Lunc 🪮

More than 150 years after the Navajo Nation signed treaties with the United States establishing its reservation and recognizing its sovereignty, the country’s largest tribe still struggles to secure the water guaranteed by those agreements.

In a 5-4 decision, the court denied the Navajo Nation’s request that the federal government be forced to act in a timely manner to help the tribe quantify, settle and access its water rights... ... Writing for the majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the tribe’s treaties do not impose “a duty on the United States to take affirmative steps to secure water for the Tribe.”

Link to the PDF going over the 5-4 SCOTUS decision.

When the researchers drafted their report, they included a key suggestion: The DOT should craft federal regulations requiring side guards.

But that recommendation generated intense resistance, both internally, from department officials who challenged their findings, and externally, from trucking industry lobbyists.

... the department supervisor overseeing the project had a very direct message for the researchers. “PLEASE delete any mention of a recommendation to develop … any regulation,” he wrote in an email. “An industry standard is acceptable, but no mention of ‘regulation.’”

The industry objections resulted in a remarkable concession from the department: It allowed trucking company lobbyists to review the researchers’ preliminary report and provide comments on it.

By the time of its release in 2020, the report had been dramatically rewritten, stripped of its key conclusions — including the need to federally mandate side guards — and cut down by nearly 70 pages.

Stanford has a tool to calculate travel times in the Roman Empire. A great resource to get a better perspective of the world they lived in. I like to use it for writing stories in settings with similar technology levels, to get an idea of how quickly people should be able to travel.

For anybody that might not have heard, Harvard University launched Intro to Programming with Python last year, which is a free 9-week course for complete beginners and includes a free certificate of completion at the end.

It's taught by the same professor who teaches Harvard's Intro to CS, the university's most-popular on-campus course.

The course is very hands-on with weekly problem sets and a final project that you complete through an in-browser code editor.

You can also take the course via edX but there, the certificate costs $199. If you take it through Harvard OpenCourseWare, the course is exactly the same but the certificate is entirely free.

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” ― Douglas Adams

A really cool site I ran across while going through my saved Reddit posts before deleting my account that I thought this community would enjoy 😄

Empusa pennata, or the conehead mantis, is a species of praying mantis in genus Empusa native to the Mediterranean Region.

An awesome post with tons of super informative threads that I thought this community could get a lot of value from. I would hate for this info to be lost so I made sure to archive it and share it here in the Fediverse, enjoy! 😄

Good read on the attainment of perfection and accepting our flaws.

I think this is the best place to post this, but I was going through my saved posts before deleting my Reddit account and thought that a lot of writers on Lemmy/Fediverse might be able to enjoy this one.

There's some great tips in these comments but this archive snapshot will make sure that information isn't lost.

Feel free to add your own tips here in the Fediverse as well!