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Best 3I/ATLAS Conspiracy Theories So Far (November 24, 2026)
Loeb, Hibberd and Crowl, arXiv: Intercepting 3I/ATLAS with Juno
- “3I/ATLAS was discovered on July 1, 2025”
Star Walk: 3I/ATLAS news recap
- “swung around the Sun at the end of October, came closest to Earth in December, crossed Jupiter’s orbit in March”
- “slipped behind the Sun at the end of September and didn’t reappear until early November”
- “NASA finally showed them off in mid-November”
IBTimes UK: Harvard professor unveils 18 anomalies
- “NASA says it’s a comet”
- “3I/ATLAS is most likely natural”
- “he rates it a 4”
- “within about five degrees of the plane the planets orbit in”
Avi Loeb: The 15 Anomalies of 3I/ATLAS
- “heads Harvard’s Galileo Project”
- “exactly 45 degrees off, would have looked interesting too”
- “nobody had seen it in a comet before”
New Space Economy: 3I/ATLAS anomalies, natural or artificial?
- “about 0.2 percent”
- “resembles industrially produced nickel alloys”
Avi Loeb: Where is 3I/ATLAS Now?
- “After the comet rounded the Sun, iron showed up”
- “the Loeb Scale”
IBTimes UK: NASA blamed shutdown for 3I/ATLAS secrecy
- “On October 2, 2025, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed 3I/ATLAS with its HiRISE camera”
- “held hostage for bureaucratic reasons”
Starlust: Loeb criticizes NASA’s big reveal
- “two messages, comet and shutdown, and called both of them boring”
Primetimer: updated perijove forecast
- “about 53.6 million kilometers”
- “about 53.5 million kilometers”
- “less than 1 in 25,000”
- “revised to just outside the line, then argued back toward it”
Avi Loeb: nearest to Jupiter’s moon Eupheme
- “A brand-new 96th moon of Jupiter, he wrote, would be a clear technological signature”
Pulse: The Angry Astronaut, “NASA Was Wrong! 3I Atlas Is Changing Course!”
- “a sideways component about as large as the radial push”
- “spinning every 7.1 hours”
- “a Dyson-swarm-style structure and a solar storm”
- “a natural comet with unusual outgassing”
CNN: 3I/ATLAS formed somewhere much colder
- “heavy water”
- “colder than 30 Kelvin”
ScienceDaily: 3I/ATLAS is bursting with methanol
- “only the third interstellar object anyone has ever spotted, after ‘Oumuamua and Borisov”
- “one of the most methanol-rich comets ever measured”
Sci.News: methane with record-breaking heavy hydrogen
- “methane on it with a record amount of heavy hydrogen”
Sky & Telescope: cold, ancient origins
- “10 to 12 billion years”
SETI Institute: signs of technology in 3I/ATLAS
- “nothing but our own interference”
- “weaker than roughly 10 to 110 watts, about what a household appliance puts out”
The poster hung in a basement office at the FBI, starting in 1993. The truth was out there. So was the poster, at every dorm-room yard sale for a decade.
Why ABBA Are Better Than the Beatles (November 22, 2026)
Daily Express: The great ABBA backlash
- “SOS was the best pop song ever written, or so Björn tells it”
- “looked at ABBA as the Antichrist”
Official Charts: ABBA’s studio albums ranked
- “the second best-selling album of all time, behind only Queen’s Greatest Hits”
Official Charts: ABBA overtake The Beatles and FACT, May 2013
- “It passed Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band back in 2013”
Official Charts: Gold reaches 1000 weeks
- “the first album ever to log 1,000 weeks on the UK album chart”
Wikipedia: Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?
