Leftovers

• Dr molly tov ☛ The small web is rehabilitating how I write

  Writing in HTML, rather than in a WYSIWYG editor, has been good for me too. There's something about having to incorporate all the tags and structure that structures my writing, too.

  I haven't written just because I want to since the previous century. Literally. I have not written like this since the 1990s.

  It's great.

• The New Leaf Journal ☛ Dunkin’ Donuts Are Not All The Same

  Despite this being a class and taking place in the computer lab, I was allowed to enjoy my coffee and donut in calculus. My coffee stayed warm in the eco-friendly expanded polystyrene foam cup so much so that it would still me warm when I reached second period if I did not finish it first. Now one may ask if it was difficult for me to enjoy my coffee and donut while taking notes. “Not at all!” I answer – I did not take notes in high school. All my teachers just accepted me as an anomaly. One time I was writing a list on my Dunkin’ Donuts napkin and the calculus teacher noted that it did not look like notes. I agreed. She then returned to the lecture. This was just the way things were. Speaking of notes, my calculus teacher also taught my physics class (which, similarly to calculus, was the less popular choice against what was perceived as an easier alternative). One class I was sitting next to a friend who would be chosen over me as valedictorian. Neither of us were taking notes. The teacher looked at him suspiciously and asked him where his notebook was. He said something to the effect of “oh right” and pulled it out and started taking notes. She did not say anything to me. Lest anyone question my method, I submit for the record that all my grades in calculus and physics were A. (Aside: Not transferable to college in those cases, but the joke is on them since I ended up being a philosophy major.)

• Austin White ☛ Long Trip It’s Been

  One of the band members recently asked me if I had any spare, and I did not. But one of the other members did in a frame. I borrowed it and photographed it digitally to recreate the poster. The unique thing was that the bulk of the poster was black, and the test was one color. This made it easy for me to create six-color variations in school. I wanted the digital version to be the same.

• Science

  • Futurism ☛ Something Mysterious Swept Over Our Entire Solar System, Scientists Say

    Comparing that data to estimates about our Solar System's trajectory, the Vienna researchers found that the Sun and the Radcliffe wave were near each other between 12 and 15 million years ago. Ultimately, the scientists estimated that we moved through the wave roughly 14 million years ago. On a geological and even evolutionary scale, that's incredibly recent; the dinosaurs are believed to have gone exstinct around 66 million years ago.

  • Groot Koerkamp ☛ Variants of min-hash sketches

  • Groot Koerkamp ☛ Types of tigs

  • Fabian Beuke ☛ Planet Nine

    Astronomers have long considered the possibility of additional, yet undiscovered planets in the solar system. The discovery of Neptune in 1846, based on mathematical predictions, demonstrated the potential for identifying new planets through indirect evidence. In recent years, some researchers have proposed the existence of a ninth planet, referred to as Planet 9, to explain certain orbital patterns observed in the outer solar system. This report outlines the development of the Planet 9 hypothesis, examining the key observations that have contributed to this idea and assessing the current state of the supporting evidence.

  • SusamPal ☛ Lemma for FTGT - Susam's Quick Notes

    The notation \( M^* \) denotes the group of all \( M \)-automorphisms of \( L \) with composition as the group operation. Note that Stewart writes \( \tau(M)^{*} = \tau M^* \tau^{-1} \) while stating the lemma but I have reversed the LHS and RHS to maintain consistency with the equations that appear in the discussion below.

    To build intuition for this lemma, I'll first present an illustration, followed by a proof. The discussion below assumes familiarity with field extensions and field automorphisms, as several notations and results from these areas will be used implicitly without detailed justification. This post is meant to serve as a set of notes on the lemma, not a comprehensive tutorial.

