Tootfinder

CANI files a CA ballot measure to let an oversight board review and undo nonprofit conversions in science and tech since Jan. 2024, indirectly targeting OpenAI (Keach Hagey/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-complet

California is considering a new tax initiative aimed at billionaires, known as the
"2026 Billionaire Tax Act."
It seeks to impose a one-time 5% tax on individuals with a net worth exceeding $1 billion.
The tax would apply to approximately 200 billionaires residing in California
as of January 1, 2026.
https://<…

One of the overall most prolific and never-ending enigmas for me is which speakers people think "sound good".
Like you can have the most garbage tinny piece of shit speakers in a TV or on a laptop and the reviews will be "sounds great!".
Or e.g. Sonos speakers—they sound horrific and people go on about how they're the best thing they've ever heard.
These aren't subjective opinions by the way, you can measure the frequency response etc.

"Trump was by a large measure the most culpable and most responsible person in this conspiracy. These crimes were committed for his benefit. The attack happened at the Capitol, part of this case does not happen without him. The other co-conspirators were doing this for his benefit."
Release of Jack Smith interview shows 'why Jim Jordan didn’t want public testimony': experts - Alternet.org
https://www.alternet.org/Bank/jack-smith-2674841248/

Saw a headline that Kent council’s (Reform) Doge-inspired cost-cutting found little waste.
And, lol ok of course.
But I would point out that the measure of success in *actual* auditing can’t be based on it always finding massive fraud.

Donald Trump signed into law this month a measure that 👉 prohibits anyone based in China and "other adversarial countries" from accessing the Pentagon’s cloud computing systems.
The ban, which is tucked inside the $900 billion defense policy law,
was enacted in response to a ProPublica investigation this year that exposed how Microsoft used China-based engineers to service the
Defense Department’s computer systems for nearly a decade
— a practice that left s…

Trump Signs Defense Bill Prohibiting China-Based Engineers in Pentagon IT Work
The measure, which emerged in response to a ProPublica investigation, bars Microsoft engineers in China and other adversarial countries from servicing sensitive Pentagon cloud computing systems.

"Une vaste enquête centrée sur les personnes, menée auprès de plus de 15 800 hommes, a permis de dresser un portrait de la psyché masculine. Elle révèle que la plupart des hommes ne sont pas du tout toxiques et que le problème se limite principalement Š une petite minorité."
3.2% pour être précis

I am mixed on this one...
On one hand I can see the risk of having Chinese people in China work on (which means "have access to", and often "have privileged access to") US DoD systems.
However, I don't see the other half of the issue - What do do about people who are not in China (perhaps in the US, even US citizens) who are, or have been induced, to use their access to promote the interests of a foreign power?
Given that under Cheato the US is dumbi…

Trump Signs Defense Bill Prohibiting China-Based Engineers in Pentagon IT Work
The measure, which emerged in response to a ProPublica investigation, bars Microsoft engineers in China and other adversarial countries from servicing sensitive Pentagon cloud computing systems.

Vegan, Flexitarian Or Carnivore? Here’s The Impact Your Diet Had This Year https://plantbasednews.org/news/environment/vegan-flexitarian-carnivore-diet-impact-year/

Vegan, Flexitarian Or Carnivore? Here's The Impact Your Diet Had This Year
If you followed a vegan, flexitarian, or carnivore diet in 2025, here’s how to measure the effect of your food choices on the world

Thiel Capital opens an office in Miami, as Peter Thiel and others reportedly look to cut ties with California over a proposed ballot measure to tax billionaires (Biz Carson/Bloomberg)

Looking at #JMusicFriday I notice I missed it last week jan 23
So while I wait for today's theme, let me post my "unit of measure" with a one week delay
BiSH / DiSTANCE [OFFiCiAL ViDEO]

• YouTube

Details on the California #wealthTax proposal:
https://lao.ca.gov/BallotAnalysis/Initiative/2025-024
It's a one-time 5% wealth tax but can be spread over 5 ye…

Streaming metrics underwent a rethink in 2025, as Netflix and Disney pivoted away from subscriber numbers to revenue per user, engagement, and other metrics (Deadline)
https://deadline.com/2025/12/streaming-report-card-2025-1236651338/

Streamer Report Card: Streaming Reached A Profit Turning Point In 2025, But Major Players Still Wonder How To Measure Success
Deadline takes a look at how the major streaming services fared in 2025 and the challenges ahead in 2026

"Bay of Biscay fishing ban to return in 2026 after proving successful at reducing dolphin deaths"
#Dolphins #Animals

Fishing ban in Bay of Biscay will return in 2026 to protect dolphins
Winter closures in recent years have gained positive results, although the measure will affect around 300 vessels.

