Tootfinder

For decades there's been a conflict between governments wanting to get access to people's private data and people trying to keep them out.
Over the years I've gradually come to the conclusion that the stable "Goldilocks zone", where there's the least likelihood of a major swing that makes things worse for everyone, is *not* the privacy utopia where devices are invulnerable, or a police state where anyone with a badge who asks can root through all your data, or…

Při posledním bivakovaní jsem mšlem nenašel své oblíbené tšbořiště nedaleko pramenišťě potoka. Okolí bylo pěkné rozryto. Tehdy jsem si i trochu zanadšval. To jsem ještě nevěděl, že v Brdech začínají řešit přichšzející sucho. Tak až pojedete do Brd, tak už budete vědět taky.
#brdy #brdyregion

RE: https://mstdn.social/@lowqualityfacts/116278993772857946
Seem accurate

"Climate change doubled likelihood of Canada’s extreme fire weather, study finds"
#Canada #Climate #ClimateChange

Climate change doubled likelihood of Canada's extreme fire weather, study finds
Human-induced climate change has more than doubled the likelihood of the extreme weather conditions that fueled Canada’s destructive 2026 wildfire season, finds a rapid analysis. As of early August, thousands of wildfires torched more than 3.8 million hectares (9.4 million acres) across the country — an area already significantly in excess of Canada’s 30-year annual […]

The Butterfly Defect Effect in Cylindrical Shell Buckling: Non-localized Interactions of Localized Imperfections
Uba K. Ubamanyu, Antoine Blond, John W. Hutchinson, Pedro M. Reis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19245 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.19245 https://arxiv.org/html/2607.19245
arXiv:2607.19245v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We investigate the buckling of axially compressed cylindrical shells containing localized defects, focusing on interactions among multiple defects and between them and the shell edges. Using high-fidelity finite-element simulations, we first characterize the parameter space of single-dimple sensitivity, defect-edge coupling, and pairwise defect-defect interactions. Building on this deterministic baseline, we run stochastic simulations of shells with randomly distributed imperfections whose amplitudes are sampled from a log-normal distribution. Post-buckling deformations form non-axisymmetric, butterfly-shaped patterns whose `wings' reach far across the shell surface. This spatial extent induces unavoidable interactions with neighboring defects and the clamped edges, so that buckling is not necessarily initiated by the deepest defect. A larger defect population raises the likelihood of an extreme defect, producing a statistical size effect: as the mean number of defects grows, the mean knockdown factor decreases asymptotically and its variability decays exponentially. The butterfly defect effect qualitatively explains the scatter in historical experimental data by correlating the knockdown factor with the cylinder length-to-thickness ratio ($H/t$) rather than the radius-to-thickness ratio ($R/t$) alone, thereby establishing $H$ as a key parameter for stability alongside $R$ and $t$. Nonetheless, the knockdown factors obtained here remain well above those reported in historical experiments, indicating that the localized Gaussian dimple, though nearly the worst-case imperfection for spherical shells, is not so for cylinders.
toXiv_bot_toot

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #ElSonido
Las Ultrasónicas:
🎵 Dulce Hoja
#LasUltrasónicas

Empirical likelihood confidence regions for ordered bivariate means
Naresh Garg
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12174 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.12174 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.12174
arXiv:2608.12174v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Let $\boldsymbol{X}_i=(X_{1i},X_{2i})^\top$ be independent and identically distributed observations with mean $\boldsymbol{\mu}=(\mu_1,\mu_2)^\top$ constrained by $\mu_1\leq\mu_2$. We study empirical-likelihood inference for a fixed mean vector and distinguish it from the previously known test of equality against an ordered alternative. At a fixed interior point, the constrained empirical likelihood ratio has the usual $\chi^2_2$ limit. At a fixed boundary point $(m,m)^\top$, its limit is the chi-bar-square distribution $\tfrac12\chi^2_1 \tfrac12\chi^2_2$. By contrast, profiling the unknown common mean in the equality-versus-order test yields $\tfrac12\chi^2_0 \tfrac12\chi^2_1$, the $k=2$ ordered-mean case of El Barmi (1996). We give an exact reduction of the latter statistic to the empirical likelihood of the paired differences, establish the localization step needed for the fixed-boundary expansion, and derive a local-to-boundary limit showing that interior calibration is not uniform over $n^{-1/2}$-neighborhoods of the boundary. Monte Carlo experiments under Gaussian, Student $t_5$, and shifted log-normal sampling examine fixed, boundary, and local regimes with explicit numerical-failure accounting. Illustrative paired-data analyses show the practical distinction between fixed-candidate confidence regions, directional equality tests, and ordinary scalar empirical-likelihood intervals truncated to the nonnegative parameter space.
toXiv_bot_toot

I've written a wee blog post about the parlous state of #LocalDemocracy in #Scotland. I've also written to the Dear Leader, John #Swinney, in a slightly more diplomatic tone.

Of size, and governance, revisited
Malta has sixty eight local government regions; Luxembourg one hundred and two; Iceland sixty one; Norway, with a population comparable to our own, three hundred and seventy two. The average number of inhabitants of a municipality across the whole of the EU is 22,455. Thus the average Scottish local authority has more than six times the population of the average European equivalent, and more than one hundred times the population of one in Czechia. Czechia is not really an outlier; France, with …

Weiss einer von euch, womit dieser Film gemacht wurde ?
#animation

Anthropic details Claude's text watermark: it only shows Claude was likely involved, is sparse in code and factual text, and disappears after a full rewrite (Anthropic)
https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-text-watermark

How Claude's text watermarking works
Future Claude models will generate text that contains a watermark. This is a way of determining the likelihood that Claude was involved in writing the text, and we, along with several other major AI providers, are implementing this change to comply with the EU AI Act. In this article, we share answers to some of the questions we’ve received about how our chosen watermarking method works, whether it affects Claude’s outputs, and why we’re making this change.