Swordsage Dachshund

And the Stellar's sea lion, which are WAY bigger and live in Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska

California sea lion breeding/onshore range (dark blue) vs total sea and nonbreeding range:

Stellars sea lion total range and breeding rookeries:

Note that the far southern dot is the farallon islands, near SF, a far southern haul out point for Stellar's sea lions. Still, the piers in SF itself are very much Cali sea lion territory, and Chonkers is very out of place for it.

Both maps from Wikipedia.

Evangelicals are the US Taliban. Maga is 'Murican ISIS. They want the same things, only for white men. NOT women. NOT people of darker skin. NOT men who are gay or trans. Evangelicals are a small push away from taking up arms and literally murdering anyone that isn't part of their cult and gives them the 'icks'.

June 6 1966 - On this day in 1966, civil rights activist and war veteran James Meredith began the  220-Mile long March Against Fear through the state of Mississippi from Memphis to Jackson, by himself.

Getting hassled along the way by white Mississippians but remaining cheerful, he marched against racism and fear; encouraging black people to join him, to stand up and not to fear violence, and to register to vote. Despite police promising protection for his march, on the second day Meredith was shot with a shotgun by a white man hiding in the bushes along the road. (See the 4th and 5th gifs to see how urgently police deal with the shooter). Meredith was quickly taken to a hospital.

His name is Will Hollingsworth. He is a former programmer and digital artist. He used AI tools in his work for years — and watched those same tools eventually replace him. And then he walked into his city council chambers on April 10, 2026 — in front of almost 100 neighbors — and said the seven words that made the whole country stop scrolling:

“We are being asked to drain our reservoirs, so a chatbot can write a poem.”

This is the speech every American needs to hear.

THE FOUR MINUTES THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING

Hollingsworth stepped to the podium at the Ravenna City Council meeting — packed with almost 100 residents — and delivered what observers are calling one of the most articulate and devastating arguments against data center construction ever given at a public meeting. He addressed the council’s debate over a proposed 12-month moratorium on data center construction in the area. 

He didn’t yell. He didn’t wave signs. He just spoke — clearly, precisely, with the knowledge of someone who had worked inside the tech industry — and said what millions of Americans had been feeling but couldn’t put into words.

Hollingsworth tackled the water myth head-on: “They want us to trust a trillion-dollar industry that tells us, with a straight face, that they can suck five million gallons of water out of our ground a day, use it as a liquid heat sink and return it to our rivers without a single consequence.” He is skeptical that the forever chemicals produced in the cooling process won’t eventually find their way back into the water table — no matter how many studies say otherwise. 

Five million gallons. Per day. Out of the ground. Of a small Ohio town. Returned to the rivers. With no consequences. They want you to trust them on that.

Then came the line that the whole internet shared: “We are being asked to drain our reservoirs so a chatbot can write a poem or so our sheriff can generate a picture of himself standing next to Bigfoot.” 

The Bigfoot line. The local sheriff’s department had actually posted an AI-generated image of themselves arresting Bigfoot on Facebook — and Hollingsworth used it to make the most powerful point of his entire speech: this is what the water of 50,000 people is being sacrificed for. Not cancer research. Not clean energy. Not cures for disease.

AI-generated Bigfoot images. For a sheriff’s Facebook page.

The crowd roared. The internet exploded. “THEY ARE AN EXTRACTION” — THE LINE THAT DEFINES AN ERA

Hollingsworth then destroyed the jobs myth — the one that every data center developer leads with when they show up to a town hall: “A big employer who uses the water of 50,000 people — which only hires about 10 people — is not an employer. They are an extraction.” 

Extraction. Not investment. Not development. Not partnership.

Extraction. Like a mining company. They take what they need — your water, your electricity, your land, your tax breaks — and leave behind exactly as little as the law requires.

And then he said the line that hit deepest of all — the one that made even people who support AI stop and think: “We are being asked to fund a 21st century luxury with a 19th century resource heist.” 

A 21st century luxury. Paid for with a 19th century resource heist. AI chatbots. Funded by the water your great-grandparents drank. Funded by the electricity that should be powering your hospital. Funded by the farmland that fed your parents’ generation.

That is what is happening in Ravenna, Ohio. That is what is happening in all of America.

