Tootfinder

Hay grown for cattle consumes nearly half the water drawn from Colorado River, study finds https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-03-28/alfalfa-hay-beef-water-colorado-river

Hay consumes a vast share of the Colorado River's water
Much of the Colorado River's water is used for agriculture. A new study shows 46% of the water that is diverted is used to grow hay to feed cattle.

from my link log —
aa-56: an astronomical ephemeris calculator program.
http://www.moshier.net/aadoc.html
saved 2024-05-28 https://

Small update to my log store build - had a bit of a disaster!
https://www.simoncox.com/post/2024-05-28-log-store-build/#step-12

Religious Studies Project Opportunities Digest – October 9, 2024
https://ift.tt/aHDBoXS
Welcome to the Religious Studies Project Opportunities Digest! This week, you will find 28 new job…
via Input 4 RELCFP

Religious Studies Project Opportunities Digest - October 9, 2024 | The Religious Studies Project
Welcome to the Religious Studies Project Opportunities Digest! This week, you will find 28 new job opportunities, 3 fellowships, 2 grants, 5 call for papers, and 3 conferences/speakers. Everyone at RSP says thank you to all who have generously supported the RSP through our Patreon and PayPal donation options! Our goal is to have 100 patrons (currently at 39!) […]

"The big problem is 'bottlenecks' that make it harder to produce housing, expand energy production, or build new roads and bridges."
vs.
"The big problem is that big corporations have way too much power over our economy and our government."
By 12pts all voters and by 42pts Dem voters prefer the second statement. They're right!

Poll: Democratic voters prefer "populism" over "abundance"
Democrats are asking themselves some hard questions as they ponder how they lost the 2024 election.

A Relativistic Jet in the Radio Quiet AGN Mrk 110
Ailing Wang, Tao An, Kenneth I. Kellermann, Hua Feng, Emmanuel K. Bempong-Manful, Roland Timmerman, Shaoguang Guo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03970

A Relativistic Jet in the Radio Quiet AGN Mrk 110
We report the discovery of a relativistic jet in Mrk~110, a narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxy historically classified as a radio-quiet active galactic nucleus (AGN). Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) observations reveal intermittent jet activity during 2015--2016 and 2022--2024, with proper motion measurements yielding superluminal velocities of $\sim3.6\pm0.6\,c$ and $\sim2.1\pm0.2\,c$, respectively. The recent jet component decelerates to $\sim 1.5\pm0.2\,c$ at a projected distance of 1.1 p…

It's not just the English Channel / La Manche.
28 deaths a day as people try to reach Spanish Canary Islands by raft or open boat.
8 drowned in the harbour on arrival yesterday when theit boat capsized.
Again. Migration by boats will continue until a) source countries get just trade, reparations and an end to neocolonialism, and meanwhile,
b) #SafeRoutes
9.757 perso…

9.757 personas fallecieron en pateras o cayucos que trataban de llegar a Canarias en 2024: 28 muertes al día
Son los datos del balance anual que realiza la ONG Caminando Fronteras con su informe 'Monitoreo Derecho a la Vida' y que suponen un aumento del 62,4% frente a las cifras del año pasado

Sennheiser generated €492.3 million in sales in 2024, despite “volatile market conditions”
#MusicTech #MusicBiz

Sennheiser generated €492.3 million in sales in 2024, despite “volatile market conditions”
The Sennheiser Group generated sales of €492.3 million across the 2024 financial year, despite facing “turbulent times” across the economic landscape. 

Last week I asked Google to stop releasing broken things. Apologists said maybe I needed to contribute more, write code or demos.
Last year I outlined some of what I *have* done and how, for the most part, Google / Web•dev doesn’t give a shit:
https://adrianroselli.com/2024/07…

Don’t Use Web•dev for Accessibility Info
Web.dev is a site from Google Chrome developer relations that provides content both to evangelize Chrome and to more broadly support the web platform. Rachel Andrew’s monthly “new to the platform” posts are effectively required reading to try to stay abreast of the browser support landscape. However, the accessibility content…

P.S. Hat tip to @… for the radium reference. He was talking about other things (https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/19/just-stop-putting-that-up-your-ass/#harm-reduction), but the whole vibe of that “Radium will magically restore you to health!” era is by far the best historical comparison I’ve found for the current froth-mouthed AI hype.

