Supergiant Betelgeuse was recently discovered to have a companion star - it's bright blue, not yet fusing hydrogen, and actually orbiting so close that it's inside Betelgeuse's outer atmosphere! I wonder what it'll be named.

There are several old avocado trees on my corner, including the one that makes these small (tho not usually this small) green avocados that turn purple and shiny like an eggplant when fully ripe. The taste is pretty typical for a green avocado -- so much less fatty than a Haas -- but with a nice floral note that I haven't come across in other varieties.

When Reaction Engines went bankrupt a few years ago there was much speculation about when -- not if -- their technology for a supercooled hybrid ramjet/rocket engine would be picked up by another entity. It seems we now have our answer as the ESA hopes to revive and complete the ambitious project for a single-stage-to-orbit, air-breathing spaceplane.

Having fucked up social discourse with Twitter and then Bluesky, Jack Dorsey claims he has seen the error of his ways, and definitely won't do it a third time with his new nonprofit aimed at helping developers build and deploy (OSS or commercial) social media tech built on the Nostr platform (with AI!). Yeesh, I might be biased. Maybe I shouldn't be writing these summaries.