Less is More: Strategic Expert Selection Outperforms Ensemble Complexity in Traffic Forecasting
Walid Guettala, Yufan Zhao, L\'aszl\'o Guly\'as
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07426

Although the next "Talk Like a Pirate Day" is not until Sept 19, 2026, we here in the US of A can start talking pirate-talk immediately.
Why?
Because the US has become a pirate nation, robbing other nations of their lands, assets, and governments.
trump ain't no Dread Pirate Roberts - he's more on par with Cap'n Dumbo Lardbutt - but he is no less a pirate than the famed Blackbeard and has probably killed more people than Blackbeard ever did.

"Climate change is affecting your food – and not in your favour"
#Climate #ClimateChange
http…

So there's a #Mastodon instance for people that are into #math called mathstodon… and that instance allows users to use #LaTeX.
The

What is missing: info about overall collisions and overall injuries. It's great that there are fewer deaths, it's not great that pedestrian deaths are still high, and it's not clear if we are seeing more, but less lethal collisions.
San Francisco's traffic deaths fall by 42% in dramatic turn

Sonnet 020 - XX
A woman's face with nature's own hand painted,
Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women's fashion:
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou f…

Physio signed me off since I told her that the wrist is more or less back to normal now.
She still wants me to keep doing the exercises for some undefined amount of time. Will into the new year be enough? Dunno. Will do that at least.
Need to get more exercise in general once this bedroom is finished building and I get the flat back to myself most days. Will have the fabled Tredmil Desk in the bedroom then so that'll help.

"What has not changed in 50 years is the fact we are still using centralized architectures, prone to government intrusion and privacy leaks. Maybe it is time to think about a “Post Cloud” era where information is distributed instead of centralized. Of course this raises questions of trust, cryptography, security and collaboration, but the technology to build such systems already exists. It is more of a question of policy and education than of technology."

Sweden has had a stated goal of economic equality for 20 yrs, but the income gap between men and women remains the same. Capital is the blind spot. Women own less, save less and therefore benefit from significantly lower capital returns than men.
Additionally, capital is taxed less than wages which further reinforces the inequality. As long as Sweden's rules put more resistance in women's paths than in men's, capital, power and security will primarily benefit men.
Fro…

The Real Gaetz Story Is Less About Sex Trafficking, More About Poverty | Dame Magazine
https://www.damemagazine.com/2025/12/03/the-real-gaetz-story-is-less-about-sex-trafficking-more-about-poverty/

As one who studied the development and growth of cities, the passage of this measure has caused me to wonder how short sighted are some programs to increase housing stocks.
Like rent control, which over decades can erase rental property availability, this measure will slowly nudge builders to locate new single family home construction outside of our city limits. (The average single family home price in our area is among the highest in the US.)
I am less clear about the impact on…

In 1990, a $100,000 salary would be worth more than $250,000 in today's dollars.
Today, a $100,000 salary would be less than $40,000 in 1990.
$100,000 is the new $40,000.
https://bsky.app/profile/thefinancenewsletter.com/post/3m77do5dycc2i

The fracturing of the Dutch far-right, after Wilder's reminded everyone that bigots are bad at compromise, is definitely a relief. Dutch folks I've talked to definitely see D66 as progressive, <strike>so there's no question this is a hard turn to the left (even if it's not a total flip to the far-left)</strike> a lot of folks don't agree. I'm going to let the comments speak rather than editorialize myself..
While this is a useful example of how a democracy can be far more resilient to fascism than the US, that is, perhaps, not the most interesting thing about Dutch politics. The most interesting thing is something Dutch folks take for granted and never think of as such: there are two "governments."
The election was for the Tweede Kamer. This is a house of representatives. The Dutch use proportional representation, so people can (more or less) vote for the parties they actually want. Parties <strike>rarely</strike> never actually get a ruling majority, so they have to form coalition governments. This forces compromise, which is something Wilders was extremely bad at. He was actually responsible for collapsing the coalition his party put together, which triggered this election... and a massive loss of seats for his party.
Dutch folks do still vote strategically, since a larger party has an easier time building the governing coalition and the PM tends to come from the largest party. This will likely be D66, which is really good for the EU. D66 has a pretty radical plan to solve the housing crisis, and it will be really interesting to see if they can pull it off. But that's not the government I want to talk about right now.
In the Netherlands, failure to control water can destroy entire towns. A good chunk of the country is below sea level. Both floods and land reclamation have been critical parts of Dutch history. So in the 1200's or so, the Dutch realized that some things are too important to mix with normal politics.
You see, if there's an incompetent government that isn't able to actually *do* anything (see Dick Schoof and the PVV/VVD/NSC/BBB coalition) you don't want your dikes to collapse and poulders to flood. So the Dutch created a parallel "government" that exists only to manage water: waterschap or heemraadschap (roughly "Water Board" in English). These are regional bureaucracies that exist only to manage water. They exist completely outside the thing we usually talk about as a "government" but they have some of the same properties as a government. They can, for example, levy taxes. The central government contributes funds to them, but lacks authority over them. Water boards are democratically elected and can operate more-or-less independent of the central government.
Controlling water is a common problem, so water boards were created to fulfill the role of commons management. Meanwhile, so many other things in politics run into the very same "Tragedy of the Commons" problems. The right wing solution to commons management is to let corporations ruin everything. The left-state solution is to move everything into the government so it can be undermined and destroyed by the right. The Dutch solution to this specific problem has been to move commons management out of the domain of the central government into something else.
And when I say "government" here, I'm speaking more to the liberal definition of the term than to an anarchist definition. A democratically controlled authority that facilitates resource management lacks the capacity for coercive violence that anarchists define as "government." (Though I assume they might leverage police or something if folks refuse to pay their taxes, but I can't imagine anyone choosing not to.)
As the US federal government destroys the social fabric of the US, as Trump guts programs critical to people's survival, it might be worth thinking about this model. These authorities weren't created by any central authority, they evolved from the people. Nothing stops Americans from building similar institutions that are both democratic and outside of the authority of a government that could choose to defund and abolish them... nothing but the realization that yes, you actually can.
#USPol #NLPol

