← Feed

Posts

• Post #3872923

  And they all came in through our porous borders! "I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I said, “Is this a Dominion scoreboard?” This is why we need the SAVE Act. This right here! You are telling me that this little teeny country full of chocolates and surrealism and little statues urinating into fountains can beat the USA at football? No way. Has your head been replaced with a green apple? You don’t have to be Tintin the boy journaliste to know that that is not a pipe. Treachery, with...

• Post #3872922

  Stupefied Russian public rewarded for giving a pass to wilfully killing infants. A privilege, not a right, and the privilege was traded for killing. And less stupefication is available literally by moving some fingers. #ukraine #olympics https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/07/world/europe/russia-olympic-suspension-lifted.html?unlocked_article_code=1.wFA.pH7G.qh4THwh8K3Kw&smid=nytcore-android-share

• Post #3872921

  Ho-hum. Back in ~1998 I became a #linux convert as we realized that WindowsNT wasn't suitable for the requirements of our telemetry startup, it being quite impoverished in key ways. A colleague instructed me on how to load some bits and bobs into a 1.44MB floppy, boot, let it jabber away with an ftp server and conclude the conversation with a complete Debian distro running on the host, ready to fold itself around our exact demands. Impressive. It's taken Microsoft decades to...

• Post #3872920

  "NSF staff members — who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation — and an internal NSF ledger seen by Nature suggest that the NSF plans to claw back around US$500 million that has already been distributed to grant-making divisions. That money would be withdrawn from three of the NSF’s eight main areas, or directorates: engineering; computer and information science and engineering; and mathematical and physical science." [against the law, but who's enforcin...

• Post #3872919

  Interesting nugget: "The research also found that studies that appeared first as preprints are retracted at roughly half the rate of papers that did not appear online before being in a peer-reviewed journal." #preprint https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02167-3

• Post #3872918

  Tsunamis go all the way up: "On 29 July 2025, a massive Mw 8.8 earthquake struck off the Kamchatka Peninsula, generating a large tsunami. Using data from over 1,400 GPS stations in Japan and Taiwan, this study observed how these shockwaves disturbed the ionosphere. We identified three distinct waves traveling through the atmosphere. A breakthrough of this study is that we traced the first tsunami-induced atmospheric wave back to its source and found it was located within 90 km of the m...

• Post #3872917

  "From an estimated 7,974 sequoia deaths (95% Bayesian credible interval (CI): 7,555–8,430), corresponding to 30.2% mortality (CI: 28.6–31.9%), we find previous prescribed burns (≤10 years prior) reduced mortality odds by 77% (CI: 69–83%), making treated trees nearly four times more likely to survive. Counterfactual simulations suggest that prescribed burns prevented at least 1,888 (CI: 1,487–2,302) deaths, and universal treatment would have saved an additional 3,888 (CI: 3,236–4,580) gi...

• Post #3872916

  The difficult problem of marrying magical thinking with logic. Slippery polar opposites-- it's like trying to push together opposite magnetic poles. There's no stable outcome. "At its core, the logical problem of evil posits that the existence of God, as conceived in classical theism, is logically incompatible with the existence of evil." https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11787-026-00415-8

• Post #3872915

  Sinking further into kremlinology and all that, senior regime politicians in the US now no longer have a fatal heart attack but rather suffer from a "brief illness "

• Post #3872914

  "In several countries, animal welfare regulations ban fish keeping in spherical aquaria. A reason for this is the belief that fish behaviour is adversely affected in spherical aquaria, because the light refraction at the aquarium's wall severely disrupts the image of the aerial world, which may disturb the fish. Using analytical calculations and geometric optical ray-tracing, we determined the paths of light rays originating from various locations in water-filled spherical and c...

• Post #3872913

  Nicely comprehensive and concise summary of the state of the art. #batteries #SecondaryBatteries #EnergyModernization "https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02150-y

• Post #3551959

  Presumably quite a bit of the increased and doubtless lucrative refined bauxite shipments to Russia from peace loving Ireland will have just showered down on Kyiv. Maybe stop doing that? Too much to ask? #ukraine https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/02/russia-attacks-kyiv-missiles-drones-ukraine

• Post #2507519

  "US officials have said a nuclear detonation would render portions of low-Earth orbit useless for up to a year." Tragically and comically optimistic. Apparently this prediction only includes ionizing radiation problems, not the spectacular cloud of orbit-denying fragments that inevitably will propagate from thousands of "noncooperative" spacecraft with their trajectories shaped by the vagaries of gravity anomalies etc. #OrbitalDebris #OrbitalConflict @sundog...

• Post #1934052

  Demonstrating the useless nature of industrially scaled entrance exams. https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/chatgpt-passes-univ-of-tokyos-entrance-exams-with-top-scores/

• Post #1934051

  "Here we synthesize soil microbiome research through a function-centred framework based on recent studies across ecological, agricultural, and environmental systems. We identify four conserved functional axes, secondary metabolism, nutrient cycling, community interactions, and stress tolerance, that collectively govern ecosystem processes and environmental outcomes. Evidence indicates that these functions influence plant productivity, climate regulation, and pollutant transformation, al...

• Post #1934049

  Forewarned is forearmed, I guess. Anyway, here's formal analysis and quantification of what we've been hearing as anecdotes. "Artificial intelligence developers are increasingly building language models with warm and friendly personas that millions of people now use for advice, therapy and companionship1. Here we show how this can create a significant trade-off: optimizing language models for warmth can undermine their performance, especially when users express vulner...

• Post #1934048

  Getting ready for the next #CarringtonEvent. :-) "The May 2024 geomagnetic storm was the largest for over 20 years. The storm was categorized as a ‘low-level’ G5, where G5 is the highest on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scale for geomagnetic storms, yet the individual solar eruptive events were not particularly severe, and the observed impacts were relatively minor. The impacts that were observed were due to the combined and sustained effect of five success...

• Post #1934047

  "15 Years of Defending Science This year, the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund (CSLDF) turns 15. Since 2011, we have helped over 400 individuals defend against government and institutional censorship, fight industry-funded attacks, and stand up for scientific and climate progress. The numbers have grown year over year, and last year, we helped a record 72 individuals, with 2026 shaping up to be even busier. Meanwhile, we have steadily developed our library of free legal educational...

• Post #1934046

  "This study examines how institutional design enables or constrains efforts to reduce car dependence in Finland's capital region. The analysis draws on an extensive set of policy, strategy, and regulatory documents spanning national, regional, and municipal governance levels. Using institutional grammar and institutional network analysis, the study systematically codes institutional statements and maps their interactions across governance levels. It further examines developments...

• Post #1873613

  #byog Here it's climate.us doing what climate.gov used to do: inform the public about #ClimateChange. https://www.climate.us/news-and-features/despite-big-storms-us-winters-are-still-warming

• Post #1844118

  The #ai tariff we must all pay for Sam, Elon, Zuck and various other pathologically needy people we're supposed to soothe shows up everywhere. And it's not only money, but the time of our lives-- which comes in a limited supply. "Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland in College Park who co-founded the SocArXiv preprint server in 2016, says that moderation at SocArXiv operates in a similar way to desk rejections at journals, in which manuscripts are r...

• Post #1571924

  "The fan mussel Pinna nobilis, the largest bivalve endemic to the Mediterranean Sea, has experienced a near-total collapse since 2016 due to mass mortality events (MMEs) primarily caused by the protozoan parasite Haplosporidium pinnae. Now listed as Critically Endangered, the species is considered functionally extinct across most of its native range. However, recent surveys in the Thau Lagoon (southern France) revealed a large resilient population, with total abundance previously estima...