Tootfinder

I have, as a side project, been trying to automate the generation of interesting word-clouds from English text, and it's surprisingly difficult. If you take the commonest words in a text, they're all common words:
"are" "which" "of" "this" "not" "it" "is" "for" "that" "a" "on" "but" "be" "and" "i" "to" "we" &qu…

First salt water swim of the year this evening, and it was very , very nice. Why don't I do this more often?

I want to generate pleasing colour palettes autogically in #Clojure; it seems to me that this is best done in the CIELAB colour space. There's no Clojure implementation, but there is a Java one, here:
https://www.gicentre.net/utils

giCentre utilities — giCentre

Dismantling the sawmill motor to investigate an ignition failure. Changing the spark plug didn't help. It could be the HT lead but my local small engine guru says probably the coil.
Getting to the coil requires dismantling a whole lot of stuff...

Over the past twenty-one years, I've posted 365 posts to my blog, on average one every twenty-one days. They total almost half a million words.
That's quite some corpus of work.
#Blog
#Blogging

365 posts
Checking my blog yesterday, I noticed that I had published 365 posts, one for every day of the year. Which, considering that the oldest post that remains is from the 24th June 2004, almost twenty one years ago, means that I've averaged one post every twenty-one days over that period. Mind you, I've not been consistent; there've been periods I've posted more, others I've posted less.

When Brooke Nichols plugged in the data, she couldn’t comprehend what she was seeing.
The mathematician and professor of infectious diseases at Boston University had created a model to predict the human cost of the Department of Government Efficiency’s (Doge) USAid funding cuts.
As Elon Musk, the head of Doge, arrived at the White House on Friday afternoon
to be congratulated by President Trump for his work slashing the federal budget,
the number of deaths on Nichols’…

Doge cuts to USAid blamed for 300,000 deaths — most of them children
Elon Musk’s tenure running Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency has, according to the academic Brooke Nichols, caused thousands of ‘preventable deaths’

Extremely rare fillet steak from one of my own bulls, served with pasta in a sauce made of onions, garlic, chilli, pepper, tomato, red wine and cream.
We know how to eat well in this house.
Thank you, Goblin!

There are now exactly 365 posts on my blog. So, considering I've been writing it for twenty years, I have a long term average of one post every twenty days, over all that time.
Some of them are good. I'd go further. Some of them are excellent.
https://www.journeyman.cc/blog/

Home
Random thoughts on politics, fiction and software; occasionally interesting.

Thunderstorm here this morning! Oddly refreshing.
I know there are parts of the world where thunder is common, but here it isn't.

Republicans suggest PBS 'grooming' children with Pride post (Brooke Migdon/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/homenews/lgbtq/5329282-republicans-pbs-pride-post-grooming/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250603/p33#a250603p33

Note to web designers: if you set a size for body text fonts, a substantial part of your audience won't be able to read your page at all, so you've lost them; and more tech-savvy users will either zoom the page, breaking your clever design, or remove your styling altogether (which is what I tend to do).
The user knows what size of font the user can read. The user has their preferences set up so they can read their screen. Trust the user.
And if that breaks your design, yo…

The phone speaker of my Teracube 2e no longer works. The reason I bought a Teracube was because it was designed to be repairable -- but Teracube no longer sells the necessary replacement part, so, short of finding another identical Teracube and cannibalising, it is in fact not repairable.
Does anyone make a phone which is #OpenHardware, with a published bill of materials, which could re…

"That is not to say that Mr Musk has changed nothing. His biggest impact is overseas. According to modeled predictions by Brooke Nichols, a health economist at Boston University, cuts to foreign aid could have already caused 300,000 deaths, 200,000 of them children, from starvation and from infectious diseases. "
- from The Economist

HM Govt is flushing another **fourteen billion pounds** down the toilet that is Sizewell C, a plant which will certainly never generate a kilowatt hour of unsubsidised electricity, probably never generate a kilowatt hour of needed electricity, and certainly cost our descendants far more to decommission than it costs us to build.
At the same time as stealing money from tidal and wave installations we urgently need.