Our pick this week is a soaring rock-metal anthem from Black Veil Brides! Big riffs, big vocals, and enough drama to fill a cathedral.
We even locked Cooper in the cupboard of sin for this one and made him listen to the entire discography ... so you know we’re committed.
Don't forget to follow us for your weekly dose of #rock and

#Blakes7 Series D, Episode 13 - Blake
SOOLIN: Just like that.
AVON: More or less. He is strongly identified with rebels, you see, and very popular with rabbles. They will follow him, and he will fight to the last drop of their blood. [smiles] Idealism is a wonderful thing. All you really need is someone rational to put it to proper use.

idk who needs to hear this, but this is your sign to drink more water (if dehydrated) or less (if over hydrated) or neither (if perfectly hydrated) :ablobcatnod:

🙋‍♂️ What the fuck is wrong with you?
❓ Have you ever seen a bandwagon you didn’t want to jump on?
💩 Can you please be less shit? https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/@EUCommission/115643458015221823

Perhaps a tad more slowly than the asteroid striking the earth some 66 million years ago, man striking oil less than 200 years ago may have a similar effect of eradicating three quarters of all living species. A few hundred years is an instant if seen on a geological time scale.

Day 30: Elizabeth Moon
This last spot (somehow 32 days after my last post, but oh well) was a tough decision, but Moon brings us full circle back to fantasy/sci-fi, and also back to books I enjoyed as a teenager. Her politics don't really match up to Le Guin or Jemisin, but her military experience make for books that are much more interesting than standard fantasy fare in terms of their battles & outcomes (something "A Song of Ice and Fire" achieved by cribbing from history but couldn't extrapolate nearly as well). I liked (and still mostly like) her (unironically) strong female protagonists, even if her (especially more recent) forays into "good king" territory leave something to be desired. Still, in Paksenarion the way we get to see the world from a foot-soldier's perspective before transitioning into something more is pretty special and very rare in fantasy (I love the elven ruins scene as Paks travels over the mountains as an inflection point). Battles are won or lost on tactics, shifting politics, and logistics moreso than some epic magical gimmick, which is a wonderful departure from the fantasy norm.
Her work does come with a content warning for rape, although she addresses it with more nuance and respect than any male SF/F author of her generation. Ex-evangelicals might also find her stuff hard to read, as while she's against conservative Christianity, she's very much still a Christian and that makes its way into her writing. Even if her (not bad but not radical enough) politics lead her writing into less-satisfying places at times, part of my respect for her comes from following her on Twitter for a while, where she was a pretty decent human being...
Overall, Paksenarrion is my favorite of her works, although I've enjoyed some of her sci-fi too and read the follow-up series. While it inherits some of Tolkien's baggage, Moon's ability to deeply humanize her hero and depict a believable balance between magic being real but not the answer to all problems is great.
I've reached 30 at this point, and while I've got more authors on my shortlist, I think I'll end things out tomorrow with a dump of also-rans rather than continuing to write up one per day. I may even include a man or two in that group (probably with at least non-{white cishet} perspective). Honestly, doing this challenge I first thought that sexism might have made it difficult, but here at the end I'm realizing that ironically, the misogyny that holds non-man authors to a higher standard means that (given plenty have still made it through) it's hard to think of male authors who compare with this group.
Looking back on the mostly-male authors of SF/F in my teenage years, for example, I'm now struggling to think of a single one whose work I'd recommend to my kids (having cheated and checked one of my old lists, Pratchett, Jaques, and Asimov qualify but they're outnumbered by those I'm now actively ashamed to admit I enjoyed). If I were given a choice between reading only non-men or non-woman authors for the rest of my life (yes I'm giving myself enby authors as a freebie; they're generally great) I'd very easily choose non-men. I think the only place where (to my knowledge) not enough non-men authors have been allowed through to outshine the fields of male mediocrity yet is in videogames sadly. I have a very long list of beloved games and did include some game designers here, but I'm hard-pressed to think of many other non-man game designers I'd include in the genuinely respect column (I'll include at least two tomorrow but might cheat a bit).
TL;DR: this was fun and you should do it too.
#30AuthorsNoMen

Sonnet 020 - XX
A woman's face with nature's own hand painted,
Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women's fashion:
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou f…

even the eagles documentary made me like the eagles' music a little more, but this billy j**l documentary (which is as charming as advertised) might be the 1st music doc to make me like someone's music even less, which i didn't think was possible. but holy shit this is insufferable. wowie zowie.

