Tootfinder

Is this Cowboys offense the most potent in the Dak Prescott era? CeeDee Lamb says it's 'best one I've been on'

https://www.cbssports.com/nf…

Here’s my 35th “Long Links” outing, curation of long-form offerings, which assume that nobody has time to read all this stuff but one or two of the pieces might brighten your day. This one is mostly political but some of the politics are from France and China. Plus a way-cool analytical history of blogging and a section labeled “wonderful things”.

After #Trump finally crashes and burns (I'm still saying I don't think he makes it to the mid terms, and I think it's more than possible he won't make it to the end of the year) we'll hear a lot of people say, "the system worked!" Today people are already talking about "saving democracy" by fighting back. This will become a big rally cry to vote (for Democrats, specifically), and the complete failure of the system will be held up as the best evidence for even greater investment in it.
I just want to point out that American democracy gave nuclear weapons to a pedophile, who, before being elected was already a well known sexual predator, and who made the campaign promise to commit genocide. He then preceded to commit genocide. And like, I don't care that he's "only" kidnaped and disappeared a few thousand brown people. That's still genocide. Even if you don't kill every member of a targeted group, any attempt to do so is still "committing genocide." Trump said he would commit genocide, then he hired all the "let's go do a race war" guys he could find and *paid* them to go do a race war. And, even now as this deranged monster is crashing out, he is still authorized to use the world's largest nuclear arsenal.
He committed genocide during his first term when his administration separated migrant parents and children, then adopted those children out to other parents. That's technically genocide. The point was to destroy the very people been sending right wing terror squads after.
There was a peaceful hand over of power to a known Russian asset *twice*, and the second time he'd already committed *at least one* act of genocide *and* destroyed cultural heritage sites (oh yeah, he also destroyed indigenous grave sites, in case you forgot, during his first term).
All of this was allowed because the system is set up to protect exactly these types of people, because *exactly* these types of people are *the entire power structure*.
Going back to that system means going back to exactly the system that gave nuclear weapons to a pedophile *TWICE*.
I'm already seeing the attempts to pull people back, the congratulations as we enter the final phase, the belief that getting Trump out will let us all get back to normal. Normal. The normal that lead here in the first place. I can already see the brunch reservations being made. When Trump is over, we will be told we won. We will be told that it's time to go back to sleep.
When they tell you everything worked, everything is better, that we can stop because we won, tell them "fuck you! Never again means never again." Destroy every system that ever gave these people power, that ever protected them from consequences, that ever let them hide what they were doing.
These democrats funded a genocide abroad and laid the groundwork for genocide at home. They protected these predators, for years. The whole power structure is guilty. As these files implicate so many powerful people, they're trying to shove everything back in the box. After all the suffering, after we've finally made it clear that we are the once with the power, only now they're willing to sacrifice Trump to calm us all down.
No, that's a good start but it can't be the end.
Winning can't be enough to quench that rage. Keep it burning. When this is over, let victory fan that anger until every institution that made this possible lies in ashes. Burn it all down and salt the earth. Taking down Trump is a great start, but it's not time to give up until this isn't possible again.
#USPol

> This mod adds mainly one thing with vast ramifications: a system for calculating the stress-strain curve of metals in the game. If you arent familiar with stress-strain curves consider getting a Materials Science Engineering degree or looking at this wikipedia article (whichever one is cheaper and less soul draining).
i love vintage story mods

#NowPlaying another great punk LP, this one is from 2018, the self-titled debut record 'Color TV' by Minnesota's COLOR TV. There's great hooky guitar lines all over this one. Kind of a Dickies feel sometimes, mixed maybe with the snottiness of The Briefs? Hadn't heard these guys-- a band to watch, for sure.

It's ginger shot time again. This one is one banana, one lemon and a good piece of ginger.

I must have missed this - Netflix is possibly going to buy Warner Brothers.
My grandparents lived close to the old Republic Studios, and not far from Universal, Disney, Warner (and the secret Lookout Mountain studio.) The area wasn't called "Studio City" for nothing.
I remember one trip to Warner right after Kent State. Our class went to one of those cool viewing studios (the kind one sees in movies) at Warner to see the rough edit (with extra violence!) of The Wil…

TL;DR: Dominant #H3N2 #influenza strain this year is new & the star of the season, with that part of the *trivalent* vax not a great match. HOWEVER, the vax is still doing its job of keeping most people out of the hospital.
Each year's vax helps build more diversity in your flu-attacking antib…

I think https://github.com/zachleat/import-module-string is one of the best things I’ve built this year (even if no one else does 😅)

It all should have been stopped the instant he started openly monetizing his hotel blocks from the White House
and sending his children to represent the United States of America at international meetings.
But we decided none of the laws, rules, or norms apply this One Special Boy 🤷‍♂️
https://

A good friend of mine has the Muppet character "Beaker" as his avatar. For reasons.
He offers me advice. I offer him advice. We chat. These are #ChatsWithBeaker
#AWS #awsuseast1

from my link log —
Two workers are quadratically better than one: modelling a queue with PRISM.
https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/queueing-prism/
saved 2020-11-02

I found this reflection of one community member in the forum interesting: «Every time I read that AI is better, faster etc. it lowers my motivation to identify. It makes me feel that what I do when identifying (mostly unknowns) is not going to be useful any longer.»
My take is that this development is par for the course once organizations "professionalize" — and thus start to focus more on keeping their staff salaries than on their mission & working with their volunteer community…
#inaturalist

Google has one enormous advantage over all other AI players in the industry. It can offer "AI-modus" to the billions of people already using Google Search. And yes, AI-modus can be bad, full of faults, but it improves and gets better. For many questions it is "good enough" probably. Also it is just one-click away for most people on a site they already visit regularly. This way Google will create another unhealthy market dominance i am afraid.

