Friday, August 28, 2026

No time for small talk this week. Too busy pondering what the new names for the Pacific and Atlantic oceans might be.

Item 1: a link

This is (hypothetically) a black hole star:

In a paper appearing today in the journal Nature, the team presents their analysis of the new object, which they discovered using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The telescope spotted the bright red dot in the very early universe, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

The scientists conclude that the most likely explanation for the strange red dot is that it is a mashup of a black hole and a star — a combination that has never been observed until now. The object is likely a hugely dense cloud of gas, powered not by standard nuclear fusion, but by a central black hole.

Pretty cool, but someone should probably let these geeks know that Soundgarden already discovered this phenomenon back in 1994.

Item 2: a list

Christopher Nolan Film Titles, Ranked:

1. Memento
2. The Prestige
3. The Odyssey
4. Following
5. Tenet
6. Interstellar
7. Inception
8. Insomnia
9. The Dark Knight
10. Oppenheimer
11. Dunkirk
12. Batman Begins
13. The Dark Knight Rises

Item 3: a media recommendation

Item 4: word of the week

Chthonic

I know, I know: you're not supposed to perform an arcane blood ritual to summon a chthonic spirit and implant it in a mortal host. But I'm pretty sure I could get it to clean out the garage for me.

Item 5: an image

See ya!

Thanks for reading. Let's reconvene in September.