tobychev @tobychev@qoto.org

”Skolkoncernen Academedia har infört ett nytt prestationsprogram för sina chefer, som till 90 procent styrs av ekonomiska mål kring bland annat aktiekurs och vinstutveckling. Inget av målen tar upp den pedagogiska kvaliteten på själva verksamheten.” www.sverigesradio.se/artikel/acad...

Even better, *any* metric on the sphere that's flat except at finitely many cone points with positive angle deficits comes from some convex polyhedron! This is called Alexandrov's theorem.

So general relativity when space is a 2d sphere has a lot to do with polyhedra!

This is just the start: when you do *quantum* gravity in this context you get into lots more mindblowing math. At this stage I'm mainly just learning that math and trying to apply it to this problem. But it's a fun way to learn math. Quantum polyhedra! 👍

More later, I hope.

(4/n)

Global CO2 emissions have plateaued since 2013, leading to a slower growth in atmospheric CO2 than would have otherwise been the case. In a new analysis at The Climate Brink, I've taken look at what would have happened if emissions had continued to grow: https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/plateauing-co2-emissions-have-slowed

"District cooling is taking root in the tropical island-nation, where temperatures are rising twice as fast as the global average and sharpening the focus on climate adaptation. That the old technology uses less electricity than centralized air conditioners is a major advantage for a resource-starved country that has to import nearly all its energy."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-08/singapore-brings-back-19th-century-tech-to-beat-warming-climate

the cyberpunk present is weird as fuck: the latest Shai Hulud malware wave contains an LLM prompt to create biological weapons and nuclear weapons, with the purpose to trip LLM safety refusals so that LLM-based code scanning wont see the malware

https://socket.dev/blog/mini-shai-hulud-miasma-and-hades-worms-target-bioinformatics-and-mcp-developers-via-malicious

Another drone, presumably Ukrainian and geospoofed by Russia, wandered into Latvia, and this time was shot down.

Tio års forskning pekar åt samma håll: vinstdrivna skolor är sämre än kommunala. Skolsystemet ger starka incitament att prioritera vinst framför kvalitet. ”Aktörer som vill ha vinst vill inte ha dålig skola men de vill inte ha bra skola heller. De vill ha den typ av skola som ger dem vinst”.

Forskarnas tydliga besked: Vin...

https://cartoguophy.com/climate-visualized/

this kind of runs like arse on my phone which i don't really understand because it is a tiny amount of data BUT it is an exceptionally cool visualisation of climate and you should all go and check it out

i am going to forget it exists before i get nerd sniped into making it run better and fixing all my mapping pet hates (slow geocoding, transparency rather than CSS blending)

Kosovo’s Prime ‌Minister ⁠Albin ⁠Kurti wins a snap vote, but with no majority.

Kurti’s Vetevendosje ​party won the most votes in Sunday’s snap election, yet failed to secure enough votes to govern alone.

Sunday’s vote, the country’s third in just over a year, was marked by low turnout. The country’s prolonged political crisis has further debilitated an already ailing economy.

https://mediafaro.org/article/20260607-kosovos-prime-minister-albin-kurti-wins-a-snap-vote-but-with-no-majority?mf_channel=mastodon&action=forward

#Kosovo #Politics #Elections #AlbinKurti

The Vatican is set to build an agrivoltaic installation (on land outside the Vatican in Italy) as part of its efforts to achieve energy neutrality for Vatican City

The foundation will be called “Fratello Sole” (Brother Sun)
https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2026-06/chirograph-fratello-sole-foundation-agrivoltaic-vatican-radio.html

We're celebrating two birthdays with this image!⁠
⁠
The first is the ongoing birth of new stars within Gum 10 and Gum 11, the star-forming regions featured here.
⁠
The second is the birthday of the telescope that captured this image: the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), which had its first light 15 years ago today. Happy birthday, VST, and thank you for 15 years of stunning views of our Universe 🤩⁠

Read more: https://www.eso.org/public/images/potw2623a/

📷 ESO/VPHAS+

#astrodon #astronomy #astrophysics #space #science

This illusion was new to me. Does whichever dot you look at turn more purple?

