@cdarwin@c.im2025-08-12 03:20:03
The Los Angeles field office director for the Department of Homeland Security
testified on Monday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers
desperately needed the help of military personnel in carrying out arrests.
The question is whether Donald Trump‘s deployment of armed forces goes against U.S. law that generally prohibits the president from using the military to police domestic affairs.
Ernesto Santacruz Jr. testified at the start of a three-day trial in S…
@pre@boing.world2025-05-27 19:06:58
A wish granting god baby, granting Conrad's wishes in service of the Rani, turns London into a misogynist utopia and The Doctor into a good husband and insurance worker.
Hard to say why misogynists are so keen on the American 50s. Perhaps because it was before blacks had the vote and women could do banking.
And if anyone doubts this ridiculous tale, their table stops working and their family might call the doubt police, so they soon learn not to. All very oppressive and subversive.
Ruby manages to doubt anyway. And all the disabled people who simply never enter into Conrad's mind. Nice touch that. Great scene in the tent city filled with the dispossessed. They don't seem to have actually done anything so far but maybe they'll get more useful in part two.
Conrad is on TV telling a story about a man named Doctor Who.
Giant dinosaur skeletons walk the city, stepping over sky scrapers, and a bone palace towers above the city. Because I guess Conrad wishes for it to be so in order to give the Rani somewhere to live.
The palace is beautiful and Gothic.
But doubt is seeping in. Rogue is back, on the TV in hell, telling the Doctor that tables don't work like that. So he investigates. Gets himself reported to the doubt police who take him and Belinda to the bone palace.
The Rani's split from Miss Flood gives the pair of them a good chemistry. Queen and her maid of honour. Seems like Mrs Flood is likely to be the Rani's downfall. She doesn't like being told to make a sandwich.
A lot of exposition going on, but they at least put a hat on it: "Isn't just exposition, I need you to doubt"
So that's the reason for the strange wishes: To make the doctor have doubts so severe that the reality collapses, and Rani can rescue Omega. Omega is the dude in a Mask from the first 3 doctors episode, who gave the timelords time travel and got trapped in the underworld in the process. Timelords forgot him and never mounted a rescue, but presumably Rani is now hoping he'll bring back Galifrey.
And with London collapsing into the underworld and the doctor falling from the sky, we get the episode break and have to wait until next week.
That's not a cliff hanger, that an already-falling-from-the-cliff hanger.
Poppy really is his daughter he's shouting as he falls. And you know what that means?
🤨🤔
Back in Space Babies, the worst episode of the Nchuti seasons, that space baby asked if he was her parents and he said he wished that he was their parents.
That wish has been granted somehow?
Is this space baby Susan's mother? They have very different skin tones, but that doesn't matter much in a regenerating species.
Never have found out much about The Doctor's child. When he traveled with his granddaughter everyone assumed he'd met his own kid, the grandchild's parent.
But that doesn't have to be true for a time traveler. Maybe he met the granddaughter before he met his own kid, and maybe his own kid was just wished into his family line 60 years later (or billions of years in his timeline I guess).
Pretty fun episode but not sure it makes much sense. Why doesn't the Rani just wish for Omega to be back instead of all this doubt and underworld bollocks?
Last one next week. Super long episode. Hope it's all cleared up. Good chance we'll meet Susan again I think. And maybe see Omega's mask once more.
@arXiv_mathGT_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-08-13 08:13:02
Distinguishing Curve Types and Designer Metrics
Ara Basmajian, Sayantika Mondal
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08539 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08539
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-07-28 10:41:42
How popular media gets love wrong
Had some thoughts in response to a post about loneliness on here. As the author emphasized, reassurances from people who got lucky are not terribly comforting to those who didn't, especially when the person who was lucky had structural factors in their favor that made their chances of success much higher than those is their audience. So: these are just my thoughts, and may not have any bearing on your life. I share them because my experience challenged a lot of the things I was taught to believe about love, and I think my current beliefs are both truer and would benefit others seeing companionship.
