Tootfinder

The front-yard garden. You don't need much space to grow an awful lot.
#gardening #BloomScrolling

"""
The barbarian role of cultural demolition crew is especially important when you consider how often cultural reconstruction is needed. Many of Rome’s glaring defects — exploitation, authoritarianism, corrupt self-aggrandizement — flow from deeply human tendencies. Time and again they’ve transformed promising civilizations into decaying, oppressive monstrosities. Time and again, history seems to cry out: Bring on the demolition crew! And time and again barbarians cheerfully respond to the call. Their previous massive wreaking of destruction, near the end of the second millennium B.C., had come after civilization went through centuries of apparent ossification.
In a way, barbarians are just a special case of that general and potent zero-sum dynamic in cultural evolution: brutal competition among neighboring societies. This rivalry renders ossified cultures vulnerable to a makeover, minor or major. They may be taken over by a vast neighboring civilization, which will revamp them in its image. Or they may be infiltrated and perhaps even disassembled by barbarians, paving the way for future reassembly. Or they may revive and prevail — an example of the “challenge and response” dynamic stressed by Arnold Toynbee. In any event, the point remains the same: however deeply human the tendencies of exploitation, authoritarianism, and self-aggrandizement, cultures that surrender to them may not be long for this world.
"""
(Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny)
Is it time for the barbarians now? Or perhaps we — here on Fedi — are the barbarians.

#birdsOfMastodon #birds #naturePhotography
A cormorant standing on rocks at the edge of a pond. June 2025

My bike is in the shop so I rode the old Raleigh today. It wasn't great.
I did get new tires & tubes, but the shifting is still bad, the brakes not great, hand grips not comfortable, the gearing is blah. I don't think I could take hills with it.
It's a 3 speed but sometimes I just can't get it to shift.
I did just 3 miles around the neighborhood and the chain came off after the first mile. On my Trek I can get the chain on in 15 seconds. This thing took…

I should have kept my mouth shut when I went to my neighbourhood internet provider to pay the monthly fee, but I asked the hypothetical how much it would cost to upgrade from my 10 years old 100-Mbps limit. They immediately upgraded me to 500 Mbps, correcting the monthly fee to minus €0,50 🤯
There goes my secret deterrent against going off the rails with playing all the video games. You might've noticed it's kind of a problem 😑

Oh those poor ICE goons. They are so afraid of getting a nasty e-mail. Oh woe is them.
Yet they beat up, arrest, deport, and terrorize people. True Nazi scum those ICE people.
And they insist they must hide their identities - as in "The Trial" by Kafka.
I, on the other hand, think they should be exposed - totally exposed: name, affiliation, DNA sequence and so forth. They should even be required, like sex offenders, to walk neighborhoods warning of their prese…

#Vancouver Gastown Public Spaces survey
Take the survey and share your experience of the following neighbourhood changes:
Public space enhancements on Water Street
Two-way Cordova Street
Sunday pedestrian zone (10 am to 6 pm)

Now I’m on MIRAC’s mailing list, so hopefully I don’t miss the next one.
Also, though…it is just deeply heartening to randomly encounter a protest: not a thing that I already knew about, but a thing that just •showed up• in my neighborhood. It makes me feel like the circle of resistance is much bigger than my own little circle. And it is.
That’s the feeling I want us to create: “Wow, these protests are everywhere.”

That thing where a neighbour goes on a bit of an “anti-woke” grumble on the neighbourhood chat then asks for help the very next day…
#lgbtq

The Neighbour Sum Problem on Trees
Sayan Dutta, Sohom Gupta
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23965 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.23965

The Neighbour Sum Problem on Trees
A graph $\mathcal G = (\mathcal V, \mathcal E)$ is said to satisfy the Neighbour Sum Property if there exists some $f:\mathcal V\to\mathbb R$ such that $f\not\equiv 0$ and it maps every vertex to the sum of the values taken by its neighbours. In this article, we provide an algorithm to check whether a given finite tree satisfies the neighbour sum property. We also find a large class of trees on $n$ vertices that satisfy the property.