Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Mocht er nog ergens een goede imagodeskundige (niet deze) op zoek zijn naar een klusje dan kan die binnenkort even bellen met Camiel Eurlings. De CDA'er die zijn ministerspost verliet om meer tijd aan een gezin te besteden dat hij niet had, daarna opdook bij KLM, weer wegging wegens wanpresteren, een vrouwenmepper bleek, opstapte bij het IOC, daarna heel lang niet in het nieuws kwam en nu wel omdat hij een hele vlucht (met daarin onder meer het nichtje van Peter Bosz) heeft vertraagd door zijn powerbank te laten ontploffen, blijkt ook nog eens gewoon een hele vervelende man. Dat vertelt een ooggetuige aan onze favoriete Curaçaose website curacao.nu ("Ik wilde net mijn gin-tonic bestellen toen dat ding in de hens vloog", dat zijn quotes, red.), die de heer Eurlings netjes om wederhoor heeft gevraagd maar geen reactie ontving, waarschijnlijk omdat Camiel zijn hoofd te diep in zijn eigen bilnaad verstopt zit.

"Eurlings valt hem al vóór de brand op. Volgens de passagier wordt de oud-KLM-topman via een VIP-service aan boord gebracht en komen zowel de purser als de gezagvoerder hem begroeten. Omdat het toestel vertraging heeft, maakt Eurlings zich volgens de getuige zorgen over zijn aansluitende vlucht vanaf Bonaire. Hij laat naar diens waarneming meer dan eens de gezagvoerder bij zich komen om te vragen of hij die verbinding nog haalt. De passagier benadrukt dat Eurlings zich daarbij niet misdraagt. Wel krijgt hij de indruk dat de oud-KLM-topman zich bewust is van zijn vroegere positie binnen de maatschappij. „Hij misdroeg zich niet, maar hij beroept zich op een status die hij niet meer heeft”, zegt hij." 

Nee. Die status is ie wel een beetje kwijt ja.

stan.jernigan has added a photo to the pool:

I took this photo at the “Peace Museum” with my iPhone 17 Pro Max during a visit to the Peace Memorial Park in Nagasaki, Japan. If you have only one chance to visit Nagasaki, make it this one. It is truly a stunning place, surrounded by beautiful grounds. You won’t be disappointed…

stan.jernigan has added a photo to the pool:

I took this photo of the “Hope Monument” with my iPhone 17 Pro Max while visiting the Peace Park in Nagasaki, Japan. It is located near the Atomic Bomb Museum and the hypocenter. Built in August 2022 to mark the 25th anniversary of the High School Peace Messengers, it is made of red and black granite and features a central circular stone inscribed with the phrase "Though we are minor in power, we are not powerless…”

stan.jernigan has added a photo to the pool:

I took this photo of the pedestrian walkway along the waterfront at Nagasaki Seaside Park, known as the “Urakamigawa River Promenade,” with my iPhone 17 Pro Max during my visit to Nagasaki, Japan. The canal walk was calm, beautiful, and a delight to explore. It was one of the highlights of my visit…

Premier Jetten en enkele ministers probeerden de internationale positie van Nederland te versterken bij de VN in New York. Een kwestie van de lange adem, want „diplomatie is voortmodderen en ploeteren”. Na afloop moest Jetten terug naar Nederland om de binnenlandse politieke crisis te bezweren.

Populism isn’t just for right-wingers.

Het financieel uitgeknepen Nederlands Film Festival in Utrecht kreeg deze zomer veel kritiek. Met de relevante, maar zware openingsfilm ‘Downtown’ van Michiel van Erp kan het festival beginnen.

Microsoft has ended 40 years of single-occupancy for Excel cells and is now allowing multiple values to inhabit the same home. "One of the oldest rules of spreadsheets: one cell, one value," said Jake Armstrong, senior product manager for Excel, in a LinkedIn post. "No longer!" "I’m excited to announce a set of new features: Lists, Arrays in Cells and Nested Arrays in Excel." For the time being, this capability is only available in Microsoft Excel for Windows and Mac Beta Channels. And it is opt-in. To make the case for lists in cells, Armstrong in a blog post explained that each Excel project can have multiple owners. "Traditionally, you'd need separate columns, helper tables, or text like 'Carlos, Henrietta, Jacob' packed into a single cell," he explained. "With lists, you can keep those values together in one cell while still working with each item individually. Project owners stay connected to the project they belong to, while remaining available for filtering, calculations, and analysis." And he goes on to cite the potential utility of arrays in cells and nested arrays for expanding the kinds of information that Excel spreadsheets can represent. Armstrong's enthusiasm for multi-value cells comes with a caveat that this is a preview feature and shouldn't be used in important workbooks until general availability. Among those commenting on Armstrong's LinkedIn post, several people suggested the change has the potential to break things and hinder auditability by making business logic less visible. External software libraries that expect cell.value to return only a string, number, boolean, or date may need to be updated to handle a new data type – though Microsoft hasn't yet published how lists, arrays in cells, and nested arrays will be represented in .xlsx XML. This includes libraries like openpyxl, pandas, and calamine. The same goes for applications that import Excel data and don't yet have any concept of multi-value cells, like CSV export, Google Sheets, LibreOffice, and older Excel builds. And users of Excel may need to flatten lists and arrays to make multi-value cells work with existing features like PivotTables, at least until those features have been adjusted to accommodate the new cell structure. ®