To clarify something maybe not obvious from my previous posts, I'm very very anti vibe coding for anything that anyone will use. LLM codegen requires more oversight, not less. This is *very* different from deterministic codegen/compilation where if the inputs are valid and the codegen is valid then the outputs are valid.

My ZigBee mesh is now mesh due to IKEA bu^Wsmartplugs >> random Tuya from Ali. They do know how to route!
Random Ali sensors are more or less OK. #zigbee #homeassistant

Hey... it's snowing again... what a surprise.
Our first winter in Barrie has been eventful as we've now gone 12 days with 2cm or more snow accumulation per day, and had a streak broken yesterday of 10 straight days of heavy snow / snow squall warnings.
According to local media the 2025 November/December snowfall amount is the highest in 25 years. Based on my substantial lack of meteorological knowledge I am predicting less snow than normal for the rest of the winter. The lakes are cooling quickly and icing over due to the colder than normal temperatures. That should reduce the lake effect snow squalls coming off of Georgian Bay. (Delivered in my Cliff Clavin voice).
#Snowmageddon #IceAge

»Write Code That Runs in the Browser, or Write Code the Browser Runs«
— by @…
🧑‍💻 https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/more-control-e…

It is cold in northern parts of the world. Studded tyres are awesome. If you do not have them, forgot to mount them or cannot afford to invest for your usage, I am here for you.
The number of times I have been caught out and unicycled on snow and ice is quite high. If I can do it, you can do it. Just take it easy! Oh and wear a helmet, even if you do not normally. That kind of a fall is exactly what they are for.

Oil is the absolute enemy, and that should be completely clear at this point. Advocate hard for a Dutch style traffic plan and Dutch bike infrastructure. Push hard for mass transit. Fight car infrastructure with everything you can. Abolish free parking.
Every dollar you spend on gas, every dollar that goes to roads and free parking, is a dollar that will be spent murdering civilians to steal their oil.
Free parking is the most important subsidy to car culture. The more expensive you can make parking, the fewer cars will be on the road, the safer cities will be, and the less money will be available for the gang of thieves directing the military.
#FuckCars

The Shorts format on YouTube gets me 30 times more views and 2 to 3 times more new subscribers. It's fascinating. I think I could post any nonsense as a Short, and I'll still break my previous "record" :/
* I don't believe this is only due to the algo pushing hard the format (although it's a significant part of it). Besides conditioning people to favour Shorts so they would see "less" adverts, YouTube is tapping at a larger audience that would eventu…

A wren (Bewick's, I think, Thryomanes bewickii) in Seattle's Discovery Park this summer
#naturalist

This article just cited the Finnish Michaux study. There are others. The whole "industrial renewable energy capture systems" wager has inadequate foundations, which is why the only way is to use much less energy. Hence #degrowth See my article and linked report for the UK case.
Is There Enough Metal to Replace Oil? - CounterPunch.org

Bluesky says it has hit 40M users and plans to launch "dislikes" in beta to tailor content rankings and reply rankings (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/31/bluesky-hits-40-million-users-introduces-dislikes-beta/…

Using #PHP arrays as pseudo-objects is almost never the right answer. They're less self-documenting, slower, worse on memory, and more bug prone.
https://peakd.com/php/@crell/php-use-a

🎜 What the Project needs is committers far less decrepit than me.
🎝 Let's say, yes, maybe, whatever, it's all good. Let's just wait and see.
🎜 If a ninety-nine-pages-long primer is slightly off-putting,
🎝 please watch this space, 'cause five-minute videos are much more Mark P's thing:
https://www.y…

@… The last time I tried LuaTeX, it was even slower than XeTeX, and there were many more or less obvious incompatibilities. Also, I’m sick and tired of the “Babel is outdated, use Polyglossia! Haha, no! Polyglossia is unmaintained, use Babel—well, except for these languages! Stop, you must now switch to Polyglossia!”
I’ve been trying to get away fro…

@… The last time I tried LuaTeX, it was even slower than XeTeX, and there were many more or less obvious incompatibilities. Also, I’m sick and tired of the “Babel is outdated, use Polyglossia! Haha, no! Polyglossia is unmaintained, use Babel—well, except for these languages! Stop, you must now switch to Polyglossia!”
I’ve been trying to get away fro…

💦 Boosting work engagement through a simple smartphone diary
#work

CO2 is #JunkFood for plants.
Food becoming more calorific but less nutritious due to rising carbon dioxide
https://www.theguardi…

"In 1990, 943 million people [in China] lived on less than $3 a day measured in 2021 dollars – 83% of the population, according to the World Bank. By 2019, the number was brought down to zero. Unfortunately, the United States was not as successful. More than 4 million Americans – 1.25% of the population – must make ends meet with less than $3 a day, more than three times as many as 35 years ago."

