The Trump administration on Monday took another step to make it harder to find major, legally mandated scientific assessments of how climate change is endangering the nation and its people.
Earlier this month, the official government websites that hosted the authoritative, peer-reviewed national climate assessments went dark.
Such sites tell state and local governments and the public what to expect in their backyards from a warming world and how best to adapt to it.
At the …
Just finished "Beasts Made of Night" by Tochi Onyebuchi...
Indirect CW for fantasy police state violence.
So I very much enjoyed Onyebuchi's "Riot Baby," and when I grabbed this at the library, I was certain it would be excellent. But having finished it, I'm not sure I like it that much overall?
The first maybe third is excellent, including the world-building, which is fascinating. I feel like Onyebuchi must have played "Shadow of the Colossus" at some point. Onyebuchi certainly does know how to make me care for his characters.
Some spoilers from here on out...
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I felt like it stumbles towards the middle, with Bo's reactions neither making sense in the immediate context, nor in retrospect by the end when we've learned more. Things are a bit floaty in the middle with an unclear picture of what exactly is going on politics-wise and what the motivations are. Here I think there were some nuances that didn't make it to the page, or perhaps I'm just a bit thick and not getting stuff I should be? More is of course revealed by the end, but I still wasn't satisfied with the explanations of things. For example, (spoilers) I don't feel I understand clearly what kind of power the army of aki was supposed to represent within the city? Perhaps necessary to wield the threat of offensive inisisia use? In that case, a single scene somewhere of Izu's faction deploying that tactic would have been helpful I think.
Then towards the end, for me things really started to jumble, with unclear motivations, revelations that didn't feel well-paced or -structured, and a finale where both the action & collapsing concerns felt stilted and disjointed. Particularly the mechanics/ethics of the most important death that set the finale in motion bothered me, and the unexplained mechanism by which that led to what came next? I can read a couple of possible interesting morals into the whole denouement, but didn't feel that any of them were sufficiently explored. Especially if we're supposed to see some personal failing in the protagonist's actions, I don't think it's made clear enough what that is, since I feel his reasons to reject each faction are pretty solid, and if we're meant to either pity or abjure his indecision, I don't think the message lands clearly enough.
There *is* a sequel, which honestly I wasn't sure of after the last page, and which I now very interested in. Beasts is Onyebuchi's debut, which maybe makes sense of me feeling that Riot Baby didn't have the same plotting issues. It also maybe means that Onyebuchi couldn't be sure a sequel would make it to publication in terms of setting up the ending.
Overall I really enjoyed at least 80% of this, but was expecting even better (especially politically) given Onyebuchi's other work, and I didn't feel like I found it.
#AmReading
Few Shot Semi-Supervised Learning for Abnormal Stop Detection from Sparse GPS Trajectories
Muhammad Ayub Sabir, Junbiao Pang, Jiaqi Wu, Fatima Ashraf
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12686
Toward Efficient and Privacy-Aware eHealth Systems: An Integrated Sensing, Computing, and Semantic Communication Approach
Yinchao Yang, Yahao Ding, Zhaohui Yang, Chongwen Huang, Zhaoyang Zhang, Dusit Niyato, Mohammad Shikh-Bahaei
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11514
Cost Analysis of Human-corrected Transcription for Predominately Oral Languages
Yacouba Diarra, Nouhoum Souleymane Coulibaly, Michael Leventhal
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12781 …
Hybrid Ridgelet Deep Neural Networks for Data-Driven Arbitrage Strategies
Bahadur Yadav, Sanjay Kumar Mohanty
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10599 https://arxi…
Risk-based framework to determine climate-informed design storms for road drainage infrastructure
Mohammad Fereshtehpour, Rashid Bashir, Neil F. Tandon
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10183
Trump nominates chief economist at rightwing Heritage Foundation
to lead Bureau of Labor Statistics
The nomination comes after Trump fired the BLS commissioner
Erika McEntarfer earlier this month
after the release of a weak jobs report.
Antoni has previously voiced concerns about revisions to the jobs data at BLS.
“There are better ways to collect, process, and disseminate data
– that is the task for the next BLS commissioner,
and only consiste…
As we turned into Lone Pine to begin the half-marathon ascent of Mount Whitney,
I got the sense that Frederick had been distilled into a person whose focus was so singular that she only needed someone to show her direction.
That someone was Boyd.
Frederick asked him to pace the miles into the base of the climb,
and it was then that Boyd told her,
finally, that she was on pace to break the age-group record.
This was the final arrow in his quiver.
…