Syncthing uses a centralized discovery server to connect device IDs to IP addresses (although you can change this to point to your own discovery server, too).

I don’t know if Funkwhale has a similar option.

The paper and the phys.org article are a year old (which is maybe why it doesn’t seem so unexpected)—any guess why Popular Mechanics is only reporting on it now?

it’s Potter, not Lovecraft. More power to ’em, but I wish it were not in that notable transphobe’s world

Agreed, but Lovecraft is at least as problematical.

With the state of their habitat, who can blame them?

First paper I’ve seen where the list of authors is longer than the main content.

Yeah, it looks totally unexceptional to me.

If you haven’t seen enough sheep or goats to tell the two apart, maybe it’s your general unfamiliarity that’s tripping your uncanny sense?

The interesting part (which isn’t in the title or summary) is that the correlation reversed between the Roman and medieval eras—before 1,000 years ago, the wild and domestic populations were evolving in the same direction.

The pupils of sheep and goats can appear round when fully dilated. (I grew up on a farm with both.)

It looks like coins have been found on the sea routes that avoided the Parthian/Sassanian empires, but not on the overland routes. I’m guessing merchants exchanged their coins on the Roman/Persian frontier, east of which the Iranian coinage was the standard anyway; but in politically fractured places like southern India (south of the Kushans and Guptas), Roman coinage became the de facto currency of international trade.

So in other words, the distribution of coins outside the empire could reflect a regional demand for a standard international coinage, rather than Roman trade per se.

Wish I could see a map like this with the finds colored by mint date.

Yes—the Amber Road, the main trade route to the Baltic, did go through Central Europe.

And the reason trade went overland instead of by sea is because the Romans weren’t trading directly with the Baltic—they were paying soldiers stationed along the Danube and Rhine who then traded with neighboring peoples (and also directly subsidizing some frontier tribes), and the frontier peoples of Central Europe were then trading Roman gold for Baltic amber.

I don’t have a thermostat, but I have indoor and outdoor temp and humidity sensors, and a window position sensor. HA notifies me (via lighting color) if I should open the window because the outdoor conditions are better than indoors, or vice versa.

Take all this with a big grain of salt—it’s based on the oddly naïve assumption that the police are trying to catch the actual instigators, and that they need real evidence to get convictions.

In my experience, the objective of the police is to create a particular public narrative (which they present to the media after the fact): the police acted with restraint, respecting the peoples’ right to assemble, until a handful of agitators turned destructive and the demonstration threatened to escalate into a major riot—at which point they swiftly intervened, caught enough of the agitators to prevent an escalation, and saved (most of) the city’s businesses from destruction.

Now, they do want to intimidate the crowd to keep things from escalating too far, but they also want to allow for some destruction to legitimize their tactics and to support the argument that the police force needs more officers. So they leave the actual instigators alone, because they’re useful to their narrative (up to a point) and because the police don’t want to engage with a group prepared to fight back. (What they really want to avoid is a large crowd seeing the example of multiple people physically resisting the riot police without being immediately subdued.)

Instead, they target:

• Journalists, street medics, and legal observers, to remove the demonstrators’ sense of institutional support and legitimacy;
• Anyone whose mugshots will alienate public support—the homeless, minorities, and anyone whose face is vaguely weird or scary;
• Anyone unable to resist a violent beating (like the disabled, elderly, and children) for pure shock value and crowd intimidation; and
• People who came dressed in black bloc fashion, but are clearly by themselves, passive, and not part of an organized group.

These last are the only ones they will try to prosecute, and often their black bloc attire plus the testimony of cops who claim they saw them engaged in destructive activity will be enough to get a conviction. In this case the anonymity of their dress backfires, because the cops can pin the actions of anyone with similar clothing and body type on them by claiming they saw the act first-hand and caught the suspect immediately afterward.

Meanwhile, the real instigators are convinced that they escaped due to the brilliance of their tactics and not because the cops had no interest in catching them.

That said, all this goes out the window when dealing with Trump’s federal agents: they’re working from different narratives with no pretense of protecting businesses, maintaining local support, or respecting anyone’s rights.

So they culture different brain tissues and blood vessels separately and then glue them together manually. Are the resulting blood vessels fully functional, such that they could keep the organoid alive indefinitely?

40% of young adults who drank in the past year

Yeah—it looks like it’s a trend among drinkers, so it says nothing about the overall drinking rate.

Yeah—I just don’t understand how they disentangle the two if they’re both happening simultaneously.

I would have thought the volume of water retained on land by dams would be more than offset by the volume lost to melting glaciers.

Predicting with 64% accuracy how voters will respond to a potential campaign strategy would be enough to comfortably win an election.

The only time orcas see humans is when we’re flailing practically helplessly in the water—they’re probably trying to save us from extinction.

I presume the goal was to put the remains in low earth orbit, where they would eventually have reentered anyway—right?