground. People treated him like the real Spiderman! Hugs, selfies etc. I almost lost it when a tourist asked him for directions. I did manage to capture a photo of it through the laughter

Another episode of our podcast is out today! Listen to me and @peterrowlett chatting about A Taxicab (in both of the ways you might possibly imagine): https://aperiodical.com/2026/01/mathematical-objects-a-taxicab/

AWS hiked GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hoping nobody would notice. Corey Quinn did. https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/05/aws_price_increase/

spotted on ravelry: the pattern to knit the sock pictured on the Wikipedia article for "sock"

https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/as-seen-on-wikipedia-socks

Don’t trade where you tweet

In the 1630s, Adriaen Pauw was the closest thing Holland had to a prime minister; he was also fabulously wealthy. To display his wealth and good taste, Pauw commissioned a tulip garden filled with cleverly positioned mirrors. The heart of the garden was a sprinkling of the rarest tulips, multiplied by the mirrors into a bountiful array. The rarest bulbs cost as much as a h

https://timharford.com/2026/01/dont-trade-where-you-tweet/

#UndercoverEconomist

We've been hosting our own email since last century, and we've never relied on Gmail for anything other than a backup, and we haven't done much of that in years: Gmail preparing to drop POP3 mail fetching https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/05/gmail_dropping_pop3/

Garlic Mouthwash Appraised Breathlessly [research study] https://improbable.com/2026/01/06/garlic-mouthwash-appraised-breathlessly/

Highly recommend reading this story about a reporter casually finding out his wife is a world Tetris champion: https://archive.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2007/08/19/bizarro_world/

Atsuko and I got Windows 3 working on a British non-PC computer called the Apricot. Took us only one more week after I got Windows 2 working on it.

Not a surprise to any of my followers, but I think this is pretty cool. Until recently, the computer only had pure MS-DOS, Windows 1.0 and DR GEM, so this is a major software upgrade.

More photos: https://www.ninakalinina.com/notes/win2apri/

@intransitivelie

Oh Tyger who’s burning so bright
In woods in the dead of the night
What hand or what eye
That never will die
Could frame your symmetrical fright?

#LimerickAPoem

Today in "Google broke email"

I have just learned that, beginning in 3 days, my employees will no longer be able to receive their work email.

Apparently Google is dropping support for Gmail accounts being able to fetch mail from outside accounts. At all. And they announced this change less than 60 days ago. (The announcement was in the basement, stairs, leopard, etc.)

What I want to accomplish is simple: ...
https://jwz.org/b/yk1C

In my latest blog post, I spend time hanging around a street corner in Rotterdam.

https://therantyhighwayman.blogspot.com/2025/12/a-street-corner-in-rotterdam.html

Apollo VIII Christmas menu, 1969 https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search/commonwealth:cz30ps80r

[$] The current state of Linux architecture support

There have been several recent announcements about Linux distributions changing the list of architectures they support, or adjusting how they build binaries for some versions of th [...]

https://lwn.net/Articles/1045363/ #LWN