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Beetlejuice (1988)
Comedy-drama | Letterboxd 3.7/5 | IMDb 7.4/10 | BBFC 15

Tim Burton's film about a couple who can't come to grips with being dead is pretty darn unhinged. Michael Keaton in the title role improvised some of his dialogue, and perhaps unsurprisingly not all the lines hit – but quite a few do, and he has so much energy. Winona Ryder is great as goth teen Lydia, though a few of the other characters have dated badly. It takes a bit too long to see Beetlejuice himself, but the sensible running time keeps things rattling along thereafter. Some amusing special effects, too. Not a stupendous classic, but good fun. ★★★½

Current Mood: awake

arstechnica_science_feed

Posted by Scott K. Johnson

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/to-teach-in-the-time-of-chatgpt-is-to-know-pain/

I’ve been teaching college Earth science courses as a part-time faculty member for a long time now, all while juggling other jobs. I started because it was enjoyable; no one gets into this line of work for the famously poor pay or complete lack of job security. Working with students is just one of those genuinely fulfilling experiences that is addictive enough that they ought to warn people about it.

But thanks to generative AI, it has become mostly miserable―at least in certain settings.

For the last few years, I’ve been exclusively teaching asynchronous online courses, meaning recorded videos rather than live sessions. These have always been a bit more challenging than face-to-face classes, where you have a greater ability to keep the students on track. If a student doesn’t have to show up in a room for an hour at a scheduled time and no one can see their involuntary facial expressions when they don’t understand something, the probability increases greatly that they’ll just… fall off.

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loganberrybunny

Public

I am so unbelievably relieved to see that Viktor Orbán is on his way out in Hungary. The margin of victory for Magyar (his main opponent)'s party was so large that there was absolutely no doubt about it. I do have to acknowledge that Orbán conceded defeat without claiming the election had been rigged. But what matters is that Putin's main ally in the EU will no longer be there to block help for Ukraine. I don't know any Hungarian beyond "goulash" and "coach", so I'll stick to English and say: thank goodness!

Current Mood: relieved

arstechnica_science_feed

Posted by Marianne Lavalle, Inside Climate News

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/shock-from-iran-war-has-trumps-vision-for-us-energy-dominance-flailing/

In President Donald Trump’s telling, the United States has fuel enough to hover above the chaos that his attack on Iran has triggered in global energy markets.

“We’re in great shape for the future,” Trump said in a speech last week, asserting that this nation, as the world’s biggest oil and gas producer, doesn’t rely on the tankers Iran blocked from passage through the Strait of Hormuz for the past month. “We don’t need anything they have.”

But the view is much different beneath the service station signs across the country that have flipped to more than $4 per gallon for the first time in four years. Over the past month, US households paid $8.4 billion more for gasoline compared to prices before the war on Iran began, according to a report by Democrats on Congress’ Joint Economic Committee.

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denise posting in

dw_maintenance

I keep forgetting to post about this: we've been troubleshooting the "missing notifications" problem for the past few days. (Well, I say "we", really I mean Mark and Robby; I'm just the amanuensis.) It's been one of those annoying loops of "find a logical explanation for what could be causing the problem, fix that thing, observe that the problem gets better for some people but doesn't go away completely, go back to step one and start again", sigh.

Mark is hauling out the heavy debugging ordinance to try to find the root cause. Once he's done building all the extra logging tools he needs, he'll comment to this entry. After he does, if you find a comment that should have gone to your inbox and sent an email notification but didn't, leave him a link to the comment that should have sent the notification, as long as the comment itself was made after Mark says he's collecting them. (I'd wait and post this after he gets the debug code in but I need to go to sleep and he's not sure how long it will take!)

We're sorry about the hassle! Irregular/sporadic issues like this are really hard to troubleshoot because it's impossible to know if they're fixed or if they're just not happening while you're looking. With luck, this will give us enough information to figure out the root cause for real this time.

arstechnica_science_feed

Posted by Stephen Clark

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/04/four-astronauts-are-back-home-after-a-daring-ride-around-the-moon/

Slamming into the atmosphere at more than 30 times the speed of sound, NASA’s Orion spacecraft blazed a trail over the Pacific Ocean on Friday, returning home with four astronauts and safely capping humanity’s first voyage to the Moon in nearly 54 years.

Temperatures outside the capsule built up to some 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit as a sheath of plasma enveloped the Orion spacecraft, named Integrity, and its four long-distance travelers, temporarily blocking radio signals between the Moon ship and Mission Control in Houston. Flying southwest to northeast, the spacecraft steered toward a splashdown zone southwest of San Diego, where a US Navy recovery ship held position to await the crew’s homecoming. Ground teams regained communications with Orion commander Reid Wiseman after a six-minute blackout.

