Tootfinder

🔥 Grand Canyon’s Dragon Bravo megafire shows the growing wildfire threat to water systems
https://theconversation.com/grand-canyons-dragon-bravo-megafire-shows-the-growing-wildfire-threat-to-water-systems-263104…

Grand Canyon’s Dragon Bravo megafire shows the growing wildfire threat to water systems
Water systems are vulnerable to melting plastic components, toxic contamination and failures that can leave firefighters without flowing water.

"""
In melancholy, the spirits are carried away by an agitation, but a weak agitation that lacks power or violence, a sort of impotent upset that follows neither a particular path nor the aperta opercula [open ways], but traverses the cerebral matter constantly creating new pores. Yet the spirits do not wander far on the new paths they create, and their agitation dies down rapidly, as their strength is quickly spent and motion comes to a halt: ‘non longe perveniunt’ [they do not reach far]. A trouble of this nature, common to all delirium, does not have the power to produce on the surface of the body the violent movements or the cries to be observed in mania and frenzy. Melancholy never attains frenzy; it is a madness always at the limits of its own impotence. That paradox is explained by the secret alterations in the spirits. Ordinarily, they travel with the speed and instantaneous transparency of rays of light, but in melancholy they become weighed down with night, becoming ‘obscure, thick and dark’, and the images of things that they bring before consciousness are ‘in a shadow, or covered with darkness’. As a result they move more slowly, and are more like a dark, chemical vapour than pure light. This chemical vapour is acid in nature, rather than sulphurous or alcoholic, for in acid vapours the particles are mobile and incapable of repose, but their activity is weak and without consequence. When they are distilled, all that remains in the still is a kind of insipid phlegm. Acid vapours, therefore, are taken to have the same properties as melancholy, whereas alcoholic vapours, which are always ready to burst into flames, are more related to frenzy, and sulphurous vapours bring on mania, as they are agitated by continuous, violent movement. If the ‘formal reason and causes’ of melancholy were to be sought, it made sense to look for them in the vapours that rose up from the blood to the head, and which had degenerated into ‘an acetous or sharp distillation’. A cursory glance seems to indicate that a melancholy of spirits and a whole chemistry of humours lies behind Willis’ analyses, but in fact his guiding principle mostly reflects the immediate qualities of the melancholic illness: an impotent disorder, and the shadow that comes over the spirit with an acrid acidity that slowly corrodes the heart and the mind. The chemistry of acids is not an explanation of the symptoms, but a qualitative option: a whole phenomenology of melancholic experience.
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

Microsoft's FY 2025 report excludes the names of rivals, breaking from a common industry practice; its last report designated 25 companies as competitors (Jordan Novet/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/31/microsoft-competitors-filings.html

Microsoft ends tradition of naming competitors in regulatory filings
Apple, Meta and Nvidia still mention their rivals in annual reports. It's a practice that Alphabet, Amazon and Tesla gave up years ago.

Investigating the Cognitive Response of Brake Lights in Initiating Braking Action Using EEG
Ramaswamy Palaniappan, Surej Mouli, Howard Bowman, Ian McLoughlin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03274

Investigating the Cognitive Response of Brake Lights in Initiating Braking Action Using EEG
Half of all road accidents result from either lack of driver attention or from maintaining insufficient separation between vehicles. Collision from the rear, in particular, has been identified as the most common class of accident in the UK, and its influencing factors have been widely studied for many years. Rear-mounted stop lamps, illuminated when braking, are the primary mechanism to alert following drivers to the need to reduce speed or brake. This paper develops a novel brain response appr…

TiPP: Ausstellung in #Amsterdam ab 26. September
'Für Eye stellt die britische Schauspielerin Tilda Swinton eine einzigartige und fesselnde Ausstellung mit neuen Arbeiten zusammen.' #TildaSwinton

Tilda Swinton | Eye Filmmuseum
The museum for film and the art of the moving image in The Netherlands. Visit the exhibition or cinema and discover our collection with more than 60.000 films.

The US is set to raise the number of military vessels deployed near Venezuela to eight this week,
which Maduro described as
“the greatest threat that has been seen on our continent in the last 100 years.”
Following an authorization by Trump to use military force against Latin American drug cartels,
the Associated Press and CBS News report that “the US Navy now has two Aegis guided-missile destroyers — the USS Gravelyand the USS Jason Dunham — in the Caribbean,
a…

Maduro Says US Pointing '1,200 Missiles' at Venezuela After Trump Sends More Warships | Common Dreams
In a press conference on Monday, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro said the US has "1,200 missiles" pointed at the country after Trump sent more warships. One US defense official said Trump is gearing up for "Noriega part two," suggesting regime change.

On the inextensibility assumption in the stability of elastic rings: overhaul of a traditional paradigm
Federico Guarracino, Ida Mascolo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02738 https:/…

On the inextensibility assumption in the stability of elastic rings: overhaul of a traditional paradigm
One of the oldest and most common structural engineering issues is the elastic buckling of circular rings under external pressure, which has a fundamental importance in a number of applications in general mechanics, engineering and bio-physics, just to name a few. Levy is considered to have provided the first significant solution to this problem in 1884, and most stability text-books make reference to this original solution, which is based on the Euler-Bernoulli beam model. Following this incip…

This does rather explain why going to the cinema to watch a real film (köln 75 5* huge recommend) last weekend was such a brilliant experience. The streamers have deadened the experience of watching at home...
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/aug/28/bland-easy-to-follow-for-fans-of-everything-what-has-the-netflix-algorithm-done-to-our-films

Unifi3D: A Study on 3D Representations for Generation and Reconstruction in a Common Framework
Nina Wiedemann, Sainan Liu, Quentin Leboutet, Katelyn Gao, Benjamin Ummenhofer, Michael Paulitsch, Kai Yuan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02474

Unifi3D: A Study on 3D Representations for Generation and Reconstruction in a Common Framework
Following rapid advancements in text and image generation, research has increasingly shifted towards 3D generation. Unlike the well-established pixel-based representation in images, 3D representations remain diverse and fragmented, encompassing a wide variety of approaches such as voxel grids, neural radiance fields, signed distance functions, point clouds, or octrees, each offering distinct advantages and limitations. In this work, we present a unified evaluation framework designed to assess t…

So @… posted his top 10 favorite movies, and I briefly cobbled together a list of what currently approximate my top 10 favorites. These stick with me.
Fair warning, and I'm aware that a couple of these films are stupid as fuck, but that doesn't stop me from loving them. 😂
Pink Flamingos
Total Recall
Conan the Barbarian
They Liv…