Tootfinder

The GSA says Oracle is giving the US government a 75% discount on its license-based software and a "substantial" discount on its cloud service through November (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.w…

Some statistics about all robotic #LunarLanding attempts so far from 1965 to 2025 compiled from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_the_Moon and https://scicomm.xyz/@AkaSci@fosstodon.org/114636519291241321 in which I only count those for which descent to the surface had been initiated, not missions lost at launch or on the way - in a nutshell ~70% of all landings by government agencies went well (essentially the same rate 60 years ago and now!) but only ~30% by private companies. Here goes ...
There have been two separate periods of soft lunar landing attempts of ca. a dozen years each, from 1965 to 1976 and 2013 to 2025 (ongoing) with a huge gap between them.
In the first interval there were 20 attempts with 13 successes (Luna 9, 13, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21 and 24 and Surveyor 1, 3, 5, 6 and 7), one partial success (Luna 23, counting as 50%) and 6 failures (Luna 5, 7, 8, 15 and 18 and Surveyor 4), so the success rate was 13.5/20 = 68 %. All missions were by - the Soviet and U.S. - governments.
In the second interval there were so far 14 attempts with 6 full successes (Chang'e-3, 4, 5 and 6, Vikram 2 and Blue Ghost), three partial successes (SLIM, IM-1 and 2, counting as 75%, 50% and 25%, respectively) and 5 failures (Beresheet, Vikram 1, Hakuto-R 1 and 2 and Luna 25) so the success rate was 7.5 / 14 = 54%.
But looking only at the government missions it was 72%, slighly up from 50 years ago. While for the commercial attempts it was only 29%. In total the success rate was 19 (18 government-run) missions out of 34 (28) attempts or 62% but 69% for governments only. And if you throw in the 6 Apollo landings, the total success rate rises to 68% and the government-only rate goes even up to 75%.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all people are created equal, endowed with inherent dignity and unalienable rights—among these are life, liberty, equality, and the pursuit of justice.
 
That to secure these rights, governments derive their power from the consent of the governed. When a leader becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right and duty of the people to refuse allegiance and to stand united in the defense of their freedoms.

Multilevel Stochastic Gradient Descent for Optimal Control Under Uncertainty
Niklas Baumgarten, David Schneiderhan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02647 https:/…

Multilevel Stochastic Gradient Descent for Optimal Control Under Uncertainty
We present a multilevel stochastic gradient descent method for the optimal control of systems governed by partial differential equations under uncertain input data. The gradient descent method used to find the optimal control leverages a parallel multilevel Monte Carlo method as stochastic gradient estimator. As a result, we achieve precise control over the stochastic gradient's bias, introduced by numerical approximation, and its sampling error, arising from the use of incomplete gradients, wh…

EDGChain-E: A Decentralized Git-Based Framework for Versioning Encrypted Energy Data
Alper Alimoglu, Kamil Erdayandi, Mustafa A. Mustafa, \"Umit Cali
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01615

EDGChain-E: A Decentralized Git-Based Framework for Versioning Encrypted Energy Data
This paper proposes a new decentralized framework, named EDGChain-E (Encrypted-Data-Git Chain for Energy), designed to manage version-controlled, encrypted energy data using blockchain and the InterPlanetary File System. The framework incorporates a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) to orchestrate collaborative data governance across the lifecycle of energy research and operations, such as smart grid monitoring, demand forecasting, and peer-to-peer energy trading. In EDGChain-E, initi…