Why SUV when you can LSV? (Low Speed Vehicles)
25mph max car! street legal in San Francisco.
Can drive on almost all roads in the city.
This one is not that great, imho (but try it at gocar). I want to see more LSVs. Amsterdam has many, and many types.
all roads w/ 35mph limits or less are ok, almost all roads in SF. Here are all limits on all roads in SF:

Happy new year to all from Bev, Linus, and my bald self. Needless to say, 2025 was more than a bit on the dicey side—began with a fascist takeover of the US and leukemia on my part, followed by knee replacement and then hip replacement for Bev. Linus, knock on wood, has been fine. I’m in complete remission and Bev is fully recovered. We’re all up and running now, hoping for a healthy and less fascist 2026.

If recently played with plain Raw photography a bit on my iPhone.
I find that I can achieve better looking results than with the stock camera's HEIF or ProRaw format.
It mainly just looks less over processed and more natural.
The main downside is that the iPhone limits you to 12 MP but I think it is worth it.
Does someone else do this as well?
Or do you use a different app than the stock camera?
Curious about Android experiences as well.

Bluesky says it has hit 40M users and plans to launch "dislikes" in beta to tailor content rankings and reply rankings (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/31/bluesky-hits-40-million-users-introduces-dislikes-beta/…

The less educated you are, the more likely you'll vote for Trump/MAGA.
And this is why Republicans:
▫️defund the Dept of Education
▫️ban books
▫️call college a scam
▫️tell people to go to trade schools
Two surveys from the WSJ & FOX News below:
#trump #education

The CCGS Amundsen is a Canadian research icebreaker run by the non-profit Amundsen Science at Université Laval and operated by Canadian Coast Guard. This past summer, the ship was able to navigate into areas previously off limits due to very thick multi-year ice (5 yrs, 7 or more metres thick). There is much less of this thick stable ice in the Arctic now due to #ClimateChange, meaning prev…

Day 29: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
I've been sitting on Simpson for a while because there's some overlap in her writing with Robin Wall Kimmerer, and I've had a lot of different genres/styles/subjects/media I've wanted to post at least one author from. But I've now hit repeats on at least YA romance and manga, and Simpson's writing is actually quite different from Kimmerer's in a lot of ways. While Kimmerer is a biologist by training and literally braids that knowledge together with her knowledge of Potawatomi cosmology and ethics, Simpson is an Anishinaabe philosopher and anarchist, and her position as a scholar of Indigenous philosophy adds a different depth to her work: she talks in more depth about knowledge relationships and her connections with specific elders, and she has more citations to other Indigenous theorists, which is the one criticism I've ever seen of Kimmerer's work. Rather than being Indigenous and a scientist, she's Indigenous and a scholar of indigenous studies.
I've only read "Theory of Water" by Simpson, but it was excellent, and especially inspiring to read as an anarchist. Simpson's explicit politics are another difference from Kimmerer's work, which is more implicitly than explicitly political. This allows Simpson to draw extremely interesting connections to other anarchist theorists and movements. "Theory of Water" is probably a bit less accessible than "Braiding Sweetgrass," but it's richer from a theory perspective as a result.
In any case, Simpson is a magnificent writer, sharing personal insights and stories along with (and inseparable from) her theoretical ideas.
#30AuthorsNoMen

You see some effort on the part of Congress to assert itself in the realm of war.
But it failed predominantly on party lines
Republicans predominantly were supporting the president and whatever it happens to be that he would like to do.
Moderate Republicans and Republicans who are in less safe districts were and are more likely to at least stand up a little bit to the president,
but there’s a very small number of them.

@…

I guess it depends on the language. I use polars heavily with Python. It works really really well. It's not just faster than pandas, it's more ergonomic, more regular, more composable and less quirky.

Python is very flexible and accommodating. And you are strongly discouraged from doing fine grained computation in Python a…

The chat interface was a marketing bet. Selling #AI as if it is not auto complete. It still is.
"#ChatGPT shifted the user’s relationship to text, moving the prompt from a ‘piece of writing for the model to finish’ to a ‘question calling for an answer’."

An evening discussing falling enrollment in #STEM courses at universities across Europe, especially traditional studies like chemistry, geology and meteorology. I wonder if young people are unaware of just how interesting #STEM careers to be? Or do they have the perception it's "too hard" compared to other subjects where easier grades may be had? Or is it simply they think they can have "better"* jobs in other fields?
#AcademicChatter
*Where better might mean higher paid, more prestigious, more certain of employment, or less workload or some combination of all of these... ?

Some folks in the replies seem a bit confused about what that 3.5% counts, conflating it with polling or election results: “What if 3.5% support the authoritarian too? Who wins then??”
That study was specifically looking at (1) ongoing political engagement (2) in opposition to an authoritarian slide. It’s •not• a poll. It’s •not• an election. It’s •not• a popularity contest. It’s about how much active counter-engagement an authoritarian takeover can withstand.
If 3.5% of the population is actually •actively• engaged in opposition work on an •ongoing• basis, then that likely indicates a much broader base of less active and more intermittently engaged opposition — like maybe an order of magnitude larger! Who knows! The golden brown on top of the bread is a decent indicator of what’s happening inside.

