Tootfinder

AAR 2025, Yogācāra Studies Unit, upcoming panels #acrel https://networks.h-net.org/group/announcements/20132871/aar-2025-yogacara-studies-unit-upco…

Scott helpfully reminds us of the differences between technical purity, semantics, and what actually matters to users in the context of — yes, really — paragraphs:
https://www.scottohara.me/blog/2024/08/29/paragraphs.html

Motional representation; the ability to predict odor characters using molecular vibrations
Yuki Harada, Shuichi Maeda, Junwei Shen, Taku Misonou, Hirokazu Hori, Shinichiro Nakamura
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16245

Motional representation; the ability to predict odor characters using molecular vibrations
The prediction of odor characters is still impossible based on the odorant molecular structure. We designed a CNN-based regressor for computed parameters in molecular vibrations (CNN\_vib), in order to investigate the ability to predict odor characters of molecular vibrations. In this study, we explored following three approaches for the predictability; (i) CNN with molecular vibrational parameters, (ii) logistic regression based on vibrational spectra, and (iii) logistic regression with molecu…

AAR 2025, Yogācāra Studies Unit, upcoming panels
https://ift.tt/FKOvzZI
ANN: US Naval History Conference: “Military and Politics: Proper Participation or Perilous…
via Input 4 RELCFP https:/…

This applies to all of us #Researchers - why do we keep flying all around the world just to give (or watch) some talks that could have been given or watched online???
Yes, in-person conferences are slightly better for "networking"... but is this really worth destroying the planet?!
Quoting @…

I need people to understand that a Lenovo ThinkPad and a Lenovo IdeaPad, or a Lenovo Yoga and a Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga, are totally different things, where one is a flimsy piece of shit and the other has a good chance of being a computer that you replace because it finally got too slow rather than because every part on it failed multiple times. ThinkPads (mostly) last.

And yes, you should feel like a piece of shit if someone calls you out on Nazi bootlicking.
That feeling is your brain telling you that you’re doing it wrong.
That feeling is what’s left of your conscience.

Day 30: Elizabeth Moon
This last spot (somehow 32 days after my last post, but oh well) was a tough decision, but Moon brings us full circle back to fantasy/sci-fi, and also back to books I enjoyed as a teenager. Her politics don't really match up to Le Guin or Jemisin, but her military experience make for books that are much more interesting than standard fantasy fare in terms of their battles & outcomes (something "A Song of Ice and Fire" achieved by cribbing from history but couldn't extrapolate nearly as well). I liked (and still mostly like) her (unironically) strong female protagonists, even if her (especially more recent) forays into "good king" territory leave something to be desired. Still, in Paksenarion the way we get to see the world from a foot-soldier's perspective before transitioning into something more is pretty special and very rare in fantasy (I love the elven ruins scene as Paks travels over the mountains as an inflection point). Battles are won or lost on tactics, shifting politics, and logistics moreso than some epic magical gimmick, which is a wonderful departure from the fantasy norm.
Her work does come with a content warning for rape, although she addresses it with more nuance and respect than any male SF/F author of her generation. Ex-evangelicals might also find her stuff hard to read, as while she's against conservative Christianity, she's very much still a Christian and that makes its way into her writing. Even if her (not bad but not radical enough) politics lead her writing into less-satisfying places at times, part of my respect for her comes from following her on Twitter for a while, where she was a pretty decent human being...
Overall, Paksenarrion is my favorite of her works, although I've enjoyed some of her sci-fi too and read the follow-up series. While it inherits some of Tolkien's baggage, Moon's ability to deeply humanize her hero and depict a believable balance between magic being real but not the answer to all problems is great.
I've reached 30 at this point, and while I've got more authors on my shortlist, I think I'll end things out tomorrow with a dump of also-rans rather than continuing to write up one per day. I may even include a man or two in that group (probably with at least non-{white cishet} perspective). Honestly, doing this challenge I first thought that sexism might have made it difficult, but here at the end I'm realizing that ironically, the misogyny that holds non-man authors to a higher standard means that (given plenty have still made it through) it's hard to think of male authors who compare with this group.
Looking back on the mostly-male authors of SF/F in my teenage years, for example, I'm now struggling to think of a single one whose work I'd recommend to my kids (having cheated and checked one of my old lists, Pratchett, Jaques, and Asimov qualify but they're outnumbered by those I'm now actively ashamed to admit I enjoyed). If I were given a choice between reading only non-men or non-woman authors for the rest of my life (yes I'm giving myself enby authors as a freebie; they're generally great) I'd very easily choose non-men. I think the only place where (to my knowledge) not enough non-men authors have been allowed through to outshine the fields of male mediocrity yet is in videogames sadly. I have a very long list of beloved games and did include some game designers here, but I'm hard-pressed to think of many other non-man game designers I'd include in the genuinely respect column (I'll include at least two tomorrow but might cheat a bit).
TL;DR: this was fun and you should do it too.
#30AuthorsNoMen

I remember one of Creed's song, 'One Last Breath'. The lyric is:
'Hold me now
I'm six feet from the edge and I'm thinking
Maybe six feet ain't so far down'
I feel, yes, it is my life. Physical exercise and sunshine are the twin angels who hold me from falling to the cliff.
Even so, falling to the cliff is a real danger which I often face. Why, since the angels do not always hold me tightly.
Six feet ain't so far down indee…

AAR 2025, Yogācāra Studies Unit, upcoming panels
https://ift.tt/b5T80JU
ANN: US Naval History Conference: “Military and Politics: Proper Participation or Perilous…
via Input 4 RELCFP https:/…