  • India Times ☛ Intuitive Machines stock plummets after second sideways moon landing

    The six-legged lander touched down at a site about 100 miles (160 km) from the moon's south pole, but Intuitive Machines ended the mission as the spacecraft wound up on its side after completing several mission milestones. "With the direction of the sun, the orientation of the solar panels, and extreme cold temperatures in the crater, Intuitive Machines does not expect Athena to recharge," the company said.

• Career/Education

  • CER ☛ My Favorite ICER 2024 Paper: How Media Artists Teach Computing

    One of their observations is that media artists teach as part of their practice. They’re always learning new tools and practices, and also always sharing them. Let’s contrast this with software engineering. How many professional software developers also teach software development? How many consider it integral to their practice? Or swap the question — how many CS1 instructors are also professional software engineers?

  • [Old] ACM ☛ Perpetual Teaching Across Temporary Places: Conditions, Motivations, and Practices of Media Artists Teaching Computing Workshops | Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 1

    Why and how do new media artists teach computing? Over the past decade, computing has become a part of the standard curriculum in university art and design departments, along with the advent of influential informal learning communities and self-organized schools. This paper is the first systematic attempt to map the diverse conditions, motivations, and practices of new media artists teaching computing. Interviews with 18 new media artists from 5 countries and 17 different sites revealed that teaching computing is closely integrated with their art practice, with a shared aim to cultivate new cultures in computing rather than only to transfer knowledge. We gathered new media artists’ accounts of precarious work, lack of time and place for their practices, and unrealistic expectations for instant results they face in their teaching. Within these precarious conditions, they developed a unique set of practices for “perpetual teaching,” which promotes self-reflective, critical, and situated learning. Our findings from this study are a call for further investigation of educators’ roles in creating cultures in computing, especially incorporating practices outside of conventional computing education settings.

  • Michigan News ☛ ‘I’m afraid to lose my job': Trump cuts disturbing University of Michigan leaders, faculty

    One concern for the Ann Arbor university involves funding cuts from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is the primary source of federal funding for medical research in the United States.

    As one of the nation’s top leading research universities, university officials are worried.

  • Seth Godin ☛ The tactics trap | Seth's Blog

    The problem is simple. You don’t have a tactics problem. You have a strategy problem.

    Borrowing tactics from someone with a useful strategy isn’t going to help because it’s their strategy that’s better, not their tactics.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Rolling Stone ☛ The Life of Luigi Mangione, United Healthcare CEO Shooting Suspect

    The bullet casings had the words “delay,” “deny,” and “depose” written on them, echoing a common phrase used by critics of the insurance industry to describe its claims-handling practices. This wasn’t a random victim — the bullets seemed to indicate that Thompson was targeted because of his work. And as a nationwide manhunt began, the conversation was not about murder in plain sight or vigilantism, but Americans’ frustrations with their health care. People spoke out about how only the wealthy in America can access proper care, about family members who’d gone through grueling medical procedures only to be buried in debt, about loved ones who’d died of cancer and other fatal diseases after their insurance denied coverage for treatment.

  • Science Alert ☛ Daylight Saving Disrupts Millions of Americans. There's a Better Way.

    While these specific disasters were not caused by daylight saving time, they are conclusively linked to fatigue, based on postaccident investigations and reports. They underscore the well-documented dangers of sleep deprivation and fatigue-related errors.

    Yet a vast body of research shows that every year, the shift to daylight saving time needlessly exacerbates these risks, disrupting millions of Americans' sleep and increasing the likelihood of accidents, health issues and fatal errors.

  • CBC ☛ Chasing daylight

    As most Canadians steel themselves to lose an hour of sleep this weekend and face the inevitable grogginess that follows, CBC News has created two tools that show how eliminating time changes would play out in more than 550 locations across the country.

• Proprietary

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)

    • LRT ☛ AI, bullying, and pornography: new technologies raise concern over child welfare

      There are other AI-linked threats for children, says Renata Gaudinskaitė, founder of the Centre for Digital Ethics. AI makes it easy to generate fake videos, automate bullying and collect children’s personal data.

