tobychev @tobychev@social.cleverlibre.org

Life or Debt: The Stranglehold of Neocolonialism and Africa’s Search for Alternatives

https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-63-african-debt-crisis/

Through their new programmes, the Structural Adjustment Facility (1986), and then the Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (1987), the IMF put a singular recipe on the table: privatise the economy, including the state sector; commodify areas of human life that had up to that…

"More journalists have reportedly been killed over a four week period than in any conflict in at least three decades. More United Nations aid workers have been killed than in any comparable period in the history of our organisation." https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2023/nov/06/israel-hamas-war-live-updates-jordan-airdrops-medical-supplies-gaza-blinken-turkey-push-contain-conflict?page=with:block-654920118f0832f412179e1c

As I read this account of how Turkish Cypriots made an inventory of the properties and belongings of the Greek Cypriots who had to flee back in 1974, I can't but think of present day #Karabakh. I am still unaware about relevant measures being taken or planned in the area https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.9783/9780812297133/html

Every new LLM start-up needs detailed discussions of water & energy use in their public facing documents, & all public sector discussion of these systems must require said.

I want everything we're doing to be interconnected efforts, because the problems also are. Demonstrate we've LEARNED something

The GOP has introduced a bill to EXPEL Palestinians from the United States. I cannot read such things without remembering what happened to my own family after Pearl Harbor. After we and 120,000 other Japanese Americans were incarcerated in prison camps for years, without charge or trial, my own mother was very nearly expelled to Japan because of racial prejudice and hatred. Only the brave actions of a civil rights attorney saved her from being sent away. #NeverAgain

🌌 The Royal #Astronomical Society announced that all journals will be #OpenAccess from 📆 January 2024. All articles from the very first volumes published in 📆 1827 to the latest articles, will be free to read in their entirety. https://ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/news/royal-astronomical-society-announces-all-journals-publish-open-access-2024

#Astronomy #RAS #MNRAS

Update on my
https://mastodon.social/@franco_vazza/111351476029307841
it has been peer-reviewed 😄 and some of the numbers I gave were based on outdated references and my wrong estimate of current uncertainties in photon diffusion in the Sun.
This means that the actual best escape time of photons from the Sun is on the lower limit of my quoted values (~180,000 years).

A more updated reference for this is https://arxiv.org/abs/1402.5482, suggested by @RauscherThomas 🙏

Tooting outside of own comfort zone is a good way to learn!

All right, I've just learned that it was my #Fediversary yesterday and I have a new paper out on arxiv today, so let's celebrate all that with an #astrodon 🧵 on magnetized accretion, and it's surprising connections with turbulence in ... pipes !

https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.00034

At a fascinating Santa Fe Institute meeting on Accelerating Science. Chiara Franzoni gave a fascinating talk about what it takes to fund high risk science, and it left me thinking.

When we evaluate grant proposals for an NSF or NIH panel, several panel members evaluate each proposal — and this sets up the classic sort of preference aggregation problem that is the bread and butter of public choice theory.

Yet we typically ignore the preference aggregation issue.

Physicist William Higinbotham was born OTD in 1910. During the Manhattan Project he was the Electronics Group leader at Los Alamos.

In 1958, while working at Brookhaven Lab, he invented one of the first video games: “Tennis for Two.” It ran on an oscilloscope.

Image: Brookhaven

@aliide @Loukas @kevinrothrock What’s missing from the discussion about corruption generally is that Ukrainian journalists were reporting on it for ages before the administration did anything – the detail about eggs is one that I remember from last year – but most people didn’t see that until the US reporters picked up in it, and as Ukraine’s EU bid progressed. It did and does matter to the people whose loved ones were getting crap winter gear.

Banks pumped more than $150bn in to companies running ‘carbon bomb’ projects in 2022
Exclusive: Projects that risk 1.5C heating target operated by companies receiving financing from European, Chinese and US banks https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/31/banks-pumped-more-than-150bn-in-to-companies-running-carbon-bomb-projects-in-2022

@kevinrothrock It's a good article, and it has already been extensively discussed in Ukraine. Ukrainska Pravda has a complete translation, NV.ua has a summary. Some of the sources have been questioned, however, especially when it comes to "commanders refusing direct presidential orders". People in the know especially question the assertion that there would have been an order to "retake Horlivka".

"Let's Do the Twist"
Fifty-five million light-years away, in the galaxy known as M87, lies a supermassive black hole. The radio image captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) provides direct confirmation that the black hole rotates.
A new study published in "Nature" has given us more rotational evidence, but also questions what exactly causes the black hole to precess.
Read more at: https://briankoberlein.com/blog/lets-do-the-twist/
#astrophysics #astronomy #science #cosmology #blackhole #nature #physics

Context for those arguments that Ukraine should have kept the Soviet nuclear weapons.
https://nucleardiner.wordpress.com/2023/10/30/revising-the-history-of-the-1990s/

10 of the 14 African leaders who have evaded term limits have come to power via military coup, civil conflict, or military support.

In other words, leaders who gained power through extraconstitutional means, subsequently tend to violate legal constraints on their time in power.

https://africacenter.org/spotlight/term-limit-evasions-coups-africa-same-coin/

https://nitter.cz/search?q=%23ImageOfTheDay
On 25 October,
https://nitter.cz/search?q=%23Mexico
🇲🇽 was severely affected by
https://nitter.cz/search?q=%23HurricaneOtis
⬇️
https://nitter.cz/CopernicusEMS
has mapped the damage in
https://nitter.cz/search?q=%23Acapulco
(
https://nitter.cz/search?q=%23EMSR703
), identifying more than 6,200 hectares of affected built-up🏚️
More at 🔗
http://emergency.copernicus.eu/EMSR703

🐦🔗: https://nitter.cz/CopernicusEU/status/1718911884345143679#m

[2023-10-30 08:45 UTC]