Nicola Romanò @nicolaromano@qoto.org

A lot can happen in 57 years.

In 1969 the corrupt President Nixon was president, the U.S. could not afford universal healthcare but did find the money to go to the moon while waging a war in Vietnam.

In 2026 the corrupt President Trump is president, the U.S. still cannot afford universal healthcare but does find the money to go to the moon while waging a war in Iran.

A widely circulated Latin phrase is Vegezius’s "Si vis pacem para bellum" — if you want peace, prepare for war. However, I believe this expression does not do justice to the Roman world, which was well aware of the miseries of war. In fact, Tacitus, in Agricola, records this phrase, which is likely the one worth remembering: "Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant" — to plunder, slaughter, and steal, they call this empire, and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

#history #language #books

A bit of whimsy for today.... the gradient horse art project (draw a horse and set it in motion) https://gradient.horse/

Great blog by Pat Thompson on academic writing:

▶️ https://patthomson.net/2026/03/08/getting-comfortable-with-being-uncomfortable/

"Academic writing is a form of thinking. It’s not the transcription of thoughts already completed, but a process of thinking itself. One of the ways we make writing harder than it needs to be is by writing as though our argument has arrived fully formed, rather than being wrestled into shape over several drafts."

This is why you *need* to write yourself, even and especially when writing is hard!

#AcademicChatter #PhD

I still can't even that my now nearly 80 year old mom has been on Fedora on a thinkpad e520 (2011) for a decade and it all just works.

I checked her laptop just now and it's fully up to date on fedora 43, so she's done like 20 version upgrades autonomously too. The battery has degraded a little but the whole thing still works fine and she's very happy with it.

This is how things should be, this is peak computing tbh.

#Fedora #Linux

I can't remember if I posted this rant already. Somewhere someone is teaching all science students to use the stupidest slide.

The slide says:

"But there's something quietly beautiful about a place where people just... share what they know. No brand deals, no engagement metrics, no algorithm nudging you toward rage. Just someone who spent twenty years studying Arctic policy posting a thread at 2 AM because they think you should understand what's happening."

https://matduggan.com/boy-i-was-wrong-about-the-fediverse/

Introducing kuva: A scientific plotting library in rust, along with cli binary with the option to plot directly into the terminal.

Feel free to drop me some feedback as an issue on the repo

https://github.com/Psy-Fer/kuva

https://crates.io/crates/kuva/0.1.1

Trump ran an entire campagin on “No more stupid wars”, and “America First”, only to rename The Department of Defence to The Department of War, and proceed to attack both Venezuela and Iran, while constantly being offended that he is not offered The Nobel Peace Prize.

The US is led by the insane.

#Linux tools for examining #sequencing data:

```
zcat sequences.fastq.gz | \
awk 'NR % 4 == 2 { print substr($0, 0, 10) }' |\
sort | uniq -c | sort -nr > index_list
```

Generates a list of the first 10 bases in sequences.fastq.gz, sorted by frequency. Handy if you need to check that the indexes you thought you used are in fact the ones that were used.

```
$ head index_list
10765621 ACGTACTGTG
9006389 AACCACGCTT
6891089 ACACCGTTGC
5198342 AGAAGCCATT
4202651 AATCGAGGTG
3788448 ACCTTGTGCA
3271929 ACGAGTTGCA
3027755 ACCGATTGCA
2682797 ACTATCCGTG
54372 ACGTANTGTG
...
```

This may become a blogpost at some point.

#bioinformatics

#Zimbabwe has rejected a US health deal that would have provided $367m (£272m) in funding over five years because of Washington's demand for sensitive data.

The decision has come to light after a government memo from December was leaked, revealing that President Emmerson Mnangagwa felt the deal was "lopsided".

What’s the biggest single crystal you’ve grown? David Boyce and students at Queenswood School have grown a 3kg crystal of copper sulfate. Now he shares his tips for how you can do it too.

Via Chemistry World on Bluesky.

#Chemistry https://www.chemistryworld.com/culture/how-to-grow-an-enormous-single-crystal/4022946.article

Do you have a vision for a Workshop but don’t have the time to arrange the logistics or raise the funding? Submit your idea to us in our annual call for topics. We'll provide all necessary support for successful applications. Find out more at https://biologists.com/workshops/propose-new-workshop/

The war waged by the tech authoritarian oligarchy against the media has reached a new level:

#Palantir is suing us. Us, the Republik Magazin.

A small Swiss media company, funded by readers, founded in 2018 and free of advertising. I am not aware of any other media company globally that Palantir is currently targeting so aggressively.

What is this about? Together with my wonderful colleagues at the WAV research collective Jenny Steiner, Lorenz Naegeli, Marguerite Meyer, and Balz Oertli, we published a two-part series on Palantir's activities in Switzerland on December 8 and 9.

Using an extensive corpus of documents – which we obtained thanks to the Freedom of Information Act – we were able to trace a sales campaign over a period of seven years. Palantir tried to get in with many federal authorities – and was rejected everywhere.

And we also found out that the Swiss Army Staff evaluated the products and came to the conclusion that the army should refrain from using Palantir products.

Among other risks, they feared that data would be passed on to the US authorities.

Palantir is not just any company. ICE uses its products to hunt down migrants in the US. The Israeli army IDF uses the software in its Gaza offensive. The British health authority NHS has made itself dependent on the products for data analysis during the pandemic. And CEO #AlexKarp displays inhuman and aggressive rhetoric towards Europe, while the company itself advertises the “optimization of the kill chain.”

These are all facts, repeatedly verified and published by renowned media outlets. Our research relating to Switzerland and Zurich is based on this.

In addition to analyzing documents, we also spoke to various sources – including Palantir executives here in Zurich. The quotes used were presented to them and approved. Of course, we always adhered to the high standards of journalistic work. We conducted a thorough fact check before publication.

But the company doesn't want us to write the truth.

After the US company owned by right-wing tech billionaire #PeterThiel dedicated an absurd blog post to us, claiming some misinformation (such as that they had not participated in official tenders with the federal administration, a point we never claimed. On the contrary: we spoke from the outset of attempts to establish contact, sales talks, informal meetings, business as usual), after the Global Director of Privacy & Civil Liberties (PCL) Engineering and contact person for Swiss media Courtney Bowman launched personal attacks against us in LinkedIn comments between Christmas and New Year (“partisan fear-mongering”), Palantir's Swiss lawyers demanded a counterstatement on December 29.

We rejected this demand in its entirety.

In January, they demanded the same thing again. We rejected it again.

And now we see each other in court.

But why all this?

Our research on the Swiss army report caused a huge international media response. The Guardian and the Austrian newspaper Der Standard reported on the Swiss army's rejection. Numerous financial portals and stock market magazines picked up our news (which could have consequences for the overvalued stock market company Palantir).

And Chaos Computer Club spokesperson Constanze Kurz presented our research to a huge audience at the renowned IT conference Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg at the end of December.

All of this is making Palantir nervous.

We have now submitted a comprehensive defense brief. We can substantiate all of our findings with several documents and publicly available media reports.

We trust in the rule of law and freedom of the press in this country.

In keeping with yesterday's event “Zurich, little Big Tech City” at the Gessneralle, where we first announced this news exclusively to the audience on site:

World politics will soon be negotiated in Zurich: freedom of the press, the facts about ICE, Trump, Israel, Karp, tech authoritarianism.

The truth.

All this at the Zurich Commercial Court.

We will not be intimidated. And we will keep you informed.

I recently posted a pre-print about reasoning and large-language models....

trying to get that piece on a pre-print server itself was a bit of a journey which illustrates concerns I've had for the last 18 months or so: namely that AI will kill publishing reform.

here a blog post about it:

#academic #openScience
https://write.as/ulrikehahn/is-ai-killing-scientific-reform

Marimar Martinez was the first US citizen shot by CBP/ICE.

Agent Charles Exum shot her five times. She miraculously survived.

DHS accused her of being a domestic terrorist.

She went to court to get the body cam footage released.

It shows Agent Charles Exum driving with his gun drawn.

Saying “do something b*tch”.

Ramming her car.

Shooting her.

Hours after the shooting, Greg Bovino emailed the agent and offered to delay his retirement in light of his excellent service.

The email said “you have much left to do”.

Other agents praised the shooting.

Said they should celebrate.

Exum bragged… “5 shots, 7 holes”

Ms Martinez showed incredible courage by fighting to ensure this footage was released to the public.

Everyone should watch it. Make sure the world sees this.

She’s standing up for Silverio Gonzalez.

For Keith Porter.

For Renee Nicole Good.

For Alex Pretti.

For everyone murdered by this regime.

She’s exposing ICE/CBP for who & what they are.

Thank you Marimar.
#uspol #ice #abolishice #cbp #immigration #fascism #marimarmartinez