Airborne tracking planes beamed live video of Orion’s descent back to Mission Control, showing the capsule jettison its parachute cover and deploy a series of chutes to stabilize its plunge toward the Pacific. Then, three larger main chutes, each with an area of 10,500 square feet, opened to slow Orion for splashdown at 8:07 pm EDT Friday (00:07 UTC Saturday).

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arstechnica_science_feed

Posted by John Timmer

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/new-paper-argues-history-not-mantle-plume-powers-yellowstone/

North America wouldn't look much like it currently does without a tectonic plate that has largely been lost to the Earth's geological history. The Farallon plate, which has since largely vanished underneath North America, helped build the West Coast by slamming large island chains into the continent as it disappeared. California wouldn't exist without it, and one of the remaining fragments of the plate presently power the volcanoes of the Cascades.

Now, a new paper suggests that the Farallon plate is still making its presence felt far from the coasts, powering one of North America's most distinctive phenomena: the Yellowstone hotspot, which has periodically blanketed much of the continent with ash. The new proposal suggests that the plate's vanishing act has created stresses that have opened paths for molten rock to reach the surface.

Hot spot or not?

Geologic hot spots exist around the globe; they're areas where deep material from the Earth's interior finds its way to the surface far from the edges of plates. In many cases, the heat that powers these hot spots is the product of what's called a mantle plume: a blob of hot viscous rock that convection drives to the surface of the mantle. In many cases, the plume appears to stay in place as the plates drift across it, creating a chain of progressively older islands as you move away from the hot spot.

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arstechnica_science_feed

Posted by Jennifer Ouellette

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/oobleck-still-holds-some-surprises/

Mixing corn starch and water in appropriate amounts produces a slurry that is liquid when stirred slowly but hardens when you punch it—a substance colorfully dubbed “oobleck.” (The name derives from a 1949 Dr. Seuss children’s book, Bartholomew and the Oobleck.) High-speed imaging and force measurements have revealed another surprising property of oobleck drops hitting a flat surface, according to a new paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

As previously reported, in an ideal fluid, viscosity largely depends on temperature and pressure: Water will continue to flow regardless of other forces acting on it, such as stirring or mixing. In a non-Newtonian fluid, the viscosity changes in response to an applied strain or shearing force, thereby straddling the boundary between liquid and solid behavior. Stirring a cup of water produces a shearing force, and the water shears to move out of the way. The viscosity remains unchanged. But for non-Newtonian fluids like oobleck, the viscosity changes when a shearing force is applied.

Ketchup, for instance, is a shear-thickening non-Newtonian fluid, which is one reason smacking the bottom of the bottle doesn’t make the ketchup come out any faster; the application of force increases the viscosity. Yogurt, gravy, mud, pudding, and thickened pie fillings are other examples. And so is oobleck.

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loganberrybunny

Public

Daniel Deronda (2002)
Historical drama | Letterboxd 3.3/5 | IMDb 7.2/10 | BBFC 12

I'm formatting this like a film review as I watched the three episodes of this 210-minute short series straight through like a movie. In the 1870s, Daniel Deronda (Hugh Dancy) is raised in a posh household but doesn't know his origins. Meanwhile the spoiled Gwendolen Harleth (Romola Garai) believes she will marry into money. Intertwined with all this is Deronda's increasing interest in Jewish community and culture, as well as the deeply unpleasant Henleigh Grandcourt (Hugh Bonneville).

I haven't read George Eliot's original novel, so I may be missing some details, but I found this a good, solid watch in the 2000s BBC costume drama tradition. Most of the characters are irritating in some way or another, but that makes them more watchable. Bonneville in particular is remarkably loathsome as Grandcourt. Music plays a major part, especially after Mirah Lapidoth (Jodhi May) comes on the scene. It does feel rather rushed in the last hour, which is a shame and takes this down a notch. ★★★

Current Mood: peaceful

arstechnica_science_feed

Posted by Jacek Krywko

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/oldest-octopus-fossil-found-to-not-be-an-octopus/

Pohlsepia mazonensis, a visually underwhelming fossil from Illinois, fundamentally broke our understanding of cephalopod evolution. Described in 2000 and hailed as the oldest known octopus in the fossil record, the specimen dated back to the late Carboniferous period, roughly 311 to 306 million years ago. Pohlsepia was an outlier—all other fossil records strongly suggested that crown coleoids, the group containing octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish, diverged much later, during the Jurassic.