- “a minute and forty-two seconds”
- “over a twelve-bar blues”
- “hurt that Paul made it without him”
Rolling Stone Australia on Maxwell’s Silver Hammer
- “a student who kills people with a hammer”
Far Out: The Beatles songs The Beatles couldn’t stand
- “Ringo called it the worst session they ever had to record”
- “George called it fruity”
Rolling Stone: 50 Terrible Songs on Great Albums
- “said flatly, “I hate it””
- “one of the White Album’s polarizing tracks”
- “ABBA’s 1976 album Arrival”
- “cheery nonsense”
- “under three minutes long”
Rolling Stone Australia on ABBA
- “Two married couples in white pantsuits and platform boots”
Rolling Stone: The 25 Best ABBA Songs
- “Nirvana invited the tribute band Björn Again to open for them”
Why AI Can’t (or Won’t) Say “I Don’t Know” (November 20, 2026)
OpenAI: Why language models hallucinate (Sept 5, 2025)
- “predict the next word”
- “almost nothing labeled false”
- “a pet’s birthday”
- “three different titles. All three were wrong”
- “declined to answer 1 percent of the questions and got 75 percent of them wrong”
- “Penalize confident wrong answers more than honest blanks”
VentureBeat: Anthropic scientists expose how AI actually thinks and IBM Think
- “The model’s default is to decline”
- “Familiarity flips the switch”
- “working backward from a wrong hint a user supplied”
- “the raw model, fresh out of its initial training, was well calibrated”
- “the calibration got worse”
Anthropic: Reduce hallucinations
- “Give it an out”
- “Make it quote first”
- “comparing several answers and treating disagreement as a warning sign”
The story is “The Last Question” (1956), and Multivac’s final answer is worth the read. DeepThought took seven and a half million years to come up with 42. Huey, Dewey, and Louie tended a forest in space in Silent Running (1972). Colossus took over the world in 1970 and announced it on television.
Pet Peeve Rant: Cache, Cash, or Cachet (November 18, 2026)
Merriam-Webster: Cache and Cachet, what’s the difference?
- “It’s pronounced exactly like cash”
- “Merriam-Webster gives cache exactly one pronunciation”
- “Both trace back to the French verb cacher”
- “It’s the shine a thing has when people want to be seen with it”
Merriam-Webster Medical: cachet
- “a little edible capsule that held medicine nobody wanted to taste”
- “It’s pronounced ka-SHAY”
Grammarphobia: Does cache rhyme with sash or sashay?
- “Somebody once wrote to a grammar column because a general said it the fancy way”
The Oxford Comma as a Moral Position (November 16, 2026)
Quote Investigator: Humorous Serial Comma Examples
- “In 1998 the Sunday Times of London”
- “an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector”
- “Drop the comma, save space.”
Spotted them? Three sentences in this post left their Oxford comma at home on purpose. The coworkers are not all drunks. The fan mail is not all crayon. The oldest friends are not a beverage.
As a Jaded Cynic, Movie Scenes That Make Me Cry (November 14, 2026)
Lesley Goldberg, The Hollywood Reporter, December 2013
- “Because the man he’s been coaching finally believes it” (the actor’s own read of the smile)
The politest apocalypse ever filmed: Gregory Peck, a submarine, and a city that queues for its own ending (1959).
“The Mad Max guy” also made a penguin tap dance. He contains multitudes.
The memory in question involves a small wooden horse and a very large furnace.
Have You Met Roko’s Basilisk? (November 14, 2026)
- “In July 2010, a user named Roko posted the idea on LessWrong”
- “Solutions to the Altruist’s burden: the Quantum Billionaire Trick”
- “He called Roko an idiot, deleted the post, declared it an information hazard, and banned all discussion of it for five years”
- “The name comes from the basilisk of legend, the serpent that kills with a look”
- “Most of the rationalists shrugged it off”
LessWrong wiki: Roko’s basilisk
- “banned all discussion of it for five years”
- “even Yudkowsky argued that an AI that tortures people doesn’t get to call itself friendly”
David Auerbach, Slate, July 17, 2014
- “The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment of All Time”
Space.com and Global News
- “Elon Musk went to tweet a pun, ‘Rococo Basilisk,’ and found the musician Grimes had made the same joke three years earlier”
The Philosophers’ Magazine: Pascal’s Wager
- “Blaise Pascal, 1600s: if God exists and you believe, you win forever”
- “For every basilisk, you can dream up an anti-basilisk” (the many-gods objection)
Spotted it? The opening’s sales pitch owes a debt to that really scary guy with the lollipops in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968).