Tootfinder

On 14 May 2024, the European Council agreed on the new EU migration pact, deciding it would enter into force on 12 June 2026.
More than 2 years later, and 23 days before the starting date, the Netherlands has its "Oh shit, we aren't ready for it" moment.
"Govt has no solution for new asylum crisis"

West Coast Whale Entanglements Still High in 2025, 9 Seen in 2026 So Far https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-releases/west-coast-whale-entanglements-still-high-in-2025-9-seen-in-2026-so-far-2026-06-1…

West Coast Whale Entanglements Still High in 2025, 9 Seen in 2026 So Far
Center for Biological Diversity: SAN FRANCISCO— Federal data shows that 33 whales were reported entangled in fishing gear off the U.S. West Coast in 2025. That’s just one fewer than the 34 entangled in 2024, which was the highest number since 2018. At least nine whales have already been seen entangled in 2026, including two humpbacks entangled near Monterey, Calif., in late May.

Sharing stats from the UK's #InternationalMuseumDay #IMD2026 @icomuk.b…

A Russian ship sank in mysterious circumstances. It may have been carrying submarine nuclear reactors to North Korea
The ship set sail just two months after Kim Jong Un had sent troops to assist with Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, end 2024.
https://…

A Russian ship sank in mysterious circumstances. It may have been carrying submarine nuclear reactors to North Korea
A Russian ship with an unusual cargo suffered a series of explosions and sank in unexplained circumstances off the coast of Spain, a CNN investigation has found.

Colorado Revises Its AI Act: What Changed and Why
https://fpf.org/blog/colorado-revises-its-ai-act-what-changed-and-why/
@…
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US Bureau of Labor Statistics data: employment in 18 AI-exposed occupations fell 0.2% between May 2024 and May 2025, while the broader US labor market rose 0.8% (Matthew Boesler/Bloomberg)

Another way to see data centers aren’t just about AI: even by EPRI’s most generous forecast, AI accounts for less than half of the load added since ChatGPT. You may not like what the rest of the buildout is being used for.
https://blog.still-water.net/what-if-data-centers-ar…

An American scientist who has studied underground nuclear tests
has been detained in China for more than 18 months on spying charges,
according to his supporters and a US lawmaker.
💥Youlin Chen, a seismologist, has been “wrongfully detained” since November 2024,
US Senator Edward Markey said in a statement Tuesday.
Donald Trump raised Chen’s detention and asked for his freedom during a meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing in May,
according to …

US expert on underground nuclear tests held in China for 18 months
An American scientist who has studied underground nuclear tests has been detained in China more than 18 months on spying charges, according to his supporters and a US lawmaker.

Extreme dominance of Earth-origin heavy ions in the intense #RingCurrent near the Earth during the May 2024 super #GeomagneticStorm: #ionosphere supplied vast majority of ring current ions during May 2024 super geomagnetic storm, study finds: https://en.nagoya-u.ac.jp/news/articles/earths-ionosphere-supplied-vast-majority-of-ring-current-ions-during-may-2024-super-geomagnetic-storm-study-finds/ - despite the dense solar wind, solar wind ion contributions to the ring current during the May 2024 superstorm were minimal; the first simultaneous observation of ring current ions and solar wind during a storm this large.

I should probably toss the unopened mayonnaise in my fridge huh

May 2026 was the second-warmest May on record globally, in between 2024 and 2025.
The global average temperature was 15.81°C, 0.55°C above the 1991-2020 average for May and 1.42°C above the estimated 1850-1900 pre-industrial average for the month.
https://climate.copernicus.eu/surface-

Seoul-based WIRobotics, which develops wearable and humanoid robots and is collaborating with Nvidia and AWS, raised a ~$68M Series B led by JB Investment (Lee Jaewoon/The Elec)
https://www.thelec.net/news/articleView.html?idxno=10507

WIRobotics Raises 95 Billion Won in Series B Funding
WIRobotics said on May 15 that it completed a 95 billion won Series B funding round.The humanoid robotics company said the financing marks a major follow-on investment secured about two years after its 13 billion won Series A round in March 2024, underscoring recognition of both its next-generation

Announcement: New Issue of Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary e-Journal
https://ift.tt/e3OhGPv
Third Symposium on Dance, Music, and Performing Arts of the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia,…
via Input 4 RELCFP

Got my power bill for May. Net consumption was 2.73 MWh, an all-time low by a signficant margin (3.3 MWh in April 2026, and 3.77 MWh in July 2024, are the previous records).
The final bill after taxes and fees was $595, not *quite* an all time low (I paid $582 in July 2024) but that was for 3.7 MWh and I'm now paying almost as much for 2.7 - yay rate increases. If I can generate a touch more solar in June I might break the all-time low though.
Now if only I could generate thi…

🐴 Firehorse superstition helps uncover why women's education may not drive Japan's fertility decline
https://phys.org/news/2026-04-firehorse-superstition-uncover-women-japan.html

Firehorse superstition helps uncover why women's education may not drive Japan's fertility decline
The rapidly declining marriage and fertility rates across developed East Asian societies strain pension and health care systems, threaten economic growth, and reshape entire societies. To tackle this issue, governments in Japan and across East Asia have invested heavily in pronatalist measures, but often with limited success. For instance, Japan's government has repeatedly expanded childcare subsidies and parental leave provisions, yet the total fertility rate hit a record low of 1.20 in 2024.

