Tootfinder

Since it was relevant to a discussion I just had on here and is something most people probably haven't thought about much (unless you've taken one of a handful of philosophy classes), I thought I'd try to lay out a key piece of Descartes' Meditations (#philosophy

Trump pulled the US out of the Network for Greening the Financial System last year, leaving Europe to take the lead on climate-related risks without the involvement of the world’s most powerful economy.
Dutch banker and lawyer Elderson said the banking industry remained convinced that climate and nature-related risks had to be addressed.
“I would think it’s very difficult to find a bank in Europe that will honestly tell you that they think this is not relevant,” he said.
“I…

ECB official warns climate crisis poses growing threat to ‘core financial stability’
Exclusive: As wildfires rage across Europe, Frank Elderson tells the Guardian nature loss poses a growing risk to the global economy

Trenchant analysis and awesome/enviable D&D campaign-level world building
> the corporation is a class of human-hostile immortal/undead (but thankfully not quite unkillable) entity which literally wants to turn the world into paperclips
https://kolektiva.social/@tiotasram/11

Terwijl veel minder relevante onderwerpen momenteel het nieuws beheersen.
"Je kunt het je niet voorstellen, maar de kans op een wereldoorlog is in geen jaren zo groot geweest"
Interessante boekentips van NRC.

Je kunt het je niet voorstellen, maar de kans op een wereldoorlog is in geen jaren zo groot geweest
Oorlog en vrede: Drie prominente auteurs laten in hun nieuwe boeken zien hoe de huidige internationale conflicten weinig nodig hebben om in een nieuwe wereldoorlog te ontaarden. De enige remedie is volgens hen een geloofwaardige afschrikking.

"15 years of climate research gathered on Lufthansa scheduled flights"
#Lufthansa #Climate #ClimateChange

15 years of climate research gathered on Lufthansa scheduled flights
For 15 years, a Lufthansa Airbus A340-300 has been carrying not only passengers around the world but also a piece of research from Jülich. On July 8, 2011, the aircraft with the registration D-AIGT took off for the first time with an IAGOS measuring system on board. Since then, it has been collecting climate-relevant atmospheric data on regular scheduled flights—coordinated by Forschungszentrum Jülich.

Does life-satisfaction inequality measure societal inequality? A focal-value-rounding critique
C. P. Barrington-Leigh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12667 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.12667 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.12667
arXiv:2608.12667v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The dispersion of self-reported life satisfaction has been proposed and used as a comprehensive measure of societal inequality. A negative cross-country association between mean life satisfaction and its standard deviation has been read as evidence that this inequality is itself welfare-relevant, but critics have pointed to the nonlinearity and boundedness of response scales. I describe a further problem: a substantial and predictable share of respondents simplify the 0--10 scale to the subset {0, 5, 10} --- "focal-value rounding" (FVR) --- a behaviour that breaks not only linearity of the scale but even its order. I derive a sharp bound on the bias that FVR can induce in the standard-deviation; at empirically-typical FVR fractions the possible bias is roughly half the cross-country range of dispersion. I estimate and correct for the bias by fitting a model of FVR behavior to the Gallup World Poll Cantril ladder and three other multi-country life evaluations. FVR inflates measured standard deviation in 133 of 135 countries, by a median of 0.090 points. However, because the corrections are nearly uniform in sign across countries, rankings of the standard deviation survive essentially intact. The ordinal inequality indices advocated as the theoretically appropriate alternative suffer even worse from FVR. The correlation between mean and standard deviation survives FVR correction with modest attenuation and some caveats. Thus FVR does not, by itself, overturn previously reported correlations; it does, however, add a further reason for caution in interpreting scalar measures of subjective wellbeing inequality: candidate statistics are differently contaminated, the ordinal repairs no less than the cardinal originals, and they disagree with one another. Lastly, I show that FVR-correction can improve the pairwise dominance-comparability of full distributions.
toXiv_bot_toot

Anyone knows the state of federation/ForgeFed in Forgejo rn?
I want to migrate away from github, maybe to a selfhosted Forgejo, maybe to git.gay, maybe to codeberg and I wanted to be able to star/PR/issue repos in other forges. Not that I do anything relevant, but I wanted to be able to receive stars/PRs/issues in my stuff too even if I decided to self host!
@… @… @… #Forgejo #Codeberg #ForgeFed

