Andrew Yool

Andrew Yool

@dryool.bsky.social

Novel reader, 🐱 lover, amateur 📸, gamer 🎮, slow 🚲, coattail-rider, rare blogger & ocean 🌊 biogeochemistry modeller (in that order). Views=own, RTs≠endorsement.

604 followers211 following927 posts

This is why I despair of professional chefs. Why write recipes - whose entire raison d'être is to help amateurs - if you're just going to bullshit on quantities? Sure, some things can be finessed to personal taste, but just say that while giving a default quantity to start with. Assholes.

theguardian.comWhy do we measure root ginger in ‘thumbs’ and centimetres rather than weight? | Kitchen aideWhen it comes to ginger, personal taste often trumps strict precision, say our experts as they get to the root of the issue

Tell me you don't know how to control the y-axis limits of your plots without telling me you don't know how to control the y-axis limits of your plots ... (Nice one @yougov.co.uk! Also: great work on making your blues for the Tories and Reform indistinguishable)

If only there was some explanation for why Reform continues to attract people with such views, and why its vetting "procedures" (and members!) seem so poor at spotting them? Hear me out - it's almost like, by occupying the same part of the political spectrum as the BNP, Reform assimilated the BNP.

Otto English@ottoenglish.bsky.social

London Reform councillor Dean Miller 'claimed King Charles was Muslim' and called black children ‘animals’, TV report alleges.. www.standard.co.uk/news/london/...

Is the clue "take a different evolutionary and life history pathway"?

The Washington Post@washingtonpost.com

Researchers found that a subset of genes from Jonathan, the world’s oldest living land animal, remained remarkably stable despite his age, which might have helped him manage his blood sugar, reduce inflammation and guard against cancer. https://wapo.st/4yoci8K

While never surprising, it's always eye-opening to read about (typically) right-wing Christians espousing views that their self-chosen idol would, by all accounts, be pretty unimpressed by. If not actively hostile.

theguardian.comLobbying, lawyers and a media blitz: the fight to kill the Church of England’s £100m slavery compensation fundSome of Britain’s wealthiest financiers, including Sir Paul Marshall, have given a platform to critical coverage or are linked to its leading opponent

Much as how creationists want the veneer of science but without its rigor or its implications for their dogmatism, they want to be seen as Good™️ without undertaking the "hard yards" of reflecting on historical injustice and its contemporary fallout. While preferably hoarding their cash and control.

I'm sure that the Conservatives and Kemi Badenoch will want to correct this error right away and not double-down on it like a rabidly tribal political party so insecure that it can't admit a typo. Right?

Simon Evans@drsimevans.carbonbrief.org

FACTCHECK: UK Conservatives double the ‘cost of net-zero’ after spreadsheet blunder The Tory "Right Way" booklet makes an erroneous claim about the cost of cutting emissions, possibly taken from a Jan26 thinktank report, and deffo the most idiotic error I've seen for a while 🧵

Enemies of America have never had it so good. A govt decimating its own talent, actively pushing a dangerously AI-heavy economy, flushing science down the pan, sending debt through the roof, and now expediting this total clown into helping disease overrun its citizens. Enjoy it future historians! 🤦

arstechnica.comRFK Jr. unveils sweeping federal initiative to find evidence of vaccine injuries[T]he Trump-RFK Jr anti-vax agenda keeps getting more corrupt and dangerous."

Entirely expected and grimly amusing to read these two news articles in the same week. In the first, Norway's #Equinor tries to bully the UK govt into continuing to extract #FossilFuel lest the corporation stop investing in the UK's ability to extract a resource we need to stop extracting ...

bbc.co.ukEquinor may stop investing in UK if oil and gas fields do not get go-aheadThe boss of the Norwegian state company says further investment in the UK could be at risk if Rosebank and Jackdaw are not approved.

However, we should entirely expect this sort of behaviour from corporations when their foundational raison d’être is under threat. But corporations are made of individual CEOs, company lawyers and sell-out scientists who are eminently prosecutable. We need to stop forgetting that.

Very much one of those occasions where, since the consequences largely fall on those who willingly consume anti-health propaganda, I'm too spiteful not to think "Darwin Award Contestants". However, as with anti-vax zealots, it's never as simple as that. Anyway, ... 🤦

Ars Technica@arstechnica.com

A flood of misinformation has eroded trust in the public health triumph that is pasteurized milk—and among the advocates working to reverse this health victory is none other than Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr: arstechnica.visitlink.me/vPM8xd

So ... dev creates software, AI clones software, dev goes bust, no-one creates software, AI inherits the Earth? Feels like there's a gap in the thinking here. Or that this form of #OpenSource is just #AI destroying things again (like journalism, art, media, etc.). (Thanks to @kyleor.land)

arstechnica.com“Software is over”: Bold AI developer takes aim at Adobe with open source clonesOpus-built Creative Cloud alternatives are ambitious, free, and nowhere near finished.

What a great story! But can you imagine being one of the diligent researchers working for years to carefully craft tortuous - and now, clearly, tortuously wrong - explanations for the manuscript's cryptic meaning, only to discover now that, effectively, the pages were merely in the wrong order? 😱

theguardian.comA medieval manuscript has confounded scholars for centuries. Have they been reading it wrong all this time?Researchers argue incorrect binding of Voynich manuscript radically changes ideas about its drawings and indecipherable text

My worst gaff was during my PhD where I rebuilt a published model that now displayed hitherto unseen rich chaotic detail ... only to discover (thankfully just a few days later) that a poor choice of timestep had turned the differential equation model into, effectively, a difference equation model.

