Tootfinder

1/2 Thanks to @… for this interesting article. It speaks to me. :)
I’ve been weather blogging @… since 2005. It is interesting how it has changed, and how I have changed.
My website used to be just data from the (expensive) station I bought when I moved back to Port Alberni. It was a hobby and a side project to practice web/coding skills I use at work. My focus was on creating useful data for people that was more local/relevant than the official EC station outside of the city.
Then I put up a webcam and learned how to make timelapses. This got the attention of local media… because pictures. :)
Then I added a blog and started to write about the weather almost daily. This was before Facebook. There was a popular local online forum where I would post things. The media would also follow my website and they started to call me when there was extreme weather (usually very hot or very wet/stormy).
Then Facebook started to get big and I made a page that eventually had a few thousand followers. I would blog often. Lots of traffic from Facebook… this was 2010 and on. I blogged about climate and weather pretty equally.
Like anyone in Port Alberni, I was/am obsessed with the Martin Mars and got wrapped up in that issue along with others which combined with the weather following probably gave me just enough exposure to have me elected as a councillor in 2014.
I continued through that 4 years, blogging often in addition to councillor duties and work, heavily on facebook, then it all went sideways on my own poor judgement (go ahead and google it, it’s ok :)) and I was not reelected, but Facebook by 2018 had also changed. Cambridge Analytica, etc.
….Continued…
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-weather-apps-data-wildfires-storms-preparation-obsession-social-media/

LinkedIn tips:
1. You don't have to read the posts.
2. If you don't like a post from someone you follow, then stop following them. You can keep a connection without following them!
3. If you don't like a post from someone you don't follow, then mark it as not interested. Send the signal to inform both the recommendation algorithm, and the people who design the recommendation algorithm, what content you don't want to see.
Whatever other people are…

I watched the Disney, two season, series on the risk of Industrial Light and Magic (ILM).
It was interesting.
And last night I watched a Studio Ghibli film.
I am active in live theatre - living actors on a stage before a live audience.
It struck me that movie making a la ILM tends to glorify the scenery without necessarily adding to the impact of the story.
I can understand how filmmakers want to immerse the audience in a different reality. But I don't thin…

The Justice Department is accelerating its efforts to undo decades of civil service protections intended to insulate the work of law enforcement officials from political interference.
A new batch of more than 20 career employees at the department and its component agencies were fired on Friday,
including the attorney general’s own ethics adviser, Joseph W. Tirrell.
Others who were dismissed included a handful of senior officials at the U.S. Marshals Service, as well as pros…

Dismissals at Justice Dept. Would Bypass Civil Service and Whistle-Blower Laws
In court filings and dismissal letters, the Justice Department’s political leadership claims sweeping authority to fire career law enforcement officials without cause.

An internal BBC review finds that documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, narrated by the child of a Hamas minister, breached an editorial rule on accuracy (Jake Kanter/Deadline)
https://deadline.com/2025/07/bbc-gaza-how-to-survive-a-warzone-re…

BBC Review Finds ‘Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone’ Broke Accuracy Rule In “Serious” Editorial Failure
BBC publishes internal review into editorial failings on 'Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone,' which was narrated by the child of a Hamas minister.