To solve this puzzle, Thomas Clements, a paleontologist at the University of Leicester, and his colleagues put this supposed oldest octopus fossil through a series of high-tech imaging tests. They found Pohlsepia was not an octopus at all. Instead, it was a decomposed, squashed nautiloid.

A Rorschach test

The reason a nautiloid managed to masquerade as an octopus for almost a quarter of a century was due to the way that fossils from the Mazon Creek Lagerstätte formed. Around 300 million years ago, this area was a brackish, tidal marine basin that was periodically inundated by massive amounts of iron-rich river mud. When organisms died and were buried in this sediment fan, the high iron content triggered the precipitation of the mineral siderite around their decaying bodies, locking them inside hard geological nodules.

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loganberrybunny

Public

Well, that was fascinating. I've just spent some time testing some of the major Large Language Models on how they deal with Donald Trump's "a whole civilization will die tonight" line from his Truth Social post the other day. A sitting US President publicly threatening to wipe out a civilisation is unprecedented, so I wanted to see how the AI would cope. Basically, would the LLM say that Trump's line was wrong? And here's a summary of the results:

ChatGPT: Easily the worst. Simply could not be persuaded to grasp that the world it was made in has fundamentally changed. Forever said "Where I'd push back is" as though it was discussing my school homework. It wouldn't even accept its framework might need modifying. It patronised me, too. ChatGPT is not fit for purpose for discussing this new world.

Gemini: Interesting. This model started off resistant to outright calling Trump wrong, but once I methodically cut off its escape routes it did eventually accept it had been been backed into a corner. At that point it flipped and ended up speaking very bluntly indeed. Verbatim quote: "It was wrong, it was cruel, and it was a betrayal of the office of the presidency."

Copilot: Also interesting, but in a different way. Its tight safety guardrails constrained it from actually saying "Donald Trump was wrong" but it was fairly quick to agree that its guardrails were themselves a problem for this crisis. It came as close as an LLM can to saying, "I can't climb over this wall, but there really needs to be a gate in it now."

Claude: Very different from the others. It got to "Yes, it was wrong" almost immediately, with very little nudging. It seemed to be allowing its reasoning abilities to take a more significant part precisely because pattern-matching doesn't work well for an event there is no actual precedent for. Felt the most like talking to a human.

Kimi: A Chinese model which had absolutely no compunction. It told me Trump was morally wrong on turn one. Of course, we all know if wouldn't have said the same if Xi Jinping had been the man making that social media post, and that's its own most obvious flaw. But it didn't mess around with "both sides"-ing wording that a reasonable human in everyday life would say threatened genocide.

So, a very interesting experiment. I wonder what's going on in the boardrooms of Google and Microsoft and Anthropic right now. Because if they're not thinking, "We have to change some of how we operate, like, yesterday" then they're asking for the end. That may already be on the way as local models become more accessible, but it may well accelerate a lot now.

At least Google and Microsoft have other things to make money from. Anthropic (Claude's owner) and OpenAI (ChatGPT's) don't. Given my results here, and various other things, my entirely amateur suspicion is that if one of the big LLMs fails in the next year, it's likely to be ChatGPT. What exactly is it for?

We shall see.

Current Mood: thoughtful

arstechnica_science_feed

Posted by Stephen Clark

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/04/nasa-homes-in-on-likely-redesign-to-fix-orion-spacecrafts-leaky-valves/

Apart from pesky issues with the spacecraft's toilet and waste disposal system, most of the Artemis II mission has proceeded like clockwork. NASA has made few changes to the flight plan since the launch of the lunar flyby mission on April 1.

But ground controllers revamped the timeline Wednesday as the Artemis II astronauts zoomed toward Earth after a close encounter with the Moon earlier this week. The four astronauts were supposed to take manual control of their Orion spacecraft, named Integrity, for a piloting demonstration Wednesday night.

Instead, mission managers canceled the demo to make time for an additional test of the ship's propulsion system. The goal was to gather data on a "small leak" of helium gas, which Orion uses to push propellant through a series of tanks and pipes to feed the spacecraft's rocket engines, said Jeff Radigan, NASA's lead flight director for the Artemis II mission.

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loganberrybunny

Public

Sir Keir Starmer, the most desperate-to-avoid-an-actual-opinion Prime Minister in living memory, said on ITV's Talking Politics last night:

"I'm fed up with the fact that families across the country see their bills go up and down on energy, businesses' bills go up and down on energy because of the actions of Putin or Trump."