@… @… Thanks. That is the plan. You can already use this one with the Convert URL link in the footer. I'll add a download link for the php script there as well. Just have one more change I want …

I loved this movie. I loved E1 & E2 but this one was playful & my son will love it... and most importantly, it left the door wide open for E4!
▶️ Now You See Me: Now You Don’t (2025) Official Trailer
https://youtube.com/watch?v=-E3lMRx7HRQ&si=huPIB2I7f0C-oqFw…

dblp_coauthor_snap: DBLP authors (2012)
A coauthorship network extracted from the DBLP computer science manuscript database, in 2012. This network is a one-mode projection from the bipartite graph of computer scientists and their publications.
This network has 425957 nodes and 1049866 edges.
Tags: Social, Collaboration, Unweighted, Metadata, Projection

#Blakes7 Series A, Episode 01 - The Way Back
JENNA: About twenty-four hours. If you're expecting a last-minute reprieve you'd better forget it. Once they get you this far there's no going back. You'd better get used to the idea. Nobody out there gives a damn about you.
[Scene: VARON's apartment. He walks towards the bed where MAJA is sleeping and stops. She awak…

Any #Python newbies out there? (Or experts that need to teach Python)
Would you have a specific online tutorial to recommend for someone who wants to learn Python without any prior programming experience? One that also explains how to install it ?
I was thinking of something like this:

None of the NASA s/c images of #3IATLAS shared at the presser come even remotely close in beauty - and obvious detail - to the current best ground-based images ... like this one by Michael Jäger and Gerald Rhemann with a 12-inch reflector taken this morning: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=2282405328942953

if I could figure out an angle to contort myself that would let me sleep this would be a good time for a nap since I saw this one before

:finger_point:⁠boop

So my car has been complaining I should put some exhaust emissions neutralizing fluid in it. A thing they call AdBlue I believe.
Bought a big 10l drum of the stuff ready to fill up.
But when I look at where I expect to find the hole for filling it, I just find a capped off tube and a warning sticker "See the GM Citreon Berlingo Blaze manual" for the adblue refilling hole.
Only user manual I have is the one telling me to expect it there.
The car was converted for wheelchair access at some point in its life. I think they are referring to the wheelchair-adaption manual, which the seller did not give me.
🤔
Have been looking around the car as much as I can for a couple of hours this morning to no avail. Where have they hidden this hole to fill up adblue?
Maybe it's under the engine or something now and you have to put the thing on stilts to find it?
🤷
Asked my mechanic about it and he says to bring it in on Monday. Gonna be a pain if I have to rip up the floorboards or something every year to refill that.
#mechanic #car #diesel

So apparently Facebook broke their event calendar in a way I can't see them in my calendar of choice, and I can't subscribe to their iCal calendar manually because of some 'insecure connection' error. Or something.
They just broke one of few legitimately usable features of this whole joke of a platform.
I'm just as pissed as this guy.
https://divine-element.com/facebook-events-not-showing-up-in-calendar/

Yet one more adverse impact of climate change:
"Greater warmth enables pests to develop faster, produce more generations each year and attack crops for longer as winters shorten. Rising temperatures are also helping pests invade places further from the equator and on higher ground that were previously too cold"
In hindsight, not surprising - but this is the first time I have seen this impact publicly discussed.
‘Borrowed time’: crop pests and food losses superchar…

Topical Toot: There’s a bunch of versions of this talk I gave over the years, here’s one of the shorter ones as a video: Failing Over without Falling Over https://youtu.be/R3_ccsuPoD8 and a similar slide deck pdf

SNF (Switzerland) restrictions proposed: only 1 concurrent research grant per PI (plus maybe one coop), only 1 proposal per year.
🔥 Hot take (since I'm not at all operating like this currently): I actually think this might be a good idea? It would curb some of the biggest "research mills", where one PI has a huge pyramid scheme underneath them, and might encourage more careful grant proposals, slower science. And might even put more emphasis back into the basic research funding (instead of the grant lotteries)?
(Maybe naive, I know, and I have no idea how this would be implemented)
#academicChatter #researchGrants
https://www.snf.ch/de/7qymWfJMG1z9XR2S/news/einschraenkungen-in-der-projektfoerderung

"…[his own destructive impact]… is the source of…actual projection & displacement. At some level, Musk understands all of this [is highly destructive]; he is, after all, a very gifted man. But the responsibility is overwhelming. It cannot be he who has summoned all the chaos & destruction. It must be the human migrants. Blame them. Blame them every day. Blame them for everything. Never stop. Keep the truth at bay. The unbearable truth. About yourself."

