@cdarwin@c.im2025-08-06 03:14:42
A federal judge on Tuesday blocked the Trump administration from reallocating $4 billion meant to help communities protect against natural disasters.
U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns in Boston granted a preliminary injunction sought by 20 Democrat-led states while their lawsuit over the funding moves ahead.
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell said in a statement that she would continue fighting to make sure “communities can adequately prepare for natural disasters
@blakes7bot@mas.torpidity.net2025-07-08 06:20:19
#Blakes7 Series D, Episode 11 - Orbit
VILA: Hideaway? Avon, if I got my hands on that kind of money, I'd have gone somewhere I could enjoy it. What is the point of having money if you have to exist on a hole like that!
AVON: You are forgetting, there is a big difference between you and Egrorian. HE has a brain.
@arXiv_astrophSR_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-06-03 07:39:30
Binarity at LOw Metallicity (BLOeM): Pipeline-Determined Physical Properties of OB Stars
J. M. Bestenlehner, Paul A. Crowther, V. A. Bronner, S. Simon-Diaz, D. J. Lennon, J. Bodensteiner, N. Langer, P. Marchant, H. Sana, F. R. N. Schneider, T. Shenar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00117
@arXiv_csSD_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-06-04 07:46:28
TalkingMachines: Real-Time Audio-Driven FaceTime-Style Video via Autoregressive Diffusion Models
Chetwin Low, Weimin Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03099 …
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-06-09 17:55:55
Apple announces a new live translation feature across Messages, FaceTime, and Phone apps, but has not yet said how many languages will be supported (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/09/appl…
@NFL@darktundra.xyz2025-07-22 02:01:42
D.C. mayor focused on getting Commanders stadium deal done: 'Nobody is waiting in the wings with $2.7 billion'
https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/d…
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-06-28 13:30:10
In Ursula K. Le Guin's "A Man of the People" (part of "Four Ways to Forgiveness") there's a scene where the Hainish protagonist begins studying history. It's excellent in many respects, but what stood out the most to me was the softly incomprehensible idea of a people with multiple millions of years of recorded history. As one's mind starts to try to trace out the implications of that, it dawns on you that you can't actually comprehend the concept. Like, you read the sentence & understood all the words, and at first you were able to assemble them into what seemed like a conceptual understanding, but as you started to try to fill out that understating, it began to slip away, until you realized you didn't in fact have the mental capacity to build a full understanding and would have you paper things over with a shallow placeholder instead.
I absolutely love that feeling, as one of the ways in which reading science fiction can stretch the brain, and I connected it to a similar moment in Tsutomu Nihei's BLAME, where the android protagonists need to ride an elevator through the civilization/galaxy-spanning megastructure, and turn themselves off for *millions of years* to wait out the ride.
I'm not sure why exactly these scenes feel more beautifully incomprehensible than your run-of-the-mill "then they traveled at lightspeed for a millennia, leaving all their family behind" scene, other than perhaps the authors approach them without trying to use much metaphor to make them more comprehensible (or they use metaphor to emphasize their incomprehensibility).
Do you have a favorite mind=expanded scene of this nature?
#AmReading
@adlerweb@social.adlerweb.info2025-07-26 15:47:57
@grumpybozo@toad.social2025-07-21 13:35:31
If we had any multibillionaires who wanted to make a big splash in effectively fighting the Fash, fully funding CPB (and hence, indirectly, PBS and NPR) would be a useful thing. A billion dollars is a lot of money, no one needs even one, much less more than one.
Sadly, we don’t.
@Mediagazer@mstdn.social2025-07-10 01:15:50
A look at celebrity impersonation scams and the steps taken by Hollywood to combat them, including a likeness management tool CAA is developing with YouTube (Rebecca Keegan/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business