Bit barn builders can rejoice, because this week the US Department of Energy (DoE) announced $5.25 billion — including $1.9 billion of federal funds and $3.35 billion in cost-share funding — to support dozens of grid improvements across the nation expected to unlock an additional 23 gigawatts of capacity. The program, which spans 31 specific projects in 26 states, is part of the department’s Speed to Power through Accelerated Reconductoring and other Key Advanced Transmission Technology Upgrades (SPARK) initiative with federal funding made available under the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) program. Uncle Sam sure does love his acronyms. “These investments will get more out of the infrastructure we already have, move more electricity across the grid, and help deliver affordable, reliable, and secure power that will fuel American prosperity for decades to come,” US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a statement. Rather than bringing new power generation capacity online, the projects aim to unlock additional capacity by reconductoring or rebuilding more than 1,500 miles of transmission lines and deploying grid-enhancing technologies (GETs), like sensors, power flow control devices, and analytical tools across 21,000 miles of American grid infrastructure. Additionally, participants working in areas prone to natural disasters will work to improve grid resilience and mitigate wildfire risks. The agency claims the program will help improve reliability and lower electricity costs for roughly 100 million Americans. And, to quote former Senator Mitt Romney, “corporations are people, my friend.” And, of course, bit barns are run by corporations. While the program should help to address power constraints faced by datacenter operators as they attempt to cash in on the AI boom, it may not be enough. Earlier this month, financial services biz Moody’s warned that the pace of datacenter construction exceeds the speed at which the US grid can add the required capacity. By 2030, Moody's estimates US datacenter electricity consumption will reach 426 TWh, nearly double the 2025 figure. This reality has prompted a flurry of investment in alternative energy technologies, including small modular reactors, geothermal generation, and even the recommissioning of aging nuclear plants. Meanwhile, chipmakers like Nvidia are pushing hard for smarter, more connected, and by extension more efficient datacenters that can release capacity back to the grid when necessary. ®

Requiem for a dream, Sarah Theresa Lee

Succulent, Tom Leighton

Eraserhead, Ethan Llewellyn

What if America Went Completely Dark? “We came up with some very astounding numbers. If you knock out nine total substations among those three grids, you can black out the entire United States.” And it could last months?

DEN HAAG (ANP) - Het kabinet nodigt twintig steden uit om ook Regenboogstad te worden. Dat kondigde staatssecretaris Judith Tielen (Emancipatie, VVD) vrijdag aan. Momenteel zijn er 56 steden die zich in samenwerking met het ministerie van Onderwijs, Cultuur en Wetenschap inzetten voor lhbti-personen.

Welke steden worden uitgenodigd, is nog niet bekend. Maar volgens de woordvoerder van Tielen hebben verschillende steden al aangeboden om mee te doen.

Samen met de Regenboogsteden wil het kabinet zorgen voor betere veiligheid van lhbti-personen. Daarvoor stelt het Rijk 2,6 miljoen euro extra beschikbaar. De samenwerking tussen het ministerie en gemeenten wordt voortgezet tot en met 2029.

Negatiever

De uitbreiding komt mede door het rapport van het Trimbos-instituut en Universiteit Utrecht waaruit bleek dat Nederlandse jongeren de afgelopen vier jaar negatiever zijn gaan denken over homoseksualiteit, meldt de woordvoerder van Tielen.

Ook komen er tien nieuwe 'Veilige Steden' bij. Die werken onder meer aan een veiliger uitgaansleven.

Supreme Court restores Trump's mass voter verification system - "The Department of Homeland Security last year redesigned a federal database known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, ​or SAVE, used to verify a person's citizenship and immigration status. The revamp allowed users to search many records at a time and to conduct searches using individuals' Social Security numbers. Since then, several Republican-led states have compared their voter lists to the database, and some voters flagged as potential noncitizens have had their registrations canceled." (previously)

Advocacy groups that sued to block the revised SAVE system said that the new approach ‌has ⁠resulted in people who were wrongfully identified as noncitizens being kicked off voter rolls. They have argued that SAVE can be outdated, meaning immigrants who have become naturalized US citizens and are thus eligible to vote are sometimes labeled as noncitizens. The modified system's overall error rate is not publicly known. The Department of Homeland Security and Justice Department did not provide that information when asked.