🎉 Resources 1.9 has just been released, here are the highlights:
• Thanks to the volunteers of GNOME Damned Lies, Resources is now available in many more languages
• Support for the new “xe” driver for Intel GPUs
• Link information is now also shown for Wi-Fi interfaces
• Resources can now halt graphical updates when its window is not in view to save on power
• Update to the GNOME 49 runtime
• Internal changes for less code complexity and clearer architecture…

Firefox is jumping the shark with this AI thing. A web browser helps you browse the web. it doesn't steal and summarize web content in order to prevent you from visiting web sites.
I think it's barely less disgusting than the blockchain web nonsense. But I acknowledge that it is possible that it is actually even more disgusting.

@… @… Just curious, do you have a clear sense of whether processing physical checks is more or less expensive than PayPal’s processing fees?
I’d love to give money whichever way leads to the smallest cut going to someone else :)…

CO2 is #JunkFood for plants.
Food becoming more calorific but less nutritious due to rising carbon dioxide
https://www.theguardi…

What Americans die from
VS
What the news reports on
https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die-from

PitchBook: US AI and robotics VC deals are up over 4x since 2023 to $160B so far in 2025, while comparable China deals are just $10B , up from $9.24B in 2023 (CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/26/cnbc-china

If you're unclear on why you have to load the video before you can play it it's because the first load only loads the image, title and channel name to make the page itself load much faster.

The person viewing is then allowed to make a more considered choice before activating the video. Perhaps you want to open the link an incognito window instead for example.

One great bonus to this embed is that it shows way less ads, if any.

Health Stuff

Recovered somewhat from whatever that weird fit was at the end of last year.

NHS still has me on some sort of list I think, appointment might turn up next year. Last contact with them they were suggesting maybe November.
But the private treatment gave me the
MRI which
showed nothing weird and post-fit symptoms have been reducing.
Experimented with eating meat to see if that helped.
Tried eating meat for a month to see if it reduced the post-fit symptoms. Maybe it did? Tried vegetarian again and maybe it got worse?
Hard to tell with intermittent symptoms and a terrible memory.
Decided it's more likely to do good than harm (to me, entirely harm to the animals obviously), and eat meat till the end of the year.
While I'm better, I don't really feel fully recovered enough to want to change things so more meat next year I think.
One of those symptoms is that booze tolerance dropped to like zero. Very rarely had more than four pints in a day this year and very rarely more than one night a
week.
Much high number than the target there really.
Tripped over a guy-rope and fell onto the wrist.
Did two days of the festival and the drive home thinking it almost certainly wasn't broken and only confirmed it was when I got home and the hospital put it in a cast.

Our pick this week is a banger from UK punk rockers Templeton Pek.
Crank that volume, give it a listen and see what we had to say about the track and the band behind it. Go on, it's almost the weekend .. treat yourself!
Follow us for more reviews of hand picked tracks from across the epic world of #rock and

This website illustrates nicely how the US lost the competition–at least for now–in open(ish) LLM models: #AIResearch #AGI_hype
/via Wired

View of hills covered by forest canopy looking south from a high point along the Fingerlakes Trail in Caroline -- a rare place south of Cayuga lake where you can find a commanding view
#photo #photography #landscape

Having some apps now liquid ass and some using the old design—the old design is much clearer and much less intrusive and much more “leave the content alone”

Hello from the Pacific Northwest during a major rain event, distinguished by a more or less complete absence of any actual freaking light or color. So here’s something I snapped a couple days ago, by way of eye therapy.
#Photography

Been working on Corsi-Rosenthal like filters devices and it's really nice to see them just sucking up PM2.5 particles in minutes when put in a room
Trying to make ones that look a bit less like a DIY shitshow and more professional
Really great and happy with these, considering making a little Open Source project for the few designs I made
Image is a prototype I put together but not yet finished the box with varnish or anything but really loving this
(background he…

Today is the anniversary of America's time zones. Before the railways forced standardization, every town had local time, more or less based on solar time. That was chaos.
England actually had railway time decades earlier.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-histor<…

Northwestern about to cave???
Writing about Cornell caving to the Trump Administration,
I told Northwestern that if it planned to cave to please do so by December 31
so I can save money.
Unfortunately, I may have gotten my wish.
The supposed pricetag is
$75 million
(more than Cornell, less than Columbia, much more than Virginia).
And it will include the usual surrender of academic freedom tempered by a bullshit assurance
(and press rele…

@… I suspect Apple's problem with GPL-3.0 is less complying with its requirements and more its language around patent grants.

