Tootfinder

Dr. Gladys West,
the pioneering mathematician whose work laid the foundation for modern GPS technology,
has died. She passed away Saturday, surrounded by her loving family. She was 95.
Born into poverty on a Virginia farm during the Jim Crow era, West grew up in a segregated South where opportunity was scarce.
Through determination and extraordinary academic talent,
she graduated first in her high school class and earned a scholarship to Virginia State College …

Dr. Gladys West, Mathematician Whose Work Made GPS Possible, Dies at 95
ALEXANDRIA, VA — Dr. Gladys West, the pioneering mathematician whose work laid the foundation for modern GPS technology, has died. She passed away

of course, all the requisite hugops to everybody at AWS, but I will share a little secret: I always tried to hold the line on Glitch being entirely hosted within US-EAST-1 simply because I knew that it would make people more forgiving of outages and downtime once they knew where we were hosted.

A look at Track Star, a YouTube music quiz show that has become a stop on the celebrity promo trail and has started creating documentary-style music features (Jessica M. Goldstein/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/arts/music/track-star-youtub…

How Track Star Became a YouTube and TikTok Music Phenomenon
“Track Star” is the YouTube series that brings out the music lover in celebrities and civilians alike.

"The case that turned the justices into art critics"
Andy Warhol would Warhol-ize Goldsmith’s photo and produce an image of Prince as a music icon. Decades later, these two contrasting portraits of Prince would wind up at the Supreme Court, with Goldsmith claiming copyright infringement and Warhol’s foundation claiming “fair use.”

For Now.
There’s a glitch in the model here because Disney or whoever can easily mix original work with AI-created work in such a way that the amalgamated works are protected. AI isn’t copylefted: it doesn’t infect works that it is linked to. @…

Weekend #Plankton Factoid 🦠🦐
Hypoxia (low oxygen) is a serious environmental impact in some coastal marine and freshwater environments, often referred to as "dead zones". In spite of the name, while fish are absent, they can be teeming with crustacean and gelateous zooplankton, which have remarkable tolerance to hypoxia. Some cladoceran zooplankton even produce hemoglobin to store …

"The case that turned the justices into art critics"
Andy Warhol would Warhol-ize Goldsmith’s photo and produce an image of Prince as a music icon. Decades later, these two contrasting portraits of Prince would wind up at the Supreme Court, with Goldsmith claiming copyright infringement and Warhol’s foundation claiming “fair use.”

Video-call glitches trigger uncanniness and harm consequential life outcomes
Nature (2025)
#teamresopal

Video-call glitches trigger uncanniness and harm consequential life outcomes - Nature
Glitches in video calls can have a negative effect on the judgement of the people involved and correspond to worse outcomes in major areas of life such as job interviews and parole hearings.

I get a steady stream in my replies of meant-to-be-helpful advice of the form “You should use [complex F/OSS tech] to [do complex thing] that [solves a problem you don’t have but renders the process unusable for the people doing it]”
…when the real tech problems we’re facing on the ground here, both with Signal and other tools, are 99% just ground-level UX stuff:
- basic, basic usability glitches
- workflow friction
- problematic default settings
- reliability

🚨 New SciFi story out by the excellent Pippa Goldschmidt, free and sponsored by the *National Academy of Sciences*
https://issues.org/futuretensefiction/the-way-out-pippa-goldschmidt/

The Way Out | Future Tense Fiction
Can animal behavior predict extreme weather? Pippa Goldschmidt’s story imagines a future in which analysts anticipate climate catastrophes by monitoring bats.