Tootfinder

NASA is racing to save an aging telescope from falling back to Earth with a daring rescue mission.
The $30 million salvage operation gets underway as soon as this week with the planned launch of a robotic lifesaver.
NASA hired startup
Katalyst Space Technologies
to boost the Swift Observatory to a higher orbit
where it can continue hunting for some of the universe’s biggest explosions.
A three-armed spacecraft built by Katalyst will chase after Swift once …

NASA races to save the Swift telescope with a $30M robotic rescue mission
NASA is racing to save its Swift telescope from falling back to Earth with a daring rescue mission. The salvage effort gets underway as soon as this week with the planned launch of a robotic lifesaver. NASA has hired Katalyst Space Technologies to boost Swift to a higher orbit where it can continue hunting for some of the universe's biggest explosions. Launched in 2004, Swift has been sinking faster and faster because of recent intense solar activity. It needs to get to a higher orbit as soon a…

One click sends a command
from the Home Assistant app
on my mobile phone
via WiFi
to the WiFi Router
to a Satellite
to a ground station in Germany
to my VPN endpoint in Iceland
to London
to Amsterdam
to Frankfurt
to Zurich
to Winterthur
to my router
to my reverse proxy
to my Home Assistant server
to my access point
to the WiFi
to the WiFi-Bridge
to the door lock
*click* *motor whirring* *door…

I was feeling unwell this morning but was stern with myself and went out to get on with a little work in the wood, measuring up the frame for my new workshop. But I slipped and fell my length into a pile of fallen timber covered in brambles... I'm not really hurt, but I'm sore and bloody, and I'm going back to bed.

Nothing in this article will be a surprise to those working in Scottish Higher Education, but it does make clear the scale of the challenge facing universities. The government crackdown on international students has been particularly hard hitting.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0lr8rp…

Scotland's universities face 'bleak' future as £200m funding gap revealed
A new report paints a 'bleak' picture of falling income from Scottish students and an over-reliance on international tuition fees.

recent-ish reading/rereading. #books

Semi-subtoot: there's a certain kind of anti-genocide narrative that draws comparisons between the Gaza genocide and the genocide of Jews, queer, and disabled people during WW2, with an incredulous overtone, the subtext of which is: if the good nations invaded Germany to stop the Nazis' evil in WW2, it's hypocritical for this nations not to take action to protect Gazan civilians now. There are a couple of problems with this line of reasoning, but the most obvious from an anarchist perspective (which sees "good nation" for the oxymoron it is) is that it's ahistorical. The reasons for the various allies' entrance into WW2 are varied, but they weren't about good and evil, and in fact the full depth of the evils of the Holocaust *was not known* in allied countries until after the war. Nations never really do things to "fight evil" like some humans might; they always act out of a kind of (imperfect) self-interest. The motivations for many of the allies were simply "we don't want Germany to conquer and destroy us" (and the imperfection in that motive is amply evident in the appeasement that preceded the war). America was of course not swayed by that motive, and it was the Japanese that (thinking the issue would have to come to a head eventually and that a surprise attack was worth speeding it up) put America in a situation where it joined for similar reasons.
Why is this extra relevant right now? Because neither the US nor any European country is existentially threatened by Israel (or threatened at all in fact, quite the opposite they're all benefiting economically from the situation in Gaza). The lesson of history isn't "brave, good nations will stand up to fight against anyone who commits genocide or other major evils", it's "nations act in their narrow and twisted and often mistaken self-interest (the interest of the national entity, which is often counter to the interest of it's citizens), and they always mythologize their actions after the fact as having been a fight against evil, which sometimes by luck is partially true."
To double down on this point: in the European theater the U.S. war actions were pretty good overall, defeating an evil opponent through military force and being a fairly gracious victor to the civilian populations there. In contrast, in the Pacific theater the U.S. was one of two evil empires duking it out for global dominance at the expense of civilians on both sides. The Japanese empire was a vile regime and perpetrated horrors in China, Korea, and across southeast Asia. The U.S. was barely better, between Japanese internment camps at home, and mass targeting of civilians on Japan, both with the firebombing of Tokyo and especially the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
So if your model of how we stop genocide is "convince the good guys to invade (or exert political pressure) and save the day", your model is wrong. That's not what happened in WW2. I'm not confident I know the perfect solution, but I do think it involves a mass of people making increasingly disruptive protest so that the cost *to rich companies and thus politicians* of falling to intervene is too high to stomach. That's a large part of what succeeded in South Africa, for example. Thankfully, there is already a vibrant protest movement to end the genocide in Gaza, and even though they haven't been fully successful yet, I'm optimistic that as things naturally (and through hard work) fall apart for various fascists politically, that movement will be able to succeed.
#gaza #genocide

Donno what’s worse, the verse itself or DuckDuckGo’s generated explanation of it. @… https://partyon.xyz/@nando161/116925119988965039

Smoke Gets In Your...Hole Where Your Soul Should Be
MAGA may have a set a new mark for belligerent stupidity
BILL MCKIBBEN
JUL 20
...wildfires, and hence smoke, will persist all summer, and since the hot world we’re creating produces ever more wildfire and hence an endless supply of future smoke, I think it’s worth taking a moment to get all this on the record.
Also, the flow of smoke down from Canada has produced a perfect MRI of the MAGA nervous system, reveali…

40 years ago this weekend, jerry garcia falls into a diabetic coma & nearly dies. in the hospital, his heart stops following an allergic reaction when doctors give him valium. the dead will cancel 30 dates through fall. he relearns to play guitar & is performing again by october.