#LB Estou bastante surpreso da Troi não estar ganhando essa de lavada. Mas, considerando a idade que eu tinha na época da série, é possível que eu considerasse a Beverly adulta demais para mim, de forma que eu nem a considerava atraente.
https://

Just finished "It's Lonely at the Center of the Earth" by Zoe Thorogood.
CW: Frank/graphic discussion of suicide and depression (not in this post but in the book).
It feels a bit wrong to simply give it my review here as I would another graphic memoir, because it's much more personal and less consensual than the usual. It feels less like Thorogood has invited us into her life than like she was forced to put her life on display in order to survive, and while I selfishly like to read into the book that she benefited in some way from the process, she's honest about how tenuous and sometimes false that claim can be. Knowing what I've learned from this book about Thorogood's life and demons, I don't want her to feel the mortification of being perceived by me, and so perhaps the best thing I could do is to simply unread the book and pull it back out of my memories.
I did not find Thorogood's life relatable, nor pitiable (although my instinct bends in that direction), but instead sacred and unknowable. I suspect that her writing and drawing has helped others in similar circumstances, but she leaves me with no illusion that this fact brings her any form of peace or joy. I wonder what she would feel reading "Lab Girl" or "The Deep Dark," but she has been honest enough to convey that such speculation on my part is a bit intrusive.
I guess the one other thing I have to say: Zoe Thorogood has through artistic perseverance developed an awe-inspiring mastery of the comic medium, from panel composition, through to page layout and writing. This book wields both Truth and Beauty.
#AmReading #ReadingNow

In the USA there's now bipartisan acceptance that "steaks cost almost 17% more than a year ago" ,[1] 60 % of shoppers buy less beef,[2] 37 % consider plant-based substitutes[3] but not clear how many would simply increase e.g. pulses or go fully #vegan. Prices of lentils are down[4] and production of pulses is expected to go up.[5]
[1]

"Putting less meat and more legumes in school menus reduces environmental impact by up to 50%"
#Food #Environment #Environment

These butterflies pick host plants where the temperatures are more comfortable, even if they're less nutritious (but it's not clear from this data that the nutritional variation is biologically significant?)
https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.11.15.688506

Mick Shots: Making common sense QB decisions https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/mick-shots-making-common-sense-qb-decisions

2/2 Reflection on #citizenship:
I do not treat the concept of “#democracy" lightly. I was born into the aftermath of centuries of totalitarian oppression that ended suddenly, leaving the nascent Ukrainian state of the late 90s and early 2000s floundering in the turbulent whirlpool of hopes and fears felt by millions of people who were finally allowed to ponder: how to build a free democratic state in the place of Soviet and imperial ruins?
I was taught the words "democracy", "citizen", "freedom", "voting", “liberty" (and more) by people who, less than two decades prior, weren't allowed to leave the borders of their country. I was told about self-determination by people whose political choices were ridiculed, punished, and eviscerated form most of their lives. The duty of governing ourselves felt to us ephemeral - a nice fantasy, akin to a fairytale or a utopia from fictional works.
And then I saw those same people fight with their bodies and souls once the previously unfathomable democracy was threatened. Protests in 2004, then again in 2014, then the unthinkable war against foreign invasion in 2022. Democracy no longer felt abstract or silly. It became as tangible as saying "I love you".
I write of Ukraine as I reflect on becoming a citizen of another country because the history and values of my adopted United States feel as real as the skin on my legs, the significance of its legacy lays as heavy as the weight of my waist-long hair, and the desire to uphold the freedoms of its Constitution burns my throat as harshly as dehydration after a long day in the sun.
People have asked me why I even want to join this country, when the present moment is shrouded in impenetrable darkness. And I answer: because I've felt the warmth of a newly lit fire of freedom breaking through shadows that for centuries looked like solid walls. I have seen kindness, and solidarity heal the fear and hate of oppression. I've seen liberty emerge from nothing but the human soul.
I am not a religious person, but I have faith. Faith in the ideals at the foundation of the American project. Faint but powerful recognition that "we the people" now includes me.
I love #America. And I hope to keep loving my home for the rest of my life.

Blaine's talk is SO GOOD @… - I'm going to get his slides too, and we should embed the hertzog video.
Speaking of great talks, will we have more or less tears at this year's #ATmosphereConf?

Has anybody done any research into how vehicles (and i guess other products but vehicle are the main thing i can think of) named after a place sell in that place, compared to other comparable cities?
For example is the Toyota Tacoma noticeably more (or less) popular in the Tacoma, WA area compared to other parts of the country?

I don't disagree with suggestions that the UK public sector should have less reliance on the big-three (American) cloud providers. But this has been a concern for more than a decade, and people should at least be aware of both the "GOV.UK PaaS" and UKCloud.

🫧 Cleaner air may be accelerating warming by making clouds less reflective
#atmosphere

Less than 48 hours after joining Bluesky,
the White House has already become one of the most blocked accounts on the social network.
According to ClearSky, which tracks Bluesky blocking stats,
the White House account is blocked by around 91,000 accounts, while being followed by only 10,000.
The only account that’s been blocked by more Bluesky users belongs to Vice President JD Vance, who joined back in June. 
While the various new government accounts hadn’t qu…

