Tootfinder

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.

"Ocean currents can generate electricity, and our study shows Africa's seas have some of the strongest"
#Africa #Oceans #Energy

Ocean currents can generate electricity, and our study shows Africa's seas have some of the strongest
The world's oceans cover more than 70% of Earth's surface. They're filled with currents, some much stronger than the fastest flowing large rivers. These currents can be harnessed as clean, marine renewable energy. Marine energy is much more predictable and reliable than many other forms of renewable energy because unlike the sun and wind, which regularly do not produce electricity, ocean currents never stop moving around the planet. New research has found that the eastern and south-eastern coas…

1/2 “My input stream is full of it: Fear and loathing and cheerleading and prognosticating on what generative AI means and whether it’s Good or Bad and what we should be doing. All the channels: Blogs and peer-reviewed papers and social-media posts and business-news stories. So there’s lots of AI angst out there, but this is mine. I think the following is a bit unique because it focuses on cost, working backward from there.”

AI Angst

Sources: Apple is in talks to acquire US streaming rights for Formula 1 following the success of F1 the Movie, which has grossed ~$300M at the box office (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/ef6bbb12-1ef5-4fc7-bff5-77d000c36bff

Tidal Disruption in Topological Solitons and the Emergence of an Effective Horizon
Pierre Heidmann, Gela Patashuri
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05463 https:/…

Tidal Disruption in Topological Solitons and the Emergence of an Effective Horizon
We compute the dynamics of particles and strings falling into smooth horizonless spacetimes that match the Schwarzschild black hole but replace its horizon with a smooth cap in supergravity. The cap consists of a regular topological structure formed by the deformations of extra compact dimensions. We show that infalling particles follow Schwarzschild-like trajectories down to the cap, but experience rapidly growing tidal forces that reach extreme values. In addition, infalling strings encounter…

Urban Solitude III 🈳
城市孤独 III 🈳
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️Fujifilm Neopan SS, expired 1995
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography

Yiding Cao Geld mit PayPal.Me senden
Folgen Sie dem Link PayPal.Me/dingsterdingster und geben Sie den Betrag ein. Es ist bequem und sicher. Sie haben noch kein PayPal-Konto? Kein Problem.

Modular functors from conformal blocks of rational vertex operator algebras
Chiara Damiolini, Lukas Woike
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05845 https://

Modular functors from conformal blocks of rational vertex operator algebras
For a vertex operator algebra $V$, one may naturally define spaces of conformal blocks following a construction of Frenkel--Ben-Zvi generalized by Damiolini--Gibney--Tarasca. If $V$ is strongly rational, these spaces of conformal blocks form vector bundles over a suitable moduli space of algebraic curves. In this article, we establish, under the same assumptions, the widely expected topological result that the spaces of conformal blocks produce a modular functor, i.e. a modular algebra over an …

Sources: Apple is in talks to acquire US streaming rights for Formula 1 following the success of F1 the Movie, which has grossed ~$300M at the box office (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/ef6bbb12-1ef5-4fc7-bff5-77d000c36bff

Switzerland currently has hazard warnings for
- heavy rain
- flash floods
- strong wind
- droughts
- forest fires
and *drumroll*
- avalanches
The only thing missing is an earthquake.
But it would probably feel to much like Iceland then 😄
#climatechange #meteoswiss