tobychev @tobychev@qoto.org

A new report from Human Rights Watch recalls that the first Trump administration's family separation policy met the definitions of "enforced disappearance" and "torture."

https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/12/16/we-need-take-away-children/zero-accountability-six-years-after-zero-tolerance

Code inheritance, the traditional way

Another extremely eyebrow raising pardon is a woman who had 5 years of house arrest left on her sentence for committing the largest local government embezzlement in US history, over $53M stolen.

You'd think being the person known for stealing the most ever from a small government shouldn't get special treatment. There's certainly more deserving individuals for sure.

https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/president-biden-commutes-sentence-dixon-comptroller-rita-crundwell/

I was going to write a singular positive post about Biden taking a break from protecting war criminals for a day to finally getting around to pardoning average people. And for sure he totally did the typical pardon of several "non violent drug offenders" which is great. But also, oh god he pardoned some real monsters who earned every minute of their sentence and then some.

At least one of the kids the Conahan jailed committed suicide as a result.

https://www.citizensvoice.com/2024/12/12/biden-commutes-sentence-for-kids-for-cash-judge/

#Biden #JudgeConahan

Wer transportiert eigentlich Donald Trumps Klimaleugner-Ideen nach Deutschland? Wie fließen die Gelder und bei welchen Parteien landet beides? Achtung: Die Antwort ist wenig überraschend! (by @correctiv_org)

So a crazy thing happened. In a crime thriller film called Les chambres rouges (Red Rooms, 2023) there is a scene where the hacker protagonist is attempting to purchase a snuff film in online auction. The auction happens via IRC or IRC-like chatting environment and to my surprise there's actually me @rolle and my wife @mustikkasoppa who are one of the bidders.

1) The nickname of my wife is mistakenly written as "mustikasoppa" (with one k) but if I recall correctly she has used a mistakenly written nickname in the past
2) We are both operators and on the same IRC channel as we've been for the past 17 years

This is not a coincidence. One nickname can be made up by accident but not two with these features and definitely not in a French movie. My wife's nick "mustikkasoppa" is Finnish and means "blueberry soup".

Our IRC logs are more or less public because of open source and statistics so I presume the scene has been made with chatgpt which has scraped our nicks from the Internet so that they ended up in the movie. We still chat via IRC every day together.

The era of AI... Do your background check, folks. I'm glad this wasn't a dramatized documentary film but a complete fiction. However my wife and I are real. Mixed feelings.

#OpenAI #Privacy #Movies #IRC #GenerativeAI #ChatGPT

It turns out that one of the enablers of COVID was actually our increased carbon footprint.

https://www.bristol.ac.uk/cabot/news/2024/virus.html

#covid #covid19 #CarbonFootprint #CO2 #climate #ClimateChange

Droughts in Brazil and Vietnam Are Driving up Global Coffee Prices.

Climate change is projected to drastically reduce suitable coffee-growing regions by 2050. #ClimateChange

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/03122024/todays-climate-droughts-coffee-prices/

Non violent climate activist Gaie Delap, aged 77, is facing imprisonment in the UK again due to home tagging wristbands not being made small enough for her, and an ankleband not being safe due to her health.

In other news #StormDarragh has smashed the UK, killing two and leaving 200,000 without power.

Make this make sense.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/dec/07/just-stop-oil-activist-gaie-delap-facing-jail-recall-as-wrists-too-small-for-electronic-tag?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Street Complete v60 was just released, with 3 new quests and a lot of work behind the scenes and fixes!

@mcc My "favorite" version of this was spending a good half a day wondering why "x" wasn't being printed only to realize the Android phone I was holding was just plugged into a charging brick and the one I had actually been deploying to all day was tucked under my desk.

The third #Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite was launched on a #VegaC rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. #Sentinel1C extends the legacy of its predecessors, delivering high-resolution radar imagery to monitor Earth’s changing environment, supporting a diverse range of applications and advancing scientific research: https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Sentinel-1/Double_win_for_Europe_Sentinel-1C_and_Vega-C_take_to_the_skies - additionally, Sentinel-1C introduces new capabilities for detecting and monitoring maritime traffic.

Mary Wareham, the deputy director of the crisis, conflict, and arms division at HRW, explains how the Biden Admin misrepresents the mines it’s sending to Kyiv and how the decision to aid Ukraine in violating its 1997 Mine Ban Treaty obligations is already unraveling disarmament elsewhere. https://meduza.io/en/feature/2024/12/02/pulling-at-the-fine-fabric-of-international-humanitarian-law

Last week, an agreement holding together seven decades of Russian-European scientific collaboration expired due to a mix of sanctions over the Ukraine invasion and Putin’s personal science whisperer (another damned Kovalchuk), who thinks Russia is better off on its own. https://meduza.io/en/feature/2024/12/03/concerning-cern

Here's a copy of the Hardy's Rouse Ball lecture in 1928:

http://wwwprof.uniandes.edu.co/~amartin/cursos/filomat/bibliografia/Hardy.pdf

and here is an extended quote that I think is interesting. The first continues a metaphor of mathematician as an observer of a mountain range who has discovered a distant peak.

"If [the mathematician] wishes someone else to see it, he [sic] *points to it*, either directly or through the chain of summits which led him to recognise it himself. When his pupil also sees it, the research, the argument, the *proof* is finished.

The analogy is a rough one, but I am sure that it is not altogether misleading. If we were to push it to its extreme we should be led to a rather paradoxical conclusion; that there is, strictly, no such thing as mathematical proof; that we can, in the last analysis, do nothing but *point*; that proofs are what Littlewood and I call *gas*, rhetorical flourishes designed to affect psychology, pictures on the board in the lecture, devices to stimulate the imagination of pupils. This is plainly not the whole truth, but there is a good deal in it. The image gives us a genuine approximation to the processes of mathematical pedagogy on the one hand and of mathematical discovery on the other; it is only the very unsophisticated outsider who imagines that mathematicians make discoveries by turning the handle of some miraculous machine."

Worth thinking of, in this age when mechanised proof is becoming more and more common.

Can a group of set theory fans contain themselves?

#30daymapchallenge Day 26 (Projections): New Zealand - a victim of projections. World maps have a bad habit of dropping New Zealand. If putting it through the alternative distortion is preferrable remains an open question.

This is what a rocket launch looks like from space.

Say “McDonald’s” to end commercial is from a very real patent, btw...