Tootfinder

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

Quantum melting a Wigner crystal into Hall liquids
Aidan P. Reddy, Liang Fu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21000 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21000

Quantum melting a Wigner crystal into Hall liquids
Recent experiments have shown that, counterintuitively, applying a magnetic field to a Wigner crystal can induce quantum Hall effects. In this work, using variational Monte Carlo, we show that magnetic fields can melt zero-field Wigner crystals into integer quantum Hall liquids. This melting originates from quantum oscillations in the liquid's ground state energy, which develops downward cusps at integer filling factors due to incompressibility. Our calculations establish a range of densities i…

Kinda wish I lived in a place that had this level of #bicycle #infrastructure
https://…

Kinda wish I lived in a place that had this level of #bicycle #infrastructure
https://…

An absolute curtain of rain closed in and caused a delay. It soon passed and the game was able to resume.
At 3-2, it was a narrower victory for the home team, the Salem Red Sox, than it ought to have been. The Carolina Mudcats had 6 errors. There could have been a 7th, but the scorers must have felt some charity for a duffed ball at 3B and let it slide.
Single A baseball is that of dream chasers and prospect pitching, not necessarily brilliant talent and discipline.

Electric-field control of two-dimensional ferromagnetic properties by chiral ionic gating
Hideki Matsuoka, Amaki Moriyama, Tomohiro Hori, Yoshinori Tokura, Yoshihiro Iwasa, Shu Seki, Masayuki Suda, Naoya Kanazawa
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20723

Electric-field control of two-dimensional ferromagnetic properties by chiral ionic gating
Chiral molecular systems offer unique pathways to control spin and magnetism beyond conventional symmetry operations. Here, we demonstrate that chiral ionic liquids enable electric-field modulation of two-dimensional (2D) ferromagnetism in FeSi(111) thin films via electric double-layer transistor (EDLT) gating. FeSi hosts chemically-stable, surface-confined ferromagnetism without bulk moments, making the interfacial spins highly responsive to chiral-ion adsorption. Using both achiral and chiral…

A Lightweight Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol Design for FANET
Yao Wu, Ziye Jia, Qihui Wu, Yian Zhu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17409 https://arxi…

A Lightweight Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol Design for FANET
The advancement of low-altitude intelligent networks enables unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) interconnection via flying ad-hoc networks (FANETs), offering flexibility and decentralized coordination. However, resource constraints, dynamic topologies, and UAV operations in open environments present significant security and communication challenges. Existing multi-factor and public-key cryptography protocols are vulnerable due to their reliance on stored sensitive information, increasing the risk of…

Following the expected mention of technology neutrality with regard to the 2035 review of CO₂ standards for cars, the automotive section of Von der Leyen's State of the Union speech ends on a positive note:
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/SPEECH…

Upstream motion of oil droplets in co-axial Ouzo flow due to Marangoni forces
Steffen Bisswanger, Duarte Rocha, Sebastian Dehe, Christian Diddens, Tobias Baier, Detlef Lohse, Steffen Hardt
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15716

Upstream motion of oil droplets in co-axial Ouzo flow due to Marangoni forces
To explore the physicochemical hydrodynamics of phase-separating ternary liquids (Ouzo-type), a binary oil-ethanol mixture is introduced into a co-flowing stream of water. Oil droplets nucleate at the interface between the two liquids, leading to a larger oil droplet interacting with the ethanol-rich jet. Although buoyancy forces and hydrodynamic drag forces push the droplet in downstream direction, we observe an upstream motion. Using computational fluid dynamics simulations of a simplified mo…

I watched "Thief" (1981), directed by Michael Mann. Sort of a heist movie, sort of a mob movie, but aspires to be a Cassavetes movie. An interesting mix, and really well shot. Ryan Coogler said this was the film that made "wet-downs" a thing, and judging by all of the wet streets & sidewalks, I believe it.
Features Willie Nelson in a minor role. Also features a soundtrack by Tangerine Dream.