The interior department is canceling a rule that put conservation on equal footing with development,
as Donald Trump’s administration eases restrictions on industries and seeks to boost drilling, logging, mining and grazing on taxpayer-owned land.
The 2024 rule adopted under former president Joe Biden was meant to refocus the interior department’s Bureau of Land Management,
which oversees about 10% of land in the US.
It allowed public property to be leased for restora…

A good reason to get outdoors in the north shore.
"Since 2024, the Village of Brown Deer has hosted a game every May, hiding a medallion within the village's 4.5-square-mile limits and sending out clues every few days. In previous years, the hunt has drawn thousands of searchers in pursuit of the cash prize and complimentary meal, sponsored by Café Corazon, according to the village."
#BrownDeer #Milwaukee #MedallionHunt

Announcement: New Issue of Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary e-Journal
https://ift.tt/TIS1kHo
Third Symposium on Dance, Music, and Performing Arts of the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia,…
via Input 4 RELCFP

A BBC presenter talking to a representative of striking doctors, making the suggestion that since doctors already earn more than the average salary people have little sympathy. When saying "that's a lot of money", it comes off as condescending given their own salaries - paid via regressive taxation - dwarf them.
https://www.

BBC pay 2024-2025: The full list of star salaries
Match of the Day presenter Gary Lineker, who left in May, is still the corporation's top earner.

During the first seven months of his presidency, the administration arrested the parents of at least 27,000 children.
During this period in 2025, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was deporting about twice as many parents each month compared with 2024.
The records do not detail how many of these children were detained or deported with their parents, and how many families were split up.
But the data provides one of the starkest views yet of how Trump’s mass depo…

Challenger: US tech companies announced cuts to 38,242 jobs in May, the most since August 2024, taking 2026's total so far to 123,653 cuts, up 65% YoY (Julia Fanzeres/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-…

Two kinds of robustness are not the same: disentangling fault tolerance and low-SNR robustness in multi-domain event detection on real data
Isao Kurosawa
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.29339 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.29339 https://arxiv.org/html/2606.29339
arXiv:2606.29339v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reliable event detection underpins induced-seismicity monitoring for Carbon dioxide Capture and Storage (CCS) and geothermal operations, distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), and industrial condition monitoring. In each setting a detector must stay reliable both when sensors fail and when the signal is buried in noise. These two failure modes are routinely conflated, and architectural complexity is often credited with robustness it may not deserve. We assemble a unified binary event-detection benchmark from three physically distinct real sources -- Hi-net seismic waveforms, Utah FORGE 2024 borehole DAS, and MAFAULDA industrial vibration -- each mapped to a common 8-channel, 256-sample representation, and evaluate a fault-tolerant detector (CEPHALON) trained with per-sample sensor-dropout against standard detectors (a 1D convolutional network, a temporal convolutional network, and a compact Transformer) trained with an identical recipe. On clean data every model is near-perfect (AUC ~ 0.99). Under progressive sensor loss, simple models with sensor-dropout are already robust and CEPHALON holds no advantage. Under additive noise, however, CEPHALON degrades far more gracefully: at -2.5 dB its overall AUC is 0.939 versus 0.532-0.572 for the convolutional baselines. Same-architecture ablations isolate the cause: disabling internal redundancy at inference reduces the low-SNR advantage only modestly, whereas removing sensor-dropout training collapses it (0.899 to 0.603 at -5 dB). The training recipe is therefore the dominant cause and parallel redundancy only secondary. We release a complete, numbered, reproducible pipeline so that every figure can be regenerated.
toXiv_bot_toot

In the central Netherlands, this was the 5th (or possibly 6th) warmest spring in the 126-year record. It was also sunny and dry.
Probably quite popular with many, but a clear sign of our changing climate. Personally, I've come to dislike hot weather in May; happy that it has cooled down now.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #BBC6Music's #CraigCharles
Sahra Halgan:
🎵 Sharaf (6 Music Session, 15 May 2024)
#SahraHalgan
https://open.spotify.com/track/6a7b6cwzpNS1oA6AR4kvt1

Announcement: New Issue of Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary e-Journal
https://ift.tt/zvk4NLK
CALL FOR PAPERS: Modernizing Winter Sam White 05/20/2026 - 9:31pm Announcement Type …
via Input 4 RELCFP

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #BBC6Music's #Afrodeutsche
Sahra Halgan:
🎵 Sharaf (6 Music Session, 15 May 2024)
#SahraHalgan
https://sahrahalgan.bandcamp.com/track/sharaf
https://open.spotify.com/track/6a7b6cwzpNS1oA6AR4kvt1