Surface Waves Alter Air Entrainment During Water Entry
Chase T. Gabbard, Mario Ibrahim, Joseph Quinton, Eli Silver, Jesse Belden, Daniel M. Harris
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.20067 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.20067 https://arxiv.org/html/2607.20067
arXiv:2607.20067v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: When a sphere crosses an air-water interface it can entrain a significant volume of air, a process relevant to numerous naval, industrial, and environmental settings. While air entrainment through sphere impact onto quiescent baths has been extensively studied, real-world interfaces are inherently unsteady, and the influence of surface waves is less understood. In this Letter, we systematically investigate the effect of interfacial geometry on the air entrained by impacting hydrophobic spheres onto an axisymmetric wavefield. By analyzing the resulting cavity across a wide parameter space, including wave phase, driving amplitude, and frequency, we reveal that local interface deformation dramatically alters air entrainment. This effect is driven by a geometric modulation of the splash curtain, which shifts the transition between cavity closure modes. We demonstrate that the influence of the waves is fully described by the local wave slope at the radius of the sphere, which alongside the Weber number We and Bond number Bo, establishes a foundational parametric framework for predicting air entrainment and cavity metrics across highly dynamic, real-world surfaces like the open ocean.
toXiv_bot_toot

Just finished "Rialto" by Kate Milford. A wonderful book with a *lot* of things to like but also a few I wish had been done differently.
Starting with the good stuff, an #OwnVoices portrayal of anxiety depression is always welcome, *especially* one that portrays positive coping strategies, including active therapy, and complex but ultimately supportive family dynamics. Dad & daughter each reminding each other to use calming strategies at different points in the book was lovely, and getting to see the complexities of the trying to be a supportive sibling was great! Larger than that aspect, portraying a YA adventure in which the parents are actively involved but don't spoil things is so great and must have been difficult to pull off. Most YA stuff quickly ushers the parents out of the picture, and this fails to provide any kind of positive or negative role model for parent/child interaction. This book had ample examples of the former, *and* let the kids have plenty of agency too. Excellent stuff that I absolutely want to see more of.
So what didn't I like?
First, as an anarchist, I always hate to see unapologetically positive (and thus drastically unrealistic) portrayals of the police. Without getting into spoilers, even the stuff about the Piepowder court bothered me. It's presented here as a cutesy alternate court tradition, but I can't help but speculate that these courts were likely not always fair in practice, and the whole "single person makes immediate judgments model" from this book is terrible in general. I just don't like positive portrayals of terrible systems that happen to be good because the people involved are good people, since they reinforce harmful positive mental models of "justice" that don't apply to the real world. This element wasn't enough to totally spoil the book for me (the plot could have mostly functioned without it) but it's a downside to me.
Second, the book is set in rural Missouri, and has plenty of Black characters. Yay for representation? Certainly better than the cast being all-white given the setting. But the book doesn't have any Black *culture* that I picked up on, and it chooses to try to completely sidestep the relevant history. Maybe I'm just not attuned to elements that were there; if anyone who read this did see them feel free to point them out. The history definitely isn't there though... for example, was the park segregated, or not? During the time it was active one imagines most parks would have been, and that if it hadn't been that would have been a very important difference, which would even have been relevant to the plot and themes of the book as written.
Now perhaps this critique is unfair because Black children and young adults *should* get to see themselves portrayed in cozy fantasies without things always having to be about racism... In a choice between erasing Black characters and erasing racism (and especially racist histories) maybe there's no right answer here and this is fine, actually. My instinct tells me that there are ways to do better, though, and that presenting a history with all the racism carefully elided isn't the greatest compromise to make here.
A while ago I read "Under the Heron's Light" by Randi Pink. It also has mythical animal guides, a Southern setting, helpful family members, a multi-generational mystery to solve, and a (slightly older) teen protagonist who is up to the task. In contrast, it is all about racist history, and takes us through multiple extremely harrowing scenes from the past.
In any case, this discomfort also wasn't a deal-breaker for me, in part because, as I said, I think it's probably good for Black children to see uncomplicatedly positive representations of people like them alongside the plenty of stuff out there that does get deep into the racism and history. I also don't have the best perspective to judge this stuff, although that doesn't mean I should default to "it's probably fine" (I'd be happy to hear from anyone who feels they have a better perspective on this, about this book or the trend in general...).
Overall, I enjoyed Rialto quite a lot. I don't think it quite makes it into my top tier of recommendations for my kids, but I think it does make the list somewhere.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon