Week 30

"Second French Plan for Open Science.. Open science refers to the unhindered dissemination of results, methods and products from scientific research. It draws on the opportunity provided by recent digital progress to develop open access to publications and – as much as possible – data, source code and research methods... The French Plan for Open Science has provided France with a coherent and dynamic policy in the field of open science. It was announced in 2018 by the Minister of Higher Education, Research and Innovation, Frédérique Vidal, and is coordinated by the Committee for Open Science, which brings together the Ministry, the universities and research performing organizations and the scientific community. Substantial progress has been made in the three years since this policy was introduced. The percentage of open access scientific publications in France has risen from 41% to 56%"

"Rowan Atkinson has made a surprising cameo behind the wheel of a hydrogen-powered Toyota GR Yaris hot hatch, while using one of the automotive industry’s largest annual events to show his support for the zero tailpipe emissions technology"

Paper: "Replacing traditional journals with a more modern solution is not a new idea. Here, we propose ways to overcome the social dilemma underlying the decades of inaction. Any solution needs to not only resolve the current problems but also be capable of preventing takeover by corporations: it needs to replace traditional journals with a decentralized, resilient, evolvable network that is interconnected by open standards and open-source norms under the governance of the scholarly community."

[-]

Reuters: "Tesla created secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints.. Tesla rigged the dashboard readouts in its electric cars to provide 'rosy' projections of how far owners can drive before needing to recharge"

[-]

250 bucks.. let's be nice now.. dont wanna bankrupt these "value creators" they give so much to society

Gizmodo: "Earlier in the week, NBCUniversal drew controversy when it suddenly up and pruned a bunch of shade trees in front of its lot. Up until then, those trees were being used by striking writers and actors as shade during their picketing, because it’s been really hot in Los Angeles lately. To see them cut down felt like a very deliberate move against picketers, even as Universal insisted it was nothing more than a not-so-happy coincidence... LA’s City Controller Kenneth Mejia.. said that StreetsLA would issue a fine of $250 to the corporation for the violation of cutting trees without a city permit"

But even when they agreed on 'freedoms', anti-gov views, neither side liked what those freedoms would entail, unleash on the other side. The economic right could not stand the socially permissive ways of the cultural left, who in turn could not stand some freedoms the right practiced such as guns, and the lax atitude towards the environment. But that was okay - that dislike could subtitute for politics now - everyone could argue until they were blue in the face that never amounted to much change since the 'superstructure' underneath that allowed it was set in stone. But argument, upon argument, hack against hack were piled on.. It made a festive party. In the process due to natural cycles there would be ups and downs, some ppl would drop out of office, some get in, some would get awarded, some get rich, even minorities would get to 'represent'.. it could look like forward momentum, advance, for a while it looked like things were getting better (but they were not)

What do you get as the result of economic right's grand bargain with cultural left? The Woke ideology. The masses were permitted to increase their "self-expressive urges" (some took it to its natural conclusion and became Woke) capitalists in return were also unshackled in their own ways and formed today's business class, some bought guns. They are different sides of the same coin.

My African map showed Niger in US column; will that change in the future?

[-]

The Guardian: "Niger’s military leadership has thrown its weight behind a coup against the president, Mohamed Bazoum"

Politico: "There was understandable glee in Kyiv when news broke that the Kremlin was turning on the self-styled Club of Angry Patriots — the ultranationalists.. But given the bigger picture, the excitement may prove premature... despite these sackings and arrests, Russia’s defenses are holding as Ukraine’s counteroffensive continues to make disappointing progress. After nearly two months of fighting, Ukraine’s made no significant breakthrough in the south, where Kyiv had hoped to see more progress in its bid to sever the so-called land bridge connecting the annexed Crimean isthmus and southern Ukrainian territories occupied by Russian forces. Moreover, Russia has launched its own counteroffensive further north around Kupyansk and Kreminna"

NBC News: "Like a hot tub: Water temperatures off Florida soar over 100 degrees (>37 C), stunning experts"

NPR: "UPS union calls off strike threat after securing pay raises for workers.. UPS posted a record profit last year, as the company reached 100 billion in revenue in 2022 for the first time... Last year, the median UPS employee made 52,000 dollars, according to the company's securities filings. Tomé earned 364 times that amount, with her salary approaching $19 million"

Abigail Disney: "I used to ride private planes. Now I’d rather get arrested protesting them.. According to Oxfam, billionaires emit a million times more greenhouse gases than the average person"

Lithium-ion batteries are self-oxidizing, they can keep their own fire alive.. and a genius big brain put this shit on cars.

Reuters: "One dead in cargo ship fire, electric car suspected source.. The crew had tried, but failed, to extinguish the fire"

US News: "A Freighter Carrying Nearly 3,000 Cars Catches Fire in the North Sea and a Crew Member Is Killed"

"@davidaugust@mastodon.online

There are 160,000 members of SAG-AFTRA, with at least 87% unable to meet the minimum for healthcare eligibility. Actors are usually working-class, without achieving million-dollar earnings or attending red carpet awards ceremonies"

"@Hypx@mastodon.social

Governor Pritzker signs legislation to strengthen Illinois' Hydrogen economy.. Legislation creates a tax credit of $10 million per year for users of clean hydrogen in Illinois"

Jack the Giant Slayer this is how you do fantasy.. Five stars

H2 Central: "Port of Rotterdam, Vopak in Race for $2,8 Billion Hydrogen Port in South Africa"

H2 Central: Germany Commits to ‘Blue Hydrogen’ in Updated National Strategy

NYT: "Who’s Behind the Judicial Overhaul Now Dividing Israel?.. Kohelet, the once-obscure think tank that conceived and now champions a revamped court system, is an American import... For years, Kohelet quietly churned out position papers, trying to nudge government policy in a more libertarian direction... American consultants are a regular feature of election campaigns, and the American-backed Israel Hayom, a free daily, is the country’s most widely read newspaper"

Automotive News: "Recurrent, a Seattle EV battery and range analytics firm, found that some EVs experienced significant declines in range as temperatures rose"

Jalopnik: "We already knew electric vehicles don’t do so well when it gets really cold outside. Well, apparently they don’t really like extreme heat either. According to Automotive News, the recent heat wave across much of the Southern and Western U.S. has brought their range issue to the forefront"

[-]

That would be a major win.. That guy nearly won the world cup for France singlehandedly despite all that FIFA bullshit and f-ing Qatar... yeah.. u know what u did mfkers

Al Monitor: "Saudi Arabia's Al-Hilal makes record $332 million bid for soccer star Mbappe"

I Ain't Superstitious - Santana & Jonny Lang #music

[-]

July-September is the typhoon season isn't it?

Arab News: "Taiwan cancels military drills as typhoon approaches"

Pattinson from Tenet also played another version of the jagoff billionaire, true. BTW Cosmopolis is not the deep critical movie some think it to be. Watch it until the end.

After making three movies about a jagoff billionaire, on Tenet his ultimate goal seemed to be to bore with maniacal detail (built on baseless science) but he truly gets you with the backdrop where it is indirectly suggested "some people in gov can be doing some scary shit and you should be scared of that shit". Oppenheimer is similar - this is the story of the atomic bomb after all. But a-bomb cannot ever be used due to M.A.D. whereas the private sector freely kills people pollutes the environment churning out shit product (much like Nolan's movies) constantly, annually. What I am wondering is when is this guy going to make a movie about toxic spills, theft, fraud that takes place in US business right now?

Nolan excels at it - that lingering, vacuous psyop. Perhaps his is most effective because of the uniqueness of style even if boring.

"@esther@strangeobject.space

Oppenheimer does very little but it does it a lot , over a long time, and very loudly. It ends up being boring and empty"

Ian Moss - 'Nullarbor Plain' #music

[-]

Another case of psychic's con, people see what they want to see in statistical generalities.

No James Vlahos definitely did not "turn his father into AI" and can posthumously talk to the man 😂

"@Hypx@mastodon.social

France backs ArcelorMittal’s Dunkirk hydrogen steel plant plans with €850m"

France 24: "The world's first hydrogen-powered passenger train, Coradia iLint, is currently being tested in Quebec's Charlevoix region. Designed in France by rolling stock manufacturer Alstom, the zero-emissions train runs on electricity produced by mixing hydrogen with oxygen, meaning that moisture its only waste product. Alstom said Europe has already placed an order for 41 hydrogen trains"

"@notjustbikes@notjustbikes.com

Every time I try to book an international train in Europe it's full or near capacity. They sell out within days of becoming available.

Demand is way up, but supply has been the same for year. We need more trains!!"

"@ErikJonker@mastodon.social

The Dutch government now has an official Mastodon instance, this gives government organisations and institutions the chance to have an official account in the fediverse.. I hope more governments will follow because the fediverse gives them the possibility to fully control the data, no advertising etc"

This means massive amount of money lost for the California public school system.

The Mercury News: "Built-in software ‘death dates’ are sending thousands of schools’ Chromebooks to the recycling bin.. With a software death date baked into each model, older versions of these inexpensive computers are set to expire three to six years after their release. Despite having fully functioning hardware, an expired Chromebook will no longer receive the software updates it needs, blocking basic websites and applications from use...

Chromebook sales soared after the start of the pandemic in 2020. More affordable than traditional laptops, the devices were seen as a way to connect students to their classes without breaking the bank — and across the country, school districts ordered them in droves... But three years later, thousands of those laptops have already been rendered useless... Oakland is not alone. In Southern California, the Torrance Unified School District will lay to rest more than 20,000 Chromebooks"

Government bad, business good? Just below two examples, gov is trying to help you, corporation is trying to take stuff away from you.

"@rcombs@treehouse.systems

aw fuck google's trying to make DRM for websites"

[-]

"Anil Dash@anildash@me.dm

This is genuinely exciting news — the FED has launched its system for doing instant electronic payments, with 35 institutions already signed on. Ask your credit union or bank when they’re launching support for it. (And note which tech media give coverage to bullshit claims from fascist CEOs purporting to build apps for this purpose, vs. actual real implementations that serve everyone.)"

CleanTechnica: "Nikola Resurrection Only Tip Of Bosch Green Hydrogen Scheme.. Bosch has teamed up with Nikola to make fuel cell truck dreams come true, with a sharp eye on the global green hydrogen economy of the future"

"India's first hydrogen fuel cell intercity Bus unveiled by BharatBenz & Reliance Ind"

NDTV: "Gautam Adani Meets Lankan President, Port Project, Green Hydrogen Plant Discussed"

Noah's Flood could have basis in reality. A '97 research says the Black Sea was a lake but it flooded due to sea level rise around 7600 BC. Before (dark blue) and after (light blue) below. The event likely gave rise to the story in the Bible which would've been witnessed by the people nearby, the story made it into myth, then into religious texts later.

[-]

TechXplore: "Rice University engineers can turn sunlight into hydrogen with record-breaking efficiency thanks to a device that combines next-generation halide perovskite semiconductors with electrocatalysts in a single, durable, cost-effective and scalable device"

[-]

"I can be whomever I want to be". That's not how it works. If that were true there would still be Turks in Turkey.

Culturally they are all Protestants as everyone else in America. You could conciously force yourself into certain choices of course but they won't be knee-jerk cultural choices, they will be mostly analytical, political ie weaker in effect than deep-seated second-level cultural factory settings.

A lot minorities of a 'certain sect' are on SCOTUS.. This is not due to a secret plan hatched up by that minority. These people were manuevered into those positions by the majority. Why? Well if you are going to pick ultra free-market judges, who you want to be against 'excessive government', isn't it better to pick those judges from among minorities? Minorities would feel the wariness against 'too much government' for other reasons anyway due to their minority status. That's the guy you want in there, a minority and a anti-gov free-market nut, scared of government due to both ideology and self-perceived minority status. He will aim to keep corp taxes low, keep loopholes, please the rich because the alternative is bad, bad government.

Pearce, A-level bad guy.. great movie, despite Caviezel 😂

I want to say Bouchon like this guy.. I am practicing everyday

[-]

Chocolate Bouchon

Where's Assange at?