Senate GOP split over how to amend the Jack Smith phone data measure (Politico)
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/11/19/congress/senate-gop-split-over-how-to-amend-the-jack-smith-phone-data-measure-00660149
http://www.memeorandum.com/251119/p132#a251119p132

Recipe for a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster:
(1) Take the juice from one bottle of Ol' Janx Spirit
(2) Pour into it one measure of water from the seas of
Santraginus V (Oh, those Santraginean fish!)
(3) Allow 3 cubes of Arcturan Mega-gin to melt into the
mixture (properly iced or the benzine is lost.)
(4) Allow four liters of Fallian marsh gas to bubble through it.
(5) Over the back of a silver spoon, float a measure of
Qualactin Hypermint…

They should measure AI-generated movies by natural resources used and extrapolate to Bambis consumed per second

At the start of Donald Trump’s first term, he promised that he and his family would never do anything that might even be “perceived to be exploitive of office of the Presidency.”
By contrast, his second term looks rapacious.
He and members of his family have signed a blitz of foreign mega-deals shadowed by conflicts of interest,
and they’ve launched at least five different cryptocurrency enterprises,
all of which leverage Trump’s status as President to lure buyers o…

Trump’s Profiteering Hits $4 Billion
David D. Kirkpatrick takes the measure of how much the Trump family’s profits has increased President Donald Trump’s net worth after his first year back in office.

Just got an email from one of my Senators, Jon Ossoff, GA with some welcomed news:
Good afternoon,
On Sunday, U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff demanded civil liberties protections before further funds are appropriated to ICE and announced he will oppose the measure scheduled for a vote this week.
(Full text of letter in the image alt-text)
#UsPol

from my link log —
Units of measure in the KCL CAD language.
https://www.ncameron.org/blog/kcl-part-1-units/
saved 2026-01-27 https://

Radiocarbon analysis of turfgrasses can help cities measure greenhouse gas emissions
https://phys.org/news/2025-11-radiocarbon-analysis-turfgrasses-cities-greenhouse.html

Radiocarbon analysis of turfgrasses can help cities measure greenhouse gas emissions
Cities around the world are working to limit emissions of climate-warming greenhouse gases, but there have been few ways of measuring whether those gases are actually decreasing in any given municipality. In new research, University of California, Irvine scientists have created an effective method to measure greenhouse gas emissions around cities—something that can help local governments gauge the effectiveness of their emission-curbing programs.

Some days ago I sent a orchestral score for a composition contest. Today I noticed a small error with timpani at measure 109 (out of 362). It's haunting me.

Asset Management Strategist Says It's Time To Rethink How We Measure Poverty | Crooks and Liars
https://crooksandliars.com/2025/11/asset-management-strategist-says-its-time

How Raiders Will Measure Progress With Wins Nowhere in Sight https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/onsi/las-vegas-measure-progress-wins-nowhere-sight

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #DriveTime
Field Music:
🎵 Measure
#FieldMusic
https://fieldmusic.bandcamp.com/album/field-music-measure

I'm installing and tweaking #Immich, a really neat "Google Photos" like app that runs locally. It uses ML to do face detection and other neat features. I've been tuning my server and needed a better way to measure performance, so I vibe wrote a helper script. If you run Immich, this might be useful to you:

GitHub - rubix1138/immich_eta: Script that queries the Immich API and calculates and ETA
Script that queries the Immich API and calculates and ETA - rubix1138/immich_eta

This is so much more of a shitshow than even I realized. Alan Wong was making major amendments and sending them to his prospective co-sponsors in literally the last *hour* before the deadline.
https://missionlocal.org/2026/01/sf-great-highway-ballot-measure-…

Roadkill: S.F. measure to reintroduce cars to Great Highway ‘crashes and burns’
San Francisco requires only four supervisors to put a ballot measure before voters. That low bar was too high for Supervisor Alan Wong.

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…

Election 2025: Santa Cruz affordable housing advocates celebrate win on Measure C
Santa Cruz voters have approved Measure C, the housing advocate-supported ballot initiative, with more than 53% of the vote, while the competing Measure B, supported by local real estate interests, failed with just 11.9%. County officials continue counting ballots, with the next update on Friday at 4 p.m.

