Tootfinder

Interesting and fulsome interview on exactly how NORAD reacted to the plane hijacking in Victoria/Vancouver on Tuesday. They speak to the commander of NORAD, currently a Canadian.
I appreciated the last section most though:
“It's the only bi-national command in the world; it's been a strong bi-national command since 1958, and nothing has changed.
We don't ever talk politics at work. It's not something that we do, nor does it affect what we do.
I would say that we are as tight, and probably tighter than we've ever been. As the world around us gets to be more dangerous, I would say that NORAD is even closer than it's ever been.
But one last thing — we have the watch. That's the slogan here for NORAD.
To give you a great example, all of the assessors, we all live on-base in homes that actually have a safe, we call it the SCIF. It's basically a classified room that has all of our systems. The days that you're on duty, you're either at work or in your house. Because the timelines are so small for answering the phone, you don't walk the dog; you don't do all these other things, and someone covers for you when you're going between work and home.
That's how important this mission is to us down here. It's really important for everybody in Canada to know that at NORAD, we have the watch”
#canpoli #norad #cf18
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/us-fighter-jets-bc-alleged-plane-hijacking-1.7588750

I just finished "An Ember in the Ashes" by Sabaa Tahir. I picked it up because I found her non-fantasy novel "All My Rage" extremely compelling, and I enjoyed fantasy a lot as a genre in my youth but as my politics have changed I'm too disappointed to enjoy a lot of fantasy any more but I thought Tahir might not fall into that.
Although I don't think Ember in the Ashes is bad, it's definitely not what I was looking for, and I don't think I'll pursue the sequels, at least not right now.
Overall the writing was weaker in a lot of ways than All My Rage, and in terms of basic fantasy quality, the worldbuilding was noticeably lacking, the romantic subplot felt stilted, and the politics were a bit murky. Compared to what I felt was Tahir's deft, delicate, and very meaningful handling of trauma in All My Rage, trauma in Ember felt overused and thin.
I also recently finished "Black Panther Red Wolf" by Marlon James, which had excellent world building and (to me) a much more nuance in both romance and in handling trauma. The politics felt a bit off for this one too I guess, but for me it was an overall more enjoyable (if much more difficult) read.
#AmReading

Been out today trying to get my phone battery replaced.
Three phone repair places said they couldn't do it today and would have to order the battery in, and the last made a call and said they'd have a battery this evening if I came back.
So I did come back and they did have the battery. Went to the pub for half an hour while they changed it only to come back and find them apologizing that their heat-plate is apparently broken since yesterday so they can't soften the glue to open the screen.
Annoying how sealed-in batteries are these days. Could change it myself if I had a heat plate to soften the glue and open the screen.
Oh well. They'll call me back when the heat plate is fixed next week.
Given how hot the battery gets now and how hot the weather is, it's a bit surprising the glue isn't softened all on it's own 😆

Advances in NASA Imaging Changed How World Sees Mars - NASA #science

Advances in NASA Imaging Changed How World Sees Mars - NASA
Sixty years ago, NASA’s Mariner 4 captured groundbreaking views of the Red Planet, leading to a steady stream of advances in the cameras used to study other

Found the specs sheet.
The front camera and ultrawide camera seem to be considerably worse.
The normal wide camera seems to be better, except it lost the electronic stabilisation (not sure how important that is tbh).
The battery is better, but it needs a screwdriver to be changed so no more switch during the day if you don’t have a screwdriver always on you. This comes with no added water resistance, which makes me wonder why they did this.
The display seems to be worse? The resolution is smaller which makes sense since the size is smaller, but also it seems to have less PPI than the Fairphone 5. The refresh rate is higher tho.
It has worse USB-C connectivity as well, the Fairphone 6 has just USB 2.0 (!!!!) compared to 3.0 on the Fairphone 5.
They also got rid of the sky blue color (which was the prettiest imo) and of the transparent option.
I don’t really understand Qualcomm processors, but at least the new GPU seems to have a better benchmark score?
#Fairphone #Fairphone5 #Fairphone6