US's own warship arrived before nuke subs that would belong to Australia

It shows up on my Navy tracker map now - #USSCanberra

df = u.usnavy(); u.sm_plot_list1(-12, 126, 8.0, np.array(df[['name','lat','lon']]))

[-]

Arab News: "USS Canberra: US commissions first Navy warship in foreign port.. The United States commissioned a warship in Sydney, Australia, on Saturday, the first time a US Navy vessel joined active service at a foreign port"

Researcher Bjarnason: "One of the issues.. that has perplexed me—has been that many people are convinced that language models, or specifically chat-based language models, are intelligent. But there isn’t any mechanism inherent in large language models (LLMs) that would seem to enable this..

LLMs are not brains and do not meaningfully share any of the mechanisms that animals or people use to reason or think. LLMs are a mathematical model of language tokens. You give a LLM text, and it will give you a mathematically plausible response to that text. There is no reason to believe that it thinks or reasons..

The intelligence illusion seems to be based on the same mechanism as that of a psychic’s con, often called cold reading. It looks like an accidental automation of the same basic tactic. By using validation statements, such as sentences that use the Forer effect, the chatbot and the psychic both give the impression of being able to make extremely specific answers, but those answers are in fact statistically generic"

[-]

China-made hydrogen-powered smart tram to be exported to Malaysia

H2 Central: "WATT Fuel Cell announced that it will supply 500 residential Imperium® Solid Oxide Fuel Cells to Hope Gas, Inc., a West Virginia-based natural gas utility"

"@esther@strangeobject.space

I sometimes hear people make fun of the fact that Berlin has a huge empty field right in its core area where Tempelhof airport used to operate which is now a public park and left almost entirely unchanged, runways and all. They talk about it as if it's an example of the city's inability to do something 'useful' with this land. And what they mean is build stuff on it.

But just the way it is, it is hugely popular among the people of Berlin, it's a unique space where the sheer size of it enables anyone to basically do whatever without annoying anyone else. Even at peak times like Saturday afternoon, it still doesn't feel crowded and the further away from the edges you go the emptier it gets. It refuses any commercial 'usefulness' and instead gives people space to use how they see fit. It's absolutely beautiful"

"@ben@werd.social

It's an interesting grift in a way: VC-subsidized startups changed an incumbent industry enough that its existing companies began to think that these new ideas were good business. But they never were, and it ate them from the inside"

LA Times: "[Netflix's] ambitions were hypercharged by a newfangled sense that it could disrupt the old school Hollywood industry and scale endlessly.. As with Uber and Lyft, whose bottomless chests of venture capital allowed them to conquer new markets once dominated by stodgy old competitors.. [but] Netflix et al. adopted another key ingredient of Silicon Valley’s approach: secrecy. Data about shows’ performance and viewer habits were kept proprietary; we knew only what the streamers wanted us to know...

It’s a sticking point in the negotiations — actors and writers on streaming series want a better way to calculate the value of their work, given that the residuals they earn are so much lower than for network or cable shows. The studios have resisted. 'The reason nobody really wants to open the books on this is because if Wall Street got a look,' one Hollywood insider told New York Magazine, 'they’d have a collective stroke.'..

The boom times are over. Executives know it. Wall Street knows it. And the story that we’re in a revolutionary moment of technological transformation will run out of gas soon. So the bosses are using that moment to do what Silicon Valley wound up doing when its other big swings didn’t pan out: squeeze labor"

But it is hilarious how entitled the corp f--ker is - he thinks he is the essential actor in this picture, rather than the OSS guy when in fact the situation is completely the other way around. #FOSS

Name coincidence, H2 is just a software product

"alan@lan@mastodon.de

lol ?"

[-]

"@vjprema@fosstodon.org

Many are turning to Lemmy as a viable Reddit alternative.. As an avid Fediverse user, my primary identity is on a Mastodon server. Since Lemmy uses ActivityPub, I thought that maybe I can just cross post into Lemmy.. despite it being a quite different type of app.. It turns out... It works!! Yes, it's possible to upvote, post, reply and follow anything on Lemmy, through my existing Mastodon account"

"@donni@mastodon.social

Animals are basically always camping"

Somewhat mountainous..

u.sm_plot_khali(0.1,show_elevation=True)

[-]

Suwalki Gap - the route is not that long

u.sm_plot_khali()

[-]

EWN: "12 GW solar-to-hydrogen facility to be built in Mozambique, South Africa to follow suit.. Once up and running, it's expected that 4,000 tonnes of hydrogen will be produced at this facility"

