Tootfinder

The Roman Space Telescope Will Find Ancient Black Holes By Watching How They Eat Stars - Universe Today https://www.universetoday.com/articles/the-roman-space-telescope-will-find-ancient-black-holes-by-watching-how-they-…

Ireland’s basic income for artists
has been made permanent
after research showed that it boosted the economy.
Other nations have similar schemes.
With more homegrown artists now coming from privileged backgrounds
and AI disrupting the creative industries,
there are calls for the UK to follow suit

‘Imagination and creation are products of time and space’
Artists help power the economy and enrich society, yet many struggle to make ends meet. Ireland's pioneering income scheme aims to change that - and is fuelling debate about whether the UK should follow.

Needless to say, do not sign up for W or give them your ID information no matter how simple they eventually manage to make it.
You simply don’t need to.
You’re already in a far superior – non-corporate, federated – space.
Do not sign up for W. And warn your friends.
The only time you have any power to stop this is now. If they succeed in gaining network effects, you will be as powerless to stop them as you are with X.
And yes, they’re just another venture capita…

Just 10 months ago, NASA asked three companies if they could do something nobody had done before.
Could they build and launch a satellite to save a $500 million astronomy mission at risk of crashing back to Earth?
What’s more, could they do it in less than a year on a tight budget?
Katalyst Space Technologies, a startup founded in 2020, presented the most compelling solution.
“They came back with a response that was technically and programmatically plausible,
an…

A bold satellite rescue mission came together in record time, but will it work?
I consider this a success already, just from the fact that we're even going to try this."

Finally found a nifty app to disable those pesky macOS Spaces animations!
#macOS #opensource #utility

Disable macOS Spaces animation · Technical inconsistencies blog
I keep Fantastical and Things on my second macOS space, and everything else on the first. However, there’s a bug that showed a black screen for a split second every time I would switch space using the trackpad. After searching how to disable the animation, I stumbled upon this neat little utility that does exactly that and it is glorious. The preference pane of InstantSpaceSwitcher

From Sputnik to Starship - estimating the experience curve of #SpaceLaunch technology: https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/5/7/pgag217/8732400?login=false -> For more than 60 years, the cost of transporting payload into space has been falling: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Transport-of-payload-into-space-SpaceX-as-the-East-India-Company-of-our-time-11365594.html - according to an analysis, there is no comparable development in history.

Study finds microplastics in tadpoles in the Amazon for the first time https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/05/study-finds-microplastics-in-tadpoles-in-the-amazon-for-the-first-time/

Study finds microplastics in tadpoles in the Amazon for the first time
Researchers have recorded microplastics in frog tadpoles and their pond habitats in the wild in the Amazon for the first time, according to a new study. This confirms widespread microplastic contamination in the Amazon Rainforest, the researchers say.   Previous studies from the region have found microplastic contamination in fish, invertebrates, soil and water samples. […]

Which one of these BGA fanouts is better?
Both are the same nominal trace/space, both are skew matched by the time you get to the vertical "home run" area heading towards the connector.
But TDR of the first one wasn't that great. Let's see if the second one is any better when the simulation finishes...

If we let the orbital datacenter scams get to the point of launching, we deserve the Kessler Syndrome we get.
Sun-synch terminator-riders are in a limited orbital space. Many current residents belong to governments, as it’s a useful surveillance orbit. Once upon a time it’s the sort of thing that a U.N. body might regulate. Suggesting that now just seems like a joke…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #Early
The Verve:
🎵 Space and Time
#TheVerve
https://7songsandtherepeater.bandcamp.com/track/the-verve-space-time
https://open.spotify.com/track/6xzj2trD8sIjnwuyqzZOUX

⭐ Starred a repository

mkpoli/language-patterns
A typological and historical database of recurring linguistic patterns — visualizing how languages converge, diverge, spread, and change across grammar, meaning, sound, space, and time.
github.com/mkpoli/language-patterns

GitHub - mkpoli/language-patterns: A typological and historical database of recurring linguistic patterns — visualizing how languages converge, diverge, spread, and change across grammar, meaning, sound, space, and time. · GitHub
A typological and historical database of recurring linguistic patterns — visualizing how languages converge, diverge, spread, and change across grammar, meaning, sound, space, and time. - mkpoli/language-patterns

A nice campus press release about the lab's new #NSFfunded project, modeling plants' reproductive activity in response to environmental variation across space and time
#science #ecology

While testing around with SteamOS off the Live Installer (on a decade old standard size SD card and similarly "ancient" USB adapter) was fun and all, and quite snappy despite the media used.. You can definitely tell it's not ready for Prime Time in the "Gaming PC" space, yet. Very much built for bespoke devices like handhelds and the new Machine/micro PCs like that.
Hence, I fresh installed a clean image of Garuda, my OS of choice the last 3 years. (I also run M…

From a time when the world (at least the „western“ world) was sane and living was kind of easy.
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:n7br7nurwxmxnwwe5ms4m4ih/post/3mlon5ye5v22y

from my link log —
PostgreSQL PostGIS trajectories through space and time.
https://blog.rustprooflabs.com/2020/11/postgis-trajectory-intro
saved 2020-12-02

In classrooms and public events and private conversations, my campus regularly facilitates discussion (often heated) about the virtues and dangers of capitalism and Marxism and every economic theory you can think of, about human rights and AI and abortion access and data centers and civil wars and genocide and myriad other subjects of •extreme• controversy.
We do not, however, make space for and amplify people who believe the Earth is flat, because that would be a f***ing waste of time.
6/

One of the hazards of photographing a much-photographed thing is that, after careful consideration of viewpoint, composition and framing, you take exactly the same pictures as everyone else who has carefully considered viewpoint, composition and framing.
Here are two photographs I took of the Atlas Fountain at Castle Howard, along with the two illustrations from its Wikipedia entry. Years apart in time, inches apart in space.

