Tootfinder

Paul Krugman says nothing here the well-informed don’t already know, but I’m quoting here because he says it so crisply:
❝Until ICE moved in Los Angeles was, in fact, remarkably peaceful.…Los Angeles [minus ICE] is probably as safe as it has ever been.❞
❝The events unfolding in Los Angeles as you read this and, I fear, the events likely to unfold across much of America soon, quite possibly this weekend, suggest that the motivations of Trump and his cronies go deeper than mere (mere!) sadism. They want to use false claims of chaos to justify a power grab that, if successful, would mark the end of the American experiment.❞
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/we-finally-know-what-american-carnage

The VMC Survey -- LIV. Anomalous Cepheids in the Magellanic Clouds Period-Luminosity relations in the near-infrared bands
Teresa Sicignano, Vincenzo Ripepi, Marina Rejkuba, Martino Romaniello, Marcella Marconi, Roberto Molinaro, Anupam Bhardwaj, Giulia De Somma, Maria-Rosa Cioni, Felice Cusano, Gisella Clementini, Richard de Grijs, Valentin Ivanov, Jesper Storm, Martin Groenewegen

The VMC Survey -- LIV. Anomalous Cepheids in the Magellanic Clouds Period-Luminosity relations in the near-infrared bands
Anomalous Cepheids (ACs) are less studied metal-poor pulsating stars ([Fe/H]<-1.5) compared to Classical Cepheids (CCs) and RR Lyrae stars. They follow distinct Period-Luminosity (PL) and Period-Wesenheit (PW) relations and pulsate in either the fundamental (F) or first overtone (1O) mode. Our goal is to assess the precision and accuracy of AC-based distances and evaluate their potential for establishing an independent distance scale. We derive new PL and PW relations for F-mode, 1O-mode, and, …

“Pivot to AI itself got hit by an AI scraper bot over the weekend! Thankfully the scoundrels who vibe-code these things are idiots.”
➡️ https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/02/fighting-the-ai-scraper-bots-at-pivot-to-ai-and-rationalwiki/…

Fighting the AI scraper bots at Pivot to AI and RationalWiki
We’ve covered the AI scraper bots before. These just hit web pages over and over, at high speed, to scrape new training data for LLMs. They’re an absolute plague across the whole World Wide Web and…

In Los Angeles wird es am Wochenende heiß und feucht. Temperaturen bis über 37 Grad werden in den Tälern und Wüsten erwartet.
Dazu kommt #tropische Feuchtigkeit durch #Sturm Alvin, was lokal zu #Gewittern

California heat wave expected to break records this weekend
Large swaths of California are under heat advisories Friday and Saturday with officials cautioning against outdoor activities in triple-digit areas.