- A UK Court of Appeal ruling (linked by fenn) banned the use of Bayesian probability reasoning in court, illustrating a clash between formal statistical methods and legal tradition.  
- kanzure shared a PNAS paper arguing that delayed evolution of lignin-degrading fungi did not cause the Paleozoic coal-production peak, challenging a popular paleo-climatic hypothesis.  
- adlai proposed a living-will clause requesting that his body be placed in a shallow bog near permafrost as a tongue-in-cheek way to “keep coal production competitive,” highlighting dark-humor transhumanist attitudes toward death and carbon cycles.  
- fenn warned that standard IRC does not guarantee end-to-end encryption and that sensitive messages can be intercepted on the recipient’s side; jrayhawk noted that major IRC clients support OTR (Off-the-Record) plugins to mitigate this risk.  
- kanzure circulated a Medium article analyzing a proposal to regulate digital-asset transactions with the same reporting requirements currently applied to in-person cash receipts, framing it as a significant policy threat to privacy and open cryptocurrency use.