@… I totally ignored Facebook for three years or so.
I'm not sure why I revisited this year, it was probably to tell whether someone is still alive, after one of my 'death-of-friends-and-family' nightmares.
I found only two acquaintances dead, and one in a wheelchair following a stroke … not too bad, given our ages and the length of time th…

Bell with another round of layoffs. The r/bell thread seems to think 10% across the country. It’s can't actually remember a time when Bell announced they were 'hiring'.
How is this company one of the 'big’ telecoms and yet continues to offload people?
#Bell
https://flipboard.com/@dailyhive/daily-hive-vancouver-ar91atkoz/-/a-IvwInjurQyG1YqTyz8NjVg:a:3765800918-/0

Was chatting with the guy next to me in the airport lounge in Istanbul. He's a Zürcher, and *he* considers Singapore "too clean". This from a city where people wipe down the outsides of trashcans. But here's one from SG of people vigorously scrubbing escalator steps.

Nice! And on sale too - this one has been on my wishlist for a while
#Steam #macOS
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2060160/The_Farmer_Was_Replaced/

a feature that i wish was built into mastodon from the start & hope it eventually comes to heads.social. feel like being able to communicate only with people on your local server is one of the missing pieces in actually making local servers work. (i'd certainly be more apt to live-toot live shows/streams if i knew the readers were specifically the heads server.)

Man I hate the new language for a task one doesn't want to do — "aversive”.
Primary reason is that it externalizes the problem. It's fixed mindset framing, that something _else_ has to change to make the situation better, that it's the task's fault for being aversive, instead of our own for not working on the aversion to the needed task.
We have a bad habit lately of attributing relational traits to the party in a relationship, rather than to the relationship itself and it weakens our thinking about things. Noticing this pattern really changes how you think, because you can start attributing things better and noticing the contexts — and contexts are often things that can be changed!

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…

This is a subtweet...
People who are not anti-capitalist sometimes wonder: "Why is there a monopoly on X life-critical thing?" (E.g., epipens, insulin, web search).
This one is really simple actually: because monopolies are more profitable than competition, and the foundation of capitalism is that capital = power.
Various societies have recognized the necropolitical outcomes of monopolies and have tried to erect barriers to monopoly; we all know that monopolies are bad, death-and-suffering-causing things. But since these societies mostly remain capitalist, they allow these barriers to be eroded by the power of capital (to do otherwise would be to repudiate capitalism because it puts a limit on the power of money). The barriers are ineffective, and the capital = power equation holds, and monopolies result and get to do their killing & maiming thing (remember: even things like social media monopolies that you wouldn't expect to pay for political assassinations like a mining company still profit from inciting genocides). *Sometimes* there are oligopolies instead of monopolies, but instances of really competitive markets are pretty rare for things that are widely sought-after.
The "government will manage the markets to prevent bad outcomes like monopolies" strategy has failed repeatedly, spectacularly, and almost universally. To actually prevent monopolies you need a population that no longer believes that money should equal power, it's that simple. Sadly, it's actually not that simple, since all of the alternatives which equate something else to power, like "the king" or "party loyalty as judged by the supreme leader" have the same problems or worse. The attitude you need to cultivate is "nobody should have power," which is hard because *all* of the power-systems we have constantly propagandize against this attitude in myriad ways. Still, in the future once we've broken free of this age where hierarchy is accepted, people will look back and wonder whether the historical records are even credible given how much needless death and suffering were endured with little resistance.
#anarchy #capitalism

Thank you all for 3,000 followers on here! Here’s a photo of Danny to celebrate the occasion ☺️
3 years into being part of Mastodon, I continue to be impressed with how wonderful the people here are and how much this social network actually FEELS social. People replying to one another, having conversations, learning things, sharing moments of joy, making friends.
Mastodon brought my business clients, helped me gain confidence in my own voice, freed me from dependence on big tech and algorithms, rekindled my interests, introduced me to incredible people and projects, and served as a source of hope in humanity in the times when cynicism and nihilism felt all but inevitable.
I love our little corner of the internet, and am so glad that it’s still here despite everyone who professed it was doomed to fade into irrelevance.
Thank you to everyone reading these words for being here on the Fedi. The world is a little better thanks to your choice to support an independent web.

'Dinge die mit "R" beginnen oder so aussehen ...' #FotoVorschlag 'Things starting with "R" or look like one...'
To me, this is the #Rofan mountain range in #tyrol

Can't sleep so I'm naturally browsing the Internet about old tech. This Sony Walkman from 1995 could very well be the ur-gadget for translucent plastics, predating the original iMac by 3 years.
But! The Sony Whoopee predates it by a year, although I think this one was aimed at kids.

HTTP has a new method: QUERY. Tl;dr: GET with a body.
https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-httpbis-safe-method-w-body-14.html
(Doesn’t have an RFC number yet but has been approved, will get one in a few weeks.)