Government can use Social Security data to identify noncitizen voters, Supreme Court rules - "The government acknowledged internally that the database could misidentify eligible voters as noncitizens and has an error rate of as high as 81 percent in some localities, the plaintiffs wrote in a filing with the Supreme Court." US Supreme Court lets Trump deploy voter database ahead of midterms - "Lawyers for the voting rights groups said the Trump administration had bypassed Congress and violated federal laws protecting Americans from government over-reach to build the master database. 'Disregarding these laws, the government has recklessly created an error-laden master citizenship database that endangers millions of Americans' privacy and voting rights,' they said." also btw...

• Republican Panic Sets In Over Prospects of a Massive Blue Wave - "The warning signs are coming in quickly from across the map—much on it from red states where President Trump won comfortably just two years ago. Outside groups backing the GOP are now spending in the millions on Senate races in once-safe territories like Nebraska and Kansas; South Carolina, Mississippi, South Dakota, and Arkansas are all drawing renewed attention amid fears of a historically massive blue wave."
• Cook nudges three Senate races toward Democrats - "In the latest Cook ratings, Kansas moved from 'Likely Republican' to 'Lean Republican.' South Carolina shifted from 'Solid Republican' to 'Likely Republican.' Georgia and the seat held by Sen. Jon Ossoff (D) changed from 'Lean Democrat' to 'Likely Democrat.' There are six Republican-held Senate seats rated by Cook as a 'Toss Up' or better for Democrats. The Georgia shift makes a Republican pickup there less likely, while the Kansas move expands the map of competitive seats for Democrats."
• Republicans may have gerrymandered their way into a Texas-sized Latino problem - "A September poll of 1,000 Latinos in Texas conducted for Cook Political and TelevisaUnivision found that 18% of Latinos who voted for Trump no longer support him, and almost two-thirds of Latino voters would be less likely to vote for candidates who support Trump's immigration policies... The risk that redistricting backfires is particularly clear in the 15th District, which in its ⁠reconfigured form would have given Trump an 18-point win in 2024, compared with a two-point margin in 2020 and a 14-point loss in his first election in 2016."
• Texas Republicans Splinter as MAGA Candidates Test Party Limits - "Paxton is trailing Talarico in polls with less than six weeks until Election Day, and has been dogged by allegations of bribery, misuse of power, and adultery, as well as criticism from other senior Texas Republicans."
• 2026 Congressional Forecast - "FiftyPlusOne's election forecast model has Democrats at a 98% chance of winning the house & a 69% chance of winning the senate."
• 3 big questions as GOP nears moment of truth - "GOP groups had spent more than $450 million through Sept. 23, more than twice what Democrats had spent, according to campaign finance expert Rob Pyers. But Republican strategists say they aren't sure yet whether the barrage is working amid voter anger over high prices, data centers and Trump's war in Iran."
• Why are workers feeling so stressed? Maybe because labor's share of the economy is at a record low - "There was a brief moment at the tail end of the pandemic, already forgotten, at which it seemed that American workers had finally grasped the reins of power, with wage gains rising and organizing strength entering a new era. The moment is forgotten today because whatever leverage labor thought it had acquired evaporated rapidly. And recently it has been scraping along the bottom." (To Rule in Hell)
• Democrats running for office turn sharply against their own party - "This surge in political friendly fire reflects the extraordinary level of anger candidates are seeing from their voters toward the Democratic Party and the national political establishment."
• The New American Dream Is Enjoying Life - "About 72% across generations say they're willing to make slower progress on financial goals to spend time with family, take vacations and prioritize meaningful experiences. Seven in 10 Americans have privately opted out of something in the past year because of financial constraints, with 41% of Gen Zers saying they had claimed to be busy to avoid a get-together that they couldn't afford." (In the Land of Billionaire Barbarians, The rising price tag of romance)
• Americans' embrace of socialism reaches record high - "The share of Americans who feel positively about socialism jumped from 39% to 43% in the past year. That shift came entirely from independents: positive views of socialism rose 8 percentage points among that group since last year, to 45%. Since 2010, favorability has climbed among Democrats from 50% to 65%. Views toward socialism are lowest among Republicans (14%), but even that has ticked up since 2019 (9%)."
• YouGov poll: "likely voters prefer Democratic socialists over MAGA Republicans by an 18-point margin."

Chris Medland picks out five key things to keep an eye on when the lights go out on race day at the Baku City Circuit.