‼️Die #Petition
"Keine Weiterleitung von Gesundheitsdaten an das FDZ ohne aktive Zustimmung des Patienten vom 04.10.2024"
hat bisher 583 Mitzeichnungen.
Es fehlen noch 29417 Unterschriften bis zum 09.07.2025.

University of Chicago Becker-Friedman Institute of Economics just published research this April 2025 of how Generative AI has had "almost no significant wage or labor impact so far".
✅ Large Language Models, Small Labor Market Effects
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf

El Pais is doing an amazing work in showing how citation metrics is a call for abuse (gaming to be more precise).
https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2024-12-05/dozens-of-the-worlds-most-cited-sci…

Dozens of the world’s most cited scientists stop falsely claiming to work in Saudi Arabia
This newspaper unveiled that Saudi universities were paying up to €70,000 a year to prestigious researchers to artificially pump up Arab institutions in international academic rankings

Die @… diskutiert nicht nur, sondern kann wen auch ganz schön in die Mangel nehmen. Aber in nett.
From: @…

P.S. Hat tip to @… for the radium reference. He was talking about other things (https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/19/just-stop-putting-that-up-your-ass/#harm-reduction), but the whole vibe of that “Radium will magically restore you to health!” era is by far the best historical comparison I’ve found for the current froth-mouthed AI hype.

MOA-2022-BLG-091Lb and KMT-2024-BLG-1209Lb: Microlensing planets detected through weak caustic-crossing signals
Cheongho Han, Chung-Uk Lee, Andrzej Udalski, Ian A. Bond, Hongjing Yang, Michael D. Albrow, Sun-Ju Chung, Andrew Gould, Youn Kil Jung, Kyu-Ha Hwang, Yoon-Hyun Ryu, Yossi Shvartzvald, In-Gu Shin, Jennifer C. Yee, Weicheng Zang, Tanagodchaporn Inyanya, Sang-Mok Cha, Doeon Kim, Dong-Jin Kim, Seung-Lee Kim, Dong-Joo Lee, Yongseok Lee, Byeong-Gon Park, Richard W. Pogge, Przemek Mr…

MOA-2022-BLG-091Lb and KMT-2024-BLG-1209Lb: Microlensing planets detected through weak caustic-crossing signals
The light curves of the microlensing events MOA-2022-BLG-091 and KMT-2024-BLG-1209 exhibit anomalies with very similar features. These anomalies appear near the peaks of the light curves, where the magnifications are moderately high, and are distinguished by weak caustic-crossing features with minimal distortion while the source remains inside the caustic. To achieve a deeper understanding of these anomalies, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of the lensing events. We carried out binary-len…

Healing Melodies
- we've known for a long time that music has healing power -
#HealingMusic #NowPlaying
https://

Healing Melodies #NowPlaying
Stan Stewart - @muz4now

„Schau Katja, für den 80 cm breiten roten Radweg bekommt Bochum demnächst den Titel „Aufholer“ vom @…“
06/2024

Are there stars in Bluesky after the return of Donald Trump to the White House?
Wenceslao Arroyo-Machado, Nicolas Robinson-Garcia, Daniel Torres-Salinas
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22702

Are there stars in Bluesky after the return of Donald Trump to the White House?
This study examines the shift in the scientific community from X (formerly Twitter) to Bluesky, its impact on scientific communication, and consequently on social metrics (altmetrics). We analysed 14,497 publications from multidisciplinary and Library and Information Science (LIS) journals between January 2024 and March 2025. The results reveal a notable increase in Bluesky activity for multidisciplinary journals in November 2024, likely influenced by political and platform changes, with mentio…

from my link log —
A non-uniform quasirandom number generator for games.
https://taylorpetrick.com/blog/post/quasi-random-dist
saved 2024-08-15

A Quasi-Random Number Generator
I decided to implement a non-uniform random number generator for use in video games. The purpose of the technique is produce random events that are more consistent than a uniform distribution, similar to stratified sampling.

#OTD 2024. Rotterdam.