There is a non-zero chance these dumbasses will accidentally kill themselves, triggering all sorts of assassination disinformation.
“Artillery shrapnel hits vehicles on California highway during Marines celebration”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c051p3981m4o
This wa…

It is always preferable to visit home with a friend. Your parents will
not be pleased with this plan, because they want you all to themselves and
because in the presence of your friend, they will have to act like mature
human beings.
The worst kind of friend to take home is a girl, because in that case,
there is the potential that your parents will lose you not just for the
duration of the visit but forever. The worst kind of girl to take home is one
of …

#NowPlaying the new tape 'Glueman III' by Denver, Colorado's GLUEMAN. I dig this one even more than their last one. Loud, yelly, raw, raunchy, simple, catchy skate punk. LOVE shit like this.
https://glueman1.bandcamp.com/…

This week, our CEO Lise Fuhr was in New York at the UN General Assembly for the WSIS20 meeting, joining discussions on building a digital ecosystem that is people-centered, inclusive, & development-focused.
She took part in several side events covering different perspectives, and addressed the General Assembly on behalf of the IGF Leadership Panel.
One message was clear: inclusive and strong digital governance doesn’t happen behind closed doors. It works best when it’s built …

When I try it with one of my own toots it looks like this
https://kanoa.de/@makeratschool/115745247320787413

Defector reports Year 5 revenue up 1% YoY to $4.65M, including $3.8M from subscriptions; all 19 original co-founders continue to work at the worker-owned outlet (Defector)
https://defector.com/defector-annual-report-year-five

Terror At Bondi
Built from eyewitness testimony and deeply personal stories gathered in the immediate aftermath, this series documents how a peaceful Sunday evening gathering became one of the darkest days in Australia's history...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustralianpods.…

Something that just drives me up the wall about this particular area of Git (merge conflicts) is that, beyond the all-too-typical Git problem of sloppy terminology, this is bad feature design. In most situations, “use ours” and “user theirs” are •both• the wrong answer! There are two doors, and they’re •both• trapdoors.
If you have a merge conflict, that means that you changed something •and• somebody else changed something, and your job is to •synthesize• both changes. To use one is to discard the other, which is usually not what you want!
The thing Git (and every Git GUI) ought to surface is a three-way merge: show me what I changed and what they changed ••relative to the nearest common ancestor••. Yes yes yes, I know it’s possible to finagle that into view with Git. It should be the danged default. It is what I should see first. It is what I should see if I have no idea what I’m doing.
1/ https://hachyderm.io/@jeremydmiller/115741417416659492

Titan submarine: There were 3 fanless PCs and a switch in there before being imploded!
(Originally saw it on Scott Manley's video about this)
From:
https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/Document/

The best part is that any one of these grocery food chains could just choose to do this, and it wouldn't even be a fraction of their budget for a single social media post—in other words, it'd be good marketing @…

I _wish_ this were the last word on this subject
it's a good one
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/order-2

Oh no. St. John’s University has banned the HOPE Conference because one person claimed it is anti-police.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@ieeespectrum/115583916468218862
The article says that they've designed the battery system to prevent thermal runaway, i.e. a fire 🔥, and to contain it if one does occur, but I would feel very anxious on boarding this s…

RIP to this #SolyTech power supply in one of my old #TigerDirect #Systemax clunkers. It just failed spectacularly with a tick-tick-tick, a large burst of yellow sparks, a loud buzz, and acrid ozoney smoke.…

I just woke up from a dream. For every parent there is a time when, with shame, we have to explain how the world actually works... when they become a little too old to keep saying, "I'll explain it when you're older."
Amsterdam is full of reminders of the occupation, of the Holocaust. It's impossible to pretend there hasn't been a great evil here... One that's not in the past, but still very alive in the present.
At some point things will have to change because fascism can't last forever. It is a thing which necessarily contains its own downfall. We will, at that point, have an opportunity to make the world one that we can be proud to tell our children we created. We can stop short and reestablish the status quo that got us here, or we can build a world that we will no longer have to explain to each new generation in shame.
What would it look like?
(Shout out to the comrade who prompted me to be thinking about this.)
There was also a sign in my dream that said, "we created the bike, therefore we can do anything." This may or may not be related.

Strange concrete sculptures circa 1960 near that big cluster of trees in the Arboretum
#photo #photography #landscape

This sentiment expressed by @… below and the aspect of slowing down is also very much part of my own reasoning for getting back into analog print making. The other large part is the conceptual overlap with (and my love of) process-based art in general. It was exactly that what has drawn me to generative/algorithmic/procedural/kinetic approaches/concepts for most of my l…

To avoid turning into midnight munchies, small fish, often no bigger than pocket change, employ a frequently observed and clever strategy:
swimming inside a salp, a type of barrel-shaped, gelatinous marine animal.
Though salps don’t conceal the hitchhikers, their thin membranes can be enough to thwart attackers.
The fish don’t seem to mind sharing their sanctuary with one another:
in this image, three diminutive jacks pack inside a salp the size of a spice jar.