    • Futurism ☛ Weird New Computer Runs AI on Captive Human Brain Cells

      The CL1, however, is a fundamentally different approach, as New Atlas reports. It makes use of hundreds of thousands of tiny neurons, roughly the size of an ant brain each, which are cultivated inside a "nutrient rich solution" and spread out across a silicon chip, according to the company's website.

      Through a combination of "hard silicon and soft tissue," the company claims that owners can "deploy code directly to the real neurons" to "solve today's most difficult challenges."

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Scientific peer review by AI — with its own cryptocurrency! As promoted in Nature

      YesNoError says it’s scanned 37,000 papers in two months! An undisclosed percentage maybe had problems? Though humans haven’t checked them yet.

      Unfortunately, YesNoError doesn’t work. Nick Brown at Linnaeus University found that YesNoError had 14 false positives out of 40 papers checked. Brown warns that YesNoError will “generate huge amounts of work for no obvious benefit. It strikes me as extraordinarily naïve.”

    • The Atlantic ☛ Chatbots are academically dishonest

      The problem with these benchmarks, however, is that the chatbots seem to be cheating on them. Over the past two years, a number of studies have suggested that leading AI models from OpenAI, Google, Meta, and other companies “have been trained on the text of popular benchmark tests, tainting the legitimacy of their scores,” Alex Reisner wrote this week. “Think of it like a human student who steals and memorizes a math test, fooling his teacher into thinking he’s learned how to do long division.” This may not be tech companies’ intent—many of these benchmarks, or the questions on them, simply exist on the internet and thus get hoovered into AI models’ training data. (Of the labs Reisner mentioned, only Google DeepMind responded to a request for comment, telling him it takes the issue seriously.) Intentional or not, though, the unreliability of these benchmarks makes separating fact from marketing even more challenging.

    • Futurism ☛ Elon’s Grok Chatbot Calculates Probability That Trump Is a Russian Asset

      Notably, this output comes after an unnamed employee at xAI, the company that hosts Grok, seemingly directed the chatbot to, as it told someone who demanded it show its instructions, "ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation."

    • Matt Wedel ☛ If you believe in “Artificial Intelligence”, take five minutes to ask it about stuff you know well

      Because LLMs get catastrophically wrong answers on topics I know well, I do not trust them at all on topics I don’t already know. And if you do trust them, I urge you to spend five minutes asking your favourite one about something you know in detail.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Distro Watch ☛ DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.

      [...] Finally, we touch upon a topic which has been debated back and forth over the past two weeks: Mozilla's new policies and documentation concerning ownership of data and the potential sale of data. Some Firefox users are considering alternatives to Mozilla's web browser and we'd like to hear which one is your favourite browser. To all of our readers, we wish you a terrific week and happy reading!

    • [Old] National Law Review US ☛ Federal Judge Allows CIPA Lawsuit Against CNN to Move Forward

      Well folks, it looks like CNN is about to get a course in the ABC’s of CIPA! If you’ve ever wondered what happens behind the scenes when you visit a news website, a recent court case might make you think twice before clicking on your next headline. A federal judge in New York just rejected CNN’s Motion to Dismiss a class action lawsuit, putting the media giant on the defensive in what’s shaping up to be a significant showdown over digital privacy rights. CNN might be in the business of breaking news, but now they’re possibly breaking privacy laws too—allegedly, of course. It sounds like they need Troutman Amin on the speed dial. The case can potentially expose how the invisible machinery of web tracking operates—and whether it violates California privacy law.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Privacy concerns rise as states demand ID for everyday purchases

      "California Uber Alles" warned us about creeping authoritarianism in the Golden State. Now, nearly 45 years after Dead Kennedys' dystopian vision, California leads the newmtotalitarian charge: demanding citizens prove their identity just to buy face cream containing Vitamin A or alpha hydroxy acids.