But did he and his staff learn anything, given the Wannong “Tiffany” Deng example? "My bad" is not a measure of improvement or competence
Daniel Lurie gets props, faces doubt in Beya Alcaraz fallout | Politics | sfexaminer.com
https:/…

Lurie lauded for taking D4 blame, faces skepticism
Some Filipino American leaders want restitution for cultural group.

But did he and his staff learn anything, given the Wannong “Tiffany” Deng example? "My bad" is not a measure of improvement or competence
Daniel Lurie gets props, faces doubt in Beya Alcaraz fallout | Politics | sfexaminer.com
https:/…

Lurie lauded for taking D4 blame, faces skepticism
Some Filipino American leaders want restitution for cultural group.

"The second excuse is that the uber-rich will flee the country. There are three possible responses to this claim. The first is that there’s no evidence to support it. The second is, if true, good riddance: they do us more harm than good. The third is to say: then the obvious solution is a global tax-avoidance measure."
#Kleptocracy
Money Talks – George Monbiot

Money Talks
The grim truth is that almost the entire political class aligns with the ultra-rich against the rest.

Daniels was looking at just 10 easily quantifiable body measurements. How many important dimensions of variations are there in a human mind? How hard are they to measure? How likely is it that even one single “average” mind exists on Earth?? The odds are vanishingly small.
[Napkin sketch: assume there are a paltry 20 dimensions of brain variation. (Surely that’s low.) Assume there’s a 1 in 5 change of being completely “normal” in each. (Surely that’s high.) Even that absurd hypothetical gives a 1 in 11,490 chance that a •single• completely average mind exists in a population of 8.3 billion.]
5/

Measuring dissimilarity between convex cones by means of max-min angles
Welington de Oliveira, Valentina Sessa, David Sossa
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.10483 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10483 https://arxiv.org/html/2511.10483
arXiv:2511.10483v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: This work introduces a novel dissimilarity measure between two convex cones, based on the max-min angle between them. We demonstrate that this measure is closely related to the Pompeiu-Hausdorff distance, a well-established metric for comparing compact sets. Furthermore, we examine cone configurations where the measure admits simplified or analytic forms. For the specific case of polyhedral cones, a nonconvex cutting-plane method is deployed to compute, at least approximately, the measure between them. Our approach builds on a tailored version of Kelley's cutting-plane algorithm, which involves solving a challenging master program per iteration. When this master program is solved locally, our method yields an angle that satisfies certain necessary optimality conditions of the underlying nonconvex optimization problem yielding the dissimilarity measure between the cones. As an application of the proposed mathematical and algorithmic framework, we address the image-set classification task under limited data conditions, a task that falls within the scope of the \emph{Few-Shot Learning} paradigm. In this context, image sets belonging to the same class are modeled as polyhedral cones, and our dissimilarity measure proves useful for understanding whether two image sets belong to the same class.
toXiv_bot_toot

Measuring the consequences of plastic contamination #environment

Measuring the consequences of plastic contamination
Plastic pollution is everywhere—including where you would least expect it, especially when it's in tiny particle form. Today, scientists are working to measure the consequences of this contamination. There's the pollution you can see—on the beach, on the roadside and in open-air landfills. And then there's the pollution you can't—on the peak of Mount Everest, deep inside the Mariana Trench, in clouds, in buildings, and in our water supply, food, blood and brain.

Bananas. Either as a size comparison or a measure of how crazy something is.
#AltUnitsOfMeasurements
#HashTagGames

Sen. Scott Wiener, proposes #California bond measure to take $23 billion to fund an in-state program to counter #GOP budget cuts and restore taxpayer funding for vital #scientific research programs in the state.
Devastating

Calif. leaders propose $23B plan to protect science research
A proposed 2026 ballot measure aims to offset federal funding cuts amid hundreds of canceled grants.

Sources: Peter Thiel and Larry Page may leave CA over a proposed ballot measure, opposed by Newsom, that levies a one-time 5% tax on those with $1B in assets (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/26/tec…

A Wealth Tax Floated in California Has Billionaires Thinking of Leaving
It’s uncertain whether the proposal will reach the statewide ballot in November, but some billionaires like Peter Thiel and Larry Page may be unwilling to take the risk.

Good evening to everyone except this clown car of politicians trying to close the city's third most popular park (and apparently not talking to each other about it)
https://missionlocal.org/2025/12/sf-alan-wong-sunset-great-highway-ballot-mea…

Supervisor Alan Wong says he’ll back measure to bring cars back to Great Highway
Supervisor Wong called both supporters and opponents of Sunset Dunes about his decision. One key person did not receive a call.