Sorry to see this.over the past few years we've had to use the ER a couple of times - and was very impressed by the quality of the staff there. At the same time, the overload was obvious.
If the only indicator of success is budget surplus then we are loosing track of the fact that actual resources - the people, the space, the equipment - are what make a place a meaningful success.
‘We can no longer pretend:’ Patients suffer at understaffed UCSF ER, providers say - Mission Lo…

‘We can no longer pretend:’ Patients suffer at understaffed UCSF ER, providers say
As nurses and doctors worked to resuscitate a man passed out on the linoleum floor of the UCSF Parnassus Medical Center waiting room, the words of a

Sorry to see this.over the past few years we've had to use the ER a couple of times - and was very impressed by the quality of the staff there. At the same time, the overload was obvious.
If the only indicator of success is budget surplus then we are loosing track of the fact that actual resources - the people, the space, the equipment - are what make a place a meaningful success.
‘We can no longer pretend:’ Patients suffer at understaffed UCSF ER, providers say - Mission Lo…

‘We can no longer pretend:’ Patients suffer at understaffed UCSF ER, providers say
As nurses and doctors worked to resuscitate a man passed out on the linoleum floor of the UCSF Parnassus Medical Center waiting room, the words of a

On the Anticipation of #Lunar Travel in the Early 20th Century - A Pedagogical Exercise: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12582 -> "This article examines, from historical and pedagogical perspectives, Alphonse Berget's anticipation of Earth-Moon travel in Le Ciel (Larousse, 1923), decades before the beginning of the space age. [...] Unlike earlier fictional treatments such as Jules Verne's De la Terre a la Lune, Berget approached space travel using physical reasoning grounded in Newtonian gravitation. [...] His estimated Earth-Moon travel time of approximately 49 hours is of the same order of magnitude as Apollo mission transit times (approx. 72 h)."

Have you been locked in? Vendor locked in? By a #WordPress event plugin?
Now is the time to escape, tell me the plugin you like to escape from, as I’m working on importers for #GatherPress.

Space-Time Modulated vs 2-Bit Reflect-Arrays: A Comparison of Main Beam Gain and Sidelobe Level Performance
Muhammad Rizwan Akram, Douglas H. Werner
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12342

Now, I don't especially like the term "church" so I may use something else... like "coven." You can do what you want. But I happen to have already mapped out an example. (It is exactly that, just an example, so take if it's useful, change if you need, and don't stick to anything too closely.) Oh, this mapping also means that you would, for religious reasons, only be allowed to work under capitalism 4 days a week instead of 5.
Given the increases in productivity over the last 100 years, a 4 day work week is a completely reasonable expectation. If we have to annex Monday for the weekend by force of religion, so be it. It is rightfully ours anyway. If enough people try it, this will probably work. If it doesn't work, it just needs more people.
The Practice of Worship:
It is recommended to break down worship in to three sections: the functional, the communal, and the spiritual. It is also recommended to break these across multiple days. A common structure for some Christian churches is to take 10-15 minutes for announcements (Functional), an hour or two for services (Spiritual), followed by (Communal) coffee, tea, and cookies for an unspecified time up to two hours after. When starting or working with limited time a single compressed model like this may work, but it's not optimal.
- The Functional
The purpose of this section is to address the functional needs of the coven. Block out time (less than 90 minute blocks is recommended) to go through reports and updates from those involved in the Dispensary, Library, Works Committee (infrastructure), and Services Committee (providing services internally and, potentially, externally). Talk through any additional announcements, including those from other covens you may be federated with.
It is helpful to include unstructured communal time, such as shared meals, during or after functional meetings. As the federation grows, more time will be needed. It is recommended to break functional meetings, work parties, and such across multiple days. When a federation becomes sufficiently large, it is recommended to take every Monday, on top of Saturday and Sunday, as a third day of community and worship.
The scope of the functional spans 3 realms (which may be more-or-less fluid): the personal or family, the coven and federation, and humanity itself. It is up to each coven and individual to negotiate how to allocate the three days of the weekend once we have liberated Monday from the work week, but it is important to reserve it for one of these three. However, some people must work on weekends. Medical personnel, for example, cannot conform to a standard work week. While the work week should be universally restricted, which specific days are used will be up to the specific coven and their members.
A functional meeting can start with an agenda like the following:
Functional Invocation
Announcements
Report Backs
Dispensary
Inventory Check
What is low
What is empty
What is expiring
What is needed
Funds status
Library
Inventory Check and Items needing return
Library acquisition requests
Funds status and budget check
Works Committee
Upcoming projects
Subcommittee updates (Following the Works Committee agenda)
New committee formations
Funds status
Services Committee
New capabilities announcements
New needs requests
Subcommittee updates (Following the Works Committee agenda)
New committee formations
Funds status
Task Check
Breaking the Circle
This agenda is a suggestion for those who don't know where to start. It can be adapted or ignored as appropriate.
- The Spiritual
Spirituality is necessarily an undefined space. It is deeply personal. Each individual taking time to share their own personal spiritual experiences can help each connect with each other. This experience of connection can itself be a spiritual experience. It may also be useful to read esoteric, mystical, or philosophical texts together as type of "book club" and share thoughts. Others may draw from their own knowledge or traditions. This is something that must be defined together within a group.
- The Communal
The communal aspect of the practice of worship bind the coven and federation together. Within the community we find joy and release, connection and comfort. The coven is where we turn in times of need, and where we share our hopes and dreams.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #WoPop
Boards of Canada:
🎵 You Retreat in Time and Space
#BoardsofCanada
https://boardsofcanada.bandcamp.com/track/you-retreat-in-time-and-space
https://open.spotify.com/track/5m3Uzjuiyj8656EGM1bwhk

Oh no. My iPad auto updated iOS and it really is as badly designed as everybody said. #LiquidAss #iOS26 #Apple

1st mama tried outdoor jam of the season for me. expansive space blues by drew gardner & co., kinetic improv by time trout (plus arthur russell's "hiding your present from you"), & the scene is now, #nyc's finest 40-year-running boho-jazz-pop surrealists (never caught "yellow sarong" before!)

I watched the entire first season of Stargate SG1 and the conclusion is: it's quite boring. Not terrible yet very mellow, shallow and trivial all the time.
It's an attempt to grasp at the star treck success without any of the philosophical deep shit going on there. It's only the sparkling space new thing and very boring and never challenging stories.
No "robots have rights" moment, nor "there are four lights" moment, nor anything remotely as deep.…

Mine arrived today. I will be roughly this excited when building it.
(I just need space, time, and a shelf)
#dcrainmaker

Some #LeftWordle enhancements:
these are currently in https://staging.left-wordle.com. They will make it to production hopefully by week’s end. I’ll announce here the intended cutover date / time for prod.

Record wildfire losses rocked 2025 even as global burned area neared all-time lows #environment

Record wildfire losses rocked 2025 even as global burned area neared all-time lows
A new analysis of global wildfire activity in 2025 reveals the world experienced some of the most destructive and deadly fire events in recent history, despite the second lowest area burned since 2002. It highlights a continued trend toward fires becoming increasingly extreme, costly, and disastrous—both economically and in lives lost.

Filing: SpaceX aims to raise $75B in its IPO, selling 555.6M shares at $135 each, which would value the company at ~$1.77T (Bailey Lipschultz/Bloomberg)

SpaceX Seeks $75 Billion in Record IPO Plan to Fund AI, Launch
SpaceX is seeking to raise $75 billion in an initial public offering that would be the biggest of all time, as Elon Musk’s rocket, space and artificial intelligence company targets a historic debut that could clear a path for more mega-listings.

Didn’t need this today, I’m already not in the best mental space.
I think it’s time for nap.

Marjane Satrapi, the brave and talented creator of the wonderful and honest graphic novel Persepolis, has died. Her magnum opus is an autobiography, telling of her young years growing up during the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Iran-Iraq war of 1980, and then moving to Austria, for safety and to study. But Vienna isn't the safe space her family was hoping for, she's having a difficult time, and returns to Iran. The difference between the two worlds really show. Back home, she can…

An Exact Framework for Solving the Space-Time Dependent TSP: #logistics on the right track: https://aktuell.uni-bielefeld.de/2026/05/04/space-logistics-on-the-right-track/?lang=en

My pitch if I ran a TV production company would be something like:
Twelve episodes a year of 3-episode serials: That keeps the number of sets you have to construct down. It gives each story the complexity of a movie and time to breath without the frantic pace. You can have one every season of the year.
You gotta remember to focus on the companion. This isn't really a story about The Doctor, it's about the companions asking the question, Doctor Who?
Episodes should generally start with a companion's face or escapade coz they're the ones we're identifying with as we figure out who the doctor is.
At some point in 2027 you'll cast and announce a new doctor.
This is when you call Billie Piper in to film and release a webisode which is just the regeneration into Billie so far: her going "Oh, hello?" Then shaking her head and saying "oh hell no" and shaking harder until she shakes the face off into the new man or woman you picked who says "Oh, that was close".
That change into the Bad Wolf Doctor was just bad without a capstone xmas episode. So a one minute tik-tokable short to announce the newbie frees you of it.
Then you can start ep1 filming and released nearly a year later on the 65th anniversary with a story that focuses on the companion getting into trouble and meeting The Doctor.
Cast nobody famous. The production is about making stars not finding them I don't want anyone having preconceived notions about the character from seeing the actor in that other show even it it was a really good one and they're great.
Earthbound cross-time time-travel story for serial one to pick up new companion, intervene in an aliens vs aliens space-war in serial two, go screw up history and fix it for the third and aliens endangering companion's family for the fourth.
When they're 3-episode serials you only need four a year. Different writer for each.
Cliff-hangers between episodes in each serial of course, with stories about the nature of time and space and getting along with other cultures and running up and down corridors and scary monsters and of course the question "who is The Doctor and how can they fix this without guns or violence with just a screwdriver and two hearts worth of compassion".
The Doctor is some weird looking older dude, more importantly vivid and strange and scholarly than handsome. He has a big coat and no question marks. Then he can change clothes but with the same coat always have the same look. He needs to be able to do a good arrogant rant at himself while he thinks.
The companion is curious and brave and young enough to be naive and surprised and energetic. Doesn't do what she's told. Wonders off against orders. Maybe sometimes bombs things.
Obviously you keep the blue box and the tune and make a new style screwdriver.
You need to do the behind the scenes shows too. Not sure if they make or cost money but they are brilliant for the geeky fandom. That may be why it came back last time.
Anyway. Sadly I don't own a production company.
I cancelled the TV license in the mean time. Give the money to Big Finish instead. These audio things are expensive. I've bought bundles before. Anyone have favorites? I lose track of which one's I've heard.
#doctorWho

The first #dhbenelux2026 keynote is given by @…: “Once Upon a Time: The Behaviour Space(s) of Stories.”

The first #dhbenelux2026 keynote is given by @…: “Once Upon a Time: The Behaviour Space(s) of Stories.”

The first #dhbenelux2026 keynote is given by @…: “Once Upon a Time: The Behaviour Space(s) of Stories.”

📚 Hayo finished reading Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Old-fashioned insanely long timelines, space travel, genetic drift, and all the fun bits that make this genre so entertaining.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
May 4, 2026
🔗 https://hayobethlehem.nl/library/book/children-…

Plum, for Proactive Land Uncovering & Monitoring, is an orchestration tool to learn, monitor, and document an exposure surface. It coordinates work between scanning agents, keeps historical results, and makes observations searchable over time.
This project, part of D4 which was initially co-funded by the European Union, is still young, but it already addresses a concrete need: helping CIRCL to keep a global view of Luxembourg’s IP space, especially in the context of NIS2-related ac…

Just finished "A Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge. A fascinating and epic science fiction novel with fascinating ideas about technology and also future societies. As I'm delving into a lot of sci fi looking for social imagination it's a good find in some ways but disappointing in others. The Qeng Ho culture is interesting, but their society is uninspiring; Vinge's rosy view of "trade" is not one I completely share, and their hierarchies and wealth accumulation are less compatible with their freedoms in my imagination than in Vinge's. That said, his perspective on the possibilities of galactic-scale civilization and the idea of the "age of failed dreams" are fascinating, especially right now, and his detailed ideas about programming, AI, automaton, and "Focus" are extremely relevant right now. Ultimately I didn't love some parts of the dénouement, and there's a lot of "great man theory of history" going on, including (only somewhat ameliorated) a focus on men over women. Vinge's damsels in distress have a lot more agency than usual for the role, but with the exception of Victory Sr. and Jr., the damsels are very much in distress, and Victory Sr. gets overshadowed a lot by Underhill.
It definitely helps one expand their imagination of what long-term and large-scale human existence could look like, which is great and no easy feat, and both the technologies that are written in and those written out are extremely convincing. The only thing I didn't find compelling was the transposition of capitalism onto such space and time scales. It's a very standard feature of sci fi from the last few decades, and I'm sure most readers don't question it, but I've become someone who can no longer imagine "capitalism across the stars" without questioning how realistic it is that its self-destructive tendencies could possibly last even a few more centuries, let alone succeed at interstellar travel.
One last extremely fascinating thing: how closely the strengths and weaknesses of Focus track with the strengths and weaknesses of modern generative AI. That, and the way that the "age of failed dreams" idea can help people imagine beyond generative AI in a positive way.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

actual NORAD vs movie NORAD
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NORADSystCtrlDivision1.jpg
https://en.…

Funny memo from the National Aeronautics and Space Council (predecessor of the National Space Council) to the U.S. Department of State from 18 July 1963 about what to do should contact with intelligent #aliens be made: https://www.war.gov/medialink/ufo/release_1/59_214434_sp_16_7.18.1963.pdf - according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell_Hunter the author had no background in exobiology but apparently he was familiar with both astronomical views and SF ideas of the time ... and certain fringe claims, too.

I always struggle to attend this festival. I've gone a few times, starting back when it was the Burger Boogaloo. It's expensive, and the stage areas get crammed so quickly now. You lose the intimate feel. Add in the likely heat and long lines and huge line up, and it can be a real drag unless you go with a group and find time to just chill in an open space.
#music

Intermittent fasting triggers surprising changes in the brain #health

Intermittent fasting triggers surprising changes in the brain
Losing weight may involve rewiring the gut and the brain at the same time. In a study of obese adults, an intermittent fasting-style diet led to significant weight loss, healthier metabolic markers, and notable shifts in gut bacteria. Brain scans also revealed changes in regions tied to appetite, cravings, and self-control. The results suggest the gut microbiome and brain may work together to influence weight-loss success.