"""
Writing has been an instrument for some of the highest expressions of the human spirit: poetry, philosophy, science. But to understand it — why it came into being, how it changed the human experience — we have to first appreciate its crass practicality. It evolved mainly as an instrument of the mundane: the economic, the administrative, the political.
Confusion over this point is understandable. Some scholars have equated the origin of “civilization” with the origin of writing. Laypeople sometimes take this equation to mean that with writing humanity put aside its barbarous past and started behaving in gentlemanly fashion, sipping tea and remembering to say “please.” And indeed, this may be only a mild caricature of what some nineteenth-century scholars actually meant by the equation: writing equals Greece equals Plato; illiteracy equals barbarism equals Attila the Hun.
But, in truth, if you add literacy to Attila the Hun, you don’t get Plato. You get Genghis Khan. During the thirteenth century, he administered what even today is the largest continuous land empire in the history of the world. And he could do so only because he had the requisite means of control: a script that, when carried by his pony express, amounted to the fastest large-scale information-processing technology of his era. One consequence was to give pillaging a scope beyond Attila’s wildest dreams. Information technology, like energy technology or any other technology, can be a tool for good or bad. By itself, it is no guarantor of moral progress or civility.
"""
(Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny)

Research and Analysis of Employers' Opinion on the Necessary Skills that Students in the Field of Web Programming Should Possess
Yordan Kalmukov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11084

Research and Analysis of Employers' Opinion on the Necessary Skills that Students in the Field of Web Programming Should Possess
In the era of artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots, based on large language models that can generate programming code in any language, write texts and summarize information, it is obvious that the requirements of employers for graduating students have already changed. The modern IT world offers significant automation of programming through software frameworks and a huge set of third-party libraries and application programming interfaces (APIs). All these tools provide most of the necessary…

#SilentSunday

U.S. health officials have changed their advice to international travelers about measles,
saying that Americans should be vaccinated against the virus
-- no matter where they’re going.
U.S. residents are recommended to get measles-mumps-rubella shots, anyway.
But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention previously emphasized the importance of vaccination for travelers going to countries with outbreaks.

All international travelers should get measles vaccinations, CDC says
U.S. health officials have changed their advice to international travelers about measles, saying Americans should be vaccinated against the disease no matter where they travel in the world. U.S. residents are recommended to get measles-mumps-rubella shots, anyway. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention previously emphasized the importance of vaccination for travelers going to countries with outbreaks. Last week, the CDC updated its guidance to call for vaccinations for travelers goi…

Oh, the arguments we had! There was a marketing person — quite a good one, and a good person too — who just couldn’t see it, who fought the dev team tooth and nail on this. She finally relented when @… wrote a brief positive plug for our app, and made her realize that the landscape had changed and her J2ME-world design instincts just didn’t work in this new iPhone market.
(I’m not sure that company ever really made the shift. They struggled with and eventually dropped their general consumer app, and concentrated quite successfully on some pro markets where features ruled all.)
4/

Woah the mobile webui of mastodon (or chuckya?) changed, it’s so much better now!!

"Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction": how the cardinal points of the compass have changed our world view.
A journey through history, discovery, religion, maps and much more.
And how online maps and GPS are reducing its relevance.
By Jerry Brotton.
https://flic.kr/p/tAv8JZ

But here’s the good news that way too many people are missing:
𝐖𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐨𝐥𝐝 𝐬𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐬 𝐜𝐫𝐮𝐦𝐛𝐥𝐞, 𝐚𝐧 𝐮𝐧𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐨𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐢𝐬 𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐠.
You are not alone in feeling uncertain about your economic future. Millions of people find themselves in a similar position. Traditional careers leave you exposed.
Here is the key: The world has changed. It has moved online – and unless you are moving with it you will be left behind.

Sammy Stein - Whatever You Wonder About Jazz
A #BookReview of "The Wonder of Jazz – Music That Changed the World "
https://muz4now.com/2022/sammy-stein-w

Sammy Stein - Whatever You Wonder About Jazz
Stan Stewart - @muz4now

"The World Wide Web has changed radically in the many years since its idealistic dawn, when macintouch.com was created, and Apple has, too. There are big issues involved in those changes, but more extreme changes are on the horizon with AI and traitorous power in and around government. "
-- Ric Ford
sad.

John Ruskin said: 'There is No Wealth but Life.'
What I had to do was find and explore new ways of seeing it.
Once I did, I never felt alone.
Cultivating alternative ways of experiencing the world has completely changed my life;
it helped me overcome anxiety and depression, opened up a world of possibility and led me to a new career in photography.
-- Andy Marshall

About the Genius Loci Digest
For over twenty years I've been seeking out alternative stories in our surviving material culture and sharing them with my photographs and words.

Free Eddie Van Halen mini-documentary explores the origins of Eruption and his two-hand tapping technique – and it’s partly narrated by the man himself
https://www.guitarworld.com/artists/guitar

Free Eddie Van Halen mini-documentary explores the origins of Eruption and his two-hand tapping technique – and it’s partly narrated by the man himself
The latest in-depth documentary from Simon Alkin focuses on the talent behind Eruption – a song that changed the guitar world forever