We're taught in many modern societies from an absurdly young age that love is not something under our control, and that dating should be a process of trying to kindle love with different people until we meet "the one" with whom it takes off. In the slightly-less-fairytale corners of modern popular media, we might fund an admission that it's possible to influence love, feeding & tending the fire in better or worse ways. But it's still modeled as an uncontrollable force of nature, to be occasionally influenced but never tamed. I'll call this the "fire" model of love.
We're also taught (and non-boys are taught more stringently) a second contradictory model of love: that in a relationship, we need to both do things and be things in order to make our partner love us, and that if we don't, our partner's love for us will wither, and (especially if you're not a boy) it will be our fault. I'll call this the "appeal" model of love.
Now obviously both of these cannot be totally true at once, and plenty of popular media centers this contradiction, but there are really very few competing models on offer.
In my experience, however, it's possible to have "pre-meditated" love. In other words, to decide you want to love someone (or at least, try loving them), commit to that idea, and then actually wind up in love with them (and them with you, although obviously this second part is not directly under your control). I'll call this the "engineered" model of love.
Now, I don't think that the "fire" and "appeal" models of love are totally wrong, but I do feel their shortcomings often suggest poor & self-destructive relationship strategies. I do think the "fire" model is a decent model for *infatuation*, which is something a lot of popular media blur into love, and which drives many (but not all) of the feelings we normally associate with love (even as those feelings have other possible drivers too). I definitely experienced strong infatuation early on in my engineered relationship (ugh that sounds terrible but I'll stick with it; I promise no deception was involved). I continue to experience mild infatuation years later that waxes and wanes. It's not a stable foundation for a relationship but it can be a useful component of one (this at least popular media depicts often).
I'll continue these thoughts in a reply, by it might take a bit to get to it.
#relationships
@arXiv_astrophEP_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-07-11 08:53:31
A comprehensive study on radial velocity signals using ESPRESSO: Pushing precision to the 10 cm/s level
P. Figueira, J. P. Faria, A. M. Silva, A. Castro-Gonz\'alez, J. Gomes da Silva, S. G. Sousa, D. Bossini, M. R. Zapatero-Osorio, O. Balsalobre-Ruza, J. Lillo-Box, H. M. Tabernero, V. Adibekyan, R. Allart, S. Benatti, F. Bouchy, A. Cabral, S. Cristiani, X. Dumusque, J. I. Gonz\'alez-Hern\'andez, N. Hara, G. Lo Curto, C. Lovis, A. Mehner, P. Molaro, F. Pepe, N. C. Santos, D.…
@ruth_mottram@fediscience.org2025-06-11 11:05:14
Way back in 2022, as the world tried to readjust back to "normal" following COVID - I helped to co-organise a bootcamp with sponsorhop from the @… IASC, @… and a generous dollop of help from @… and @… colleagues.
We gathered 10 senior scientist mentors and 22 students in an old torpedo research station (now used by Roskilde University) for 10 days. It was an extremely intense period but the 4th paper produced by this talented group has just come out.
I consider facilitating #EarlyCareerScientists to work on important science problems an extremely rewarding part of my job, and I'm looking forward to the next one already as part of our PISCO project.
In the mean time, go and read this extremely cool work, collecting together a huge number of radiosonde observations going back to the 1950s over the Arctic Ocean and using them to assess how well CMIP6 models represent lower atmosphere.
#CMIP6 #ClimateModels #Arctic #ArcticClimate #SeaIce
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024JD041412
@NFL@darktundra.xyz2025-06-26 00:00:48
Saints QB Tyler Shough ready to deal with ups, downs of being rookie starter: 'You're not going to faze me if we start off 0-2 or I (expletive) suck https://www.nfl.com/news/saints-qb-tyler-shough-ready-to-deal-with-ups-downs-…
@Sustainable2050@mastodon.energy2025-06-24 18:43:01
NATO boss Rutte (fmr Dutch PM) sends app to Trump, who promptly publishes it.
"Wow, your bombing of Iran was great; it makes the world a safer place!"
Straight from The Hague, formerly known as the International City of Peace and Justice. Awkward.
@bourgwick@heads.social2025-07-03 00:51:57
@cdarwin@c.im2025-08-01 03:00:55
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in July
removed references to Donald Trump’s two impeachments
from an exhibit display
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/2025/07/31/trump-impeachment-smithsonian/