Have you ever noticed how certain melodies can transport you through time and space? Big band music exemplifies this magic, uplifting our spirits while showcasing innovation and resilience. Let its rhythm remind us that life is a symphony of beautiful notes awaiting their moment. #MusicMagic #BigBandLove

Single-Microphone Audio Point Source Discriminative Localization From Reverberation Late Tail Estimation
Matthew Maciejewski
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.09627 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.09627 https://arxiv.org/html/2605.09627
arXiv:2605.09627v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Location information can be a valuable signal for audio segmentation tasks, especially as a complement to methods focusing on the content or qualities of the sources. Though audio source localization is typically performed using the observations of the signal captured by multiple microphones in space, information about a source's location is captured by a single microphone through its arrival time and spectral amplitude--given the source's emitted signal is known. Since reverberation originates from the audio sources in a room, it accordingly contains some information about the emitted audio signals. The late-tail part of reverberation is relatively invariant to the local source and microphone geometry, depending primarily on only the room itself, and thus can provide the necessary reference information about audio signals that depends minimally on their location. In this work, we leverage the robust late-tail estimation of Weighted Prediction Error (WPE) dereverberation within a probabilistic framework to estimate the likelihood of two audio signals collected in the same room as having originated from the same location. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the speaker diarization task in both simulated and real environments.
toXiv_bot_toot

Dreamt I was watching a damaged scientific satellite from a nearby viewpoint floating in space.
The bus was a rectangular shape about 2:1 aspect ratio with no visible solar arrays, perhaps not yet extended.
Its reaction wheels and one large annular ion thruster were working but the other ion thruster on the far side of the centerline had fallen silent for some reason causing off center thrust. It was twitching back and forth, firing the one good thruster for a short time then rot…

This is the time of year when my vinyl listening decreases, just because the turntable is connected to an 845 tube amp that doubles as a space heater (and it's hot!). I'm listening to more digital sounds for now, on the summer system.. and apparently I'm becoming a reggae fan. @@…

The Station (Multi, XP'd on PC) Something has gone wrong on the Espial, a cloaked space station overlooking an inhabited planet. It's your job to figure out what the problem is and where the crew went before it's too late.
Recently acquired this 8 year old game for $1.50 in the summer Steam sale. This is a very short (2.5 hours to roll credits) walking sim puzzle game. Despite that short play time, it's got all the things you'd expect: locked doors, ID cards (bra…

Quantification of atmospheric carbon dioxide from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES East)
Aaron Sonabend-W, Sean Campbell, John Platt, Christopher Van Arsdale, Anna M. Michalak
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23991 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.23991 https://arxiv.org/html/2605.23991
arXiv:2605.23991v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: There is a growing urgency to track greenhouse gasses with the resolution, precision and accuracy needed to support independent verification of $CO_2$ fluxes at local to global scales. The current generation of space-based sensors, however, only provides sparse observations in space and time. This challenge has fueled interest in the potential use of data from existing missions originally developed for other applications for inferring global greenhouse gas variability. The Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) onboard the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES-East), operational since 2017, provides full coverage of much of the western hemisphere at 10-minute intervals from geostationary orbit at 16 wavelengths at an approximately 2$km^2$ spatial resolution. Here, we leverage this high spatial coverage and temporal revisit to develop a single-pixel, physics-guided neural network to estimate dry-air column $CO_2$ mole fraction ($XCO_2$). The model employs a time series of GOES-East's 16 spectral bands, ECMWF ERA5 lower tropospheric meteorology, MODIS surface reflectance, solar and satellite viewing geometry, and day of year. Training used collocated GOES-East and OCO-2/OCO-3 observations. We also present case studies illustrating the use of the model to observe $XCO_2$ enhancements over urban areas and drawdown over agricultural regions. Overall, while the precision of GOES-East derived $XCO_2$ can never rival that of dedicated instruments, the unprecedented combination of contiguous geographic coverage, 10-minute temporal frequency, and multi-year record offers the potential to observe aspects of atmospheric $CO_2$ variability currently unseen from space.
toXiv_bot_toot

Yesterday I got an alert that my disk space on my Mastodon instance server was running out.
All the media seemed to suddenly be refreshed and at a very fast rate.
It took a while to figure out it was the Meta AI scraper hitting the instance quite a lot.
I finally managed to block it in Caddy abs and robots.txt together with some other AI scraper.
#mastodon

Entanglement Builds Space-Time. Now “Magic” Gives It Gravity. | Quanta Magazine
https://www.quantamagazine.org/entanglement-builds-space-time-now-magic-gives-it-gravity-20260603/

The thing I love about computers is that I can tell you basically anything about how a computer works, not because I know everything but because I know how to figure it out. I can walk you, over the course of an hour, two, there, maybe more, though every step of typing something into a web form, from the electrical signals that get turned into digital via an ADC, to the USB controller memory, to the kernel driver, to user space, through the application stack, back down to the kernel, to the network driver, through routers, up the server stack, TCP/IP, key exchanges, etc.
I don't mean I have the time to dig into these things. I used to, and it was fun. I've given more than my fair share of interviews talking though variations of this. What I'm talking about isn't pure knowledge, but that, given relatively simple theory, and the right tools, every action of a computer can be understood down to the limits of physics.
The thing I hate about #LLMs is that take something comprehensible and make it something almost completely opaque. Even with a solid understanding of the theory, literally no one understands what's happening. That is shit. It makes playing with technology not fun anymore. The way in which companies are making things even more opaque by running stuff in the cloud is everything I hated about closed source on steroids.