• Defence/Aggression

  • El País ☛ Bonnie Honig, philosopher: ‘Let’s pretend Trump doesn’t exist and go about our business’

    The Canadian theorist and feminist defends the role of dissent in democracy. To deal with the U.S. president, she suggests that we stop saying his name

  • LRT ☛ What would it cost Europe to defend itself without US help?

    For decades, European NATO members have relied on the United States, the alliance's largest and strongest economic power, to shoulder the main burden of the continent's defense. Now, leaders in Europe are considering how to respond to the likely collapse of NATO if Trump withdraws US support.

  • VOA News ☛ China far outpacing US in military, commercial ship numbers

    The anemic state of American shipbuilding and ship maintenance, and the risks they raise for the military, was shared with VOA through more than a dozen interviews with U.S. military and industry officials spanning several months and conducted ahead of Trump's announcement.

  • Task And Purpose ☛ Space Force’s secretive space plane lands after 434 days in orbit

    The X-37B space plane touched down at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California after 434 days in space. Space Force is in general quite secretive about the spacecraft and its missions, often only giving the briefest description of what the goal is or what experiments are onboard. This flight for the X-37B was unique for several reasons. This mission utilized a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket to go a farther distance into pace and put itself in a “highly elliptical” orbit. In October, the spacecraft carried out new and innovative aerobreaking maneuvers, as a way to preserve its fuel. Using the drag of the Earth’s atmosphere, encountered during the closer arc of that elliptical orbit, it adjusted course and its speed without having to utilize onboard fuel. Given the uncrewed craft’s tendency for missions longer than a year, fuel conservation is an important aspect. Gen. Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations, described the successful move as helping to push “the bounds of novel space operations in a safe and responsible manner.”

  • VOA News ☛ China falsely frames elections in Tajikistan as democratic, inclusive

    Freedom House, a prominent human rights watchdog, ranks the Tajik government as one of the most authoritarian regimes in the world.

    Rahmon's son, Rustam Emomali, chairs the upper house of parliament, and analysts predict that this sets the stage for a dynastic succession, further entrenching the regime's power.

    The Norwegian Helsinki Committee, based in Oslo, describes Tajikistan’s parliament as a "rubber-stamp body," devoid of any real legislative authority.

  • RFA ☛ Chinese warships under close watch near Australian waters

    Richard Marles, who is also a deputy prime minister, said in an interview on Thursday that three Anzac-class frigates - HMAS Stuart, HMAS Warramunga and HMAS Toowoomba were monitoring the Chinese warships that were about 500 kilometers (310 miles) northwest of Perth.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Phone bans sweep US schools despite skepticism

    "The majority of kids who have phones don't love it," he said. "However, if you dig deeper with them in the conversation, they will acknowledge that it's helped them remain focused."

    Mough said the phone ban has reduced classroom distractions, cyberbullying and instances of students meeting up to skip lessons.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Epstein Files: Biggest Questions Remaining About Sex Trafficker

    The move backfired completely. What Bondi had teased on Fox News and then released was mostly pages of Epstein’s contacts list and flight logs from private jets he used, both of which have been public for years (and in less redacted form). Conspiracy theorists eager to see the so-called “Epstein client list,” of which there has never been any evidence, called the disclosure a farce and renewed their usual claims of an ongoing coverup. Bondi alleged that FBI agents in the New York field office had withheld more documents, and demanded them in a letter to bureau director Kash Patel.

  • [Old] The Guardian UK ☛ ‘The perfect target’: Russia cultivated Trump as asset for 40 years – ex-KGB spy

    Now 67, Shvets is a key source for American Kompromat, a new book by journalist Craig Unger, whose previous works include House of Trump, House of Putin. The book also explores the former president’s relationship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

  • [Old] Forbes ☛ Trump Kompromat Claimed: Kremlin Documents Reportedly Show Putin Conspiring For Billionaire

    According to the Guardian, the leaked papers claim Putin met with his spy chiefs and senior ministers in January 2016, where they decided to back a “mentally unstable” Donald Trump.

