Tootfinder

Google unveils Operation Blue Skies, a £5M trial to re-route North Atlantic aircraft to reduce contrail-induced warming using Google's AI atmospheric forecasts (Madeleine Cuff/New Scientist)
https://www.newscientist.com/article/25850

Planes flying over the Atlantic will be re-routed to avoid contrails | New Scientist
Operation Blue Skies is the world’s first trial to deploy contrail avoidance measures across an entire airspace, aiming to lower the climate impact of flights on a large scale 

The Trump administration has paused construction of border infrastructure in Big Bend National Park in Texas following public criticism of the controversial project.
Crews were filmed bulldozing pristine desert wilderness earlier this month, sparking rare bipartisan pushback.
The construction is part of a larger plan for the Big Bend region to build hundreds of miles of walls, vehicle barriers and other border infrastructure.
The Department of Homeland Security waived req…

Bipartisan Outcry Forces Trump to Pause Border Security Project in Big Bend National Park in Texas
The Trump administration has paused construction of border infrastructure in Big Bend National Park in Texas following public criticism of the controversial project. Crews were filmed bulldozing pristine desert wilderness earlier this month, sparking rare bipartisan pushback. The construction is part of a larger plan for the Big Bend region to build hundreds of miles of walls, vehicle barriers and other border infrastructure. The Department of Homeland Security waived requirements that federal …

Discord suspends livestreams in Brazil, after the country's data protection authority ordered it last week, saying Discord failed to protect children and teens (Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/brazil-discord-children-social-me…

Discord suspends Brazil livestreams after suicide raises child protection concerns
Discord, the popular platform for gamers to communicate online, said it suspended its livestreams in Brazil. The move Monday takes place in the wake of a suicide case and after a body of the country’s justice ministry accused it of failing to protect for children and adolescents. Discord said in a statement that it is implementing the suspension of livestreams after a decision by Brazil’s national agency of data protection last week and added it is in conversations “to seek a solution tha…

Gutierrez: Joint practices are the sweet spot – controlled chaos fueling real improvement https://www.raiders.com/news/joint-practices-raiders-texans-controlled-chaos-fueling-real-improvement-preseason-training-camp

Great article about the loss of diversity induced by recommender systems (including LLMs):
Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same
"A world that keeps removing the unlikely also removes the things that could have become the next likely. Ecologists have known this for a long time already and even priced it: they call it the insurance value of biodiversity, the standing reserve of rare species that cost energy and contribute nothing, until the clim…

Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same
What 640 London shopping streets, 4,000 Billboard hits, a million films and synthetic AI personas tell us about why everything is flattening into sameness and how to regulate the algorithms behind it.

Damn! spent the whole evening reading articles and not editing photos (as planned) ...
Ah well - then I invite you to a walk we did recently on a sunny day along some nice blooming bushes.
#hiking #flowers #outdoors

This is encouraging but,
1) Land use emissions have fallen less than the rise in fossil fuel emissions: global emissions are still rising.
2) There is uncertainty in the data (other than for deforestation) which is greater than the decrease.
3) It's unclear to me what the overall flux is - the balance of sequestration Vs emissions. We know some forests have become net emitters.
Why

Why land-use emissions have fallen by a third this century – in six charts - Carbon Brief
Emissions from land-use change – including deforestation, loss of peatland and forest degradation – have been falling over the course of the 21st century.

Gutierrez: Joint practices are the sweet spot – controlled chaos fueling real improvement https://www.raiders.com/news/joint-practices-raiders-texans-controlled-chaos-fueling-real-improvement-preseason-training-camp

Filing: Nvidia agrees to spend up to $105B to support SB Energy's new data center campus in Ohio set to be leased by OpenAI; Nvidia invests $1.5B in SB Energy (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-…

Discord suspends livestreams in Brazil, after the country's data protection authority ordered it last week, saying Discord failed to protect children and teens (Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/brazil-discord-children-social-me…

Discord suspends Brazil livestreams after suicide raises child protection concerns
Discord, the popular platform for gamers to communicate online, said it suspended its livestreams in Brazil. The move Monday takes place in the wake of a suicide case and after a body of the country’s justice ministry accused it of failing to protect for children and adolescents. Discord said in a statement that it is implementing the suspension of livestreams after a decision by Brazil’s national agency of data protection last week and added it is in conversations “to seek a solution tha…