China launched its crewed Shenzhou-23 spacecraft and eased it into a successful docking with a space station early Monday as part of Beijing's ambitions to send humans to the Moon by 2030, state media said.
During this mission, a Chinese astronaut is scheduled to spend a full year in orbit on the Tiangong space station, a crucial first in the Chinese lunar landing programme.
The Long March 2-F rocket blasted off in a cloud of flames and smoke on time at 11:08 pm (1508 GMT) Su…

Successful Launch Spurs China Toward Crucial First For Moon Landing
China launched its crewed Shenzhou-23 spacecraft and eased it into a successful docking with a space station early Monday as part of Beijing's ambitions to send humans to the Moon by 2030, state media said.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #WoPop
Boards of Canada:
🎵 Copy of You Retreat in Time and Space
#BoardsofCanada
https://open.spotify.com/track/5m3Uzjuiyj8656EGM1bwhk

"Private industry is much more efficient and faster than NASA"
Time from first concept to first operational flight:
- Saturn V: ~11 years (1957–1968)
- Space Shuttle: ~13 years (1968–1981)
- SLS: ~14 years (2012–2026)
- SpaceX Starship: 21 years (2005–?, no operational flight yet)
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #BBC6Music's #StuartMaconiesFreakZone
Boards of Canada:
🎵 You Retreat In Time And Space
#BoardsofCanada
https://boardsofcanada.bandcamp.com/track/you-retreat-in-time-and-space
https://open.spotify.com/track/5m3Uzjuiyj8656EGM1bwhk

Shear alignment and tensorial Taylor--Aris dispersion of Brownian rods in a circular tube
Jingsen Feng, Xu Chu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17614 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.17614 https://arxiv.org/html/2605.17614
arXiv:2605.17614v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Brownian rods disperse in pressure-driven flow through a coupling between axial shear, anisotropic translational diffusion and Jeffery--Brownian rotation. Classical tube Taylor--Aris theory treats transverse mixing as a scalar process, and existing passive-rod reductions have mainly addressed planar geometries. A circular tube adds two ingredients: the shear strength varies with radius and freely rotating rods sample a three-dimensional orientation space. We formulate a tensorial Taylor--Aris theory for dilute axisymmetric rods in Poiseuille flow by solving the local steady orientation Fokker--Planck problem and using its second moments to close a conservative axisymmetric transport equation. The long-wave reduction shows how each part of the diffusion tensor enters the one-dimensional limit. The radial diffusivity sets the invariant cross-sectional measure and the cell problem for the leading Taylor coefficient; the radial--axial component produces an inverse-P{\'e}clet correction to the migration speed; the axial component gives the direct diffusivity. The central mechanism is the streamwise alignment generated in high-shear annular layers. Alignment reduces radial diffusivity there, shifts the long-time sampling of the velocity profile toward slower streamlines, and amplifies the radial cell response. In strong shear this raises the Taylor coefficient by about \(23\%\) for aspect ratio \(p=1000\) and by about \(30\%\) in the infinitely slender limit, approaching the fully aligned bound. Direct simulations of the full tensorial equation validate the asymptotic coefficients. The same radial mixing operator also gives a Sturm--Liouville spectral model that tracks finite-time relaxation from different radial injections to the long-time Taylor regime.
toXiv_bot_toot

#LARES-2 satellite measures #FrameDragging effect around the Earth: #GeneralRelativity result ever taken *that* long?)

Weather tracker: deadly May heatwave shatters records across Europe https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/may/29/weather-tracker-deadly-may-heatwave-shatters-records-across-europe

« Isekai shokudou » is the best isekai in all of time and space. Closely followed by Konosuba.
#anime

Where's the Hubble Space Telescope now?
https://satellitetracker3d.com/track?norad-id=20580

Satellite Tracker 3D
Real-time 3D tracking of satellites

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #VarietyMix
Model 500:
🎵 Night Drive (Time, Space, Transmat)
#Model500
https://model500.bandcamp.com/track/night-drive-thru-babylon

Common plastic chemical linked to lifelong anxiety in new study #environment

Common plastic chemical linked to lifelong anxiety in new study
Exposure to a common plastic chemical before and shortly after birth may have lasting effects on behavior. Researchers found that male rats exposed early in life to DEHP—a plasticizer used in products ranging from medical devices to toys—showed significantly higher anxiety as adults, even long after exposure had ended. The animals were more hesitant to explore open spaces and spent more time frozen in place, classic signs of anxiety in rodents.