The Guardian: "An inconvenient truth: you can’t sell the green revolution to people who can’t afford it.. a narrow majority of Londoners still favour expanding the [ultra low emission zone], but it’s markedly more popular among middle-class professionals than low earners who can’t afford to trade in spluttering old diesels"

Al Jazeera: "Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has expressed concern about Israel’s policies, saying that he has no immediate plans to invite his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu to the country"

"Netanyahu.. boasts of having derailed the Oslo accords with political trickery [in a 2001 tape] 'I de facto put an end to the Oslo accords,' the then-former prime minister bragged. Since the accords state that Israel would be allowed to hang on to pre-defined military zones in the West Bank, Netanyahu told his hosts that he could torpedo the accords by defining vast swaths of land as just that.. 'They asked me before the election if I’d honor [the Oslo accords],' Netanyahu detailed. 'I said I would, but … I’m going to interpret the accords in such a way that would allow me to put an end to this galloping forward to the 67 borders. How did we do it? Nobody said what defined military zones were. Defined military zones are security zones; as far as I’m concerned, the entire Jordan Valley is a defined military zone. Go argue.'"

[-]

"@brembs@mastodon.social

What do these developments have in common?

• Libraries are running institutional #repositories

• Scholarly organizations are hosting #mastodon instances

• the EU council decides to foster #openscience infrastructures

• The EU launches #CoARA to deprecate #bibliometrics and journal brand

They are all steps towards replacing academic journals"

European Commision: "[T]he EU and Argentina have taken a further step in their energy cooperation with the signature of a [MoU]. Signed by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and the President of the Argentine Republic Alberto Fernández..the MoU sets out key areas of cooperation, including renewable energy, hydrogen and methane emissions abatement"

Pillow and MetPy are both, of course, open source as in free.

I added wbt feature to my climate report page, checked it a few times today, I can confirm wet-bulb 25 C is extremely uncomfortable (31 C is death, per info below).

from metpy.calc import dewpoint_from_relative_humidity, wet_bulb_temperature
from metpy.units import units
T = 46; H = 50; P = 1000

dew = dewpoint_from_relative_humidity(T * units.degC, H * units.percent)
wet_bulb_temperature(P * units.hPa, T * units.degC, dew)

Out[1]: 35.12274652837743 <Unit('degree_Celsius')>

There are codes out there that can calculate wet-bulb temp

TDB: "'When will it get too hot for normal daily activity as we know it, even for young, healthy adults?'... The answer goes beyond the temperature you see on the thermometer. It’s also about humidity. Our research is designed to come up with the combination of the two, measured as “wet-bulb temperature.”.. a study published in 2010.. theorized that a wet-bulb temperature of 95 F (35 C)—equal to a temperature of 95 F at 100% humidity, or 115 F at 50% humidity – would be the upper limit of safety... Our studies on young healthy men and women show that this upper environmental limit is even lower than the theorized 35 C. It occurs at a wet-bulb temperature of about 87 F (31 C)"

Dessler: "Cherry picking is a tactic where someone selectively chooses a small portion of a data.. the central United States [was the exception] – the region that saw extreme warmth during the dust bowl era – where summertime maximum temperatures were indeed higher in the 1930s. It is this small blue region in the central U.S. that contrarians are focusing on when they argue that the 1930s had worse heat waves. Obviously, focusing on that one region gives a deeply misleading picture of the evolution of summer heat globally"

"@andrewdessler@mastodon.world

Climate misinformers are pushing the '1930s was warmer' trope. This is classic cherry picking"

H2 Central: "The German government wants to use hydrogen for decarbonising road transport and heating, in addition to industry, according to a highly anticipated revamp of the national hydrogen strategy, which was leaked to business daily Handelsblatt"

Resize code has built-in interpolation.. If eg 90x90 is resized to 300x300 that means a lot empty new pixels that need to be filled. Missing values are interpolated from existing pixels.

Using image processing code on terrain data.. now that's an idea. Elevation can be seen as gray pixel values, then zoom is like crop and resize. Worked brilliantly (and fast, via Pillow pkg).