I loved this movie. I loved E1 & E2 but this one was playful & my son will love it... and most importantly, it left the door wide open for E4!
▶️ Now You See Me: Now You Don’t (2025) Official Trailer
https://youtube.com/watch?v=-E3lMRx7HRQ&si=huPIB2I7f0C-oqFw…

While this may be a good idea, I personally would not want to get anywhere near a so called "venture" backed by Vinod Khosla, not no way, not no how.
"One of America’s most dangerous volcanoes will soon power homes"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-sol…

netscience: Scientific collaborations in network science (2006)
A coauthorship network among scientists working on network science, from 2006. This network is a one-mode projection from the bipartite graph of authors and their scientific publications.
This network has 1589 nodes and 2742 edges.
Tags: Social, Collaboration, Weighted, Projection

Having just watched #Jaws for the first time in ages, I was stunned by the famous opening sequence ... but not by its cinematography or acting or editing - but by the never-ending chain of in-your-face #continuity errors in lighting once the girl enters the water: one moment we have a low Sun and a red sky, then we have the Sun near the zenith (with a day for night effect) then low again and so on, for several cycles.
Now #Spielberg, is there supposed to be some hidden message here? Well, there isn't.
(Once it's day, fortunately, this problem is gone, and a great movie unfolds, still fresh after 50 years. And I know, you shouldn't mess with a masterpiece, but Lucas added characters to Star Wars IV, and Cameron corrected a wrong star pattern in Titanic, so may be Spielberg could just, for an anniversary special edition ... o.k., I shut up. ;-)

A few years back, wifey and I did a project together, as we often do. We wanted to do a very specific mashup - death metal and Pokémon. It's admittedly a niche. But we wanted to choose Cubone because that's the name of our furry son (the one in my avi). And the Pokémon's back story, wearing his dead mom's skull, it's pretty metal. Original shirt inspiration on the right, for reference (I have a very worn copy of this one). I sketched it out, she painted (she's so tale…

Series D, Episode 02 - Power
GUNN SAR: Put that thing back where it came from. Use his glove.
[On the hillside]
PELLA: The one being held by the Hommiks is called Avon.
KATE: Well, does he concern us?
PELLA: Our future depends on him. Dorian is dead.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/402/207

I feel as though I should illustrate the difference that this one single constraint can make by two examples.
The rules of Simon Says are maximally authoritarian. You must perform any action ordered, with the only restriction that the authority must say "Simon says" first. Were you forced to stay in this system, it would be the most despotic autocracy possible. But it's not. It's a silly game because you can leave at any time.
Let's flip this and imagine a room. During a specific period of time you will have absolute control over everything in this room. In this room you have total freedom. This is not even the limited freedom, the coordinated freedom, the compromising freedom of civil society. You could, without consequence, perform any action you wish in this room. You could say anything, destroy or steal any object, order any individual to perform any action, kill any person in the room with you and take anything they own. This is the sovereign freedom, the absolute freedom, of dictators and kings. The only restriction is that you are not allowed to leave the room while you have this freedom. In fact, you really only have this level of freedom because the room is actually empty other than for you. I am, of course, talking about a form of torture still common in the US: solitary confinement.

Nearly a million chickens packed the barns at Howe’s Hens last Christmas Eve when the first of them tested positive for bird flu.
The deadly virus spreads so fast that even if only one hen is infected,
farmers are legally obligated to kill all of the others.
Massive mounds of carcasses soon appeared outside the Ohio egg farm, covered in compost. 
The slaughter wasn’t enough.
The virus tore through industrial barns in Darke County
and moved on through one …

On RNZ right now, they're talking about how the software used by pharmacists is not even remotely fit for purpose. Imagine that. Why isn't that sort of thing being sorted by a publicly funded, openly licensed (available to all) system developed by a consortium of companies - that can be scrutinised by anyone - because it's too important to be entrusted to the proprietary gain of any one company. This stuff is a no-brainer. Some things are far too important to be dependent on a pr…

netscience: Scientific collaborations in network science (2006)
A coauthorship network among scientists working on network science, from 2006. This network is a one-mode projection from the bipartite graph of authors and their scientific publications.
This network has 1589 nodes and 2742 edges.
Tags: Social, Collaboration, Weighted, Projection

My bet is that this will turn into a fairly substantial copyright and contract case.
"Kristen Bell Is the Star of a New Fox Jesus Podcast. No One Told Her"
https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/kristen-bel…

Best wishes and sympathy to any former colleagues dealing with us-east-1 going pear-shaped. Looking at the signals, this outage is an extra-weird one, which is unsurprising because with decades of experience, all the non-extra-weird outage scenarios have been discovered and dealt with.
#aws

Army № 39 Anthony Paradiso jumps in front of Cornell Quarterback № 18 Stefano Luis moments after Luis passed the ball in Sprint Football under the lights this Friday
#photo #photography #football