Long; central Massachusetts colonial history
Today on a whim I visited a site in Massachusetts marked as "Huguenot Fort Ruins" on OpenStreetMaps. I drove out with my 4-year-old through increasingly rural central Massachusetts forests & fields to end up on a narrow street near the top of a hill beside a small field. The neighboring houses had huge lawns, some with tractors.
Appropriately for this day and this moment in history, the history of the site turns out to be a microcosm of America. Across the field beyond a cross-shaped stone memorial stood an info board with a few diagrams and some text. The text of the main sign (including typos/misspellings) read:
"""
Town Is Formed
Early in the 1680's, interest began to generate to develop a town in the area west of Natick in the south central part of the Commonwealth that would be suitable for a settlement. A Mr. Hugh Campbell, a Scotch merchant of Boston petitioned the court for land for a colony. At about the same time, Joseph Dudley and William Stoughton also were desirous of obtaining land for a settlement. A claim was made for all lands west of the Blackstone River to the southern land of Massachusetts to a point northerly of the Springfield Road then running southwesterly until it joined the southern line of Massachusetts.
Associated with Dudley and Stoughton was Robert Thompson of London, England, Dr. Daniel Cox and John Blackwell, both of London and Thomas Freak of Hannington, Wiltshire, as proprietors. A stipulation in the acquisition of this land being that within four years thirty families and an orthodox minister settle in the area. An extension of this stipulation was granted at the end of the four years when no group large enough seemed to be willing to take up the opportunity.
In 1686, Robert Thompson met Gabriel Bernor and learned that he was seeking an area where his countrymen, who had fled their native France because of the Edict of Nantes, were desirous of a place to live. Their main concern was to settle in a place that would allow them freedom of worship. New Oxford, as it was the so-named, at that time included the larger part of Charlton, one-fourth of Auburn, one-fifth of Dudley and several square miles of the northeast portion of Southbridge as well as the easterly ares now known as Webster.
Joseph Dudley's assessment that the area was capable of a good settlement probably was based on the idea of the meadows already established along with the plains, ponds, brooks and rivers. Meadows were a necessity as they provided hay for animal feed and other uses by the settlers. The French River tributary books and streams provided a good source for fishing and hunting. There were open areas on the plains as customarily in November of each year, the Indians burnt over areas to keep them free of underwood and brush. It appeared then that this area was ready for settling.
The first seventy-five years of the settling of the Town of Oxford originally known as Manchaug, embraced three different cultures. The Indians were known to be here about 1656 when the Missionary, John Eliott and his partner Daniel Gookin visited in the praying towns. Thirty years later, in 1686, the Huguenots walked here from Boston under the guidance of their leader Isaac Bertrand DuTuffeau. The Huguenot's that arrived were not peasants, but were acknowledged to be the best Agriculturist, Wine Growers, Merchant's, and Manufacter's in France. There were 30 families consisting of 52 people. At the time of their first departure (10 years), due to Indian insurrection, there were 80 people in the group, and near their Meetinghouse/Church was a Cemetery that held 20 bodies. In 1699, 8 to 10 familie's made a second attempt to re-settle, failing after only four years, with the village being completely abandoned in 1704.
The English colonist made their way here in 1713 and established what has become a permanent settlement.
"""
All that was left of the fort was a crumbling stone wall that would have been the base of a higher wooden wall according to a picture of a model (I didn't think to get a shot of that myself). Only trees and brush remain where the multi-story main wooden building was.
This story has so many echoes in the present:
- The rich colonialists from Boston & London agree to settle the land, buying/taking land "rights" from the colonial British court that claimed jurisdiction without actually having control of the land. Whether the sponsors ever actually visited the land themselves I don't know. They surely profited somehow, whether from selling on the land rights later or collecting taxes/rent or whatever, by they needed poor laborers to actually do the work of developing the land (& driving out the original inhabitants, who had no say in the machinations of the Boston court).
- The land deal was on condition that there capital-holders who stood to profit would find settlers to actually do the work of colonizing. The British crown wanted more territory to be controlled in practice not just in theory, but they weren't going to be the ones to do the hard work.
- The capital-holders actually failed to find enough poor suckers to do their dirty work for 4 years, until the Huguenots, fleeing religious persecution in France, were desperate enough to accept their terms.
- Of course, the land was only so ripe for settlement because of careful tending over centuries by the natives who were eventually driven off, and whose land management practices are abandoned today. Given the mention of praying towns (& dates), this was after King Phillip's war, which resulted in at least some forced resettlement of native tribes around the area, but the descendants of those "Indians" mentioned in this sign are still around. For example, this is the site of one local band of Nipmuck, whose namesake lake is about 5 miles south of the fort site: #LandBack.

from my link log —
Elementary functions NOT following the IEEE 754 floating-point standard.
http://www.hlsl.co.uk/blog/2020/1/29/ieee754-is-not-followed
saved 2025-02-11

Elementary Functions and NOT Following the IEEE 754 Floating-Point Standard — TRYING TO FIND THE OBVIOUS
The IEEE-754 Standard for floating-point numbers was introduced initially in 1985 to solve the problem of diverse floating point implementations prevent code being portable and increase stability across platforms. It has been widely adopted and revised over the last 30 years and if you have dealt

Electronic localization on the structural inhomogeneities formed due to Bi and Te deficiency in the MBE grown films of AFM topological insulator MnBi2Te4: Evidence from spectroscopic ellipsometry and infrared studies
N. N. Kovaleva, D. Chvostova, T. N. Fursova, A. V. Muratov, S. I. Bozhko, Yu. A. Aleshchenko, A. Dejneka, D. V. Ishchenko, O. E. Tereshchenko, K. I. Kugel

Electronic localization on the structural inhomogeneities formed due to Bi and Te deficiency in the MBE grown films of AFM topological insulator MnBi2Te4: Evidence from spectroscopic ellipsometry and infrared studies
The intrinsic substitutional and antisite defects cause unintentional doping and shift of the E_F position above the conduction band minimum in the AFM topological insulator (TI) MnBi2Te4. This prevents measurements of the quantum anomalous Hall effect (QAH) and investigation of the topological Dirac states. In the present study, the Mn-Bi-Te films grown by the MBE technique onto Si(111) substrates with decreasing Bi and Te contents and increasing Mn content were investigated by 0.5-6.5 eV spec…

Observation of the Shadows of the Moon and Sun Using the Pierre Auger Observatory at an Average Energy of $7\times10^{17}\,$eV
Katar\'ina \v{S}imkov\'a (for the Pierre Auger Collaboration)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08582

Observation of the Shadows of the Moon and Sun Using the Pierre Auger Observatory at an Average Energy of $7\times10^{17}\,$eV
The interaction of cosmic rays with celestial bodies such as the Moon or the Sun produces a shadow in the arrival direction distribution of the cosmic rays reaching the Earth. Such deficits from an isotropic flux have been observed by astroparticle observatories below energies of $10^{15}\,$eV. Above this energy, measurements were limited due to the low number of events as a result of the steeply falling cosmic-ray flux with energy. With more than 10.6 million events recorded during 20 years of…

Google announces Gemma 3 270M, a compact model designed for task-specific fine-tuning with strong capabilities in instruction following and text structuring (Google Developers Blog)
https://developers.googleblog.com/en/introducing-gemma-3-270m/

Introducing Gemma 3 270M: The compact model for hyper-efficient AI- Google Developers Blog
Explore Gemma 3 270M, a compact, energy-efficient AI model for task-specific fine-tuning, offering strong instruction-following and production-ready quantization.