  • India Times ☛ Ukrainian journalist reveals why Zelenskyy doesn't wear a suit: 'His White House outfit was not a casual wear'

    The most important part of Zelenskyy's outfit that day was the Ukrainian trident which is one of the key national symbols. Ukrainian designer Elvira Gasanova earlier said the trident set him apart as he's a wartime leader who does not need suits. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Zelenskyy has not deviated from his olive and black T-shirts, sweatshirts that he teas with cargo trousers.

• Environment

  • Hindustan Times ☛ Scientists say Donald Trump job cuts threaten climate research, public safety

    Last week, he was among hundreds abruptly fired in a sweeping government purge which, critics warn, will delay hurricane forecasts, cripple climate research and disrupt vital fisheries.

  • VOA News ☛ Greenland and Afghanistan: Frontiers in race for critical minerals

    Where mineral resources are located and extracted has often played a major role in geopolitical and economic relations. Today, the world’s attention is turning to two places believed to be rich in untapped reserves — but accessing each of them comes with unique challenges.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Futurism ☛ Someone Stole the Wheels From All the Teslas in This Parking Lot

      While opinions will differ on the ethics of property destruction and theft, the move to lump "vandalism" in with "violence," and "protest" with "terror" is no accident. In the not-too-distant past, these tactics have been used to repress all kinds of progressive action, from workers movements to student marches to antiwar protests.

      As the global movement against Musk heats up, the onus should fall on those in power not to conflate terrorism with theft — even if their cars end up on cinderblocks.

    • GO Media ☛ Thieves Make Off With 44 Wheels From Unsold Tesla Storage Lot

      Stealing 44 wheels takes a lot of planning, forethought, and effort. How many trucks worth of wheels and tires did they have to haul away from the scene? More than anything, I'm just kind of impressed.

    • The Atlantic ☛ The FAA’s Troubles Are More Serious Than You Know

      The offer of early retirement and the dismissal of probationary employees are the two main ways the FAA is trimming its workforce. Both are blunt instruments that threaten to sacrifice key talent, current and former officials told me.

      All told, at least 124 engineers, 51 IT specialists, and 26 program managers signed up for early retirement. The vice president for mission-support services, who started as an air-traffic controller in the 1990s, expressed interest in leaving. So did the agency’s acting vice president for air-traffic services.

    • Heliomass ☛ Montreal's Eastern Tramway Proposal

      In terms of the proposal there’s not a lot to go on, save an artist’s impression of a tramway running down the central reservation of a highway, similar to how the REM is set up in Brossard.

      But we do get a map at least, and here we see the inspiration has been drawn from previous transit plans to serve Montreal’s East End and the Eastern off-island suburbs.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-03-07 [Older] Potassium Mining Project in Brazil’s Amazon Rainforest Divides Indigenous Tribe

    • Omicron Limited ☛ First national analysis finds America's butterflies are disappearing at 'catastrophic' rate

      A team of scientists combined 76,957 surveys from 35 monitoring programs and blended them for an apples-to-apples comparison and ended up counting 12.6 million butterflies over the decades. Last month an annual survey that looked just at monarch butterflies, which federal officials plan to put on the threatened species list, counted a nearly all-time low of fewer than 10,000, down from 1.2 million in 1997.

      Many of the species in decline fell by 40% or more.

  • Overpopulation

    • The Local SE ☛ EU sees record drop in births, data shows

      The fertility rate across the EU's 27 countries stood at 1.38 live births per woman, down from 1.46 in 2022 and well below the "replacement level" of 2.1, at which a population is stable.