Day 22: Yuki Urushibara
I've got a few more mangaka left on my short list, and might very well get to at least one more, but Urushibara is the author of Mushishi and anyone who knows either the manga or anime understands immediately why she appears here.
Mushishi is a "seinen" anime, which means it's written for adults, not children or teenagers (although it's very accessible for all ages). It deals with a vast array of life's circumstances through the lens of a traveling mushi expert and the various whimsical supernatural creatures he is called on to deal with. He's not an exorcist though, instead understanding that humans must live in harmony with the mushi, and working like an ecologist to sort things out. As is probably obvious, Urushibara is an incredible world-builder; she's also a top-notch artist and above all, her stories are overflowing with kindness, humanity, and respect for the natural world.
Besides Mushishi, I've read "Suiiki", and it's one of the few manga I stumbled through in the original Japanese, which says a lot given my limited reading vocabulary (and the fact that it doesn't include rubi). It weaves the supernatural into a story of childhood innocence and curiosity in a lovely way.
Much like Shirahama who I mentioned earlier, Urushibara's stories are full of gentle wisdom for all ages, but Urushibara's work is quieter and less dramatic, with an adult main character confident in his expertise instead of a young-and-learning protagonist.
#30AuthorsNoMen

A day of lots of painting, most of which is more or less invisible on a photograph coz it's the clear-coat varnish over the top of the wood stain. Does it look more shiny? To the eye it does, but even that may fade as it dries. The clear coat is important to protect the wood though.
For the first time all the exposed wood is blue though. Hurray.
One more days work tomorrow, then we're off for six days while I have to work and play away.

A look at the challenges facing Europe's chip industry, as the EU will likely fall short of its targeted 20% share of global chip manufacturing by 2030 (Foreign Affairs)
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/europe/europe-losing-chips-race

Mick Shots: Making common sense QB decisions https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/mick-shots-making-common-sense-qb-decisions

So I grew up next to #Chernobyl and this is, well, TERRIFYING.
A story for y’all: I’m from a city called Zhytomyr, 2 hours west of Kyiv in the North of #Ukraine. We were downwind of the Chernobyl #nuclear power plant when the 1986 disaster happened.
I wasn’t born for another 12 years, but my childhood was filled with stories and the aftermath of it all. Things like:
- My grandmother worked as a head doctor in a hospital and rehabilitation facility exclusively for children of Chernobyl victims to treat the extremely high prevalence of Tuberculosis and other severe health complications. (To specify: these were SECOND GENERATION of exposure).
- A lot of the kids in that facility were orphans, because their parents died young from health problems.
- My uncle’s wife was born in Pripyat. She was 1 year old when the disaster happened. Her parents were told to evacuate while given no information about what happened. They had to pack up their things and rush out to an unfamiliar city with their baby, never to see the rest of their belongings, apartment, or hometown again.
- When I was a kid, it became so common to see weirdly mutated animals and insects that even 2-3 year olds would make jokes about “Chernobyl mosquitos” and I wouldn’t even flinch seeing occasional giant bugs, dark frogs, weird-looking dogs.
- We’d frequently hear of nearby farms having issues with their animals being born too mutated to survive or random outbreaks from contaminated water / food. Crops would randomly fail. People would get poisoned on a regular basis. This all got less common as I grew up.
- My mother still remembers being a little girl, 10 years old, and looking outside from their balcony at the clouds blowing over from Chernobyl that day. People were told to not go outside and to shut all the windows, but not given an explanation as to why. My mother swears that the rain looked different. They weren’t able to go and buy more food for the kitchen for multiple days.
Anyway - nuclear safety isn’t a joke. I don’t understand how this level of carelessness can happen after Chernobyl and Fukushima.

https://www.404media.co/power-companies-are-using-ai-to-build-nuclear-power-plants/

We close out 2025 this week with another early pick, a fitting track from 90s rock act Semisonic.
Give it a listen and bring in the new year with us, as we run through why we feel this is the perfect track for the occasion.
Thanks again to all our readers for another fun year of music blogging, we'll be back in the new year to showcase more hand picked tracks from across the epic world of #rock

Day 28: Samira Ahmed
As foreshadowed, we're back to YA land, which represents a lot of what I've been enjoying from the library lately.
I've read "Hollow Fires", "This Book Won't Burn", and "Love, Hate, and other Filters" by Ahmed, along with "Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know" which is quite different. All four are teen ~romances with interesting things to say about racism & growing up as a South Asian Muslim, but whereas the first three are set in small-town Indiana, the third is set in France and includes a historical fiction angle involving Dumas and a hypothetical Muslim woman who was (in this telling) the inspiration for several Lord Byron poems.
Ahmed's novels all include a strong and overt theme of social justice, and it's refreshing to see an author not try to wade around the topic or ignore it. Her romances are complex, with imperfect protagonists and endings that aren't always "happily ever after" although they're satisfying and believable.
My library has a plethora of similar authors I've been enjoying, including Adiba Jaigirdar (who appeared earlier in this list), Sabaa Tahir ("All my Rage" is fantastic but I'm less of a fan of her fantasy stuff), Sabina Khan ("The Love and Lies of Rukhsana Ali"), and Randa Abdel-Fattah ("Does My Head Look Big In This?"; from an earlier era). Ahmed gets the spot here because I really like her politics and the way she works them into her writing. Her characters are unapologetic advocates against things like book bans, and Ahmed doesn't second-guess them or try to make things more palatable for those who want to ban books (or whatever). Her historical fiction in "Mad..." is also really cool in terms of "huh that could actually totally be true" and grappling with literary sexism from ages past.
#30AuthorsNoMen