Sizewell C nuclear plant gets £14.2bn government investment
The chancellor calls it a "landmark decision" but critics say the cost of the project is still unclear.

"the additional expenditure on the NHS is not about improving our living standards, but about correcting the physical consequences of the appalling food that the neoliberal food supply industry is delivering to us, which is grossly detrimental to our health. We are not, in other words, better off as a consequence of this additional expenditure" -- @…

Neoliberalism is consuming our well-being
As The Guardian has noted: Britain is on track to become a “National Health State” where half of all public spending is allocated to the NHS and social care by the end of the decade, according to a leading thinktank. They added: As the chancellor came under pressure on Thursday to defend her...

Oor Lesley mentioned this video she made on her podcast this week. As she says, this is a perfect miniature of Scotland's power problem...
But she needs to learn to pronounce Bealach na BŠ!
#ScotPol
#GridTransition

More than 900 anti-LGBTQ incidents recorded over last year: GLAAD (Brooke Migdon/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5328789-glaad-tracks-1000-lgbtq-attacks/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250602/p78#a250602p78

#Clojure map-interval
Like `map` -- apply function `f` to each element in `col` in turn and return the values returned in sequence, but in a single thread and pausing between each invocation of `f`.

Useful for example in circumstances where you're querying a rate-limited service.

Map, but with a delay
Map, but with a delay. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

Search for millicharged particles in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 13.6$ TeV
S. Alcott, Z. Bhatti, J. Brooke, C. Campagnari, M. Carrigan, M. Citron, R. De Los Santos, A. De Roeck, C. Dorofeev, T. Du, J. Goldstein, F. Golf, N. Gonzalez, A. Haas, J. Heymann, C. S. Hill, D. Imani, M. Joyce, K. Larina, R. Loos, S. Lowette, H. Mei, D. W. Miller, B. Peng, S. N. Santpu, I. Reed, E. Schaffer, R. Schmitz, J. Steenis, D. Stuart, J. S. Tafoya Vargas, D. Vannerom, T. Wybouw, Z. Xiao, H. …

Search for millicharged particles in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 13.6$ TeV
We report on a search for elementary particles with charges much smaller than the electron charge using a data sample of proton-proton collisions provided by the CERN Large Hadron Collider in 2023--24, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 124.7~fb$^{-1}$ at a center-of-mass energy of 13.6~TeV. The analysis presented uses the completed Run 3 milliQan bar detector to set the most stringent constraints to date for particles with charges $\leq0.24~\rm{e}$ and masses $\geq0.45~\rm{GeV}$.

I am not an expert on this; I have no special knowledge whatever.
Nevertheless, it's my opinion that the future of drone warfare cannot be first-person-view drones, because such drones require near-continuous real-time comms, and any channel over which comms can be transmitted can be jammed or hacked by the enemy.
So future drones will need to be, essentially, sealed boxes, with their target's identifying characteristics and general location set before launch.
Scary…

Time to write to your MP again!
#ClimateChange
#ClimateEmergency
#JustStopOil
#FossilFuel

Petition: Ban fossil fuel advertising and sponsorship
Advertisements encourage the use of products and sponsorship promotes a positive reputation & creates a social licence of trust & acceptability. In 2003 a ban on all tobacco advertising was introduced and has arguably worked. I believe continued fossil fuel usage will kill more people than smoking.

Friends, when I do things on the croft which I think are interesting, I usually post photos here.
Today, we have slaughtered, gralloched and quartered a bull. There are many photographs. There is a bit of blood, but actually not that much.
Would people be interested in photos, if I put content warnings on them?
@… , am I OK posting pictures of thi…

Twenty minutes to go time. I *think* everything is ready.

