Tootfinder

It's a misleading title. But a bold hypothesis ->
Canada to Join EU - First Non-European Member, €150B Defence Access, Treaty Can Be Amended
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_MozOqbeGM

Weekend #Plankton Factoid 🦠🦐
The equinox has returned, so let's talk spring phytoplankton blooms. Temperature and light has increased to create stratification (warm water layer floats over a denser one). Algae is kept near the surface, growing quickly without sinking into the depths. This is the Sverdrup (1953) Critical Depth Hypothesis.
Dr. David Shull at Western Washington Univ…

What @… says is what a lot of us have been lamenting since the ICE invasion started. Shouldn’t local police protect citizens from ICE?? Why this hasn’t happened is a really good question. Factors to consider:
- “Obstructing a federal agent” is illegal, and local police / politicians feel constrained by that (even if the agents themselves don’t seem constrained by the actual law at all, only by what they think they can get away with)
- Police can in theory cite federal agents for e.g. traffic violations or illegal plate swapping after the fact, as long as they’re not “obstructing” the agents — but how do you cite a masked person with fake plates who refuses to give ID?
- Some police are visibly supportive of ICE, chumming it up with them and giving literal fist bumps; a nontrivial subset are outright closet Nazis. A lot of people don’t really see any need to go past “ACAB” as a full explanation for all of this — and certainly The ACAB Hypothesis is…um, not really being proved false right now in Minneapolis.
- I think some police quietly resent ICE for stepping on their turf, but that does not seem to have boiled up into actual confrontation in MSP. One police leader here painted it in early Dec as “some people want to instigate a confrontation between Minneapolis Police, and that’s not going to happen.” Police culture says that police should be a neutral party in a dispute between ICE and residents, and actually protecting residents would be taking sides. (Duh, yes, taking sides that way is your literal job, you dumbasses…but I digress.)
- Some police (especially leadership) really want to get on the community’s good side after the murder of George Floyd, and see this as an opportunity, but unfortunately this has materialized entirely as non-interventionist support: “We responded to a 911 call and help a distressed resident after her husband was abducted!” “We transported children left parentless on the streets by ICE safely back to their home!” “Our officers volunteered at the food shelf!” OK, nice, good for you buddy.
So yeah, I’m wondering this too, and am bitter about it. https://tilde.zone/@n1xnx/115928447564126393

Hi #fediverse. We need to talk about something.
While talking to a colleague about how I recently learned most people have never sat on a crow it came up that she has never been sat on by a cat. Like, not even once during childhood.
Another colleague admitted they also have never been sat on by a cat.
My hypothesis is that most people have at one point in their life sat on b…

"The most recent orbital computations make it increasingly likely that the object [the new #Kreutz comet MAPS] is a fragment of one of the comets observed by Ammianus Marcellinus in AD 363, thereby strengthening evidence in support of the contact-binary hypothesis of the Kreutz system," writes Zdenek Sekanina in https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.17626: "In this context, the comet is the only second-generation fragment of Aristotle's comet that we are aware of to appear after the 12th century. It does not look like a major fragment, but rather like an outlying fragment of a much larger sungrazer."

Mystery of Armenia’s Giant 6,000-Year-old ‘Dragon Stones’ is Finally Solved https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/mystery-of-armenias-6000-year-old-dragon-stones-believed-solved/

Mystery of Armenia’s Giant 6,000-Year-old 'Dragon Stones' is Finally Solved
The research team's working hypothesis is that the stones are tied to an ancient water cult, but it took a few wrong guesses to get there.

Hypothesis: Every sufficiently large, complex, or performance sensitive application will eventually end up with a custom memory pool or allocator of some sort.

