Tootfinder

What’s brewing?
#StudioVibes
#WorkInProgress

In the final talk of the morning sessions of the #SolarEclipse Conference Thoby Dittrich talked about the Modern Eddington Experiment (the website https://moderneddingtonexperiment.org is under heavy construction): the best observing result of gravitational deflection of starlight by the Sun in the optical during solar eclipses is still Brun's from 2017 - https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.00343 - while others have tried with a vengeance since. The goal remains to observe the significant deflection of star positions between 1 and 2 solar radii from the center of the Sun: this is known as the 'forbidden zone' because the corona can be very bright here and only bright stars can be measured reliably - but those in turn are rare. It turns out that the star fields around the totally eclipsed Sun in 2027 and 2028 will be unusually rich in good candidates so there is (or should be) considerable interest in the physics didactics community to make use of these eclipses in southern Spain / northern Africa and Australia, respectively. 4/n

De VVD is een crisis in slow motion - @…
https://chrisaalberts.nl/2025/06/14/de-vvd-is-een-crisis-in-slow-motion/

Nutzer von Meta AI veröffentlichen ihre Anfragen – offenbar unbewusst
In Metas KI-App können Nutzer auf Wunsch ihre Prompts veröffentlichen. Manche Beispiele werfen die Frage auf, ob das immer ganz bewusst passiert.

On my way to The Hague, to draw the red line for Dutch government with respect to Israel's continuing genocide in Gaza.
After last time's 100,000 participants, NS put in a lot of extra trains. My very early one already has a lot of passengers in red.
#rodelijn

The full formula for the probability of "success" is:
p = {
1/(2^(-n 1)) if n is negative, or
1 - (1/(2^(n 1))) if n is zero or positive
}
(Both branches have the same value when n is 0, so the behavior is smooth around the origin.)
How can we tweak this?
First, we can introduce fixed success and/or failure chances unaffected by level, with this formula only taking effect if those don't apply. For example, you could do 10% failure, 80% by formula, and 10% success to keep things from being too sure either way even when levels are very high or low. On the other hand, this flattening makes the benefit of extra advantage levels even less exciting.
Second, we could allow for gradations of success/failure, and treat the coin pools I used to explain that math like dice pools a bit. An in-between could require linearly more success flips to achieve the next higher grade of success at each grade. For example, simple success on a crit role might mean dealing 1.5x damage, but if you succeed on 2 of your flips, you get 9/4 damage, or on 4 flips 27/8, or on 7 flips 81/16. In this world, stacking crit levels might be a viable build, and just giving up on armor would be super dangerous. In the particular case I was using this for just now, I can't easily do gradations of success (that's the reason I turned to probabilities in the first place) but I think I'd favor this approach when feasible.
The main innovation here over simple dice pools is how to handle situations where the number of dice should be negative. I'm almost certain it's not a truly novel innovation though, and some RPG fan can point out which system already does this (please actually do this, I'm an RPG nerd too at heart).
I'll leave this with one more tweak we could do: what if the number 2 in the probability equation were 3, or 2/3? I think this has a similar effect to just scaling all the modifiers a bit, but the algebra escapes me in this moment and I'm a bit lazy. In any case, reducing the base of the probability exponent should let you get a few more gradations near 50%, which is probably a good thing, since the default goes from 25% straight to 50% and then to 75% with no integer stops in between.

In der WAZ gibt es einen Städtevergleich, unter anderem zu den Themen Parken und Nahverkehr. Bochum erhält dabei die Note 3,6 für das Parken und 2,4 für den Nahverkehr. (Ach, wäre es doch nur so einfach...)
Das muss an den Erwartungen liegen, die Menschen an das Autofahren haben; ich kann mir das nicht anders erklären. Aus meiner 16-jährigen Erfahrung in der mobilen Pflege kann ich anekdotisch berichten, dass ich überall legal parken konnte, nur nicht immer vor der Haustür. (1/2)

Ui, @… spielen im September in Berlin. Im Schokoladen
#berlin #punk #punkrock…

MÄNNI - Die fröhliche Tour
MÄNNI endlich mal wieder in Berlin auf eigener Tour: Diesen September geht MÄNNI [https://mnni.de] erstmals auf eigene Headlinertour. Passend zur letzten Veröffentlichung „Das fröhliche Album“ (Dackelton Records) wird es unter dem Motto „Die fröhliche Tour“ neun Konzerte in ganz Deutschland geben. Wie gewohnt mit rauer Stimme, manchmal tiefgründig, oft politisch wird hier deutschsprachiger Punkrock mit viel Melancholie und Witz geboten. Neben den alten Hits wie „Ibuprofi“, �…

"Ein besonders schwieriges Erbe – spartenübergreifende Initiativen zur Erschließung, Digitalisierung und Erforschung des Nachlasses von Leni Riefenstahl" @…: https://blog.sbb.berlin/ri…