Tootfinder

Astronomie: Womöglich zweite Aufnahme des Exoplaneten bei Alpha Centauri A
Um Alpha Centauri A kreist womöglich ein Exoplanet in der Zone, in der flüssiges Wasser vorkommen könnte. Bestätigt ist das nicht, es gibt aber nun zwei Bilder.

Trump suggests expelling Spain from NATO for not ramping up its war budget.
Spain should never (in the 1980s) entered NATO.
No debería entrar en NATO, jamšs.
Trump sugiere "expulsar" a España de la OTAN por negarse al 5% del gasto en defensa
https://www.el…

Trump sugiere "expulsar" a España de la OTAN por negarse al 5% del gasto en defensa
"No tienen excusa para no hacerlo, pero no pasa nada. Quizá deberíamos expulsarlos de la OTAN, francamente", ha dicho el presidente de EEUU en el Despacho Oval

#ScribesAndMakers - 10 Oct. Shameless self-promotion day.
Neat demos of incremental/pseudoinfinite PCG ideas:
https://cs.wellesley.edu/~pmwh/labyrinfinite/
https://cs.wellesley.edu/~pmwh/effervescent/
https://cs.wellesley.edu/~pmwh/hydrodendron/
Incremental reversible RNG library for PCG:
https://cs.wellesley.edu/~pmwh/anarchy
Exploration graphs library:
https://pypi.org/project/exploration/
With visualizer:
https://cs.wellesley.edu/~pmwh/mvmap/egviewer/explorationViewer/viewer
Not quite final form but playable pseudoinfinite minesweeper game:
https://cs.wellesley.edu/~pmwh/chlorophyll/

They make explosives. Not to be conspiracy-theorist, but we keep having manufacturing plants blow up...
‘Multiple people’ dead after explosion at Tennessee plant as crews search rubble for missing workers | The Independent
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/explosion-bucksnort-tennessee-plant-death-toll-b2843396.html

Finally, what Xia & Lindell call a "separation problem" is, in our view, a feature of our approach and not a bug.
If, e.g., all languages in a family are polysynthetic (or none are), that’s not a statistical artefact – it’s the signal. The outcome is well associated with genealogy, showing that family membership captures someth genuinely informative about the process. When the model finds that family explains a large share of the variance, that's not a failure–it's evidence that phylogenetic structure dominates the pattern.
So while Xia & Lindell insist that "autocorrelation due to relationships and distance cannot be captured in family or regional-level analyses", we see that as an empirical question – and we treated it as one.
The real test is whether a mixed model that explicitly represents phylogeny and geography performs worse than their alternative, where the entire shared history of languages and environments is effectively collapsed into a single dimension (an eigenvector).
In other words: we model relationships – Xia & Lindell summarise them into one number per language.

Noch einige der zuletzt hier besonders häufig geteilten #News:
Wie unsere Erde: Exoplanet TRAPPST-1e könnte eine sekundäre Atmosphäre haben

Thanks for coming to my talk at @…, everyone! It was a joy and an honour to be invited – and I hope it was valuable! 🤗💚 Here are the slides: https://noti.st/matthiasott/ZXgFeg

Painting With the Web by Matthias Ott
Today’s Web is more complex, unpredictable, dynamic, and powerful than ever. Yet, 25 years after “A Dao of Web Design” we still approach building for the Web with a mindset of control, using linear workflows and static design tools that often don’t reflect the Web’s true nature and potential. The canvas we work on has transformed, the materials we use have changed. Together, we’ll explore how we can use web design engineering to start painting with the Web and create designs that ar…

Finished "Lobizona" by Romina Garber. I have extremely mixed feelings about this book. It's a powerful depiction of the fear of living as an undocumented child/teen and it has interesting things to say about rejection, belonging, and the choice between seeking to be recognized for who you are and wanting you blend in enough to be accepted as normal. However, it's also an explicit homage to Harry Potter, and while it doesn't include antisemitic tropes or glorify slavery or even have any anti-trans sentiments I can detect, to me the magical school setup felt forced and I thought it would have been a better book had it not tried to fit that mould. Also, it would have been a super interesting situation to explore trans issues, and while it's definitely fine for it not to do that, the author's praise of Rowling's work has me wondering...
There's a sequel that I think could in theory be amazing, but given the execution of the first book, I think I'll wait a bit before checking it out. By putting her main character in opposition to both ICE in the human world and the magical authorities in the other world, Garber explicitly sets the stage for a revolution standing between her protagonist and any kind of lasting peace. But I'm not confident she's capable of writing that story without relying on some kind of supernatural deus ex machina, which would be disappointing to me, since "a better world if only possible through divine intervention" is an inherently regressive message.
Overall, #OwnVoices fantasy centering an undocumented immigrant is an excellent thing, and I've certainly got a lot of privilege that surely influences my criticism. However, #OwnVoices stuff has a range of levels of craft and political stances, and it can be excellent for some reasons and mediocre for others.
On that point, if anyone reading this has suggestions for fiction books grappling with borders and the carceral state, Is be happy to hear them.
#AmReading

How the US democracy is designed to avoid representation
Right now in the US, a system which proclaims to give each citizen representation, my interests are not represented very well by most of my so-called representatives at any level of government. This is true for a majority of Americans across the political spectrum, and it happens by design. The "founding fathers" were explicit about wanting a system of government that would appear Democratic but which would keep power in the hands of rich white landowners, and they successfully designed exactly that. But how does disenfranchisement work in this system?
First, a two-party system locked in by first-post-the-post winner-takes-all elections immediately destroys representation for everyone who didn't vote for the winner, including those who didn't vote or weren't eligible to vote. Single-day non-holiday elections and prisoner disenfranchisement go a long way towards ensuring working-class people get no say, but much larger is the winner-takes all system. In fact, even people who vote for the winning candidate don't get effective representation if they're really just voting against the opponent as the greater of two evils. In a 51/49 election with 50% turnout, you've immediately ensured that ~75% of eligible voters don't get represented, and with lesser-of-two-evils voting, you create an even wider gap to wedge corporate interests into. Politicians need money to saturate their lesser-of-two-evils message far more than they need to convince any individual voter to support their policies. It's even okay if they get caught lying, cheating, or worse (cough Epstein cough) as long as the other side is also doing those things and you can freeze out new parties.
Second, by design the Senate ensures uneven representation, allowing control of the least-populous half of states to control or at least shut down the legislative process. A rough count suggests 284.6 million live in the 25 most-populous states, while only 54.8 million live in the rest. Currently, counting states with divided representation as two half-states with half as much population, 157.8 million people are represented by 53 Republican sensors, while 180.5 million people get only 45 seats of Democratic representation. This isn't an anti-Democrat bias, it's a bias towards less-populous states, whose residents get more than their share it political power.
I haven't even talked about gerrymandering yet, or family/faith-based "party loyalty," etc. Overall, the effect is that the number of people whose elected representatives meaningfully represent their interests on any given issue is vanishingly small (like, 10% of people tops), unless you happen to be rich enough to purchase lobbying power or direct access.
If we look at polls, we can see how lack of representation lets congress & the president enact many policies that go against what a majority of the population wants. Things like abortion restrictions, the current ICE raids, and Medicare cuts are deeply unpopular, but they benefit the political class and those who can buy access. These are possible because the system ensures at every step of the way that ordinary people do NOT get the one thing the system promises them: representation in the halls of power.
Okay, but is this a feature of all democracies, inherent in the nature of a majority-decides system? Not exactly...
1/2
#uspol #democracy