Erich von Däniken died today at the age of 90. I know, I know what most of you are going to say, but in my teenage years, his books had a profound influence on me (amusingly, I encountered it first in their Serbo-Croatian translation, maybe my first "real" book I read in Croatian). More than the ancient alien hypothesis, his books took me to many fascinating corners of the world, be it in the Americas, in India, Sub-Saharan Africa, or the English countryside. 1/3

Ammonites made it through the K-Pg extinction event according to this paper! #FossilFriday 🤯
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-34479-1

Ammonite survival across the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary confirmed by new data from Denmark - Scientific Reports
We provide a reassessment of the hypothesis of ammonite survival across the Cretaceous–Paleogene (Maastrichtian–Danian) boundary, based on new data from the lower Danian Cerithium Limestone Member at Stevns Klint, eastern Denmark. The occurrence of this unit in disjunct basins between eroded crests of uppermost Maastrichtian bryozoan mounds prompts a reconsideration of ammonite redeposition as an alternative to the survival hypothesis. We describe new ammonite specimens from the Cerithium L…

In a few days the #PlanetNine hypothesis - first published on 20 Jan 2016 in the paper https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/0004-6256/151/2/22 ("EVIDENCE FOR A DISTANT GIANT PLANET IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM", yes, they shouted it in all caps) - will turn 10 years old. The proposed big outer solar system inhabitant has never been found: https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/planet-9-x-y-edge-of-solar-system reviews the situation.

If you have neither
- a question that it's supposed to answer
- a hypothesis you want to test
- a set of variables or metrics you are actively following
you have no "experiment".

Hate to share this because it's so unconfirmed but Spain's Transport Minister said one hypothesis is a cyberattack.
Travel chaos in Catalonia as ‘suspected cyber attack’ hobbles train network leaving thousands stranded amid intermittent services
…

Catalonia travel chaos: thousands stranded as suspected cyber attack disrupts rail network
Thousands of travelers face delays and stranded journeys in Catalonia after a suspected cyber attack disrupts the regional train network, causing intermittent service and widespread travel chaos.

A complete set of canonical nucleobases in the carbonaceous asteroid (162173) #Ryugu: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-026-02791-z -> "The detection of diverse nucleobases in asteroid and meteorite materials demonstrates their widespread presence throughout the Solar System and reinforces the hypothesis that carbonaceous asteroids contributed to the prebiotic chemical inventory of early Earth."

Interesting observation from today (a beautiful, cloudless day): We got *less* solar power than a few days ago, when it was partly cloudy. Significantly less, by almost a factor of two vs the previous peak (and closer to what we got on fairly rainy days).
My working hypothesis at this point: the sun is low in the sky because it's winter, and spends a significant fraction of its time partly occluded by trees.
On a cloudy day, shading isn't really a thing because you have t…

Fast $k$-means Seeding Under The Manifold Hypothesis
Poojan Shah, Shashwat Agrawal, Ragesh Jaiswal
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01104 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.01104 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.01104
arXiv:2602.01104v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study beyond worst case analysis for the $k$-means problem where the goal is to model typical instances of $k$-means arising in practice. Existing theoretical approaches provide guarantees under certain assumptions on the optimal solutions to $k$-means, making them difficult to validate in practice. We propose the manifold hypothesis, where data obtained in ambient dimension $D$ concentrates around a low dimensional manifold of intrinsic dimension $d$, as a reasonable assumption to model real world clustering instances. We identify key geometric properties of datasets which have theoretically predictable scaling laws depending on the quantization exponent $\varepsilon = 2/d$ using techniques from optimum quantization theory. We show how to exploit these regularities to design a fast seeding method called $\operatorname{Qkmeans}$ which provides $O(\rho^{-2} \log k)$ approximate solutions to the $k$-means problem in time $O(nD) \widetilde{O}(\varepsilon^{1 \rho}\rho^{-1}k^{1 \gamma})$; where the exponent $\gamma = \varepsilon \rho$ for an input parameter $\rho < 1$. This allows us to obtain new runtime - quality tradeoffs. We perform a large scale empirical study across various domains to validate our theoretical predictions and algorithm performance to bridge theory and practice for beyond worst case data clustering.
toXiv_bot_toot

AI won't reduce the number of programmers. It will create millions more, because running code you cannot understand is not programming. It is faith.
https://www.ocrampal.com/there-will-be-more-programmers-not-fewer/

There Will Be More Programmers, Not Fewer
AI won't reduce the number of programmers. It will create millions more, because running code you cannot understand is not programming. It is faith. Part I — The Hypothesis The Democratization Arc, and What It Actually Produced. The prevailing narrative about AI and programming runs like this: LLMs will automate code