AND HE TRAINED THE VERY MACHINE THAT REPLACED HIM

Here is the part that hit the hardest on social media. The part that made people share the video millions of times.

Will Hollingsworth is a former programmer who used Midjourney — an AI image generation tool — in his daily work as a digital artist. In his own words, he “trained the very machine that would eventually replace me.” He fed it images. He refined its outputs. He made it better. And then it took his job. 

He built it. He fed it. He improved it. And then it took everything he had built his career around.

And now — instead of being bitter, instead of retreating — he walked into his city council meeting and used every skill he had developed across a career in technology to make the most powerful public argument against unchecked data center development that America has heard in 2026.

The machine took his job. So he used his voice.

AND IT WORKED

After Hollingsworth’s speech — after the chamber erupted in applause — the Ravenna City Council voted to approve a temporary moratorium preventing new data centers from being built in the area. The speech had done what no amount of formal lobbying or legal threats had managed to do: it changed minds. In real time. At a public meeting. In a town of 11,000 people in Ohio. 

The video went viral on Hollingsworth’s TikTok with more than 600,000 views. It was shared on X more than 250,000 times. It collected 49,000 likes on Reddit — where one user wrote: “God Damn that was good. Seriously this should be used as a script in every county these corporations are hustling.” National outlets from TechRadar to Tom’s Guide to Yahoo News covered it within days. 

A four-minute speech. At a city council meeting. In Ravenna, Ohio. Watched more than a million times across platforms. Inspiring communities across the country. And it actually worked.

The moratorium passed.

ERIN BROCKOVICH JUST JOINED THE FIGHT

And now — just one week ago — the most famous environmental advocate in American history stepped in.

Consumer advocate and environmentalist Erin Brockovich — whose real-life fight against corporate pollution became one of the most celebrated films in American history — announced she is joining the fight against AI data centers nationwide. She told CNN: “The size of these places is unbelievable” and called the rapid expansion of data centers across the country “shocking.” 

Erin Brockovich. The woman who took on Pacific Gas and Electric. Who stood up for the families of Hinkley, California when no one else would. Who proved that one person — with the right information and the right voice — can bring a trillion-dollar corporation to its knees.

She has now pointed that same energy at the data center industry. And she wants your help finding them.

Brockovich has launched a data center tracking initiative — publicly asking communities across America to report data centers being built in their neighborhoods, share documentation of permits and NDAs, and connect with her organization for support in fighting back. “Erin Brockovich’s next crusade is tracking new data centers across the US — and she wants your help,” was the headline that spread across tech and environmental media simultaneously. 

Will Hollingsworth in Ravenna, Ohio started a movement with four minutes and a microphone.

Erin Brockovich just picked up the torch.

Hollingsworth closed his speech with words that silenced the room — and then brought it to its feet: “I am not a cynic when it comes to technology. I am a believer in community. I believe that a drop of clean water for a Ravenna child is worth more than a billion AI-generated images. Let us choose the child.” 

Let us choose the child.

Not the server. Not the shareholder. Not the stock price. Not the press conference where Trump stands next to tech billionaires and announces $500 billion in buildings that are already falling apart.

The child. The water. The community. The future that belongs to the people who actually live here.

That is what Will Hollingsworth said. In four minutes. At a city council meeting. In a town most Americans had never heard of. And a million people heard him.

Share this speech with everyone you know. Let them choose the child too. 

Follow for more data centers updates

Source: Futurism — “Man at City Council Meeting Makes Devastating Case Against Proposed Local Data Center” (April 17, 2026)

Teaching thermodynamic laws to AI unlocks a polymer modeling challenge

For more than half a century, materials scientists have struggled with how to simulate the complexity of polymer materials. An individual chain can comprise tens of thousands of atoms, a melt or composite contains billions, and the properties engineers actually care about, such as how an adhesive grips a surface, how a self-assembling block copolymer locks into a nanostructure, or how a biopolymer film stretches without tearing, emerge only over length and time scales that forcible atomistic simulation cannot reach.

Researchers upcycle pomegranate peel into high-performance water purifier

Pomegranate peel discarded by food vendors could soon help clean up contaminated water, thanks to research from the Department of Chemistry at the Faculty of Science. Led by Professor Sam Li, the research team developed a nanoscale carbon material derived from the fruit waste that is capable of efficiently removing 4-nitrophenol (4-NP), a persistent industrial pollutant, from water. The work was published in Environmental Nanotechnology, Monitoring & Management. Widely used in the production of pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and dyes, 4-NP routinely enters waterways through industrial discharge. It is highly soluble and chemically stable, allowing it to persist in aquatic environments and move through rivers and lakes.