I feel as though I should illustrate the difference that this one single constraint can make by two examples.
The rules of Simon Says are maximally authoritarian. You must perform any action ordered, with the only restriction that the authority must say "Simon says" first. Were you forced to stay in this system, it would be the most despotic autocracy possible. But it's not. It's a silly game because you can leave at any time.
Let's flip this and imagine a room. During a specific period of time you will have absolute control over everything in this room. In this room you have total freedom. This is not even the limited freedom, the coordinated freedom, the compromising freedom of civil society. You could, without consequence, perform any action you wish in this room. You could say anything, destroy or steal any object, order any individual to perform any action, kill any person in the room with you and take anything they own. This is the sovereign freedom, the absolute freedom, of dictators and kings. The only restriction is that you are not allowed to leave the room while you have this freedom. In fact, you really only have this level of freedom because the room is actually empty other than for you. I am, of course, talking about a form of torture still common in the US: solitary confinement.

netscience: Scientific collaborations in network science (2006)
A coauthorship network among scientists working on network science, from 2006. This network is a one-mode projection from the bipartite graph of authors and their scientific publications.
This network has 1589 nodes and 2742 edges.
Tags: Social, Collaboration, Weighted, Projection

dbpedia_genre: DBpedia work-genre network
A bipartite network of the affiliations between artists and their works on one side and genre classifications on the other, as extracted from Wikipedia by the DBpedia project. The date of this snapshot is uncertain.
This network has 266717 nodes and 463497 edges.
Tags: Informational, Relatedness, Unweighted

Back in my day, pedophiles were punished, not protected.
The lengths these fools are willing to go to protect them is mind boggling.
I feel like I’m the crazy one.
-- Karintha Styles
https://bsky.app/profile/karintha.bsky.social/post/3magjkdgeh22t<…

The implications are interesting enough when we apply this to systems like capitalism or national governments, but there are other very interesting implications when applied to systems like race or gender.
Like, as a cis man the only way I can be free to express and explore my own masculinity is if the masculinity I participate in is one which allows anyone the freedom to leave. Then I have an obligation to recognize the validity of nom-masculine trans identity as a necessary component of my own. If I fail to do this, then I trap myself in masculinity and allow the system to control me rather than me to be a free participant in the system.
But if it's OK to escape but not enter, that's it's own restriction that constrains the freedom to leave. It creates a barrier that keeps people in by the fear that they cannot return. So in order for me to be free in my cis masculine identity, I must accept non-masculine trans identities as they are and accept detransitioning as also valid.
But I also need to accept trans-masc identities because restricting entry to my masculinity means non-consensually constraining other identities. If every group imposes an exclusion against others coming in, that, by default, makes it impossible to leave every other group. This is just a description of how national borders work to trap people within systems, even if a nation itself allows people to "freely" leave.
So then, a free masculinity is one which recognizes all configurations of trans identities as valid and welcomes, if not celebrates, people who transition as affirmations of the freedom of their own identity (even for those who never feel a reason to exercise that same freedom).
The most irritating type of white person may look at this and say, "oh, so then why can't I be <not white>?" Except that the critique of transratial identities has never been "that's not allowed" and has always been "this person didn't do the work." If that person did the work, they would understand that the question doesn't make sense based on how race is constructed. That person might understand that race, especially whiteness, is more fluid than they at first understood. They might realize that whiteness is often chosen at the exclusion of other racialized identities. They would, perhaps, realize that to actually align with any racialized identity, they would first have to understand the boot of whiteness on their neck, have to recognize the need to destroy this oppressive identity for their own future liberation. The best, perhaps only, way to do this would be to use the privilege afforded by that identity to destroy it, and in doing so would either destroy their own privilege or destroy the system of privilege. The must either become themselves completely ratialized or destroy the system of race itself such being "transracial" wouldn't really make sense anymore.
But that most annoying of white person would, of course, not do any such work. Nevertheless, one hopes that they may recognize the paradox that they are trapped by their white identity, forced forever by it to do the work of maintaining it. And such is true for all privileged identities, where privilege is only maintained through restrictions where these restrictions ultimately become walls that imprison both the privileged and the marginalized in a mutually reinforcing hell that can only be escaped by destroying the system of privilege itself.

Nixon's "Saturday Night Massacre" was 52 years ago today.
It was a shocking breach of DOJ norms, and a major turning point for public opinion on Watergate.
Trump already had one of these (on a Thursday) in February,
and has had at least four more since then
https://bsky…

This week's #ThursDeath is GOUTED CORPSE from Cleveland, Ohio. They have a couple EPs under their belt, one last year, and this one from this year- 'Blighted'. Great dynamics, riffs, growly but understandable vocals. Maybe some thrash and grind in there too. Excellent, grody rippers of songs on this one.

sp_infectious: Art exhibit dynamic contacts (2011)
This dataset contains the daily dynamic contact networks collected during the Infectious SocioPatterns event that took place at the Science Gallery in Dublin, Ireland, during the artscience exhibition INFECTIOUS: STAY AWAY. Each file in the downloadable package contains a tab-separated list representing the active contacts during 20-second intervals of one day of data collection. Each line has the form “t i j“, where i and j are the a…

