Tootfinder

The Oldest Stars in the Galaxy Just Weighed In on One of Cosmology's Biggest Arguments - Universe Today https://www.universetoday.com/articles/the-oldest-stars-in-the-galaxy-just-weighed-in-on-one-of-cosmologys-bigges…

Zurbaršn was definitely a bit bonkers. Genius, sure, but woa, some of the symbolism is out there! The cherub heads with wings are a recurring theme, hovering with holy payloads. Check out the alt text for all the details.
#art #NationalGallery

from my link log —
A simple ray tracer written in the meson.build language.
https://github.com/annacrombie/meson-raytracer
saved 2023-11-19 https://

Whatever the expectations for the July 7-8 NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey,
the geopolitical situation favors Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan so heavily that he is all but guaranteed to emerge the winner
—if NATO summits can have winners at all.
In the wake of the disastrous Iran war,
both the timing and the venue are highly auspicious.
Donald Trump told reporters that he was coming to Ankara solely for Erdogan
—another small, symbolic victory.
The…

Erdogan Has Laid a Trap in Ankara
No matter what happens at the NATO summit, the Turkish strongman wins.

Since it was relevant to a discussion I just had on here and is something most people probably haven't thought about much (unless you've taken one of a handful of philosophy classes), I thought I'd try to lay out a key piece of Descartes' Meditations (#philosophy

#marswaterhistory

I had a weird dream where I was talking to someone at some kind of ceremony, I think a funeral, where I had timidly painted my face with clay as part of some ritual. This person was talking about how far society has come while our brains have not caught up.
Imagine if your ancient cave dwelling ancestors were dropped into this world of cars, office hours, budgets, climate change, and AI. They would be absolutely freaking out and struggling to understand things all the time... Just like you are now.
Society teaches us to suppress these emotions. You're supposed to be OK with giant metal boxes flying around you in rumbling stampedes, but you feel it in unexplained anxiety. You're supposed to just fit your life into tight little bounds that ignore weather and season, but you feel it in more unexplained anxiety and depression. We are all part of something so big and complicated we can't make sense of it, we cannot possibly comprehend it all, it is simply too much to fully grasp the implications of our individual actions within global capitalism. Should we be surprised by our urge to simply destroy it, by the anger and desire to simply "smash" something far more complex than can be met with simple violence?
Some part of my brain was trying to remind me to be compassionate to myself. Perhaps that reminder can be useful to you as well.

Non-uniqueness of geodesic limits and a question of Grayson and Gage
Shrey Aryan, Tang-Kai Lee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04855 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.04855 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.04855
arXiv:2608.04855v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Grayson and Gage proved that an immortal curve shortening flow of simple closed curves on a closed surface converges subsequentially to a closed geodesic, and they asked whether this limiting geodesic is unique. We answer this question negatively by constructing a smooth Riemannian metric on $\mathbb{S}^2$ and an immortal simple closed curve shortening flow that converges along different sequences of times to every geodesic in a one-parameter family of distinct simple closed geodesics.
toXiv_bot_toot

What is a sanguine new congressional candidate to do
when the district they thought they were running in gets torn apart by a governor’s efforts to gerrymander his state at the president’s behest?
For Pia Dandiya, a first-time candidate for the Democratic party in Florida,
the answer was simple:
pick up some maps, hit the road, and embrace the challenge of conquering a different part of the state.
Dandiya, a professional educator dipping her toe for the first ti…

Pia Dandiya for Congress — A New Future for Florida
A Democrat who wants to write a new future, Pia is determined to make the American dream more accessible to her fellow Floridians.

RE: https://c.im/@cdarwin/117020833483614521
On Tuesday, Michigan Democrats will answer a simple question:
What if we support passion and change over safety?
The answer could reverberate through the party for years.