A University of Texas at Austin-led team has reconstructed the most detailed map to date of the molecular machines that carried out the functions of life in an ancient ancestor that gave rise to all complex life on Earth, including us, shedding new light on genetic causes of human diseases. This representation of protein networks, known as the protein interactome and published in Cell Genomics, is like a treasure map the researchers have used to dig up hundreds of genes that weren't previously known to be associated with human diseases. Using animal models and human patient data, they have already confirmed for the first time that three of these genes are connected to rare disorders. The work could potentially lead to new targets for treating a host of other diseases.

Killdeer (Charadrius vociferus) chick catching an earthworm, family Charadriidae, order Charadriiformes, TX, USA

She played bass on 10,000 songs, including the most-played track of the twentieth century. She was paid $55 per session. Her name never appeared on the albums.

Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, 1964. A woman in a cardigan walks past the receptionist, a Fender Precision bass in her hand like a briefcase. She doesn’t sign autographs. She signs a timesheet.

Her name is Carol Kaye. In three hours, she will record what will become the most-played track of the twentieth century. She’ll pocket fifty-five dollars and head to another studio, on the other side of town, for the next session.

The record label will never put her name on the album.

Between 1957 and 1973, Carol Kaye took part in roughly 10,000 recording sessions. Not as the featured artist, not as a guest, but as a hired hand. She was part of an anonymous collective nicknamed The Wrecking Crew—elite studio musicians who actually played the instruments on your favorite records while the famous bands posed for promotional photos.

The work was relentless. Three albums before the day was over. Stale coffee in paper cups. No rehearsal. The charts arrived minutes before the tape rolled. If you couldn’t read a chart and nail the take in two tries, you didn’t get called for the next session.

Carol could do it on the first try.

She started playing guitar in grimy bars at fourteen because her family couldn’t pay the electric bill. Music wasn’t a romantic dream for her. It was survival. It was a job—factory work with better acoustics and lower pay.

But she was faster and sharper than almost everyone else. She corrected charts in pencil while the producer was still explaining what he wanted. In one session in 1968, she told a famous producer his arrangement sounded like a dying dog. She chose her own line. They kept her version.

That descending bass line that drives the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”? Carol Kaye. The propulsive groove of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”? Carol Kaye. The acoustic-guitar intro to “La Bamba”? Carol Kaye. The iconic theme from Mission: Impossible? Carol Kaye.

She invented techniques on the spot, out of sheer necessity. When the bass sound was too muddy for AM radio, she stuck felt under the strings and used a hard pick instead of her fingers. The tone cut through the static like a blade. It became the sonic signature that defined 1960s pop.

Bassists spent years—decades—trying to crack the secret of the Beach Boys’ gear to get that sound. They were studying the wrong people. They should have been studying Carol.

She received no royalties. No residuals. No gold-record ceremony. No credit on the album sleeves. When “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” hit number one, Carol was already back in a studio cutting a soap jingle.

The biggest bands mimed her bass lines on TV variety shows. New York marketing departments decided a mom in classic clothes didn’t fit the rebellious-youth image they were selling. So they simply left her name off the album credits.

For thirty years, almost no one cared. The truth only began to surface in the late 1990s, when music researchers found the same union contract numbers on thousands of hit records. The very documents meant to preserve studio musicians’ anonymity betrayed them.

Think about it. Every time you heard “Good Vibrations,” “River Deep – Mountain High,” the Righteous Brothers, Nancy Sinatra, or Sonny and Cher, you were hearing Carol Kaye. She composed the soundtrack of an entire generation’s youth.

And yet the records still say nothing. She’s now over eighty. She wrote instructional books. She trained countless bassists. She is finally starting to be recognized by music historians who uncovered the truth about The Wrecking Crew.

But she never got what she deserved: her name on those albums. Credit for the music that defined an era. Recognition that those bass lines everyone associates with the “Beach Boys” were, in fact, Carol Kaye’s.

Fifty-five dollars a session. Ten thousand sessions. The most-played track of the twentieth century.