"despite the law being very clear, actually, a few very determined transphobes have crawled their way to the heart of the law like maggots in an apple. A system that has been working perfectly well since 2010 has now been unnecessarily tampered with – and Starmer has capitulated because he’s spineless"
#TransRightsAreHumanRights

Juno Dawson: I had gender reassignment surgery – then the Supreme Court said I wasn’t a woman
I have the same choices over my life and body that I would want for every single person on earth. I’m not trying to make a statement about what a woman is, I just want to be one, writes Juno Dawson – who appears on The Independent’s Pride list 2025

"I changed my passport in 2015, but now I can’t get a visa to the USA for my book tour unless I say I’m male? Will I get detained at JFK? My birth certificate was lawfully reissued in 2018 as a female birth certificate, but now I’m not a woman legally?"
#TransRightsAreHumanRights

Juno Dawson: I had gender reassignment surgery – then the Supreme Court said I wasn’t a woman
I have the same choices over my life and body that I would want for every single person on earth. I’m not trying to make a statement about what a woman is, I just want to be one, writes Juno Dawson – who appears on The Independent’s Pride list 2025

"If one uses the word “fascism”, people accuse you of hysteria – but isn’t this precisely what fascism looks like? A minority group is unfairly demonised until public opinion sours sufficiently for lawmakers to impose restrictions on said group"
#TransRightsAreHumanRights

Juno Dawson: I had gender reassignment surgery – then the Supreme Court said I wasn’t a woman
I have the same choices over my life and body that I would want for every single person on earth. I’m not trying to make a statement about what a woman is, I just want to be one, writes Juno Dawson – who appears on The Independent’s Pride list 2025

Right, I *think* we have everything lined up for slaughtering a bull on Sunday.
Nervous.

"As I've mentioned before, I'm working (with a group of other volunteers) on producing a Local Place Plan for Auchencairn, and, in the process of doing that, we're using the Place Standard Tool. Data from the Place Standard Tool is delivered as an unwieldy CSV file with 53 columns, most of which contain narrative data.
This is pretty hard to analyse... so I've written a tool to automate summarising the data. And, actually, I'm quite pleased with it." -- m…

Place Standard Tool Summariser: Full Test Run

@… I have a new #git repository on my laptop of a project I started today. What's the procedure for pushing it up to my #forgejo instance?

If you're (like me) trying to create a Local Place Plan for your locality, and are struggling to analyse data from the Place Standard Tool, I've written a wee #Clojure program, leveraging Google's Gemini #LLM, to do it for you.
If you're just trying to analyse data from some other spre…

According to @…'s newsletter this morning, the Citizen's Advice Bureau is now requiring #Trans employees (? and clients?) to use toilets according to their gender assigned at birth, which, if true, is not a good look at all. Journalist is Steph Paton, who I sli…

Scots charity in trans rights row after announcing change to bathroom access
A Scottish charity may be discriminating against transgender staff after announcing a change to bathroom access following the recent UK Supreme Court ruling on the Equality Act, say legal experts.

@… so, it I were to ask here whether your ~900 lines of Go were in a public repository anywhere, no-one would ever read it and I wouldn't get a reply?

I've been asked to run an AI text summariser over a bunch of survey responses. I'm skeptical anyway, so probably approaching the task with a bad attitude, but none of the open source AI text summarisers I've tried so far actually run at all, due to the usual Python bit-rot and lack of stable libraries.
Tried AI-News-Summariser, sumeval, ParaSum, SummerTime... currently trying Transformers, but it's taking an age to install.
Can anyone suggest one which at least ru…

H'mmm... My @forgejo instance has been hit very hard last night by AI crawlers, including from
* https://openai.com/gptbot (125,467 hits in 24 hours)
*

Last night I dreamed that the great computer scientist, Niklaus Wirth, had died by suicide because he was convinced his intellect was failing, because a simple financial calculation was failing, because he'd caught an exception and just returned zero instead of handling it, because he'd written sketch code and meant to come back and deal with it later but had not done so.
Which is almost certainly all arrant nonsense, but what a BIZARRE thing to dream about.

Here's Willow Defebaugh, a trans woman, talking about JK Rowling. Listen for just a couple of minutes. It's worth it.
#TransRightsAreHumanRights
Planet: Critical: Beyond Separation | Willow Defebaugh
Starting from: 00:38:45
Episode webpage: