Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
Robert Mark Kamen: “Write what makes you excited, and if it makes you excited, and you’re any good, it will excite somebody else. And if it doesn’t excite them to buy it, it will excite them to let you write something they have."
Trump attacked on Iran with no consultation with NATO allies, doing them great harm, yet angrily demands help. Who wants an ally like that?
Nothing Works in Trump’s America — Except Racism. “Trump is objectively bad at running the government, but he’s objectively good at running a Klan rally, and his supporters value the latter so much that they forgive the former.”
Trump’s DOJ says he’s not required to turn over official records
“President Trump DOJ says he’s not required to turn over official records.” The Justice Department has concluded that a federal law requiring presidential records to be turned over to the government is unconstitutional, a senior White House official tells Axios.
Trump has shown that he disagrees with the law. When he left office in 2021 after his first term, he kept many official documents — including some classified materials.He was indicted by President Biden’s Justice Department for doing so and allegedly trying to hide them from federal investigators.
The case was dropped after Trump was reelected in 2024.The Trump Justice Department’s legal counsel concluded that the Presidential Records Act is “exceeds Congress’ powers … at the expense of the constitutional independence and autonomy of the executive branch,” according to the White House official. Congress does not have the power to compel an entire branch of government to create and save every single possible piece of paper,” the official added.”
A Sydney council has launched court proceedings against an alleged tree vandal, sending a clear warning to deter offenders who illegally clear trees from committing the “reckless and intentional” crime.
The Inner West Council alleged the vandalism happened on December 28, 2024, when Norman Sukkar destroyed five magenta lilly pillies and one tuckeroo tree at the heritage-listed Allman Park in Ashfield. He has been accused of drilling holes into tree trunks and was photographed holding a petrol can.
A photo taken by a local showing a man appearing to drill into a tree at Allman Park.FACEBOOK
Clearing trees without approval is prohibited under state environmental planning policies (SEPPs). Furious residentsat the time erected a “tree graveyard” in the spot and dubbed the vandal “the Allman Park serial killer”. They also said that trees in the same park – including a large gum nicknamed Bluey – were destroyed in the past.
Vandals are typically motivated by better harbour views and an increase in property value, but councils say the offence is difficult to prosecute in court because the burden of proof is high and requires substantial evidence.
Inner West Council was able to secure a prosecution after more than a year, and is seeking the maximum penalty of $1 million in the Land and Environment Court. For corporations, the maximum fine is $5 million.
A tree graveyard in Allman Park, Ashfield.FACEBOOK
Sukkar was summoned to court in early February, and the matter appeared for the first time in March.
Deputy Mayor Chloe Smith said the “reckless and intentional” offence was illegal and “deeply selfish and harmful” to the environment.
“ Unfortunately, like many councils, we’ve seen cases of trees being poisoned and vandalised,” she said. “Vandalism to our natural environment is a serious offence and will be punished to the maximum possible extent.”
In 2025, vandals drilled numerous holes into the trunks of a 100-year-old Port Jackson fig tree at Woolwich. Seven other trees were poisoned, and about 30 trees cut.
In November 2023, a tract of waterfront land was cleared of hundreds of trees and plants in Lane Cove.JANIE BARRETT
Smith said it was the first time in a long time that a council had been able to take an individual to court over the destruction of public trees.
“Despite clear evidence of a crime, it’s notoriously difficult for councils to identify the person responsible or bring a prosecution,” she said.
The state government in April last year modified penalties and introduced a tiered system of fines, meaning the older and larger the tree, the higher the fine. Repeat offenders would also be subject to higher penalties.
The changes doubled fines for individuals – up to $6000 a tree – and tripled penalties for corporations, reaching $18,000 a tree.
Astrophysicists Have Thoughts
Based on hard science fiction, a genre that prioritizes scientific accuracy, the blockbuster gets a lot right but misses a few things, experts say.
Ryan Gosling (Jacob) as a reluctant astronaut in “Project Hail Mary.”Credit...Jonathan Olley/Amazon MGM Studios
“The stars weren’t big enough,” Mark Popinchalk said. “Stars are really big.”
