Tootfinder

Last weekend the Defa Film Library started a virtual festival titled "The Colorful World of DEFA Animation: A Short History". Throughout July and August every few days a anther example of East German animated film will go online. The overall streaming link on the website is good from now until the end of August.
https://www.

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.

Good Morning #Canada
Normally, I'm posting about history or geography or trivia, but the July tourism numbers are dominating the news. We "Nasty" Canadians are choosing not to visit the USA, and trips across the border continue to drop month after month. At the end of 2024, U.S. tourism revenue from Canadians was projected to increase 16%. Surprise! Losses by USA businesses are already estimated to be in excess of $20B USD, and some states are bracing for government cuts due to a decrease in sales taxes.
#CanadaIsAwesome #ElbowsUp
https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2025/08/11/canadian-car-visits-us-plunge-37-percent/

At no other time in modern history has a country so thoroughly turned its back on its core national strengths.
With devastating cuts to science and health research,
the administration is turning its back on a history of being powered and renewed by the innovation and vision of immigrants.
What America may find is that we have squandered the greatest gift from the Manhattan Project
— which, in the end, wasn’t the bomb
— but a new way of looking at how science a…

Opinion | Trump Is Squandering the Greatest Gift of the Manhattan Project
The U.S. risks not just being left behind, but out of the game entirely.

"""
Customarily, the honour of having liberated hysteria from the ancient myths about a displacement of the uterus goes to Le Pois and Willis. Jean Liebaud, translating or rather adapting Marinello’s work for the seventeenth century, still accepted (with a small number of caveats) the idea of a spontaneous movement of the womb. If it moved, it was “to be more at ease; not that this came about through prudence, nor was it a conscious decision or an animal stimulus, but by a natural instinct, to safeguard health and to have the pleasure of something delectable.” The idea that it could change its place and move around the body, bringing convulsions and spasms everywhere it travelled, had been abandoned, for it was now taken to be ‘tightly held in place’ by the cervix, ligaments, vessels and the sheath of the peritoneum; yet in some senses it could change its location. “The womb therefore, even though it is tightly fixed to the parts that we have described and cannot easily change its place, still manages to roam, making strange, petulant movements around the woman’s body. These diverse movements include ascensions and descents, convulsions, wanderings and prolapses. It can wander up to the liver, spleen, diaphragm, stomach, chest, heart, lung, throat and head.” Physicians of the classical age are more or less unanimous in refusing this explanation.
[…] Yet these analyses were not sufficient to break the theme of an essential link between hysteria and the womb. But the link is now conceived in different terms. It is no longer considered to be the trajectory of a real displacement through the body, but rather a sort of mute propagation through the paths of the organism and its functional proximities. It cannot be said that the seat of the malady has become the brain, nor that thanks to Willis a psychological explanation of hysteria was now possible. But the brain does take on the role of a relay that distributes a malady whose origins are visceral, and the womb brings it on just as the other viscera do. Up until the end of the eighteenth century, and Pinel, the uterus and the womb are still present in the pathology of hysteria, but thanks to a privileged diffusion by the humours and nerves, not because of any particular prestige of their nature.
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

Raiders training camp preview: Will TE Brock Bowers find running mate? https://www.reviewjournal.com/sports/raiders/raiders-training-camp-preview-will-te-brock-bowers-find-running-mate-3396631/

Man, I try hard to stay neutral-ish on the whole #genAI landscape, on the assumption that once the bubble pops, there’ll be gold nuggets in the rubble. But I read things like this and voices in the back of my head are shouting “burn it with fire!”

AI Generated 'Boring History' Videos Are Flooding YouTube and Drowning Out Real History
"These AI videos are just repeating things that are on the internet, so you end up with a very simplified version of the past."