Long; central Massachusetts colonial history
Today on a whim I visited a site in Massachusetts marked as "Huguenot Fort Ruins" on OpenStreetMaps. I drove out with my 4-year-old through increasingly rural central Massachusetts forests & fields to end up on a narrow street near the top of a hill beside a small field. The neighboring houses had huge lawns, some with tractors.
Appropriately for this day and this moment in history, the history of the site turns out to be a microcosm of America. Across the field beyond a cross-shaped stone memorial stood an info board with a few diagrams and some text. The text of the main sign (including typos/misspellings) read:
"""
Town Is Formed
Early in the 1680's, interest began to generate to develop a town in the area west of Natick in the south central part of the Commonwealth that would be suitable for a settlement. A Mr. Hugh Campbell, a Scotch merchant of Boston petitioned the court for land for a colony. At about the same time, Joseph Dudley and William Stoughton also were desirous of obtaining land for a settlement. A claim was made for all lands west of the Blackstone River to the southern land of Massachusetts to a point northerly of the Springfield Road then running southwesterly until it joined the southern line of Massachusetts.
Associated with Dudley and Stoughton was Robert Thompson of London, England, Dr. Daniel Cox and John Blackwell, both of London and Thomas Freak of Hannington, Wiltshire, as proprietors. A stipulation in the acquisition of this land being that within four years thirty families and an orthodox minister settle in the area. An extension of this stipulation was granted at the end of the four years when no group large enough seemed to be willing to take up the opportunity.
In 1686, Robert Thompson met Gabriel Bernor and learned that he was seeking an area where his countrymen, who had fled their native France because of the Edict of Nantes, were desirous of a place to live. Their main concern was to settle in a place that would allow them freedom of worship. New Oxford, as it was the so-named, at that time included the larger part of Charlton, one-fourth of Auburn, one-fifth of Dudley and several square miles of the northeast portion of Southbridge as well as the easterly ares now known as Webster.
Joseph Dudley's assessment that the area was capable of a good settlement probably was based on the idea of the meadows already established along with the plains, ponds, brooks and rivers. Meadows were a necessity as they provided hay for animal feed and other uses by the settlers. The French River tributary books and streams provided a good source for fishing and hunting. There were open areas on the plains as customarily in November of each year, the Indians burnt over areas to keep them free of underwood and brush. It appeared then that this area was ready for settling.
The first seventy-five years of the settling of the Town of Oxford originally known as Manchaug, embraced three different cultures. The Indians were known to be here about 1656 when the Missionary, John Eliott and his partner Daniel Gookin visited in the praying towns. Thirty years later, in 1686, the Huguenots walked here from Boston under the guidance of their leader Isaac Bertrand DuTuffeau. The Huguenot's that arrived were not peasants, but were acknowledged to be the best Agriculturist, Wine Growers, Merchant's, and Manufacter's in France. There were 30 families consisting of 52 people. At the time of their first departure (10 years), due to Indian insurrection, there were 80 people in the group, and near their Meetinghouse/Church was a Cemetery that held 20 bodies. In 1699, 8 to 10 familie's made a second attempt to re-settle, failing after only four years, with the village being completely abandoned in 1704.
The English colonist made their way here in 1713 and established what has become a permanent settlement.
"""
All that was left of the fort was a crumbling stone wall that would have been the base of a higher wooden wall according to a picture of a model (I didn't think to get a shot of that myself). Only trees and brush remain where the multi-story main wooden building was.
This story has so many echoes in the present:
- The rich colonialists from Boston & London agree to settle the land, buying/taking land "rights" from the colonial British court that claimed jurisdiction without actually having control of the land. Whether the sponsors ever actually visited the land themselves I don't know. They surely profited somehow, whether from selling on the land rights later or collecting taxes/rent or whatever, by they needed poor laborers to actually do the work of developing the land (& driving out the original inhabitants, who had no say in the machinations of the Boston court).
- The land deal was on condition that there capital-holders who stood to profit would find settlers to actually do the work of colonizing. The British crown wanted more territory to be controlled in practice not just in theory, but they weren't going to be the ones to do the hard work.
- The capital-holders actually failed to find enough poor suckers to do their dirty work for 4 years, until the Huguenots, fleeing religious persecution in France, were desperate enough to accept their terms.
- Of course, the land was only so ripe for settlement because of careful tending over centuries by the natives who were eventually driven off, and whose land management practices are abandoned today. Given the mention of praying towns (& dates), this was after King Phillip's war, which resulted in at least some forced resettlement of native tribes around the area, but the descendants of those "Indians" mentioned in this sign are still around. For example, this is the site of one local band of Nipmuck, whose namesake lake is about 5 miles south of the fort site: #LandBack.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.17600 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_eco…

Towards post-growth policymaking: Barriers and enablers for wellbeing economy and Doughnut economics government initiatives
Providing wellbeing for all while safeguarding planetary boundaries may require governments to pursue post-growth policies. To understand how post-growth policymaking can be fostered, we examine wellbeing economy and Doughnut economics government initiatives across governance scales in Europe, New Zealand, and Canada. To identify political dimensions of barriers and enablers as well as priorities for future action, we apply a framework that distinguishes polity, politics, and policy to analyze …

My day just took a nosedive because some fascist jerk is celebrating a bill landing on his desk!
Honestly, it’s wild how people still put their faith in the same old power games when real change comes from people coming together, running things themselves, and kicking the fascists out of the picture.
Being autistic, I usually struggle to get what people mean, but Rudolf Rocker said some real shit that even my autistic brain understands.

Hundreds of protesters greeted Trump and the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, as they arrived at the hastily assembled concentration camp in the Florida Everglades .
The space was previously a largely disused airstrip surrounded by swampland abundant in alligators and Burmese pythons.
“You’ll have a lot of people that will deport on their own because they don’t want to end up in an Alligator Alcatraz, or some of these other places,” Governor Ron DeSantis said.
“Th…

**A New Declaration of Independence from Tyranny: Effective July 4, 2025** from Andy Borowitz, via FB:
 
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a people to break from a leader who governs with cruelty, contempt, and corruption, a decent respect to the opinions of humankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.