Replaced article(s) found for math.DG. https://arxiv.org/list/math.DG/new
[1/1]:
- Weighted GJMS operators on smooth metric measure spaces
Ayush Khaitan
https:/…

Diamonds,
particularly those with nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers,
are being used to create advanced quantum sensors
that can measure magnetic fields with high sensitivity.
To unlock the full potential of these sensors,
researchers need to understand the behavior of the material at the atomic level.
In a recent study conducted at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME),
Prof. David Awschalom’s team has developed a n…

Sonnet 091 - XCI
Some glory in their birth, some in their skill,
Some in their wealth, some in their body's force,
Some in their garments though new-fangled ill;
Some in their hawks and hounds, some in their horse;
And every humour hath his adjunct pleasure,
Wherein it finds a joy above the rest:
But these particulars are not my measure,
All these I better in one general best.
Thy love is better than high birth to me,
Richer tha…

House unanimously rebukes Thune on data seizure payouts (Hailey Fuchs/Politico)
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/11/19/congress/house-votes-to-overturn-thunes-controversial-subpoena-measure-00661169
http://www.memeorandum.com/251119/p172#a251119p172

Mithilfe privater #Satelliten der GHGSat-Konstellation wurden erstmals weltweit #Methanemissionen aus über 3000 Öl-, Gas- und #Kohleanlagen direkt erfasst.
Besonders betroffen si…

Private satellites pinpoint methane emissions from oil, gas and coal facilities worldwide
"The countries where we measure the largest oil and gas methane emissions are Turkmenistan, the U.S., Russia, Mexico and Kazakhstan."

In a world with kings, our only agency is to beg “please, sir, be kind.”
#apple #BigTech

20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple
Summary: A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple Developer ID, and everything associated with it, and I have no recourse. Can you help? Email paris AT paris.id.au (and read on for the details). ❤️ Here’s how Apple “Permanently” locked my Apple ID. I am writing this as a desperate measure.

New #ThingUmbrella example to create a parametric, grid layout-based calibration sheet for black and white photography development. The sheet includes different swatches and gradients to measure results/responses of different exposure times and developer solutions/processes. The sheet also includes a placeholder for a custom test image to be added later...
All sheet components are pa…

Dark-eyed juncos living in urbanized Los Angeles have shorter bills than juncos in nearby natural areas— but while UCLA was closed for COVID-19 safety, campus juncos evolved longer bills again
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2520996122

Jesus fucking christ.
https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/

20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple
Summary: A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple Developer ID, and everything associated with it, and I have no recourse. Can you help? Email paris AT paris.id.au (and read on for the details). ❤️ Here’s how Apple “Permanently” locked my Apple ID. I am writing this as a desperate measure.

Evaluation using in-situ observations from national governments and Citizen Scientists suggests nadir #altimeters can accurately measure water level changes regardless of lake area: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15481603.2025.2543521 -> Volunteers Help NASA Test Lake Monitoring From Space: https://science.nasa.gov/get-involved/citizen-science/how-small-is-too-small-volunteers-help-nasa-test-lake-monitoring-from-space/

The best description of Brown University, from Bess Kalb. (And to be clear, the heirs and star's kids are invariably also in that carton.)
https://besskalb.substack.com/p/brown-america

Shutdown Talks: Senate Democrats have struck a deal with Republicans and the White House to pass five spending bills to fund a large portion of the government for the remainder of the fiscal year,
as well as a stopgap measure to fund the Department of Homeland Security for two weeks while they continue negotiating guardrails to rein in immigration agents.
It is unclear how quickly the House can and will process those funding bills after the Senate passes them.
Cabin…

Trump Live Updates: Senate Democrats and White House Reach Deal to Avoid Shutdown