• Finance

  • International Business Times ☛ 2025-03-07 [Older] After Target, Amazon, Whole Foods, Twitch, and Ring Face Boycotts Starting Friday – Here's Why

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Vietnamese Magazine ☛ EU Criticizes Vietnam’s Crackdown on Activists in UN Rights Council Address

    Ambassador Lotte Knudsen, head of the EU delegation to the UN, emphasized that such arrests have a "chilling effect" on freedoms of expression, assembly, and association. She urged Vietnam to release all individuals imprisoned for peacefully expressing their views and to ensure that civil society can participate freely in all aspects of development without harassment or intimidation. ​

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ "Send. More. Cops."

  • Jasper Tandy ☛ I got told off for taking this picture

  • RFA ☛ EU ‘deeply concerned’ about arrests, rights abuses in Vietnam

    “We remain deeply concerned over the arrests of human rights defenders as well as labour rights, climate and environmental experts in Vietnam, which has a chilling effect on freedom of expression, assembly and association,” said Ambassador Lotte Knudsen, the head of the European Union delegation to the U.N.

  • The Washington Post ☛ Meta, Mark Zuckerberg considered censorship for China, whistleblower says

    Meta, then called Facebook, developed a censorship system for China in 2015 and planned to install a “chief editor” who would decide what content to remove and could shut down the entire site during times of “social unrest,” according to a copy of the 78-page complaint exclusively seen by The Washington Post.

    Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg also agreed to crack down on the account of a high-profile Chinese dissident living in the United States following pressure from a high-ranking Chinese official the company hoped would help them enter China, according to the complaint, which was filed in April to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Cyclists hit by car while giving out immigration rights cards in Boyle Heights

    “This block was not well lit, but we all had lights on and were riding in the right lane and we are legally allowed to ride and take the full lane,” Resendiz said. “I was the only one trying to stop the vehicle and had thrown my bike under it and she had run it over, and that gave us enough time for the folks in the back to grab the plates.”

  • VOA News ☛ Women's rights advocates warn UN to confront backlash against progress

    "Equality is not to be feared, but instead to be embraced," she said. "Because an equal world is a better world."

    Women in all parts of the world are facing challenges to their reproductive rights, personal safety, education, equal pay and political participation.

  • VOA News ☛ UN urges Taliban to end restrictions on girls on International Women’s Day

    In addition to banning girls from secondary and university education, the Taliban have barred them from working with government and nongovernment organizations, traveling long distances without a close male relative, and going to parks, public baths and salons.

    The U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, in a statement issued on March 8, condemned the “progressive erasure of women and girls from public life” and called on the Taliban to lift restrictions on Afghan women.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Unmitigated Risk ☛ TPMs, TEEs, and Everything In Between: What You Actually Need to Know

    A TPM is not the same as a TEE. Intel SGX is not identical to AMD SEV. And no, slapping “FIPS-certified” on your product doesn’t automatically make it secure.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• IP Kat ☛ 2025-03-07 [Older] C-575/23: statutory assignment of rights without prior consent is against EU law

• India Times ☛ US drops bid to make Google sell AI investments in antitrust case

  The U.S. Department of Justice on Friday dropped a proposal to force Alphabet's Google to sell its investments in artificial intelligence companies, including OpenAI competitor Anthropic, to boost competition in online search.

  The DOJ and a coalition of 38 state attorneys general still seek a court order requiring Google to sell its Chrome browser and take other measures aimed at addressing what a judge said was Google's illegal search monopoly, according to court papers filed in Washington.

• Patents

  • Kangaroo Courts

    • IP Kat ☛ 2025-03-04 [Older] To infinity and beyond! The sufficiency requirements for open-ended ranges (T 1977/22)

• Trademarks

  • IP Kat ☛ 2025-03-03 [Older] 'MAGIC PUSSY'? Not contrary to “accepted principles of morality”, says EUIPO BoA [Ed: EUIPO's kangaroo court]

  • IP Kat ☛ 2025-03-06 [Older] [Guest post] “Quevedo Port” for olive oil does not infringe PDO “Porto/Port”, rules EU General Court