Tootfinder

Two things: Via AltNationalParkService on FB: **Marine veterans are speaking out against the troop deployment in Los Angeles. Across the country, they’re taking down their American flags that have flown in front of their homes for years. Remember, we have friends everywhere.**
And, in a comment: "Notice how no one is talking about the Epstein files now?"

Sad news in the parish this evening. After 34 years, the Famous Pizza D'or in Monaghan town is closing their doors on June 1st 2025.
#Mastodaoine #Monaghan

Half-Iterates of $x(1 x)$, $\sin(x)$ and $\exp(x/e)$
Steven Finch
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.07625 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.07625…

Half-Iterates of $x(1+x)$, $\sin(x)$ and $\exp(x/e)$
The title reflects the original intent of this paper -- to continue exploring compositional square roots -- focusing on Walker's (1991) study of the Abel equation $f(\exp(x/e))=f(x)+1$ for real $x \neq e$. An unexpected discovery changed everything. We already knew that Écalle (1974) developed theory inspiring relevant calculations across years. Precise details, however, seemed to escape attention until recently. Helpful online posts of Jagy (2012) are important not to overlook. The new algori…

Cowboys’ George Pickens ‘Has Every Reason to Be Motivated’ https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/dallas-cowboys/george-pickens-pittsburgh-steelers-dak-prescott/?adt_ei=[email]

The Python library "YFinance" decided to force an upgrade. They did this by making the old version report a rate-limit error on every request.
Confusing.
Would have been better if they reported a "old version not supported" error or something instead. So that wasted some time.
That upgrade had dependencies which have dependencies upon a newer version of Python, so needed a whole OS upgrade really.
Which failed. Bricking the Rasp PI it was running on.
Oh well, complete rebuild of the whole machine and software it runs from scratch then.
That took all day yesterday. At the end I notice that the touch-screen doesn't touch. Needs drivers.
The drivers haven't been upgraded in six years. They brick the machine again when trying to install them on Debian Trixie.
Luckily, I kept good notes and could rebuild it all again much faster with no mistakes and knowing what to do and all the required custom software changes already made and saved.
So now I spent a whole day on annoying upgrade work because a single Python library decided to break the old version, and my Rasp Pi has no touch-screen. Which isn't ideal for a machine mostly operating as a fancy light switch for all the LED strips in the house.
This happens all the time in software. Millions of man hours wasted, so much hardware dumped because the drivers get abandoned.

In other news: Microsoft abandons Windows 10 any day now. Good luck to everyone faced with doing that lap on the upgrade treadmill.
I still have more work to do to bring up this RaspPi's software to where it was, but it'll have to wait, other things to do. At least it's back to sending me the nightly finance report and controlling the LED strips. If without a touch screen now.
#software #upgradeTredmil #python #microsoft

Calamus 26 We two boys together clinging
This is one of the gayest of the Calamus poems, a fantasy of two men against the world, full of life and ardor. I should be all over this in my gay reading!
Instead I see a darker form of Americanism here. "Power enjoying ... Armed and fearless ... No law less than ourselves". It's classic American individualism fantasy, a repudiation of community and law. Armed, at that.
On top of that I trip over the "North and South" part every time I read this. In 1860 when this was published we were just steps away from a Civil War after 10 years of enormous tension. I don't blame Whitman for wanting unity, his whole program in Leaves of Grass is American unity. All I can think is how there's no moral equivalence between the North and South. But Whitman wasn't an abolitionist and this poem reflects that.
Sorry for not reveling in the gay, maybe it's the ICE and California National Guard news affecting my reading today.

We spent the past two months redoing our sculpture garden. We opened it 14 years ago, and it needed a little care, mostly to the plant life. The new plants are native varieties for the most part, and the garden has been redesigned to create separate spaces for art and events. Learn more:

Running cars on E-Fuels, made with CO2 from the air and green Hydrogen?🚗⛽🌿⚡
E-Fuels, so the story goes, could allow using existing cars and infrastructure like gas stations. However, E-Fuels are extremely inefficient.
In 2022, Siemens Energy, Porsche, and the Chilean company HIF inaugurated the Haru Oni pilot plant in Chile's windy Magallanes region, which turns CO2 and Hydrogen into Methanol and small amounts of Gasoline. How's it going? 🧵

What's up with the Production of E-Fuels in Chile?
In 2022, Siemens Energy, Porsche, and HIF inaugurated a pilot plant for the production of E-Methanol and E-Gasoline in southern Chile. The Haru Oni plant was intended to be just the beginning — with plans for large-scale production just a few years later. However, it does not look like that will ever happen.

Taylor Series Kinematics
Craig W. Looney
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06170 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06170

Taylor Series Kinematics
Has it ever occurred to you that the kinematic equations for uniformly accelerated one-dimensional motion are Taylor series expansions? If not, you are in good company. I didn't know this myself until a colleague pointed it out to me many years ago, and I was stunned to learn something new and wonderful about something so familiar. Accordingly, my first objective in this paper is to clearly present the not-widely-known Taylor series derivations of these basic equations to a population primed to…

New Zealand prime minister Ardern was grappling with whether to go:
“Something had been loosened worldwide,” she says,
with rage everywhere,
public servants being followed and attacked,
as if they were “somehow distinct from being human”.
We all recognise this rage,
but Ardern was at the centre of it,
representing progressive politics, tough Covid measures, empathy, emotion, anti-racism, femaleness;
a symbol of a different time, more rational…