I guess a political movement that's gerrymandering willy-nilly, changing rules to decimate voter rolls of (presumed) opponents, using deepfake AI videos to have opponents say things they didn't, and generally treating democracy as a full-contact sport where only winning matters, then this fits well.

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I guess a political movement that's gerrymandering willy-nilly, changing rules to decimate voter rolls of (presumed) opponents, using deepfake AI videos to have opponents say things they didn't, and generally treating democracy as a full-contact sport where only winning matters, then this fits well.

View full thread

I guess a political movement that's gerrymandering willy-nilly, changing rules to decimate voter rolls of (presumed) opponents, using deepfake AI videos to have opponents say things they didn't, and generally treating democracy as a full-contact sport where only winning matters, then this fits well.

Your regular reminder that no matter how clear the evidence, fishermen steadfastly refuse to recognise the main problem they face is other fishermen. Pretending a natural predator outcompetes industrial fishing suits captains and politicians. Still, the Tragedy of the Commons has gotta tragedise. 🌊

theguardian.comTo cull or not to cull: Greenland debates fate of world’s slowest sharkAs trawlers compete with Greenland sharks for halibut and cod, conservationists and fishers clash over what to do about misunderstood species

As #ncview has hitherto had the world's worst colourmap by default (at least in the installs I've used), this is great news! 🌊 However, it does mean that we no longer have a ready "don't do this" exemplar to point at as a colourmap abomination.

Barry Baker@barrybaker.bsky.social

Been working on a reimagination of ncview. It led me to create github.com/bbakernoaa/n...

Breaking News: Well-made, self-contained #BBC drama with clear story arcs, a definite end, no postponed denouement, and no requirement for further continuity cancelled after just one series! Outrageous!

Alternatively: Climate refugee desperately rolls reproductive dice on Southern California coast 🌊 🐢 🌡️

The Washington Post@washingtonpost.com

A sea turtle has made its nest on the West Coast for the first time on record, laying eggs on a Southern California beach. The turtles are usually found in tropical waters, but a warming ocean by California has led to more unusual animal sightings.

So close ... This could have been a reference to a #SpermWhale rather than a #HumpbackWhale. For an #astronomy account, you've clearly not been leafing through your #HitchhikersGuide recently enough, @apod.shinyakato.dev! 😉 🐋 💐 ⬇️

🔭 A New Lunar Crater: McGetchin Image Credit: NASA/GSFC/Intuitive Machines Text: Keighley Rockcliffe (NASA GSFC, UMBC CSST, CRESST II) ap260923

I mean, how the hell does this make sense for helping to understand the patterns of spatial and temporal activity in the underlying ocean field here? Sure, it's free of certain cultural prejudices, and it emphasises "One Ocean", but only at the cost of throwing in the towel for coherence.

Anyway, I know this risks being murdered by fellow 🌊oceanographers, but it needs saying. And I say it as a "One Ocean" person who thinks the Southern Ocean is the best ocean because it gets to do its whole thing with minimal interference from the land. But, for the love of Poseidon, don't use this!

What a rabbit hole to fall down! A fantastic tale that both sheds light on a forgotten / overlooked (female, naturally 🤦) figure and illustrates the vicissitudes of life and contingencies of history. #VincentVanGogh

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🤦

Jason Kint@kint.bsky.social

Eye popping. Court just unsealed Summary Judgment motions in New York Times v OpenAI / Microsoft. Easy to see why the AI companies had so many redactions (pink). Their own people wrote the lede for NYT, the "largest theft of labor in human history"... "more and more substitutive..." /1

One might have expected a company made rich by selling an information-based product that it has defended against piracy for decades to understand "fair use" and "intellectual property theft" instinctively, but ...

As an ecological aside, before we all get too self-righteous beating up on LLMs, "destroys its supply chain" sounds like a pretty good summary of human civilization's current antics

I hate to say it, but UK union leaders, when faced with a choice that potentially threatens their influence, are pretty great at choosing the wrong answer. Even when - as here - they're good at spotting the serious threat to wider civic society that unlimited political donations presents.

theguardian.comUnion leaders resist political donations cap after Reform given £72mGeneral secretaries say union funding is ‘cleanest money in politics’ and different to that from wealthy individual donors

More accurately: Resource extraction business that pays no downstream externality costs and has no plan for future other than "continue extraction" urges govt to let it keep more profit behind fig leaf of "helping consumers" and continuance of "ignore socioeconomic / environmental costs" model

theguardian.comScrap windfall tax on oil and gas firms early, North Sea industry urgesLabour should replace levy in 2027 rather than 2030 as energy bills are poised to surge over the winter, says lobby group

Another generation, another #Commons. We're now treating low-Earth orbit just like we've been treating the atmosphere for decades. Short-term gains for some create long-term problems for us all. Again. But, of course, doing anything else would be government red-tape, regulation, anti-freedom, ...

Earth's orbital environment is a finite resource. Our latest Space Environment Report shows the long-term impact of our activities in space worsened by an order of magnitude in just one year. The time to tackle space debris is now. Read more: www.esa.int/Space_Safety... @operations.esa.int