tobychev @tobychev@social.cleverlibre.org

@cstross @nyrath This season, the same people are really nervous watching "Napoleon" that he will be killed in battle.

As an educator, it’s my job to do my best to make sure that every student is seen, valued, and safe in school •so that it is possible• for them to be challenged, both intellectually, socially, and emotionally.

Flatten that out into that one word, and it’s my job to “make students comfortable so it it possible to be uncomfortable.” And that’s catchy — but it’s nonsense, because we’re not talking about a single dimension here!

6/

At the top of this page, you see the totals for the company that were on the top 100 table. Below that are a number of links to other information you can find out about the company, such as: a list of all of the company's monetary penalties over $5,000 under all U.S. laws since 2000, a list of the company's subsidies, information on the company as a supplier of fossil fuels rather than as a direct emitter of greenhouse gasses, and information on the company as a toxic air polluter and toxic water polluter. This project is able to link back and forth to all of those other sources of information with the same company definition because I work on all of those other projects.

Below that is the main part of the information: the facility display showing everything in the GHG emissions database that Southern Company owns. In particular, you can now see that that 25% of company emissions comes from the James H Miller Jr plant in Quinton, Alabama. The link on the city name takes you to a mapquest map of the area around the facility, the link on the name is supposed to take you to whatever information EPA has on the facility but it doesn't because EPA evidently changed its link style and I have to fix it. 2/n

PSA for visual artists:

Nightshade is out!
https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/

Nightshade is an ML-poisoning algorithm that causes models trained with treated images to malfunction. Use in conjunction with Glaze to protect your work and give a big "fuck you" to the capitalists stealing your shit for their own profit.

#mastoart

Big news in bug math. This is the first year since 1803 when both 13-year cicadas and 17-year cicadas will emerge from the ground simultaneously in the US!

13 and 17 are both prime. It's believed cicadas evolved to have prime-number life cycles to avoid predators that emerge more frequently, like once every 4 years or 5 years or... whatever. By showing up infrequently, with a prime number life cycle, they can starve out those predators.

And since 13 and 17 are both prime and 13 × 17 = 221, both kinds of cicadas emerge simultaneously only once every 221 years. And

1803 + 221 = 2024

so now they'll both emerge simultaneously and we'll have 𝑙𝑜𝑡𝑠 of cicadas!

Also, this year the two kinds can interbreed!

The last time the Northern Illinois Brood’s 17-year cycle aligned with the Great Southern Brood’s 13-year cycle, Thomas Jefferson was president.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/19/science/cicadas-emergence-broods.html

Samma dag som en skollobbyist tar klivet från SVT till politiken meddelas det att ÖB blivit entreprenör.

Det är hög tid att göra upp med lobby-Sverige, skriver Leonidas Aretakis.

https://www.flamman.se/ob-raggar-kunder-med-baskern-pa/

X Community Notes now means that opinion/analytical criticism can’t be tweeted without a stamp of disapproval from the EU, the Council of Europe, and Chatham House.

JAXA's Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) is getting ready for landing on the lunar surface tomorrow Friday Jan 19 at 15:20 UTC.

The spacecraft, nicknamed the “Moon Sniper,” will demonstrate precision landing in a target area less than 100m in diameter, using real-time image recognition technology.

The spacecraft will land on a sloping surface near the crater Shioli.

SLIM carries a number of science instruments and will also deploy 2 rovers.

1/n

As of yesterday? Trogdor, the Burninator, is old enough to buy alcohol in the united states.

The next paper examined with simulations how competitive expectation-based updating is relative to a simple, fixed trust strategy with respect to accuracy vis a vis a single source. The surprising answer to that is “not very”: accuracy gains are minimal and come at the cost of order effects. This counterintuitive result makes sense with the benefit of hindsight (see paper)

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/tops.12374

5/9

More info on #ConnectAround from @volexity

https://www.volexity.com/blog/2024/01/10/active-exploitation-of-two-zero-day-vulnerabilities-in-ivanti-connect-secure-vpn/

- Exploitation dates to at least late 2023
- Chinese nation state actor

Loads of info in the blog.

Mandela left Ethiopia safely, but had only returned to South Africa incognito for a few months, when he was detained. He would stay behind bars for 27 years.

US diplomat and CIA spy Donald Rickard revealed just prior to his death in 2016, that the CIA had tracked Mandela's movements and passed them on to the Apartheid regime which arrested him. He said they did so because they feared he would facilitate the spread of communist ideology across Africa.

And that is that.

"To understand this extraordinary spasm of violence as an act of national self-defense, you’d have to accept that Israel’s only chance for safety depends upon #Gaza being crushed and emptied of virtually all Palestinians." https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/12/opinion/israel-icj-genocide-south-africa.html

It's not possible to understand the actions of a government, or maybe anything in the human world, via a priori theory. The only way to understand is via facts and constantly tested interpretive models.

E.g. it's a commonplace that "homeless encampment sweeps make no sense." In this context making no sense means contradicting a theory. Maybe "municipalities intend to end homelessness" or "the purpose of government is to meet people's needs". An attractive way to reconcile the contradictions is assuming that governments are dumb or incompetent.

It's necessary to assume that facts make sense. If they keep on doing something that seems senseless it's the theory that has to go, otherwise it's impossible to understand what's really going on. They don't want to end homelessness. They're not in the needs-meeting business, at least not the needs of the unhoused, and they're made up of people and people aren't dumb or incompetent.

What they're really doing is a much more complex and difficult problem. I don't have all the answers and they're not necessarily easy to explain, but attaining a deep instinctual acceptance of the principle that theories never trump facts, that actual facts always make sense, is the first step towards understanding.

ℹ️ Update: It has now been 24 hours since the #Gaza Strip fell largely offline, in the ninth major telecoms outage since the start of the war; metrics indicate that the situation is ongoing, leaving most residents cut off from the rest of the world 📉

"who knew poop shaming was even a thing?"

https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/194trv8/who_knew_poop_shaming_was_even_a_thing/

#DisciplinaryTechnology #Bossware #SIgns #Poop

Starship Enterprise implies the existence of Starship Free, Starship Personal, Starship Cloud (Most Popular), Starship Cloud Pro, Starship Cloud Pro PLUS, and Starship On Premises (Contact for pricing).

Kenya's UBI trial data is in.
people dont stop working when they have a UBI.
lump sum UBI had the greatest economic benefit, creating a lot more entrepreneurs.

we have conclusively verified humans can be trusted to make excellent financial decisions.

now it is time to fix economic policies to connect people with money directly, not manage it for them out of mistrust.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3x329k32DXVjasx1zSqApH?si=RslQjGSeRYK0osae88yJig

An astronomer team has observed some of the youngest planetary disks ever seen. Designated as Class 0 and Class 1, these are planetary systems younger than 300,000 years old. Even at this early stage of star formation, the protesters are surrounded by disks with rings and spiral structures that indicate where new planets could be forming. It was previously believed that planets couldn't form before the first million years, but there they are.

https://public.nrao.edu/news/early-evolution-of-planetary-disk-structures-seen-for-the-first-time/

The IPCC should hire the BBC’s graphics team for AR7.