Where is AIED Headed? Key Topics and Emerging Frontiers (2020-2024)
Shihui Feng, Huilin Zhang, Dragan Ga\v{s}evi\'c
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20971 ht…

Where is AIED Headed? Key Topics and Emerging Frontiers (2020-2024)
In this study, we analyze 2,398 research articles published between 2020 and 2024 across eight core venues related to the field of Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED). Using a three-step knowledge co-occurrence network analysis, we analyze the knowledge structure of the field, the evolving knowledge clusters, and the emerging frontiers. Our findings reveal that AIED research remains strongly technically focused, with sustained themes such as intelligent tutoring systems, learning analyt…

Indian shot flowers with water droplets. LA Arboretum, Arcadia, California, USA. July, 2024. #laarboretum #flowers #flowerphotography

Estonia issues arrest warrant for Moroccan wanted for major pharmacy data breach https://therecord.media/estonia-arrest-warrant-pharmacy-data-breach

Einige der Absurditäten hatte ich gar nicht mitbekommen oder sie sind wieder untergegangen. #Steuerbetrug ist kein Kavaliersdelikt, auch wenn das laut Wikipedia oft so gesehen wird:
> wobei Steuerhinterziehung am häufigsten in Verbindung damit [#Kavaliersdelikt] gebracht wurde

Response to comment on Mutualism weaken the latitudinal diversity gradient among oceanic islands
Camille Delavaux, Thomas Crowther, James Bever, Evan Gora
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21006

Response to comment on Mutualism weaken the latitudinal diversity gradient among oceanic islands
In our original paper (Delavaux et al. 2024; https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07110-y), we find that the latitudinal diversity gradient (LDG) in plant species richness is reduced on oceanic islands worldwide. Moreover, we find that plants that associate with mutualists, including pollinators, AM fungi, and N-fixing bacteria, disproportionately contribute to this reduction. To make this assertion, we fit models of continental diversity to absolute latitude and compared mainland diversi…

Comment on "Politicizing science funding undermines public trust in science, academic freedom, and the unbiased generation of knowledge"
John M. Herbert
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18196

Comment on "Politicizing science funding undermines public trust in science, academic freedom, and the unbiased generation of knowledge"
In a commentary published in mid-2024 (to which the present work is a direct response), a number of scientists argue that U.S. funding agencies have "politicized" the process by which grants are awarded, in service of diversifying the scientific workforce. The commentary in question, however, makes numerous unfounded assertions while recycling citations to a fusillade of opinion essays written by the same cabal of authors, in an effort to resemble a work of serious scholarship. Basic fact-check…

Alphabet Index Mapping: Jailbreaking LLMs through Semantic Dissimilarity
Bilal Saleh Husain
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12685 https://…

Alphabet Index Mapping: Jailbreaking LLMs through Semantic Dissimilarity
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, yet their susceptibility to adversarial attacks, particularly jailbreaking, poses significant safety and ethical concerns. While numerous jailbreak methods exist, many suffer from computational expense, high token usage, or complex decoding schemes. Liu et al. (2024) introduced FlipAttack, a black-box method that achieves high attack success rates (ASR) through simple prompt manipulation. This paper investigates the underly…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #BBC6Music's #6MusicsIndieForever
Bombay Bicycle Club:
🎵 Always Like This (Glastonbury 2024)
#BombayBicycleClub
https://micsmith.bandcamp.com/track/always-like-this-ft-bombay-bicycle-club
https://open.spotify.com/track/4tzmUppkUmYCAhl4Q8ubtY

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.06448 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csDL_…

Gaming the Metrics? Bibliometric Anomalies and the Integrity Crisis in Global University Rankings
Global university rankings have transformed how certain institutions define success, often elevating metrics over meaning. This study examines universities with rapid research growth suggestive of metric-driven behaviors. Among the 1,000 most publishing institutions, 98 showed extreme output increases between 2018-2019 and 2023-2024. Of these, eighteen were selected for exhibiting sharp declines in first and corresponding authorship. Compared to national, regional, and international norms, thes…

Доля расходов россиян на еду подскочила до рекорда с начала войны.
Стремительное ускорение инфляции после накачки экономики триллиоными расходами на войну ударило по карманам российских потребителей. Доля расходов граждан РФ на покупку продуктов питания в апреле 2025 года достигла максимума с начала войны в Украине, показало исследование холдинга «Ромир».
В среднем потребители тратили на еду 34,6% своих расходов против 33% в начале года и 28,6% в апреле-2024. Зафиксированный «Ромир…

Two elected #Democrat political officials in #NorthernCalifornia town booked and held on $1 million bail for #arson & #insurance sch…