Lmst

Smooth and rough Madrone bark

the trunk of a living madrone tree, showing a patch of smooth yellowish red back, somewhat older flaky reddish brown bark and then framing the lower left some darker brown bark

Immature bad eagle, about 9400’ in the eastern Sierra Nevada. It’s mama was perched just below, which doesn’t show in this pic and I couldn’t see at that time, but I know because just a moment later the two of them flapped athletically off down slope and disappeared in an instant.

Huge mostly brown bird with lighter colored patches peeking through, a huge curved beak mostly yellow with a darker tip. It’s perched in a dead pine tree.

At the end of May, pretty close to the peak of the run-off, a northern dipper on the edge of her (his?) personal cataract. As she flew back and forth I spent a lot of electrons trying and failing to get a pic of her entering or leaving her nest under the flow on the opposite side. Finally she came and posed right in front of me and, ok, it still looks pretty dramatic.

dark grey bird, feathers ruffled by a breeze, perched on a grey rock on the edge of a huge white waterfall

e boosted:

Via Mark Joseph Stern:

NEW: SCOTUS shoots down a federal judge’s effort to protect eight men from being expelled—without due process—to South Sudan, where they face torture and death.

Dissenting, Sotomayor says the court’s “indefensible” decision makes it complicit in “lawlessness.” https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a1153_2co3.pdf

1/... #SCOTUS

e boosted:

Find someone who loves you like Arizonans love the monsoons.

#Tucson #AZ

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@ai6yr I have had the best experience with McMaster Carr lately. Global Industrial too. Makes me feel good I can ignore Grainger (overpriced) and U-Line (nazis) completely, and nearly completely avoid Home Depot (also terrible racist religious fanatics)

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Back in the day, Twitter used to be really good if I set up a thread to connect freelancers with clients. Let's see if Mastodon can do it.

Clients: if you're looking for freelancers/contractors, get in the comments

Freelancers/contractors: get in the comments

Everyone else: boosts appreciated.

The market is *dead* for freelancers and a big part of that (in my opinion) is fragmentation. Let's get that network effect *back*.

#FediHire

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@riley @futurebird

everybody knows
about Napier's bones
you could multiply
and you could divide
you could even extract
the square root
such sweet sweet necromancy

but nobody knows about
Genaille–Lucas rulers
with which you could save
a little addition on the way
at the price of a
much more complicated name
and no allusion
to death
and what the dead might say

#poetry
#math

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@trochee Bostrom's basic error - shared by the broligarchy - is that quicker = smarter

(tells you a lot about their childhoods fwiw)

But if you throw the energy needs of a small country at a problem, no wonder it does it quicker than just one person.

Real intelligence = recognizing reasons as reasons and weighing them against each other

#caturday #June

white and black cat, resting through the heat of the day under the ruella and lantana

@amyfou
to compare:
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Red-tailed_Hawk/photo-gallery/60384881

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Our library has opened a stick library. I needed you to know this.

Dokk1 Aarhus Main Library. inside. Beyond: a white sign on a far wall: Bibliotek. 'Library.' To the right: the edge of a shelf with a plant hanging down. In front of us, about a metre high, a nice wooden display board. It is made of horizontal planks, smooth and light brown, with wooden hooks fashioned into them. Placed on each row of hooks, like valuable swords in a museum, six nice long slim curvy sticks. On top, a sign (in English, even though this is a Danish library): ‘Stick Library. Take a stick. Leave a stick.’ There is no further explanation and nor should we seek one. It is enough that this stick library exists, here, now, before us, for our pleasure, here in this library.

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Silent AND invisible

@ChuckMcManis
oh, I’d understood that you wanted binary random variables. The whole random number generator thing is a can of worms. The python function uses Mersenne Twister MT19337, which is pretty good for a lot of things: guaranteed to produce (precisely) uniformly distributed sequences of 32 bit numbers for a long time. It’s not good for everything, for instance those 32 bit numbers are only 623 dimensional equidistributed. The wiki article is a reasonable start:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_Twister

@ChuckMcManis

assuming that you mean that calling N times the average converges to P as N gets arbitrarily large, in python this should do the job:

from random import random
def f(P) :
x = random()
if x > P:
out = 0
else :
out = 1
return out

Last week I got out early enough to have good illumination for this Gilded Flicker.

Sitting at the top of a saghuaro cactus, a Gilded flicker: a large woodpecker with a spotted chest, black bib, bright read cheeks and a brown head

The opuntia in the front yard has started it’s spring bloom. The pattern seems to be that these early blooms are yellow, but they become more orange as the season goes on. The cactus bees (Diadasia rinconis for a guess) seem to nap in the flowers as well as busily collecting pollen

yellow flower petals , yellow stamens and anthers, with a greenish yellow pistil in the center, with a black and pale cactus bee ( Diadasia rinconis for a guess) resting on the anthers

@MarvClowder @ai6yr
I tried and failed to chase down an archival source for the “presumed immunity from infection” part of that would inspire me with confidence so many years after a presumed infection that I don’t remember. There was a link to a CDC webpage that 404’d. My rubella titre is respectable though, so that saved me a vaccination

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If you dare, pour yourself a strong, heavily tariffed beverage and read this column by Jonathan Last, who is what we used to call a "rock-ribbed conservative":

"We have a deeply stupid government. But also, we have the government we deserve. The American age is over. And it ended because the American people were no longer worthy of it."

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-american-age-is-over?r=a9n56&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

Photo of Jonathan Last in front of a banner reading "The Heritage Foundation"

Trying a failing to get a snapshot of the lunar eclipse, I saw what I thought to be a stray neighborhood cat, but then realized it wasn’t quite the right shape, or the right motion: our local desert fox. Pretty blurry, because no time to change the camera settings before it trotted around the corner

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