Yesterday I finished "The Other Side of Tomorrow" written by Tina Cho and illustrated by Deb JJ Lee. Lee's "In Limbo" was an excellent graphic memoir, and this similarly has wonderful art, although I didn't make the connection until checking the authors after reading to the end.
This book is a realistic fictional account of two childrens' escape from North Korea via China, Laos, and ultimately Thailand where they could declare themselves refugees at a US embassy and get sponsored to live in America. Along the way they're helped by various members of the Asian Underground Railroad. I'll avoid spoilers but yet definitely encounter difficulties along the way.
The ending definitely hits different now (while also accentuating my disgust with the current US regime). Like "Libertad" that I also finished recently, the "escape to the US at the end" plot line is going to become less prevalent going forward, although Libertad involved a good measure of complexity around that point.
I was a bit disappointed in one of the later plot points where a different and more-real-world-probable turn of events could have served as a better message for society, with the "lucky" outcome as written reinforcing regressive notions of family, and as an ex-Christian the Christian elements of the story made me feel a way. I'm an agnostic, not an atheist though, and can respect the idea that those willing to risk torture and death for their faith have every right to stand by it and take inspiration from it. Most (very valid) critiques of big western Church institutions just don't apply to underground churches in northern China who are helping people escape the horrors of deep fascism.
Overall a really good book.
#AmReading #ReadingNow

OpenAI and kids safety group Common Sense Media partner to consolidate competing measures for a California ballot initiative meant to protect kids from chatbots (Maria Curi/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/01/09/openai-kids-safety-california-ballot-measure

OpenAI and kids' safety advocates team up on California ballot measure
Signature gathering to qualify for the ballot is likely to start early next month.

Evil stuff my mind cooks up:
Take a Rubik's cube apart and change it so that a corner piece has two adjacent stickers of the same color.
Then randomize the rest of the cube.
Give it to a solver and measure the time until they realize it's unsolvable.

Lol. The argument against this bill to charge nj data centers more for electricity is that they will just charge users more for their services.
But people can opt out of AI services and can't opt out of needing electricity.
https://www.phillyvoice.com/new-jersey-dat

2025 In Review: What’s New In Web Performance?
Slow websites continue to be a problem and a lot of work is being done so developers can measure performance more effectively and fix performance issues.
🧑‍💻 https://www.debugbear.com/blog/2025-in-web-performance

2025 In Review: What’s New In Web Performance? | DebugBear
Find out how web performance changed in 2025, and what changes are coming up in the future.

GOP pats itself on the back for not fixing a problem it created
#news

Longest US government shutdown in history set to end after House passes bill
Measure to restart federal operations passes narrowly, but excludes healthcare funding demanded by Democrats

Attosecond-resolved quantum fluctuations of light and matter
Matan Even Tzur, Chen Mor, Noa Yaffe, Michael Birk, Andrei Rasputnyi, Omer Kneller, Ido Nisim, Ido Kaminer, Maria Chekhova, Michael Krueger, Misha Ivanov, Nirit Dudovich, Oren Cohen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18362 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18362 https://arxiv.org/html/2511.18362
arXiv:2511.18362v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Until recently, attosecond optical spectroscopy and quantum optics evolved along non-overlapping directions. In attosecond science, attosecond pulses have been regarded as classical waves, applied to probe electron dynamics on their natural time scale. Here, we transfer fundamental concepts of quantum optics into attosecond physics, enabling control of both the properties of the XUV attosecond pulses and the quantum fluctuations of matter on attosecond time scales. By combining bright squeezed vacuum (BSV) with a strong laser field to drive high-harmonic generation, we transfer the quantum properties of the BSV onto the resulting XUV attosecond pulses. Applying advanced attosecond interferometry, we reconstruct the quantum state of the XUV high harmonics and their associated attosecond pulses with attosecond precision. Finally, we resolve the squeezing of the electron's wavepacket during one of the most fundamental strong-field phenomena - field induced tunneling. The ability to measure and control quantum correlations in both electrons and XUV attosecond pulses establishes a foundation for attosecond quantum electrodynamics, manipulating the quantum state of electrons and photons with sub-cycle precision.
toXiv_bot_toot

A customs union is a sensible, pragmatic measure, not because of "going for growth", which is a) unattainable anyway and b) ecocidal, but to make life easier for small businesses who send goods to our neighbours.
Davey claims ‘historic victory’ for Lib Dems after tokenistic vote in favour of customs union with EU – UK politics live | Politics | The Guardian

The surname "Adams" should be completely disqualifying in NYC politics from now on. #NYCCouncil
https://www.amny.com/news/speaker-adams-no-vote-daylig…

Running out of daylight: Advocates fume over Speaker Adams not holding vote on universal ‘daylighting’ street safety bill before year’s end
Outgoing City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams will not bring a measure to implement universal "daylighting," which would eliminate parking near intersections

Ok, time for a little #rant
One aspect of (generative) AI in education that I have become increasingly aware of is the role AI plays in magnifying the results-oriented culture we have created. Grades and publication metrics are designed to measure the achievement of individuals as compared to other individuals. For students, better grades mean admission to the next degree or a better job. For…

