Tootfinder

Still as cis as ever, but I thought I'd show my support by posting an interesting transition metal compound from my lab inventory.
Here's a solution of tantalum chloride in ethanol/methanol, intended for sol-gel deposition of tantalum pentoxide thin films. You spin coat it on a substrate then heat in air; the chlorine swaps with an oxygen in atmospheric water vapor and you get HCl gas evaporating and Ta2O5 on the surface.

"People should not tie their feeling of their own worth to their income... Most people agree we shouldn’t judge people by their bank account or their earning power but we still do it. Hey we have flaws. We also judge people based on how attractive they are and how tall they are and other far from sensible things. Study after study shows we do this even if we want to pretend we don’t."

Dutch farmland has a major water quality problem, in part due to the overload of manure ending up in ditches. Turns out that farmers have found a workaround: in just 7 years, they made 30,000 ditches disappear by filling them up, 1/3 of those illegally.
Bad for biodiversity and water management.
https:…

Hoe de sloten in Nederland verdwijnen
Jaarlijks verdwijnen duizenden sloten in Nederland, blijkt uit onderzoek van de Volkskrant, en dat gebeurt deels illegaal. Regels om de waterkwaliteit te verbeteren, geven boeren juist een prikkel om sloten dicht te gooien, en gemeenten handhaven nauwelijks. Wie daar kritisch op is, kan soms zelfs op intimidatie rekenen. ‘Als jullie terugkomen, druk ik met een shovel jullie auto in elkaar!’

Weekly Climate Solutions Digest #25!! 💖🌊✨
https://www.forpeopleandpla.net/weekly-climate-solutions-digest-25/?utm_source=bri-mastodon&utm_medium=social&src=mstdn

Weekly Climate Solutions Digest
Welcome Day and night meet as equals this week. The light feels freshly washed. In low marshes, spring peepers try out their first chorus, small notes that somehow fill the cold air. So much of our selection shares that feeling of beginnings that are also completions. Two East Coast wind

There's a general feeling that Judges shouldn't be able to make sentencing decisions that deviate from guidelines, except for the circumstances where it *would* be appropriate. How to identify those circumstances is the tricky part.
AI maybe?

WELKER: You voted to hold Bill and Hillary Clinton in criminal contempt earlier this year for failing to comply with subpoena.
Why shouldn't the same standard apply to the former AG Pam Bondi?
BYRON DONALDS: We'll see what happens when we get back to DC
https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/p…

Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com)
WELKER: You voted to hold Bill and Hillary Clinton in criminal contempt earlier this year for failing to comply with subpoena. Why shouldn't the same standard apply to the former AG Pam Bondi? BYRON DONALDS: We'll see what happens when we get back to DC

Why are we having fewer children?
(Interview with Berkay Ozcan, Professor at LSE)
- Couple formation happens at later age
- Women are choosing "careers" and not just "jobs"
- More people choose not to have kids at all
What else is going on? Short anser: we don't know yet
Even in countries providing a lot of support to parents, fertility rate has still declined
Immigration is no silver bullet. It's part of the solution, not th…

Berkay Ozcan: “Immigration is not a silver bullet for falling birth rates”
Berkay Ozcan discusses falling birth rates, whether immigration might provide the answer and what a smaller global population would mean for the environment.

this is exceedingly strange and the only obvious symptom is gtk-keystores failing to open, and a search on those can only suggest creating fresh accounts and copying over from all previous, which is far more work than blowing away #Ubuntu and starting over with #Debian13, but this SHOULDN"T be so mysterious and require such drastic measures! All that happened was perhaps an auto-update, but gdm3 rejects the first login then accepts none further, and gnome-shell --wayland will run, but highly crippled, hotkeys disabled, and many programs will not run.
Today's tech puzzle I did not ask for 😞

Hidden Higher-Order Vulnerabilities in Simplicial Complexes Revealed by Branch-Consistent Functional Robustness
Kaiming Luo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.24286 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.24286 https://arxiv.org/html/2603.24286
arXiv:2603.24286v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Robustness of higher-order networks is often quantified by the instantaneous smallest positive eigenvalue of the Hodge $1$-Laplacian under simplex deletion. We show that this observable is generically ill-defined: along a deletion trajectory, eigenvalue branches can switch, so the quantity being monitored may correspond to different nonharmonic modes at different steps. The primary issue is therefore definitional rather than algorithmic. We resolve it by fixing the first nonharmonic branch of the intact complex and following that same branch throughout the damage process, which defines a branch-consistent functional robustness. Triangle sensitivities then follow directly from first-order perturbation theory, making the resulting mode-sensitive deletion protocol a consequence of the observable itself rather than an independent heuristic. Across synthetic and empirical clique complexes, removing only a small fraction of triangles is sufficient to drive the tracked mode to collapse, while graph-level observables remain unchanged because the $1$-skeleton is exactly preserved. The same framework also reveals bridge-like localization of functionally critical simplices and provides a compact predictor of dynamical timescales.
toXiv_bot_toot