For two decades, the media defaulted to portraying
Chief Justice John Roberts as a moderate institutionalist,
pointing to high-profile decisions
—to uphold parts of the Affordable Care Act or striking down President Donald Trump’s attempt to ask about citizenship in the 2020 census
—in which he broke from conservative orthodoxy.
But those decisions were always the exception.
Today, as the Roberts court rewrites the Constitution in the image of Trumpian aut…

My name is Heather, and I was one of the very first hires for Barack Obama’s campaign.
I know how to win the tough fights — because I’ve lived them.
Now I’m leading North Star PAC to stop billionaire Jeffrey Yass and the MAGA machine from buying Pennsylvania’s courts.
If they succeed in the state’s Supreme Court retention election, they’ll rig the maps and lock us out of power for decades — just like they did in Texas.
But I can’t do this without you. While Yass and…

I think we can actually prove that this constraint is the *only* constraint that can preserve freedom:
1. There will exist actors in a system who will wish to take advantage of others. Evolution drives survival and one strategy for increasing survival in an altruistic society is to become a parasite.
2. Expecting exploitative dynamics, a system needs to have a set of rules to manage exploitation.
3. If the set of rules is static it will lack the requisite variety necessary to manage the infinite possible behavior of humans so the system will fail.
4. If the system is dynamic then it must have a rule set about how it's own rules are updated. This would make the system recursive, which makes the system at least as complex as mathematics. Any system at least as complex as mathematics is necessarily either incomplete or inconsistent (Gödel's incompleteness theorem). If the system is incomplete, then constraints can be evaded which then allow a malicious agent to seize control of the system and update the rules for their own benefit. If constraints are incomplete, then a malicious agent can take advantage of others within the system.
5. Therefore, no social system can possibly protect freedom unless there exists a single metasystemic constraint (that the system must be optional) allowing for the system to be abandoned when compromised.
Oh, you might say, but this just means you have to infinitely abandon systems. Sure, but there's an evolutionary advantage to cooperation so there's evolutionary pressure to *not* be a malicious actor. So a malicious actor being able to compromise the whole system is likely to be a much more rare event. Compromising a system is a lot of work, so the first thing a malicious actor would want to do is preserve that work. They would want to lock you in. The most important objective to a malicious actor compromising a system would be to violate that metasystemic constraint, or all of their work goes out the window when everyone leaves.
And now you understand why borders exist, why fascists are obsessed with maintaining categories like gender, race, ethnicity, etc. This is why even Democrats like Newsom are on board with putting houseless people in concentration camps. And this is why the most important thing anarchists promote is the ability to choose not to be part of any of that.

The agency told ProPublica it has made no decision on whether to vaccinate hens and has no timeline on when it might announce one
— though it is “proactively assessing” the possibility.
Avoiding the question of airborne spread appears to be in the USDA’s
“best interests,” said Michelle Kromm, an animal health consultant
who directed Jennie-O Turkey’s bird flu response in past outbreaks.
“If this is a major risk factor, then vaccine is absolutely a critical mit…

linux: Linux source inclusions (v3.16)
A network of Linux (v3.16) source code file inclusion. Nodes represent source files and a directed edge indicates if one file includes another.
This network has 30837 nodes and 213954 edges.
Tags: Technological, Software, Unweighted
https://networks.skewed.de/net/linux

There's a word at the beginning and end of Dawn of Everything that feels self-referential right now: Kairos.
> We began this book with a quote which refers to the Greek notion of kairos as one of those occasional moments in a society’s history when its frames of reference undergo a shift – a metamorphosis of the fundamental principles and symbols, when the lines between myth and history, science and magic become blurred – and, therefore, real change is possible. Philosophers sometimes like to speak of ‘the Event’ – a political revolution, a scientific discovery, an artistic masterpiece – that is, a breakthrough which reveals aspects of reality that had previously been unimaginable but, once seen, can never be unseen. If so, kairos is the kind of time in which Events are prone to happen.
> Societies around the world appear to be cascading towards such a point. This is particularly true of those which, since the First World War, have been in the habit of calling themselves ‘Western’. On the one hand, fundamental breakthroughs in the physical sciences, or even artistic expression, no longer seem to occur with anything like the regularity people came to expect in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet at the same time, our scientific means of understanding the past, not just our species’ past but that of our planet, has been advancing with dizzying speed. Scientists in 2020 are not (as readers of mid-twentieth-century science fiction might have hoped) encountering alien civilizations in distant star systems; but they are encountering radically different forms of society under their own feet, some forgotten and newly rediscovered, others more familiar, but now understood in entirely new ways.
Reading this as I write something very inspired by this work feels especially serendipitous, especially at this time. When they wrote the book, I think that kairos felt more serendipitous itself. But as the frequency of opportunity increases, the veil between realities feels more malleable... that perhaps we can poke a finger through and open a portal to a completely different future than the one we've felt locked into for such a long time.
https://anarchoccultism.org/building-zion/the-coordinated-swarm-lyhr