"""
In the sixteenth century, lunacy was a constant theme that was never questioned. It was still frequent in the seventeenth century, but started to disappear, and by 1707, the year in which Le François asked the question ‘Estne aliquod lunae in corpora humana imperium?’ (Does the moon have any influence over the human body?), after lengthy discussions, the university decided that their reply was in the negative. In the course of the eighteenth century the moon was rarely cited among the causes of madness, even as a possible factor or an aggravation. But right at the end of the century the idea reappears, perhaps under the influence of English medicine, which had never entirely forgotten the moon, and Daquin, followed by Leuret and Guislain, all admitted the influence of the moon on the phases of maniacal excitement, or at the least on the agitation of their patients. But what is important here is not so much the return of the theme as the possibility and conditions necessary for its reappearance. It reappears entirely transformed, filled with a new significance that it did not formerly possess. In its traditional form, it designated an immediate influence, a direct coincidence in time and intersection in space, whose mode of action was entirely situated in the power of the stars. But in Daquin by contrast, the influence of the moon acts through a whole series of mediations, in a kind of hierarchy, surrounding man. The moon acts on the atmosphere with such intensity that it can set in motion a mass as heavy as the ocean. The nervous system, of all the parts that make up the human organism, is the part most sensitive to atmospheric variations, as the slightest variation in temperature, humidity or dryness can have serious effects upon it. The moon therefore, given the important power that its trajectory exerts on the atmosphere, is likely to act most on people whose nervous fibres are particularly delicate:
“Madness is an exclusively nervous condition, and the brain of a madman must therefore be infinitely more susceptible to the influence of the atmosphere, which itself undergoes considerable changes of intensity as a result of the different positions of the moon relative to the earth.” [Daquin, Philosophie de la folie, Paris, 1792]
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

Today’s global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, he says. The threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots.
...
If citizens’ juries and wealth caps seem wildly optimistic, Kemp says we have been long brainwashed by rulers justifying their dominance, from the self-declared god-pharaohs of Egypt and priests claiming to control the weather to autocrats claiming to defend people from foreign threats and tech titans selling us their techno-utopias. “It’s always been easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Goliaths. That’s because these are stories that have been hammered into us over the space of 5,000 years,” he says.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/02/self-termination-history-and-future-of-societal-collapse

Good Morning #Canada
The Webster–Ashburton Treaty was signed August 9, 1842, and resolved several border issues between the United States and the British North American colonies (the region that very soon would become the Dominion of Canada). The treaty would end disputes and controversies over the vague indefinite terms and text of the old peace agreement of the Treaty of Paris of 1783, which ended the American Revolutionary War. Specifically, it defined borders between Maine and New Brunswick, territory surrounding Lake Superior, and reaffirmed the western border on the 49th parallel. More importantly, it began a period of peace and friendly diplomacy between the two countries... until Americans decided a moronic spray tanner, suspected abuser of women, convicted felon, golf cheat, and narcissistic conman should be their president.
#CanadaIsAwesome #History
https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/webster-ashburton-treaty

NFL legend Cris Carter responds to being called 'overrated' by former All-Pro cornerback

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/nfl-legend-…

AI Generated 'Boring History' Videos Are Flooding YouTube and Drowning Out Real History https://www.404media.co/ai-generated-boring-history-videos-are-flooding-youtube-and-drowning-out-real-history/

This was always how it was going to end, just a financial settlement and AI companies can continue.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/technology/anth…

Anthropic Agrees to Pay $1.5 Billion to Settle Lawsuit With Book Authors
The settlement is the largest payout in the history of U.S. copyright cases and could lead more A.I. companies to pay rights holders for use of their works.

An interesting read, but there's one sentence at the end that really kind of stuck with me
But history is starting to rhyme.
It is.
https://tedium.co/2025/07/31/uk-online-safety-ninja-sword-ban/
It's reminiscent of the po…

Thoughts On A Ninja Sword Ban
An understandable decision to bar ninja swords in the U.K. hits differently to me given its somewhat censorship-friendly climate of late.

Refugees, intergenerational trauma, child death, abusive family
Also just finished "The Best We Could Do" by Thi Bui, which is the second memoir I've stumbled upon recently that deals with the Vietnamese exodus after the end of the war (House Without Walls by Ching Yeung Russel is the other one, which is written in verse, not illustrated). Bui traces more of the political landscape and history of Vietnam through the stories of both of her parents, and also unpacks a lot of intergenerational trauma, but has less focus on the boat trip out and refugee camp experience, presumably because hers were easier than Russel's.
My thoughts after reading this return repeatedly to all of the impacts that patriarchy and toxic masculinity had on her father, from setting up his father and grandfather to be abusive towards him and the women in their lives, to pushing him deep into depression when he feels unable to fulfill the role of a protective husband, ironically leaving his wife to pick up the slack and ultimately ruining their relationship, to how it teaches him to despise and shirk the caregiver role he's left with, ultimately passing on some measure of trauma to his children. For sure war, abusive family, and child death can happen in the absence of patriarchy and those are in some ways perhaps bigger factors here, but at the same time, Bui's mom copes with most of the same factors in healthier ways.
#AmReading