"Ocean impacts nearly double economic cost of climate change, study finds"
#Oceans #Climate #ClimateChange

Ocean impacts nearly double economic cost of climate change, study finds
For the first time, a study by researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego integrates climate-related damages to the ocean into the social cost of carbon—a measure of economic harm caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

Maine Rejects Anti-Voting Ballot Measure, Reaffirms Voting Access (Yunior Rivas/Democracy Docket)
https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/maine-rejects-anti-voting-ballot-measure-reaffirms-voting-access/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251104/p168#a251104p168

An appeals court in Missouri
✅has ordered the rewording of a misleading explainer for a Republican-backed ballot measure
🔥that aims to undo a previously passed initiative that expanded abortion and reproductive rights in the state.
The order from the three-judge panel within Missouri’s Western District of Appeals
represents the second time in just a few months that the explanation accompanying the anti-abortion ballot measure was found to be confusing or deceptive.

Missouri Court Orders Clearer Wording on GOP Measure to Undo Abortion Rights
The ballot measure seeks to undo a citizen-driven one that passed in 2024, which expanded abortion rights in the state.

signed up to collect signatures for SF's overpaid CEO tax, aka Stand Up For SF. I figure I can collect for this and the transit funding measure at the same time.
#sfpol

Man, I bet we’re all relieved today that Obama shut ICE down the first chance he got. And then Biden… remember when he shut it down a second time just for good measure? (And while busy funding and arming a whole friggin’ genocide in Palestine, what a legend!) *Phew!* Imagine what could have happened if the Democrats had just kept going with business as usual.
#theRatchetEffect

Speaking as a retired chemist, this is absolutely essential to help maintain California's strength in science and engineering.
On the other hand , the most valuable parts of my education (as opposed to training) came from the humanities. Yet we don't seem to recognize how important and central that non-STEM segment is. Why not?
Wiener pitches $23B ‘science bond’ to backfill Trump research cuts

Wiener pitches $23B ‘science bond’ to backfill Trump research cuts
The proposed ballot measure would fund research grants as federal grant freezes threaten California labs and universities.

Speaking as a retired chemist, this is absolutely essential to help maintain California's strength in science and engineering.
On the other hand , the most valuable parts of my education (as opposed to training) came from the humanities. Yet we don't seem to recognize how important and central that non-STEM segment is. Why not?
Wiener pitches $23B ‘science bond’ to backfill Trump research cuts

Wiener pitches $23B ‘science bond’ to backfill Trump research cuts
The proposed ballot measure would fund research grants as federal grant freezes threaten California labs and universities.

Tennessee Counties Adopt Gun Dispossession Measure After Legislative Delay — ProPublica
https://www.propublica.org/article/tennessee-guns-dispossession-domestic-violence-impact

I think if you’re worth more than say $5 million you should get some sort of “congrats, you won” badge and then you should be banned from owning businesses or having political office for the rest of your life.
Maybe also ban from social media for good measure.

Volunteers measure distance at long jump track at the January Jicker inside Cornell's Barton Hall last week
#photo #photography #sports

From these honored dead we take increased devotion
to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.
That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.
That this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom
and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people
shall not perish from the earth.
-- Abraham Lincoln Gettysburg Address

One thing I'm interested in is government committing to transparency in service performance. This was one of the original features of the post-2012 approach... that got ignored and shuttered ( www.gov.uk/performance goes to an archive)
https://roadmap-…

Creating a consistent approach to measuring how digital services perform
GDS is establishing a consistent government digital performance framework to measure services, driving evidence-led improvements across departments.

Experimental insights into data augmentation techniques for deep learning-based multimode fiber imaging: limitations and success
Jawaria Maqbool, M. Imran Cheema
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19072 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19072 https://arxiv.org/html/2511.19072
arXiv:2511.19072v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Multimode fiber~(MMF) imaging using deep learning has high potential to produce compact, minimally invasive endoscopic systems. Nevertheless, it relies on large, diverse real-world medical data, whose availability is limited by privacy concerns and practical challenges. Although data augmentation has been extensively studied in various other deep learning tasks, it has not been systematically explored for MMF imaging. This work provides the first in-depth experimental and computational study on the efficacy and limitations of augmentation techniques in this field. We demonstrate that standard image transformations and conditional generative adversarial-based synthetic speckle generation fail to improve, or even deteriorate, reconstruction quality, as they neglect the complex modal interference and dispersion that results in speckle formation. To address this, we introduce a physical data augmentation method in which only organ images are digitally transformed, while their corresponding speckles are experimentally acquired via fiber. This approach preserves the physics of light-fiber interaction and enhances the reconstruction structural similarity index measure~(SSIM) by up to 17\%, forming a viable system for reliable MMF imaging under limited data conditions.
toXiv_bot_toot