Wildfires used to 'go to sleep' at night. Climate change is turning them into prime burning hours https://phys.org/news/2026-04-wildfires-night-climate-prime-hours.html

Wildfires used to 'go to sleep' at night. Climate change is turning them into prime burning hours
Burning time for North American wildfires is going into overtime. Flames are lasting later into the night and starting earlier in the morning because human-caused climate change is extending the hotter and drier conditions that feed fires, a new study found.

Volador 1.0: A Data-Driven Air-Sea Full-Coupling Regional Forecast Model with Submesoscale-Permitting Based on MOE-Swin-Transformer Framework
Yuhang Zhu, Jianxin Wang, Yu-kun Qian, Yineng Li, Yahui Liu, Yankun Gong, Shilin Tang, Shiqiu Peng, Tao Song
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24032 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.24032 https://arxiv.org/html/2605.24032
arXiv:2605.24032v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: A data-driven air-sea full-coupling regional forecast model with submesoscale-permitting, named "Volador 1.0", is developed for the South China Sea (SCS). The model features a Swin-Transformer framework integrated with a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) system, a latent space interaction architecture based on Cross-Grid Bidirectional Cross-Attention, and a fast-slow dual-branch architecture. Both the three-month hindcast test and the 15-day operational real-time forecasting demonstrate that Volador 1.0 has a very encouraging and promising performance in 0-72h forecasting of temperature and salinity in the 0-500m upper ocean as well as the sea surface height with root-mean-square-error (RMSE) or mean absolute error (MAE) smaller than or at least comparable to those from the reanalysis datasets REDOS V2.0 and GLORYS12 and the state-of-the-art regional numerical model Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS). In particular, Volador 1.0 demonstrates its capability of capturing/forecasting submesoscale processes including internal waves, with an energy spectrum well representing sub- to mesoscale energy cascade as expected by the classical turbulence theory. Further analysis based on ablation experiments shows that the air-sea full-coupling framework, which takes into account the dynamic exchanges of momentum and heat fluxes between the atmosphere and the ocean, indeed helps improve the model's performance compared to the non-full-coupling one. Volador 1.0, though still subject to refinement in the coming future with a large space for improvement, blazes a path for an accurate, fine and fast marine environment forecasting, and thus could help promote our capability of disaster prevention and mitigation in the SCS as well as in other coastal regions where these innovative techniques can be applied.
toXiv_bot_toot

From a mountaintop in Chile the Vera C. #Rubin Observatory has finally begun the revolutionary Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST): https://noirlab.edu/public/news/noirlab2616/ - the ten-year survey is Rubin’s signature campaign to create the most comprehensive, cinematic record of the Universe in history.

In memory of her mom who died at her same age, Megan Wotherspoon ran nearly the full length of Saskatchewan.
"Wotherspoon said her mother was a forestry technician who felt deeply connected to the land. She died in 1995, when her daughter was six years old.
"I've just been reflecting on the time I haven't spent with her because of what happened," she said. "So, this was just a time to … see the places that she loved and hold space for her.""
#love
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/megan-wotherspoon-finishes-run-leukemia-9.7249659

Anatoly's mother had her eyes lowered, beneath the table.
"Why are you looking at your phone? The roast is getting cold!"
She put the phone down with a quick, seemingly involuntary gesture.
"I haven't heard from my son in two days.
It happens, sometimes:
at the front they have no signal,
and until the mission is over, no one gets in touch.
But this time... I don't know."
We looked at each other for a second …

Anatoly's Mother
Anatoly's mother waits for her son's messages with the quiet, stubborn hope only a mother can have. In the space between one phone call and the next, war enters the house through silences, small gestures, and the unbearable weight of what everyone already knows.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #KEXP's #VarietyMix
Pantha du Prince:
🎵 Supernova Space Time Drift
#PanthaduPrince
https://open.spotify.com/track/7AHAhgQaJSp7HvlN1YnD69

#photography #bloomScrolling #tulips #pink

The driver of a lifted Chevrolet Silverado was so oblivious behind the wheel of a three-ton truck that she missed an entire Lamborghini Huracan,
drove onto it, and then put it in park to see what was going on.
From the footage, the Lamborghini appears to be moving slowly through a parking lot, likely searching for a space.
The Silverado enters with noticeably more speed than the setting calls for.
There’s no meaningful correction, no obvious braking in time, and then C…

Florida Woman Drove Her Lifted Truck Over A Lamborghini And Didn’t Even Notice
The Huracan was crawling for a parking spot when a three-ton lifted Chevy Silverado climbed right over its front end without stopping

At 15:24 CEST on 15 June 2026, a faint blue glow in space was switched off for the last time: #BepiColombo across the inner Solar System, the spacecraft's solar electric propulsion (SEP) system completed its final thrust arc, marking the end of BepiColombo’s long cruise phase and the beginning of its arrival at Mercury.

