Tootfinder

🔊 #NowPlaying on #BBCRadio3:
#ThroughTheNight
- Slovenian National Day
Barry Douglas joins the RTV Slovenia Symphony Orchestra and conductor Lio Kuokman in Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto. The orchestra also plays a work by the composer Leon Firšt.
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002xng0

Circular Economy Synergies and Trade-offs in Data Centres
Vlad C. Coroam\u{a}, Oana Dumbrav\u{a}
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04571 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.04571 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.04571
arXiv:2608.04571v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: This report analyses data centre (DC) sustainability and circularity, revealing existing synergies and trade-offs:
The PUE is too coarse, mixing cooling and power provisioning. It wrongly attributes server fan consumption and transformation losses to IT energy. It does not measure compute but infrastructure efficiency, which is already outstanding. Compute energy, however, is exploding. Better energy metrics for DCs would thus cover i) compute efficiency, ii) transformation efficiency, and iii) cooling overhead.
Trade-offs exist between cooling energy and water as well as on-site and upstream water: Consuming water on-site lowers the cooling energy, which also lowers the water consumed upstream in power generation. For 'wet' electricity, there is little competition: It is worth spending more on-site energy to save both electricity and related upstream water. For 'dry' electricity, there is a trade-off.
Waste heat recovery brings energy circularity but has limited uses and is not the same energy quality, a fact not reflected by current metrics. A better metric would consider the avoided energy through heat recovery instead of the amount recovered.
Material circularity can be achieved by interpreting the 9R framework in the context of DCs. Circularity-enhancing measures can be categorised into product design, process design and business models, choice of materials, and operating conditions. Together, they have effects across all circularity levels.
The relation between DCs and the power grid is complex. Modern DCs present new challenges for the grid. Mitigation includes battery storage and onsite generation. These measures have, in turn, further consequences, both beneficial and detrimental. They can offer grid flexibility as well as innovations in the field of energy. But they also bring noise, pollution, and GHGs, and compete with the energy sector for resources.
toXiv_bot_toot

🔊 #NowPlaying on #BBCRadio3:
#Radio3InConcert
- Aldeburgh Festival - Ravel's La Valse
An orchestral journey of bold originality from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra at the Aldeburgh Festival, featuring conductor Ryan Wigglesworth and pianist Steven Osborne.
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002xn6x

Popular Front recently did a piece on the current conflicts in Ethiopia:
https://popularfront.substack.com/p/everything-you-didnt-know-about-the
It's a good primer for anyone who's unfamiliar, but is definitely lacking if you know any Ethiopian folks or pay attention to much news out of the Horn of Africa.
The interplay between authoritarian liberal nationalism, as represented by Abiy Ahmed and his government, and tribal federalism , represented by various tribal factions, reads to me very similarly to the liberalization of Europe (enclosure of the commons, a push to sacrifice ethnic identities for nationalist ones, etc). Like the liberalization of, say, France, it's a lot more complicated than "old thing bad, new thing good."
Liberalism was violent and authoritarian. It often sacrificed leftists. Liberalism's focus on borders and national identity led directly to pogroms and Nazism. Similarly, liberalization of Ethiopia has led to genocide and ethnic cleansing.
People think of "the terror" in France as a leftist thing, but it wasn't. It was a Liberal thing, centrist extremism, carried out against right and left.
I understand that tribal federalism is also not a good system, but I don't have a ton of depth so I'm not going to try to explain it. During the European Liberal revolutionary period of 1848, ethnic minorities would often side with some monarch or emperor against liberalism out of fear of liberal nationalism. It makes sense to support a system that's bad if your other option is a nationalism that erases your identity.
But even in Europe at that time, anarchism offered an alternative but that alternative often also drew from simply a different branch of liberalism that also suppressed culture and identity. Today the world is different. Democratic Confederalism offers a solution to *exactly* this problem, tested for more than a decade in Syria and developing now in Myanmar.
But the cross pollination between Syria and Myanmar in terms of fighters really made the ideological cross pollination possible. I don't think anything like that is happening now in Ethiopia.
Eurocentrism makes it easy to ignore what's happening now, but Addis Ababa is the seat of the African Union Commission. Ethiopia is a major military power in the region, so these developments carry a lot of weight. Especially as the US collapses and the world becomes more multipolar, the development of regional powers like Ethiopia will have a big impact on how that part of the continent develops.
If any folks are more familiar with Ethiopia than I am (which shouldn't be hard since I'm basically not), please correct me or add context if anything is missing or wrong.

🔊 #NowPlaying on #BBCRadio3:
#BBCProms
- 2026
Live at the BBC Proms: Kirill Petrenko conducts the Berlin Philharmonic in Scriabin's Symphony No. 3, and Beethoven's Violin Concerto with soloist Augustin Hadelich.
Relisten now 👇
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0030jmq