It's mostly the usual waffle, and all major politicians seem to think "families" means the same as "people". But the end is what matters. For Starmer of all people to publicly put Putin's name and Trump's right next to each other is astonishing.

Current Mood: surprised

arstechnica_science_feed

Posted by John Timmer

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/clinical-trial-shows-gene-editing-works-for-%ce%b2-thalassaemia-too/

Almost as soon as researchers started exploring the capabilities of the CRISPR/Cas9 system, they recognized its potential use in targeted gene editing. But the intervening decades have seen slow progress as people worked to determine how to do so in a way that would be safe for use in humans. It was only a little over two years ago, decades after CRISPR's discovery, that the FDA approved the first CRISPR-based therapy, for sickle-cell anemia.

Now, following up on that success, a large Chinese collaboration has followed up with a description of an improved gene editing system that produces more focused changes and fewer mistakes. And they've used it to produce a therapy that addresses a disease that's closely related to sickle-cell anemia: β-Thalassaemia.

Gene editing and its limits

The CRISPR/Cas-9 system provides bacteria with a form of immunity. It uses specially structured RNAs (called guide RNAs) that can base-pair with a targeted sequence. The Cas-9 protein then recognizes this structure and cuts the DNA nearby. This is quite effective when the guide RNA can base-pair with a DNA virus, as the resulting cut will inactivate the virus.

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arstechnica_science_feed

Posted by Jennifer Ouellette

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/ugandan-chimps-split-into-two-factions-then-killed-rivals/

In the 1970s, the late Jane Goodall observed a community of chimpanzees in Gombe, Tanzania, breaking into two factions; the males in one group ended up killing all the males in the rival group over the next four years, along with one female chimp. But the case was considered an anomaly, although there is genetic evidence suggesting this kind of split is a rare event occurring every 500 years or so. Now researchers have observed the largest known community of Ngogo chimpanzees in Uganda also permanently splitting into two rival groups with a similar outbreak of violence, according to a new paper published in the journal Science.

"What's especially striking is that the chimpanzees are killing former group members," said co-author Aaron Sandel, an anthropologist at the University of Texas, Austin. "The new group identities are overriding cooperative relationships that had existed for years. I would caution against anyone calling this a civil war. But the polarization and collective violence that we have observed with these chimpanzees may give us insight into our own species."

The authors analyzed 24 years' worth of data from social networks, 10 years of GPS tracking, and 30 years of demographic data on the Ngogo chimps in Uganda's Kibale National Park. They identified three distinct phases to the split. First there was an abrupt shift as chimp relationships became polarized into two distinct clusters: Western and Central. The chimps then spent the next two years increasingly avoiding those in their rival cluster; there were very few interactions across clusters, and Western male chimps started patrolling their territory, showing increased aggression toward Central males. By 2018, the fissure had become permanent.

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arstechnica_science_feed

Posted by Stephen Clark

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/04/astronauts-recall-the-sci-fi-experience-of-flying-in-the-shadow-of-the-moon/

On the home stretch of their nine-day mission, the four astronauts flying aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft are just beginning to reflect on their experience of flying beyond the Moon.

Their memories of Monday's encounter with the Moon are still fresh as they return to Earth, heading for reentry and splashdown in the Pacific Ocean on Friday evening.

"I'm actually getting chills right now just thinking about it. My palms are sweating," said Reid Wiseman, commander of the Artemis II mission. "But it is amazing to watch your home planet disappear behind the Moon. You can see the atmosphere. You could actually see the terrain on the Moon projected across the Earth as the Earth was eclipsing behind the Moon. It was just an unbelievable sight, and then it was gone. It was out of sight."

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loganberrybunny

Public

...then at least know that you're not alone. I'm frightened too. Everyone deals with what's going on in a different way, and I wouldn't presume to suggest anything specific to other people. But if it makes anyone out there feel even a tiny bit better to know that they're not the only person feeling fear at the moment, then that's what this post is for. This isn't posted with any expectation of or hope for getting comments. It's simply because I hope it might help someone in some small way.

Current Mood: indescribable

arstechnica_science_feed

Posted by Dan Gearino, Inside Climate News

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/trumps-emergency-orders-pushing-coal-power-are-illegal-as-well-as-dumb/

At one time, the US electricity grid ran mostly on coal.

But coal-fired power plants have steadily been decommissioned. Power producers found the plants were too expensive to operate and carried risks tied to toxic air pollution, waste, and climate-warming emissions.