The FCC votes along party lines to repeal a Biden-era cybersecurity rule aimed at preventing intrusions like Salt Typhoon, calling it an ineffective measure (Kelcee Griffis/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

This survey question is rich. This is from one of the BigMoneySF groups trying to make it harder for the rest of us to put stuff on the ballot.
But they will never ban paid signature gathering, the one thing that would most effectively keep crap off the ballot. They just want to raise the signature threshold for the rest of us. It would still be easy for billionaires to abuse the system and qualify any ballot measure they like, just hard for anyone else.

Ocean impacts nearly double economic cost of climate change, study finds #ocean

Ocean impacts nearly double economic cost of climate change, study finds
For the first time, a study by researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego integrates climate-related damages to the ocean into the social cost of carbon—a measure of economic harm caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

If you:
🔸create an entangled pair of particles,
🔸and then separate them by a very large distance,
🔸and then measure the quantum state of one of them,
🔹the quantum state of the other one is all-of-a-sudden determined,
-- not at the speed of light, but rather instantaneously.
This has now been demonstrated across distances of hundreds of kilometers over time intervals of under 100 nanoseconds.
If information is being transmitted between these two entangled…

Quantum entanglement wins 2022's Nobel Prize in physics
They say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. But thanks to these three pioneers in quantum entanglement, perhaps we do.

OpenAI introduces a framework to evaluate chain-of-thought monitorability and a suite of 13 evaluations designed to measure the monitorability of an AI system (OpenAI)
https://openai.com/index/evaluating-chain-of-thought-monitorability

House Rejects Measure to Bar Strikes Inside Venezuela (Robert Jimison/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/us/politics/trump-venezuela-house-vote.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/251217/p142#a251217p142

Back in my Evidence classes it was once suggested (in jest) that one way to measure a person's age was to cut off an arm and count the rings. Yeah, sometimes law school got weird, like when I had to set up a international cacao bean exchange to get around some hard currency restrictions.

House Republicans push to repeal Senate litigation provision in funding measure
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5603174-house-republicans-senate-litigation-provision-funding-bill/

California voters approve Democratic-drawn congressional map as national redistricting battle spreads (Ben Kamisar/NBC News)
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/california-ballot-measure-election-act-redistricting-pass-rcna238907
http://www.memeorandum.com/251104/p178#a251104p178

OpenAI launches FrontierScience, a benchmark to measure models' expert-level scientific reasoning with 700 questions, finding GPT-5.2 is its strongest model (OpenAI)
https://openai.com/index/frontierscience/

Anthropic open sources a method to score AI model political evenhandedness; Gemini 2.5 Pro got 97%, Grok 4 96%, Claude Opus 4.1 95%, GPT-5 89%, and Llama 4 66% (Ina Fried/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/11/13/anthropic-bot-bias-data

Anthropic tries to measure bot bias
There's no consensus over what constitutes political bias in AI systems.

I don't see a big conflict here. BART is right to focus on keeping the lights on, but Oakland advocates are also right to think long-term. It's good to give people a future with better BART to look forward to in the runup to the funding measure.
"BART’s fiscal crisis could close 9 stations. So why are people pushing for a new one [San Antonio] in Oakland?"

Adelita Grijalva is finally sworn in as Trump scrambles to derail Epstein files measure (Steve Benen/MSNBC)
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/adelita-grijalva-sworn-in-trump-epstein-files-rcna243532
http://www.memeorandum.com/251112/p112#a251112p112

In a decisive vote Friday,
the Virginia Senate approved a
constitutional amendment that would automatically restore voting rights to people with felony convictions
after they complete their sentence
and guarantee the right to vote in the commonwealth.
The measure will now head to voters for final approval.
The amendment, which passed the Senate 21-18 after earlier approval by the House of Delegates,
would fundamentally change how Virginia treats vot…

Virginia takes key step to end ‘overt and intended effort to block Black people from voting’
Read more here.