The USDA told ProPublica it has made no decision on whether to vaccinate hens
and has no timeline on when it might announce one
— though it is “proactively assessing” the possibility.
Avoiding the question of airborne spread appears to be
in the USDA’s “best interests,”
said Michelle Kromm, an animal health consultant who directed Jennie-O Turkey’s bird flu response in past outbreaks.
“If this is a major risk factor, then vaccine is absolutely a critical…

linux: Linux source inclusions (v3.16)
A network of Linux (v3.16) source code file inclusion. Nodes represent source files and a directed edge indicates if one file includes another.
This network has 30837 nodes and 213954 edges.
Tags: Technological, Software, Unweighted
https://networks.skewed.de/net/linux

Suddenly, Trump’s effort to rig the 2026 midterms with corrupt gerrymanders appears in trouble.
A panel of judges just blocked the GOP gerrymander in Texas, which had added five seats.
In Indiana, Republicans currently lack the votes to redraw their congressional map.
Trump is angry about all this.
He lashed out at Indiana Republicans, threatening primaries and calling one opponent “weak” and “pathetic.”
So is the scheme dead?
-- No.
Several as…

facebook_wall: Facebook wall posts (2009)
Friendship relationships and interactions (wall posts) for a subset of the Facebook social network in 2009, recorded over a 2 year period. Edge directed edge represents a post by one user on another user's FB wall.
This network has 46952 nodes and 876993 edges.
Tags: Social, Online, Temporal, Multigraph

Dr. Kirk Moore had been on trial for five days,
accused of falsifying COVID-19 vaccination cards and throwing away the government-supplied doses.
The Utah plastic surgeon faced up to 35 years in prison if the jury found him guilty
on charges that included conspiracy to defraud the United States.
Testimony had paused for the weekend when Moore’s lawyer called him early one Saturday this July
with what felt to him like unbelievable news.
U.S. Attorney Gener…

facebook_wall: Facebook wall posts (2009)
Friendship relationships and interactions (wall posts) for a subset of the Facebook social network in 2009, recorded over a 2 year period. Edge directed edge represents a post by one user on another user's FB wall.
This network has 46952 nodes and 876993 edges.
Tags: Social, Online, Temporal, Multigraph

tree-of-life: Protein interactomes across the tree of life (2019)
Protein-protein iteraction networks ("interactome") for 1,840 species. An interactome captures all physical protein-protein interactions within one species, from direct biophysical protein-protein interactions to regulatory protein-DNA and metabolic interactions. .
This network has 264 nodes and 288 edges.
Tags: Biological, Protein interactions

tree-of-life: Protein interactomes across the tree of life (2019)
Protein-protein iteraction networks ("interactome") for 1,840 species. An interactome captures all physical protein-protein interactions within one species, from direct biophysical protein-protein interactions to regulatory protein-DNA and metabolic interactions. .
This network has 327 nodes and 458 edges.
Tags: Biological, Protein interactions

tree-of-life: Protein interactomes across the tree of life (2019)
Protein-protein iteraction networks ("interactome") for 1,840 species. An interactome captures all physical protein-protein interactions within one species, from direct biophysical protein-protein interactions to regulatory protein-DNA and metabolic interactions. .
This network has 975 nodes and 3928 edges.
Tags: Biological, Protein interactions

foodweb_little_rock: Little Rock Lake food web (1991)
A food web among the species found in Little Rock Lake in Wisconsin. Nodes are taxa (like species), either autotrophs, herbivores, carnivores or decomposers. Edges represent feeding (nutrient transfer) of one taxon on another.
This network has 183 nodes and 2494 edges.
Tags: Biological, Food web, Unweighted

email_enron: Email network (Enron corpus)
The Enron email corpus, containing all the email communication from the Enron corporation, which was made public as a result of legal action. Nodes are email addresses and node i links to node j if i sent at least one email to address j. Non-Enron email addresses are also present, but only their links to/from Enron addresses are observed.
This network has 36692 nodes and 367662 edges.
Tags: Social, Communication, Unweighted, Multigr…

email_enron: Email network (Enron corpus)
The Enron email corpus, containing all the email communication from the Enron corporation, which was made public as a result of legal action. Nodes are email addresses and node i links to node j if i sent at least one email to address j. Non-Enron email addresses are also present, but only their links to/from Enron addresses are observed.
This network has 36692 nodes and 367662 edges.
Tags: Social, Communication, Unweighted, Multigr…

add_health: Adolescent health (ADD HEALTH) (1994)
A directed network of friendships obtained through a social survey of high school students in 1994. The ADD HEALTH data are constructed from the in-school questionnaire; 90,118 students representing 84 communities took this survey in 1994-95. Some communities had only one school; others had two. Where there are two schools in a community students from one school were allowed to name friends in the other, the "sister school".

physics_collab: Multilayer physicist collaborations (2015)
Two multiplex networks of coauthorships among the Pierre Auger Collaboration of physicists (2010-2012) and among researchers who have posted preprints on arXiv.org (all papers up to May 2014). Layers represent different categories of publication, and an edge's weight indicates the number of reports written by the authors. These layers are one-mode projections from the underlying author-paper bipartite network.
This n…