Sonnet 096 - XCVI
Some say thy fault is youth, some wantonness;
Some say thy grace is youth and gentle sport;
Both grace and faults are lov'd of more and less:
Thou mak'st faults graces that to thee resort.
As on the finger of a throned queen
The basest jewel will be well esteem'd,
So are those errors that in thee are seen
To truths translated, and for true things deem'd.
How many lambs might the stern wolf betray,
I…

The White House points to a
seven-month snapshot
showing low inflation,
but economists say prices are closer to 3 percent.
The shutdown delays fresh data.
Most experts agree inflation has picked up in recent months,
in part because of Trump’s tariffs.
Economists expect more tariff-driven price increases in the months to come.

OnePlus 15R review: the new $700 device is fast with a big battery and a vibrant 165Hz OLED, but one less camera than 2024's 13R and only four years of support (Igor Bonifacic/Engadget)
https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphone

I have yet to hear any, much less a solid, argument against my suggestion that Presidential pardons and commutations are revocable by a subsequent president.
Were I elected president I would revoke all of El Cheato's pardons and commutations and let the people involved make arguments (probably in the context of Habeas Corpus proceedings) why those actions are not Constitutional.
My own sense is that the question tends more towards the "not revocable" with regard to …

Just finished "The Word for World is Forest" by Ursula K. Le Guin. Can't believe I didn't read this one earlier, and this strengthens my resolve to finish off the rest of her stuff I have yet to read sooner. I think it benefits somewhat from having read it after "Four Ways to Forgiveness" which gives more of the Hainish context. Certainly none of the blurbs I had read about it did it any measure of justice, which is one reason I hadn't prioritized it. More than being about colonization, it's about a solution to the paradox of tolerance, and both the price and imperfections of that solution. As usual with Le Guin's science fiction, it's a rich companion to anarchist thought.
I think the typical objection to seeing it as an answer to the warlord question would be that it serendipitously positions the indigenous population with more power and a less ruthless opponent than in the imagined scenario, and it uses the League of Worlds as a sort of deus ex machina to foreclose further retribution. Ultimately that's why I think it's more about the paradox of tolerance than anything else, but I also think in regards to the warlord problem that we are too quick to underestimate just how numerous and enthusiastic the opponents of a warlord might be, and to overestimate the strength of technological weapons wielded by frail (and psychologically unarmored) humans.
In any case, Le Guin gives this book's alien humans yet another fascinatingly credible capability, and getting to see the introduction of ansible technology with all its implications is pretty cool too. Maybe not

Sonnet 020 - XX
A woman's face with nature's own hand painted,
Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women's fashion:
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou f…

Our pick this week is a suitably heavy slab of darkness from Sinsaenum, returning at last with their long-awaited new album. Just what you need as we roll into the last month of the year.
Check it out and see what we had to say about the track, the album it's from and the band behind it.
Don't forget to follow us as we showcase and write about one awesome track from across the epic world of #rock

Measured the gap under the dresser desk.
The clearance under the desk is 61cm.
What to make of the measurements diagram for that chair then?
The seat is at 46cm but how high are those arms? More or less than 15cm? 🤔
Probably approximately that, yeah.

The Biden administration may have shot the serif,
switching from Times New Roman font on the grounds that serif-less fonts such as Calibri are more accessible to readers with disabilities.
That’s all over now.
The State Department Action Request reads:
“To restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products
and abolish yet another wasteful DEIA [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility] program,
the Department is return…

Day 21: Aya Yoshinaga
I'm actually generally much less aware of the creators involved in the anime I watch, for a number of reasons, and the few anime directors I could name without looking them up were all men before I started this list. I've now got a short list of anime directors/writers who are women, and the first I'll include here is Yoshinaga, in part because she was pivotal to one of my favorite lesser-known anime, "Kurau Phantom Memory". It was actually one of the first anime I watched ever, but I didn't like it just because of that, since I've rewatched it at least twice and still regard it highly. It's got a pretty cool science fiction setting, an extremely cool barely-comprehensible alien race, a female protagonist who is not sexualized and not subjected to romance, and it centers a platonic relationship torn apart by technological hubris. Very "cool seinen stuff that wouldn't make it past the focus groups today" stuff.
Besides Kurau, Yoshinaga has worked on other great stuff like Golden Kamuy, Azumanga Daioh, Durarara, and Fullmetal Alchemist, and when you see a correlation like that between well-written shows and the same writer showing up again and again, it's clear there's talent there, even if most of these are manga-based.
Probably going to circle back to at least one more anime writer, but for tomorrow I'll move on to manga probably, since I want to space out all my YA enthusiasm a bit.
#30AuthorsNoMen

This block of wood, of which there are four at the corners of the bed now I've painted them, is very evocative isn't it?
I could glue a thimble atop that and some window-stickers on the side I bet... 🤔
Sheets of 1cmx1cm mirror tiles appear to be available easily. The more ideal 1cmx2xm less common.
Maybe best as a custom sticker?
Needs windows and a banner and maybe a siren light anyway when its done.