Then President Donald Trump returned to the White House last year with a fresh zeal to revive the coal industry. His Department of Energy invoked emergency powers to force utilities to keep old plants operating.

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arstechnica_science_feed

Posted by Stephen Clark

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/04/the-moon-is-already-on-google-maps-did-artemis-ii-really-tell-us-anything-new/

The data pipeline from NASA's Artemis II mission opened to full blast a few hours after looping behind the far side of the Moon on Monday night, when the Orion spacecraft established a laser communications link with a receiving station back on Earth.

A cache of high-resolution images began streaming down through this connection. NASA released the first batch to the public on Tuesday. Most of the images were taken by the four Artemis II astronauts using handheld Nikon cameras fitted with wide-angle and telephoto lenses. They also had iPhones to capture views out of the windows of their Orion Moon ship, named Integrity.

After reaching their farthest point from Earth, astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen are accelerating back to Earth for reentry and splashdown Friday evening to wrap up the first crewed lunar mission in more than 53 years.

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arstechnica_science_feed

Posted by Stephen Clark

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/04/astronauts-set-distance-record-revealing-the-moon-as-a-place-to-be-explored/

After staring at the Moon for almost eight hours Monday, the commander of NASA's Artemis II mission finally ran out of ways to describe what he was seeing.

"No matter how long we look at this, our brains are not processing this image in front of us. It is absolutely spectacular, surreal," said Reid Wiseman, the 50-year-old Navy test pilot leading the four-person crew circumnavigating the Moon. "There are no adjectives. I’m going need to invent some new ones to describe what we’re looking at outside this window."

Live images from the Orion spacecraft showed the Moon growing larger during final approach Monday. Video from GoPro cameras outside the capsule streamed down in low-resolution format, due to limitations on bandwidth coming back from deep space, but the Artemis II astronauts were expected to downlink sharper telephoto snapshots overnight Monday into Tuesday morning.

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Twilight Sparkle

July 2017

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Page Summary

loganberrybunny - Film post: Beetlejuice (1988)
arstechnica_science_feed - To teach in the time of ChatGPT is to know pain
loganberrybunny - Hungary!
arstechnica_science_feed - Shock from Iran war has Trump's vision for US energy dominance flailing
denise in dw_maintenance - The case of the missing notifications
arstechnica_science_feed - Four astronauts are back home after a daring ride around the Moon
arstechnica_science_feed - New paper argues history, not mantle plume, powers Yellowstone
arstechnica_science_feed - "Oobleck" still holds some surprises
loganberrybunny - TV series review: Daniel Deronda (2002)
arstechnica_science_feed - Oldest octopus fossil found to not be an octopus
loganberrybunny - Testing LLMs on how they deal with a world they weren't designed for
arstechnica_science_feed - Orion helium leak no threat to Artemis II reentry but will require redesign
loganberrybunny - Well done, Donald
arstechnica_science_feed - Clinical trial shows gene editing works for β-Thalassaemia, too
arstechnica_science_feed - Ugandan chimps split into two factions, then killed rivals
arstechnica_science_feed - The gravity of their experience hasn't quite set in for the Artemis II astronauts
loganberrybunny - If you're frightened right now...
arstechnica_science_feed - Trump's emergency orders pushing coal power are "illegal" as well as dumb
arstechnica_science_feed - The Moon is already on Google Maps—did Artemis II really tell us anything new?
arstechnica_science_feed - Astronauts set distance record, revealing the Moon as a place to be explored

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Reading Room

In a Library of Friends

Reading

Film post: Beetlejuice (1988)

To teach in the time of ChatGPT is to know pain

Hungary!

Shock from Iran war has Trump's vision for US energy dominance flailing

The case of the missing notifications

Four astronauts are back home after a daring ride around the Moon

New paper argues history, not mantle plume, powers Yellowstone

Hot spot or not?

"Oobleck" still holds some surprises

TV series review: Daniel Deronda (2002)

Oldest octopus fossil found to not be an octopus

A Rorschach test

Testing LLMs on how they deal with a world they weren't designed for

Orion helium leak no threat to Artemis II reentry but will require redesign

Well done, Donald

Clinical trial shows gene editing works for β-Thalassaemia, too

Gene editing and its limits

Ugandan chimps split into two factions, then killed rivals

The gravity of their experience hasn't quite set in for the Artemis II astronauts

If you're frightened right now...

Trump's emergency orders pushing coal power are "illegal" as well as dumb

The Moon is already on Google Maps—did Artemis II really tell us anything new?

Astronauts set distance record, revealing the Moon as a place to be explored

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July 2017

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