Mace unveils measure renaming DC's Black Lives Matter Plaza to honor Charlie Kirk (Ashleigh Fields/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5643290-black-lives-matter-plaza-mace-kirk/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251210/p132#a251210p132

Sources and filings: Peter Thiel donated $3M to a group to beat California's wealth tax, the first of several expected major donations by tech leaders in 2026 (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/11/us/politics/peter-thiel-california-weal…

Thiel Gives $3 Million to Group Seeking to Block California Wealth Tax
More large donations from wealthy Silicon Valley figures are expected as they try to marshal opposition to a proposed ballot measure that would impose a new tax on billionaires.

Sending women who get abortions to prison for decades.
Outlawing IUDs.
Sharply restricting in-vitro fertilization.
These are the strictest abortion prohibitions and punishments in the nation being considered by South Carolina lawmakers,
even as opponents of the procedure are divided over how far to go.
The bill faces a long legislative path and uncertain prospects, even if it clears the state Senate subcommittee that’s reviewing it.
But the measure up for a …

South Carolina senators to debate strict abortion proposal Tuesday
A group of South Carolina senators plans to consider a proposal that could introduce the strictest abortion prohibitions and punishments in the nation. The bill, which faces a long legislative process, highlights ongoing divisions in conservative states over abortion. It proposes banning all abortions unless the woman's life is at risk and could criminalize those who assist in abortions. The proposal has split anti-abortion groups, with some opposing punishment for women. The bill's future is u…

Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) introduced legislation on Wednesday seeking to
reverse the Trump administration's new childhood vaccine schedule that has alarmed health experts.
The measure, an amendment to an appropriations package currently under consideration by Congress,
would prohibit any funds going to the Health and Human Services Department from being used to implement the changes,
which removed the HPV, RSV, Rotavirus, COVID-19, Flu, Hepatitis A & B and Men…

ICE Has Been Detaining Native Americans In Minnesota

Scientists at NeurIPS, which drew a record 26,000 attendees this year, say key questions about how AI models work and how to measure them remain unresolved (Jared Perlo/NBC News)
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/ai-progress-surges-resea…

AI progress surges while researchers struggle to explain It
Academics, start-up founders and researchers representing industrial titans from around the globe descended on San Diego for the top gathering in AI.

In " Trump v Slaughter" the Supreme Court is likely to rule that
Trump has the power fire FTC head Rebecca Slaughter
(and, by implication, the heads of many other agencies thought to have a measure of independence,
such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Federal Election Commission)
at his discretion.

The problem is that such a decision wouldn’t restore the constitu…

In this Supreme Court case, a sledgehammer is better than a scalpel
On Trump’s ability to fire the heads of agencies, the Supreme Court should take the harder route.

Sony unveils the Fair Human-Centric Image Benchmark dataset to test the fairness of computer vision models, saying it was compiled in a fair and ethical manner (Thomas Claburn/The Register)
https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/05/sony_ai_vision_model_benchmark/…

Sony rolls out a standard way to measure bias in how AI describes what it 'sees'
: Images in the test dataset were all sourced with consent

The US Senate will vote Thursday on competing bills to address the
imminent expiration of subsidies
for Affordable Care Act health insurance plans,
but neither measure is expected to pass,
greatly increasing the chances that
healthcare costs will soon rise to unaffordable levels for many Americans.

The working plan would only guarantee a future Senate vote on enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies,
not an extension of the credits that Democrats have made a key demand in exchange for their votes.
Even if the Senate passes the new funding measure, it would have to go back to the House for another vote before going to Donald Trump’s desk for his signature.

The latest on the government shutdown as flights disrupted and food aid benefits paused
The record-long government shutdown is affecting air travel and food stamp benefits. Follow here for the latest news updates.

The 2026 military funding bill released this week would
require the U.S. to assess Israel’s weapons arsenal
and suggest ways to undo any “gaps” that may be caused by arms embargoes imposed by other countries protesting Israel’s violence.
This remarkable measure comes as a response to at least two dozen countries that have restricted or ended weapons transfers to Israel since its genocide began on October 7, 2023.
It also comes after countless experts, including watch…

Annual defense bill includes provision to effectively undo Israel arms embargoes
Republicans boast that the budget “provides unprecedented levels of support for the security of Israel.”

2025 MAINE 2 - TEMPORARY RESTRICTIONS ON DANGEROUS WEAPONS POSSESSION
GENERAL
BALLOT MEASURE
estimates
73% of votes counted
Yes. wins.
AP race call at
6:55 p.m. on. Nov. 4, 2025.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/r

Maine Question 2 results 2025
Live Maine question 2 election results over adding a potential ‘red flag’ law in the state.