FreeTube is an open-source desktop YouTube client focused on privacy.
It blocks ads and Google tracking, giving you a cleaner YouTube experience without logging in. A great option if you want to watch content with less tracking.
👉 https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube
👉 More tools like this: https://digital-escape-tools-phi.vercel.app/
Top 10 of this year's most read pieces — no.9: our post on a 1678 pamphlet, The Mowing-Devil, which includes the earliest known depiction of a crop circle: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-mowing-devil/
(Full Top 10 here: https://publicdomainreview.org/blog/2025/12/top-10-most-read-pieces-from-2025)
In 1899, Charles Godfrey Leland published Aradia, “the gospel of the witches”, containing a goddess-orientated creation and saviour narrative, purported to descend from an ancient, hermetic tradition of witchcraft in Italy. A. D. Manns explores this text via an enchanting conjecture: that the writer, medium, and witch Roma Lister played a pivotal role in the formation of both Aradia and, therefore, a new form of paganism called Wicca.
Wooo it's up! New paper alert! I will write a summary thread about this paper tomorrow morning when I'm not quite as mentally exhausted!
"An Orbital House of Cards: Frequent Megaconstellation Close Conjunctions" by Thiele, Heiland, Boley, & Lawler https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09643
Not recommended for reading right before bed. It's real bad up there in Low Earth Orbit, folks.
The number of objects in orbit is rapidly increasing, primarily driven by the launch of megaconstellations, an approach to satellite constellation design that involves large numbers of satellites paired with their rapid launch and disposal. While satellites provide many benefits to society, their use comes with challenges, including the growth of space debris, collisions, ground casualty risks, optical and radio-spectrum pollution, and the alteration of Earth's upper atmosphere through rocket emissions and reentry ablation. There is potential for current or planned actions in orbit to cause serious degradation of the orbital environment or lead to catastrophic outcomes, highlighting the urgent need to find better ways to quantify stress on the orbital environment. Here we propose a new metric, the CRASH Clock, that measures such stress in terms of the timescale for a possible catastrophic collision to occur if there are no satellite manoeuvres or there is a severe loss in situational awareness. Our calculations show the CRASH Clock is currently 5.5 days, which suggests there is limited time to recover from a wide-spread disruptive event, such as a solar storm. This is in stark contrast to the pre-megaconstellation era: in 2018, the CRASH Clock was 164 days.
DigitalEscapeTools
The Public Domain Review
Vladimir Savić
Prof. Sam Lawler