Tootfinder

California Governor Gavin Newsom just went on a right-leaning Sean Ryan Show podcast & slammed Republican officials who constantly criticize his state: “More patents, more engineers, more researchers, more Nobel Laureates in my state than any other damn state.”

#California #GavinNewsom

moreno_taro: Papuan gift-giving (1970)
A network of gift-giving relationships (taro exchange) among households in a Papuan village. Data collected by survey c.1970.
This network has 22 nodes and 78 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unweighted
https://networks.skewed.de/net/moreno_ta…

Later, I'll be giving a talk at #IANLS25 on some quantitative analyses of Latin book prodcution in Germany (and Italy in part) from 1500 through 1800. Slides, code and data can be found here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15878272

It turns out "my" shirt design was stolen and used by some US assholes who now sell a Rob Anybody t-shirt.
I can't do anything about that, except giving everybody the design for free - if it has to be out there, nobody should profit from it.
If you end up using it, please PLEASE donate to one of Pratchett's favorite charities or at least to somebody in need.
And add a #GNUTerryPratchett

Is it possible for it to be a happy Monday? Nah, need more #coffee

I wonder if I ever shared #photos from my #FrozenMajesties Collection - or at least it is a while since I last shared them.
Anyways, I took it during a winter hike in the #Karwendel and r…

Moskau und Kiew äußern sich zu jüngstem Gefangenenaustausch
Am Dienstag gab es einen erneuten Gefangenenaustausch, der bei den Gesprächen in Istanbul vereinbart wurde. Das russische Verteidigungsministerium erklärte, dass gemäß den Absprachen "die zweite Gruppe russischer Soldaten zurückgekommen" sei. Weder zum Ort des Austauschs noch zur genauen Anzahl der Soldaten machten Moskau und Kiew zunächst nähere Angaben.
Der ukrain…
📑

Ukraine-Liveblog: ++ Ukraine erhält Leichname von Gefallenen ++
Die Ukraine hat die sterblichen Überreste von mehr als 1.200 getöteten Soldaten erhalten. Russland meldet einen Vorstoß im Westen der ukrainischen Region Donezk.

The full formula for the probability of "success" is:
p = {
1/(2^(-n 1)) if n is negative, or
1 - (1/(2^(n 1))) if n is zero or positive
}
(Both branches have the same value when n is 0, so the behavior is smooth around the origin.)
How can we tweak this?
First, we can introduce fixed success and/or failure chances unaffected by level, with this formula only taking effect if those don't apply. For example, you could do 10% failure, 80% by formula, and 10% success to keep things from being too sure either way even when levels are very high or low. On the other hand, this flattening makes the benefit of extra advantage levels even less exciting.
Second, we could allow for gradations of success/failure, and treat the coin pools I used to explain that math like dice pools a bit. An in-between could require linearly more success flips to achieve the next higher grade of success at each grade. For example, simple success on a crit role might mean dealing 1.5x damage, but if you succeed on 2 of your flips, you get 9/4 damage, or on 4 flips 27/8, or on 7 flips 81/16. In this world, stacking crit levels might be a viable build, and just giving up on armor would be super dangerous. In the particular case I was using this for just now, I can't easily do gradations of success (that's the reason I turned to probabilities in the first place) but I think I'd favor this approach when feasible.
The main innovation here over simple dice pools is how to handle situations where the number of dice should be negative. I'm almost certain it's not a truly novel innovation though, and some RPG fan can point out which system already does this (please actually do this, I'm an RPG nerd too at heart).
I'll leave this with one more tweak we could do: what if the number 2 in the probability equation were 3, or 2/3? I think this has a similar effect to just scaling all the modifiers a bit, but the algebra escapes me in this moment and I'm a bit lazy. In any case, reducing the base of the probability exponent should let you get a few more gradations near 50%, which is probably a good thing, since the default goes from 25% straight to 50% and then to 75% with no integer stops in between.

lastfm: last.fm listening habits (2007)
Two bipartite networks from the music website last.fm, giving the user-song and user-band interactions. Nodes are users and songs/bands, and an edge (i,j) denotes that a user i listens to the song/band j.
This network has 175069 nodes and 19150868 edges.
Tags: Social, Online, Unweighted
https://

Governor Hot Wheels won’t stand up and do the right thing, shocking
#fucktheGOP
https://www.kut.org/politics/2025-07-07/texas-elon-musk-greg-abbott