High-Order ADER-DG Hydrodynamics with ExaHyPE: Implementation, Validation, and Astrophysical Benchmarking
Andr\'es Mauricio Su\'arez Mantilla, Leonardo Casta\~neda Colorado
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17132 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.17132 https://arxiv.org/html/2605.17132
arXiv:2605.17132v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We describe a high-order ADER-DG solver for the compressible Euler equations within the ExaHyPE framework. The implementation combines a high-order ADER-DG polynomial representation, a local space-time DG predictor, adaptive mesh refinement, and an a posteriori subcell finite-volume limiter. We test the code on a deliberately mixed set of one- and two-dimensional problems: a strong-shock Sod-type problem, the Shu-Osher shock-entropy interaction, the Woodward-Colella blast wave, a contact-driven vortex sheet, and a shock-interface interaction. The one-dimensional cases recover the expected Euler wave patterns and show clear order-dependent gains in smooth and oscillatory regions. The two-dimensional cases probe a different part of the method, namely contact preservation, shear-driven roll-up, baroclinic vorticity deposition, and Richtmyer-Meshkov-type growth. In these tests the high-order update gives the expected resolution away from discontinuities, whereas the subcell limiter keeps the calculation stable near shocks and steep interfaces. The resulting code provides a reproducible ExaHyPE implementation for idealised inviscid, non-relativistic flows in which shocks, contacts, and multidimensional interfaces are the dominant features.
toXiv_bot_toot

I have no intention of signing up for W currently, but I might consider it if we can get it to replace LinkedIn.

Either way I am planning to stay here..
#WSocial #NoWNoX #surveillance #capitalism #BigTech #VC @_elena https://mastodon.social/@_elena/116770291207686239

Dynamic Evolution of Pore-scale Heterogeneity and Transport Conditions Control Mineral Dissolution Regimes
Jinlei Wang, Yongfei Yang, Martin J. Blunt, Branko Bijeljic
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18223 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.18223 https://arxiv.org/html/2605.18223
arXiv:2605.18223v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Mineral dissolution in porous media is classically partitioned into static regimes within the Pe-Da plane, but this framework fails to capture the dissolution behavior of structurally complex rocks. Using three-dimensional micro-continuum simulations on micro-CT images of three rock samples spanning a wide range of pore-space heterogeneity, we track the joint evolution of dissolution morphology, velocity distribution, and reaction rate. Our results reveal that initial flow heterogeneity controls accessibility of reactants, thereby controlling the dissolution regime,reshaping them as dynamic trajectories. Channeled dissolution emerges as a simultaneous reorganization of structure and flow, and the resulting permeability-porosity relationship cannot be captured by a single power-law. The effective power-law exponent increases with heterogeneity and changes over time, reaching a maximum of 9.8, 18.0, and 40.9 for the three samples. Consequently, the effective reaction rate falls one to three orders of magnitude below the uniform dissolution prediction, with the suppression scaling with flow heterogeneity due to mass transfer limitations in channeled dissolution.
toXiv_bot_toot

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@mike_bowler/116856446192240775
The high concentration of CO2 problem is yet another reason you always want air conditioning available.
It allows you to still get fresh air into buildings regularly (through occasional opening of windows), even when it's hot outside.
"Central air" systems especially are also designed to gently circulate air throughout a space, keeping the time you need to open windows relatively short and overall energy loss low.

Spatio-Temporal Signatures of Intermittency in Helically Rotating Turbulence through Topological Data Analysis
Snigdhashree Mallick (International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, India), Yashwanth Ramamurthi (International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, India), Shiva Kumar Malapaka (International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, India), Amit Chattopadhyay (International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, India)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17560 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.17560 https://arxiv.org/html/2605.17560
arXiv:2605.17560v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: A central challenge in hydrodynamic turbulence is identifying precisely when, and at which length scales, strong turbulent fluctuations (STFs) emerge and develop into intermittent events, which are often obscured by conventional statistical diagnostics. We address this problem by applying a Topological Data Analysis (TDA) framework to reveal the spatiotemporal signatures of intermittency in low-resolution ($128^3$) helically rotating turbulent flows. Vorticity magnitude and length-scale (eddy size) fields are used as scalar observables for TDA: vorticity characterizes rotational dynamics that generate multiscale flow structures, while length-scale fields encode the scales at which intermittent activity arises. Their evolving topology is quantified using persistence diagrams and Wasserstein-distance metrics. Compared with traditional statistical approaches, this framework is more sensitive to localized and short-lived flow variations, enabling clearer detection of intermittent behavior. Pronounced variations in Wasserstein-distance heatmaps provide direct signatures of STFs across space and time. Together, these results demonstrate that TDA offers an effective complementary tool for detecting STFs that lead to intermittency within turbulent regime.
toXiv_bot_toot

I was hoping to get a new macmini to replace #newOldiMac before the summer but there are no refurbished ones in the Canadian Apple Store right now and the wait time on a new one is 12 weeks!
So no point doing that… plus the prices on RAM and SSD upgrades are crazy rn. Maybe the bubble will pop by then and we’ll have a flood of ex-AI gear on the market…
So instead I will focus my homelap on improving our home network situation, getting a couple 10gBT switches and capable router, and running a couple important cables around the house.
Then maybe I will see if I can make some space in our basement wiring closet for another shelf to hold a few old MacBook laptops that I have gathered over the years and see if I can turn them into a ProxMox cluster.
#networking #homelab #macmini #inflation