Week 17 history isn’t favoring Dallas in 2025 https://insidethestar.com/week-17-history-isnt-favoring-dallas-in-2025

it’s a beautiful day to walk around downtown and campus

Gravitational waves induced by matter isocurvature in general cosmologies
Guillem Dom\`enech, Jan Tr\"ankle
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02122 https://a…

Gravitational waves induced by matter isocurvature in general cosmologies
The expansion history and content of the Universe between the end of inflation and the onset of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis is mostly unknown. In this paper, we study gravitational waves (GWs) induced by matter isocurvature fluctuations in a generic perfect fluid background as a novel probe of the physics of the very early Universe. We analytically compute the induced GW kernel and analyze the spectral GW energy density for a sharply peaked isocurvature power spectrum. We show that the spectral sh…

Warren Buffet’s observation that
“we only know who is bathing naked when the tide goes out”
is a restatement of Galbraith’s argument that bad corporate and banking structures in 1929 only looked obvious with hindsight.
This was demonstrated again in 2008. Today the banking system is far stronger, but stricter regulation has meant that risks have gravitated to non-banks.
The Shiller cyclically-adjusted Price/Earnings ratio for US stocks is currently twice its historical…

History lessons from “The Great Crash”? | Lowy Institute
Optimists always get more airplay than spoilsports predicting an end to the good times. But hindsight tells all.

Tight End University: History, purpose of program and this year's surprise Taylor Swift performance

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/tight-e…

"""
The barbarian role of cultural demolition crew is especially important when you consider how often cultural reconstruction is needed. Many of Rome’s glaring defects — exploitation, authoritarianism, corrupt self-aggrandizement — flow from deeply human tendencies. Time and again they’ve transformed promising civilizations into decaying, oppressive monstrosities. Time and again, history seems to cry out: Bring on the demolition crew! And time and again barbarians cheerfully respond to the call. Their previous massive wreaking of destruction, near the end of the second millennium B.C., had come after civilization went through centuries of apparent ossification.
In a way, barbarians are just a special case of that general and potent zero-sum dynamic in cultural evolution: brutal competition among neighboring societies. This rivalry renders ossified cultures vulnerable to a makeover, minor or major. They may be taken over by a vast neighboring civilization, which will revamp them in its image. Or they may be infiltrated and perhaps even disassembled by barbarians, paving the way for future reassembly. Or they may revive and prevail — an example of the “challenge and response” dynamic stressed by Arnold Toynbee. In any event, the point remains the same: however deeply human the tendencies of exploitation, authoritarianism, and self-aggrandizement, cultures that surrender to them may not be long for this world.
"""
(Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny)
Is it time for the barbarians now? Or perhaps we — here on Fedi — are the barbarians.

Book Review “The End” by Joel Wainwright

Societies usually known as 'civilised' don't seem to keep their civilisations going without an ample supply of very cheap labour. Slavery, indentured servitude, outsourcing to low-wage countries, (undocumented) immigration, and lately robots, provided that throughout the course of history, and those are now complemented by robotic 'intelligence' – a.k.a. AI – for non-physical labour. I wonder where it will end. If it ever will.

Antonio Gates' prowess in crucial situations vaulted Chargers star into Hall of Fame https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6523698/2025/07/30/antonio-gates-pro-football-hall-of-fame-chargers/

Probing Non-Minimal Dark Sectors via the 21 cm Line at Cosmic Dawn
Federico Cima, Francesco D'Eramo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10664 https://

Probing Non-Minimal Dark Sectors via the 21 cm Line at Cosmic Dawn
Observations of the hydrogen hyperfine transition through the 21 cm line near the end of the cosmic dark ages provide unique opportunities to probe new physics. In this work, we investigate the potential of the sky-averaged 21 cm signal to constrain metastable particles produced in the early universe that decay at later times, thereby modifying the thermal and ionization history of the intergalactic medium. The study begins by extending previous analyses of decaying dark matter (DM), incorporat…

"Bangladesh aims to revive five critically endangered plants"
#Bangladesh #Plants #Environment

Bangladesh aims to revive five critically endangered plants
For the first time in its history, Bangladesh is attempting to protect five species from extinction by increasing their numbers and strengthening their population in the wild. The floral species are bulborox (Bulbophyllum roxburghii), the small-bulb orchid Bulbophyllum oblongum, dwarf date palm (Phoenix acaulis), chaulmoogra (Hydnocarpus kurzii) and bash pata (Podocarpus neriifolius). All of them are […]