Pretty neat how clearly this lets you see the reduced sensitivity to blue light in the very centre of your vision.

https://www.schulz-hildebrandt.com/9-purple-dots-illusion/

https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11582

An Asian man was travelling without a ticket, but the conductor stopped asking for his ID and enquired instead: "Have you eaten today?".

https://euobserver.com/220455/have-you-eaten-today-what-an-incident-on-an-italian-train-taught-me-about-eu-values/

Ukraine's and Russia's human rights commissioners met yesterday in Belarus (at the latest POW swap) and agreed to establish the direct exchange of civil documents (eg, pension records), family correspondence, and official paperwork for relatives of soldiers killed in the war. https://t.me/astrapress/114942

A Ukrainian naval drone drifted into NATO territory and detonated in the port of Constanța, Romania, after Russian electronic warfare disrupted its guidance, Ukraine's navy acknowledges. Romania's Defense Ministry reported no casualties or damage. https://t.me/ukrainian_navy/20766

"The authors report that the occurrence of extensive deforestation in tandem with climate change will cause the remaining rainforest to lose resilience at global-warming levels of or slightly higher than 1.5 °C — rather than 4 °C — above pre-industrial levels".

Wunderling, N., Sakschewski, B., Rockström, J. et al. "Deforestation-induced drying lowers Amazon climate threshold." (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10456-0

#droughts #deforestation #landGrab #landUse #landUseChange #forests #forest #carbon #carbonSinks #carbonSink #footprint #Brazil #beef #cattle #Amazon #Amazonia #climateChange

The UN General Assembly just voted 141-8 to endorse last year’s landmark International Court of Justice climate opinion, which says countries violate international law if they fail to protect people from climate harm. The resolution is non-binding, but it calls for stronger national climate plans, fossil fuel subsidy phaseouts and possible reparations. AP https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-vanuatu-trump-administration-international-court-90b89dc776e0bece17f2ab4064b7f71e
#ShareGoodNewsToo

after years of digging and research, i finally found the toolkit that was used to make MS multimedia software Encarta, Dinosaurs and Dangerous Creatures.

when i fell in love with these programs, i imagined they were built with a rich multimedia authoring environment/IDE like Macromedia Director. e.g. dragging and dropping images, sounds, text and video onto a stage, animating it with keyframes, and then scripting it for interaction.

the toolkit used was, as it turns out, a very roughly hewn collection of individual programs. there was no IDE. all of the content was written in RTF files, which were then compiled with links to external resources like wavs and avi's.

i cannot imagine what a nightmare this was for the MS Home teams to work with. there is no drag and drop of any kind, no object linking and embedding (OLÉ!), nor animation editor. this is a dog's breakfast of individual programs written by different people.

i'm frankly amazed that the MS Homes teams put together such well-designed programs *despite* how painful this toolkit is to use

the one thing i can say in its favour is that it has one badass tetricube logo for cover art :D

huge thank you to @david_rysk and @philpem for archiving this extremely obscure piece of software

https://archive.org/details/microsoft-multimedia-viewer-2.0-rips-20210921-1.7z

#multimedia #cdrom #retrocomputing #win31

Sweden’s right-wing and far-right coalition backs down on deportations of young adults.

The media coverage of several cases involving young people who grew up in Sweden and were forced to leave their families has shocked public opinion.

Facing pressure in the polls, the government is revising the rules.

https://mediafaro.org/article/20260602-swedens-right-wing-and-far-right-coalition-backs-down-on-deportations-of-young-adults?mf_channel=mastodon&action=forward

#Sweden #Politics #Deportations

Nu ska jag ta upp en EXTREMT viktig grej angående Socialdemokraternas snack om att "förbjuda vinster" i skolan. Det kommer inte att funka och börsnoterade koncernen Cedergrenska (såklart grundad av moderatkopplade skolor) skriver det själva rätt ut. *tråd* analystgroup.se/textintervju...

Intervju med Cedergrenskas arb...