Tootfinder

I’ve been doing an unholy amount of weeding recently and keep seeing these little spiders fleeing my progress. Many are carrying a tiny white ball and so I looked them up out of curiosity.
Apparently they are “Rabid Wolf Spiders”, which sounds like they themselves got to pick it out and sought something impressively terrifying so that humans would leave them alone. It’s certainly a misnomer since spiders cannot be rabid.
The white ball is an egg sac.

An early morning alone on the banks of the (still young) Isar river some weeks ago... Really more "flow" rather than #WaterfallWednesday, but I just absolutely cherish places and moments like this & feeling so privileged being able to experience these after decades of living in large cities... (each time also a reminder how much we stand to lose...)

A Comparative Approach to Assessing Linguistic Creativity of Large Language Models and Humans
Anca Dinu, Andra-Maria Florescu, Alina Resceanu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12039

A Comparative Approach to Assessing Linguistic Creativity of Large Language Models and Humans
The following paper introduces a general linguistic creativity test for humans and Large Language Models (LLMs). The test consists of various tasks aimed at assessing their ability to generate new original words and phrases based on word formation processes (derivation and compounding) and on metaphorical language use. We administered the test to 24 humans and to an equal number of LLMs, and we automatically evaluated their answers using OCSAI tool for three criteria: Originality, Elaboration, …

All Eyes, no IMU: Learning Flight Attitude from Vision Alone
Jesse J. Hagenaars, Stein Stroobants, Sander M. Bohte, Guido C. H. E. De Croon
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11302

All Eyes, no IMU: Learning Flight Attitude from Vision Alone
Vision is an essential part of attitude control for many flying animals, some of which have no dedicated sense of gravity. Flying robots, on the other hand, typically depend heavily on accelerometers and gyroscopes for attitude stabilization. In this work, we present the first vision-only approach to flight control for use in generic environments. We show that a quadrotor drone equipped with a downward-facing event camera can estimate its attitude and rotation rate from just the event stream, e…

Jaime Alanís died a day after a frenzied immigration raid of Glass House Farms in Ventura county
where authorities arrested at least 200 workers.
The 57-year-old, who was from the town of Huajúmbaro in Michoacšn, Mexico, is the first known person to die during the Trump administration’s enhanced immigration enforcement operations in southern California.
The federal government’s ramped up enforcement activities have brought chaos across southern California as Ice agents des…

Beyond the MaxCut problem in $H$-free graphs
Zhihan Jin, Aleksa Milojevi\'c, Istv\'an Tomon
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13298 https://

Beyond the MaxCut problem in $H$-free graphs
In a recent breakthrough, Zhang proves that if $G$ is an $H$-free graph with $m$ edges, then $G$ has a cut of size at least $m/2+c_Hm^{0.5001}$, making a significant step towards a well known conjecture of Alon, Bollobás, Krivelevich and Sudakov. We show that the methods of Zhang can be further boosted, and prove the following strengthening. If $G$ is a graph with $m$ edges and no clique of size $m^{1/2-δ}$, then $G$ has a cut of size at least $m/2+m^{1/2+\varepsilon}$ for some $\varepsilon=\…

Demoralization isn’t just exhaustion, rather it’s the feeling that our efforts don't matter which brews from the lack of communal support. full article @ https://www.brichapman.com/p/the-demoralization-epidemic

the demoralization epidemic
you are not meant to do this alone 🤝

Improving Surgical Risk Prediction Through Integrating Automated Body Composition Analysis: a Retrospective Trial on Colectomy Surgery
Hanxue Gu, Yaqian Chen, isoo Lee, Diego Schaps, Regina Woody, Roy Colglazier, Maciej A. Mazurowski, Christopher Mantyh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11996

Improving Surgical Risk Prediction Through Integrating Automated Body Composition Analysis: a Retrospective Trial on Colectomy Surgery
Objective: To evaluate whether preoperative body composition metrics automatically extracted from CT scans can predict postoperative outcomes after colectomy, either alone or combined with clinical variables or existing risk predictors. Main outcomes and measures: The primary outcome was the predictive performance for 1-year all-cause mortality following colectomy. A Cox proportional hazards model with 1-year follow-up was used, and performance was evaluated using the concordance index (C-index…

Steelers DB, West Virginia alum Beanie Bishop disrespects Pitt logo following recent practice

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/steeler

Allen’s Hummingbird flying up to Mexican Bush Sage. LA Arboretum, Arcadia, California, USA. July, 2025. #laarboretum #bird #birds