So #Gentoo #Python eclasses are pretty modern, in the sense that they tend to follow the best practices and standards, and eventually deal with deprecations. Nevertheless, they have a long history and carry quite some historical burden, particularly regarding to naming.
The key point is that the eclasses were conceived as a replacement for the old eclasses: "distutils" and "python". Hence, much like we revision ebuilds, I've named the matching eclasses "distutils-r1" and "python-r1". For consistency, I've also used the "-r1" suffix for the remaining eclasses introduced at the time: "python-any-r1", "python-single-r1" and "python-utils-r1" — even though there were never "r0"s.
It didn't take long to realize my first mistake. I've made the multi-impl eclass effectively the "main" eclass, probably largely inspired by the previous Gentoo recommendations. However, in the end I've found out that for the most use cases (i.e. where "distutils-r1" is not involved), there is no real need for multi-impl, and it makes things much harder. So if I were naming them today, I would have named it "python-multi", to indicate the specific use case — and either avoid designating a default at all, or made "python-single" the default.
What aged even worse is the "distutils-r1" eclass. Admittedly, back when it was conceived, distutils was still largely a thing — and there were people (like me) who avoided unnecessary dependency on setuptools. Of course, nowadays it has been entirely devoured by setuptools, and with #PEP517 even "setuptools" wouldn't be a good name anymore. Nowadays, people are getting confused why they are supposed to use "distutils-r1" for, say, Hatchling.
Admittedly, this is something I could have done differently — PEP517 support was a major migration, and involved an explicit switch. Instead of adding DISTUTILS_USE_PEP517 (what a self-contradictory name) variable, I could have forked the eclass. Why didn't I do that? Because there used to be a lot of code shared between the two paths. Of course, over time they diverged more, and eventually I've dropped the legacy support — but the opportunity to rename was lost.
In fact, as a semi-related fact, I've recognized another design problem with the eclass earlier — I should have gone for two eclasses rather than one: a "python-phase" eclass with generic sub-phase support, and a "distutils" (or later "python-pep517") implementing default sub-phases for the common backends. And again, this is precisely how I could have solved the code reuse problem when I introduced PEP517 support.
But then, I didn't anticipate how the eclasses would end up looking like in the end — and I can't really predict what new challenges the Python ecosystem is going to bring us. And I think it's too late to rename or split stuff — too much busywork on everyone.

Dallas Cowboys make Jake Ferguson highest-paid tight end in franchise history https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/2025/07/27/dallas-cowboys-contract-jake-ferguson/85396049007/

In an article for the Financial Times, J D Vance wrote:
“We owe it to our European partners to be honest:
Our generosity in Ukraine is coming to an end.
Europeans should regard the conclusion of the war there as an imperative. ...
And Europe should consider how exactly it is going to live with Russia when the war in Ukraine is over.”
⭐️The watershed moment in American history that led to this was when five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled in

Is Trump America's New Tokyo Rose?
Money-as-speech has metastasized so extensively it threatens to kill its host, ending democracy here and turning America into another Putin- or Orbán-style autocracy run by Trump...

Good Morning #Canada
The Battle of Lundy's Lane, also known as the Battle of Niagara, was fought on July 25th 1814, during the War of 1812. An invading American army clashed with British and Canadian defenders near present-day Niagara Falls, Ontario. It was one of the bloodiest battles of the war, and one of the deadliest battles fought in Canada, with approximately 1,720 casualties, including 258 killed. The engagement was marked by intense musketry at close range and instances of friendly fire on both sides amidst the smoke and confusion, which caused several units to break entirely. The two armies fought each other to a stalemate; neither side held firm control of the field following the engagement. However, the casualties suffered by the Americans precipitated their withdrawal and signaled the beginning of the end of the War of 1812. This battle therefore gave Canada a strategic victory.
#CanadaIsAwesome #History #ElbowsUp
https://youtu.be/TfOqx-qO9gM?si=W-JF7tkWZDxgwweN

Micah Parsons, Cowboys contract talks near boiling point as situation grows 'more personal' https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nfl/dallas-cowboys/news/micah-parsons-cowboys-c…

The CPJ condemned the Israeli strike and called for action from the international community.
“Israel’s broadcasted killing of journalists in Gaza continues while the world watches and fails to act firmly on the most horrific attacks the press has faced in recent history,” said CPJ’s regional director Sara Qudah. “These unlawful killings must end now. The perpetrators must no longer be allowed to act with impunity.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/25/journalists-among-people-killed-by-israeli-strike-on-gaza-hospital?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Micah Parsons: 'Not really much movement' in contract extension talk with Cowboys https://www.foxsports.com/articles/nfl/micah-parsons-not-really-much-movement-in-contract-extension-talk-with-cowboys