Wrote about this before, about a (very simplistic) proof equating compression with computational learning. In this bizarre way they defined it compression does equal learning, so it's no surprise actual compression algo equals big clunky neural nets.

Neural net "AI" gets beaten by simple compression 😂

"'Low-Resource' Text Classification.. Deep neural networks (DNNs) are often used for text classification.. However, DNNs can be computationally intensive, requiring millions of parameters and large amounts of labeled data, which can make them expensive to use, to optimize, and to transfer to out-of-distribution (OOD) cases in practice. In this paper, we propose a non-parametric alternative to DNNs that’s easy, lightweight, and universal in text classification: a combination of a simple compressor like gzip with a k-nearest-neighbor classifier. Without any training parameters, our method achieves results that are competitive with non-pretrained deep learning methods on six in-distribution datasets"

[-]

Wiki: "Death Valley is a desert valley in Eastern California, in the northern Mojave Desert.. It is thought to be the hottest place on Earth during summer.. On June 30, 2013, a verified temperature of.. 54.0 °C was recorded.. The valley again recorded that temperature on July 9, 2021"

The Guardian: "A unique partnership.. is promising to establish a $3bn green hydrogen project in the far north of Western Australia. In what could be one of Australia’s biggest clean energy projects, more than a million solar panels will power electrolysers to produce 50,000 tonnes of green hydrogen a year.

A new company – Aboriginal Clean Energy – will develop the ambitious project near the town of Kununurra. Three Indigenous groups will each have an initial 25% share in the company alongside climate crisis investment and advisory firm Pollination"

Andy Kalmowitz: "It's Too Hot For EVs To Work Right.. The heat wave affecting much of the U.S. may be causing electric vehicles to lose nearly a third of their range"

CNBC: "Disney pulling back on making Marvel, Star Wars content, Iger says.. Iger said the explosion in Marvel TV shows in recent years 'diluted focus and attention' for the brand"

Thunderball - Domino #music

[-]

Maybe Cook learned a thing or two from the Kraut.. The Chinese tho were the original inventors of the idea.

Captain Cook brought pickled cabbage, sauerkraut with him to all his voyages. It can be preserved efficiently, and cabbage has lots health benefits. Some laughed at him but his crew avoided scurvy, he had the last laugh.

Marinated, dried, baked poultry is great... Possible to live on it, and other outdoor-friendly preservation tricks, dried fruits, pickled vegs even. No need for a fridge.

2022 renewables share percentage of energy consumption - data from BP

dict((k,u.renew_perc_bp(k)) for k in ['Total World','US','China','Norway','Australia','Germany'])

Out[1]: 
{'Total World': 6.71,
 'US': 8.05,
 'China': 7.18,
 'Norway': 6.46,
 'Australia': 10.3,
 'Germany': 18.03}

Freedom

WION: "Alarming stats, in charts: US has more gun dealers than McDonald's, Starbucks outlets put together"

Marvel is partly working the government scare angle still.. in the hopes that people will want "the free market" to save them and accept econ inequality as necessary, and tax corporations less? 🤨

The viewership numbers point the way; MCU's are mostly in the dump, whereas people loved the DCU small budget Joker that didn't even have a Batman in it.

Gunn picked Sman as the first movie he'll do as new head of DC Studios? The emphasis was that Supes is a nice person.. This is a change of tone, Marvel had started around a jagoff billionaire (Stark), on DCU although Snyder did SM first they immediately inserted their billionaire into it (B. Wayne) and tried to rearrange things around him (and failed), we also know Snyder's plan for Supes was that he'd eventually turn evil. The new DCU tone sounds different; Clark Kent is small town, rural type of person anyway, not a bilionaire jagoff, meaning the reboot will be centered around more relatable characters. Even their reimagined Bats sounds like will be more human than before.

iOS is based on BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution), and Android has open source Linux at its core. Free stuff makes the world go around.

#Tlaib #Palestine

[-]

Axios: "There's no safe port in a changing climate. Americans who move from one region to another are increasingly citing climate change as at least one driving factor.. Yet nowhere is truly safe from extreme weather, some of which is fueled by climate change... Case in point: The recent catastrophic flooding in Vermont, a state that often ranks high on lists of so-called 'climate havens.'"