Paul Sutton @zleap@qoto.org

Russell Wilson Not Expected to Play in Steelers Season Opener vs Falcons: Report https://www.newsweek.com/sports/nfl/russell-wilson-not-expected-play-steelers-season-opener-vs-falcons-report-1950282?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

Person in Missouri caught H5 bird flu without animal contact https://arstechnica.com/?p=2048150 #science

Data center water consumption is spiraling out of control

Energy usage might be front of mind amid the AI era, but surging data center water consumption is raising serious concerns among industry stakeholders.

Don't worry about data center water use, they said. It's nothing.

Don't worry about data center energy use, they said. It's nothing.

https://www.itpro.com/infrastructure/data-centres/data-center-water-consumption-is-spiraling-out-of-control

#Jenin, West Bank

A dog stands on a street that was torn up by bulldozers during an Israeli raid in the centre of Jenin in the occupied West Bank.

Photograph: Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP/Getty

@palestine
#WestBank

[1/2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/aug/29/peter-hendy-ex-network-rail-chair-threatened-firm-engineer-euston-criticism
https://stallman.org/archives/2023-nov-feb.html#21_January_2024_(Boeing_defects)

The UK's railroad minister, in his previous job, threatened to deny contracts arbitrarily to an engineering company unless it bullied a worker into ceasing to raise safety concerns. In response, the company fired him. I am not competent to judge the validity of those …

Others have said this, but the Internet Archive's appeals-court loss to Big Publishing is a disaster for everyone but the cartel of companies and a tiny number of A list authors.

The publishers will tolerate libraries only as long as they can control everything about how books can be loaned. If public libraries were being invented today, the cartel would make their core functions illegal.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/4/24235958/internet-archive-loses-appeal-ebook-lending

So at some point I want to make a personal website for my academic career; who am I, where did I study, where do I work right now, what do I research, how do you get in touch with me, etc.

BUT I refuse to faff about any tools or platforms for making websites, or doing any fancy stuff whatsoever; I'm gonna code this website by hand out of HTML and CSS, and it will consist of nothing more than static text, images, links, and formatting. I refuse to "build it beautiful", blech.

This is all well and good, but I'm worried about HTTPS. My browser refuses to connect to any non-HTTPS website, and clearly I'm going to have to make it happen on my website, but unlike composing the site and getting it hosted, I have no idea what's involved in getting my website certified (as evident from the fact I don't even have the vocabulary to properly articulate what I'm talking about).

Can anyone enlighten me? Thanks. (Boosts appreciated.)

#AskFedi #Webdev #https

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "The future of cosmological likelihood-based inference: accelerated high-dimensional parameter estimation and model comparison" by Davide Piras (Université de Genève), Alicja Polanska (MSSL) , Alessio Spurio Mancini (Royal Holloway, London), Matthew A. Price(UCL) & Jason D. McEwen (UCL)

https://astro.theoj.org/article/123368-the-future-of-cosmological-likelihood-based-inference-accelerated-high-dimensional-parameter-estimation-and-model-comparison

This sounds like a nice idea in principle, but I'll believe that water company bosses can go to jail when I see it.

Maybe they should concentrate on enforcing existing laws before coming up with new ones that they also won't enforce?

#WaterPollution #ShitInRivers #ShitOnBeaches

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwy5dwlwkwro

An emphasis from @iceadvice on #climate #TippingPoints: 5 of them appear in the Polar regions.

#EPSW24

Why are journalists -I think mainly American ones- reporting judge Alexandre de Moraes as being in a feud with Elon Musk, when issuing court orders. That's not a feud but a just doing his job in the face of a recalcitrant defendant, surely? Why is it a feud?

DIY, pirated medicine is becoming increasingly accessible and easier to make due to automation, new tech, and new software developed and released by Four Thieves Vinegar Collective:

https://www.404media.co/right-to-repair-for-your-body-the-rise-of-diy-pirated-medicine/

"The Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) is seeking proposals to work on systems for two related climate tipping points. One is the accelerating melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which could raise sea levels dramatically. The other is the weakening of the North Atlantic Subpolar Gyre, a huge current rotating counterclockwise south of Greenland that may have played a role in triggering the Little Ice Age around the 14th century."

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/09/04/1103555/the-uk-is-building-an-alarm-system-for-climate-tipping-points/

Think about it…if LLMs can easily do homework assigned to elementary school students, why do we even need children?!

I want to try and express a nuance here, and I hope I can get it right.

A friend said, in another place, that she remembers the 90s, and how it was stacked against us. And without letting cis people of the time off the hook - because when provoked, they could be viciously transphobic - I think there are ways in which it is much harder to transition now.

In 1992, almost no one knew anything of trans people. We were an occasional joke on most sitcoms. So the open hostility? It wasn't there right away. It would arrive, if you made a nuisance of yourself (like asking for rights, or recognition of basic human dignity, y'know, high-falutin' stuff like that). You'd get smacked down, hard. But there weren't organizations raising money to power legislation against us. Our governments, for the most part, weren't directly persecuting us. They weren't helping, either, but they weren't generally seeking to deny care to trans people.

Now...now you have billionaires funding legislative pushes against us. You have organized armies of trolls, ready to hound to sh someone who has the notion to be trans in the world. You have governments at every level working against us openly and proudly.

I'm not sure it *was* harder then. The other big difference is the existence of the Internet. In 1992, it was infinitesimal. Academic, largely, and research government types. Thus, I have no Internet presence under my deadname. None. Never have. No photos to live down, either. When I went stealth, it was quite easy to go stealth, in some ways. People didn't know to look for us.

And last, the phones. When I was young enough that bullies were an issue, they stayed at school. They didn't follow me home, sit on my nightstand, and leave me nasty messages for when I woke up. Young folk today can never get away from their tormentors. It's incessant.

So...I'm not sure I deserve a medal for transitioning then rather than now. It's just when I reached my limit, like all of us.

NASA Earth Science Education Collaborative Member Co-Authors Award-Winning Paper in Insects https://science.nasa.gov/learning-resources/science-activation/nasa-earth-science-education-collaborative-member-co-authors-award-winning-paper-in-insects/ #NASA #EarthScience #ScienceActivation

Seismic echoes reveal a mysterious 'donut' inside Earth's core https://phys.org/news/2024-09-seismic-echoes-reveal-mysterious-donut.html #science