Popinchalk, a postdoctoral fellow at the American Museum of Natural History, was voicing a quibble with “Project Hail Mary,”the sci-fi blockbuster. Starring Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace, a reluctant astronaut, it follows a desperate mission to save the human race, through perilous interstellar travel and some nifty microbiology experiments.
In some ways, this is silly. “Project Hail Mary” is a work of science fiction, emphasis on the fiction. And while it’s possible to get caught up in the wattage of a light saber or the precise speed a warp drive allows, such speculation is extraneous to the stories. But this movie is based on a novel by Andy Weir (“The Martian”), who writes hard science fiction, which blends imagined tales with fact, or at least plausibility. As Weir said recently, scientific accuracy is his “whole shtick.”
So discussions of the science of “Project Hail Mary” aren’t exactly ancillary. Armchair physicists and even some actual physicists have powered countless online threads with questions around interstellar travel, alien life and why Grace, who has a doctorate in microbiology, can’t seem to balance a centrifuge.
The film, like the book, relies on a premise that a microbe called astrophage, a fictional space mold, has entered our solar system, absorbing enough of the sun’s light to send the Earth into an ice age. It has also attacked other suns, imperiling other planets. Jillian Bellovary, a scientist who directs the masters program in astrophysics at the CUNY Graduate Center, dismissed this crisis.
“Nothing can siphon the sun’s light away,” she said. “It’s a cute idea, OK, but that is not a thing.” This was also Popinchalk’s chief complaint, that the sun and similar stars are so massive that it would take a phenomenal amount of microbes to affect its light. Other scientific grumbles: that xenon, a noble gas, could transform into a pliant solid; that microbes cannot only survive but even thrive in the vacuum of space; that these microbes would somehow power interstellar travel.
“It is very squishy,” Charlotte Olsen, an astrophysicist at City Tech who specializes in galaxy formation, said of that idea. But Olsen didn’t mind the squish, in part because the film was accurate in so many other ways, like its depiction of the silence of space or the physics of a spacewalk, the work of rotational gravity or a moment when Rocky, the alien engineer who befriends Grace, calls out the lameness of naming a planet Tau Ceti e.
“It’s true, astronomers are not good at naming things,” Popinchalk said. “That’s an actual astronomy thing.”
Many of the seemingly implausible ideas of “Project Hail Mary” do have some basis in fact. There’s precedent for a dangerous calculation error and for the use of light emission to power spacecraft. Scientists have even been able to crystallize xenon, though they can’t yet manipulate it in the ways Rocky can. And if the idea that astrophage might harm the sun stretches credulity, a lack of light has plunged the Earth into ecological crisis. Just ask a dinosaur. (Some Reddit wags have joked that the book’s great lapse is the insistence that Grace might walk from the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory to the Mission Control Center in the Houston heat.)
“I didn’t get too upset at any of the scenes,” Bellovary said. “I was never like, Oh my God, that’s so wrong. That never actually happens. A pretty good score for science.”
What might delight scientists most is the depiction of scientific thought. While “Project Hail Mary” has its share of explosions and catastrophes, it’s the thinking that’s thrilling. Grace and Rocky must come together, with tools and whiteboards, craft and ingenuity, to solve a seemingly insoluble problem. They make mistakes, but they learn from those mistakes and from each other.
“Getting things wrong is really important in science, and that’s not something that people who aren’t scientists really know,” Bellovary said.
The film also shows the importance of cooperation. Grace bounced out of academia after his thesis was mocked, suggesting that he doesn’t work well with others. But in Rocky, a faceless, adorable life form, Grace finds a colleague. “One of the core things that scientists do is collaborate,” Olsen said. “My take is that he learns to become a scientist because he learns how to collaborate.”
Before the mission, Grace worked as a middle school science teacher. (Could Grace pilot a spacecraft without proper training? That’s another detail the movie fudges.) Bridget Ierace, a high school science teacher and a science communicator, thinks her students could learn a lot from the film.
“It shows the people behind the science,” she said. “It shows that scientists make mistakes and have emotions and that there are different things that drive them.” That’s not necessarily a lesson in physics or microbiology, but it’s still a good one.
Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.
Space Traffic Controllers: A small team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California has been keeping track of spacecraft orbiting the moon and Mars and raising alerts when it seems that two of them might cross paths.
