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

We distinguish "personal unfairness",
-- the view that one’s own economic situation is unfair,
from "social unfairness",
-- the view that the economic situation of others in society is unfair.
Uncertainties associated with the transition to a globalized knowledge economy heighten people’s feelings of personal unfairness
Feelings of personal unfairness increase support for the "populist right"
and feelings about social unfairn…

Left-Wing Populism vs. Right-Wing Populism - What's the Difference? | This vs. That
What's the difference between Left-Wing Populism and Right-Wing Populism? Left-wing populism and right-wing populism are both political movements that aim to...

The decay of values continues...
https://climatejustice.social/@PeterRu/115277445442427554

★ Do you get excited or upset about AWS SCPs, or GCP Org Policies?
★ Do you have experience developing software to solve cloud security challenges?
★ Do you downplay your cloud security knowledge but actually you know a lot of niche oddities of cloud IAM?
★ Do you like working in diverse security teams that care about your wellbeing?
★ Do you want to get paid to work on cloud security for one of the most sophisticated AWS environments in the world?
I'm hiring a…

Security Software Engineer (L5), Cloud Infrastructure Security | USA - Remote | Netflix
Netflix is one of the world's leading entertainment services, with over 300 million paid memberships in over 190 countries enjoying TV series, films and games across a wide variety of genres and languages. Members can play, pause and resume watching as much as they want, anytime, anywhere, and can change their plans at any time. Netflix operates our streaming service control plane on Amazon Web Services, which has led to one of the largest and most sophisticated AWS environments in the world. C…

Desiderata for a biomedical knowledge network: opportunities, challenges and future Directions
Chunlei Wu, Hongfang Liu, Jason Flannick, Mark A. Musen, Andrew I. Su, Lawrence Hunter, Thomas M. Powers, Cathy H. Wu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22424

Desiderata for a biomedical knowledge network: opportunities, challenges and future Directions
Knowledge graphs, collectively as a knowledge network, have become critical tools for knowledge discovery in computable and explainable knowledge systems. Due to the semantic and structural complexities of biomedical data, these knowledge graphs need to enable dynamic reasoning over large evolving graphs and support fit-for-purpose abstraction, while establishing standards, preserving provenance and enforcing policy constraints for actionable discovery. A recent meeting of leading scientists di…

CAI Fluency: A Framework for Cybersecurity AI Fluency
V\'ictor Mayoral-Vilches, Jasmin Wachter, Crist\'obal R. J. Veas Chavez, Cathrin Schachner, Luis Javier Navarrete-Lozano, Mar\'ia Sanz-G\'omez
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13588

CAI Fluency: A Framework for Cybersecurity AI Fluency
This work introduces CAI Fluency, an an educational platform of the Cybersecurity AI (CAI) framework dedicated to democratizing the knowledge and application of cybersecurity AI tools in the global security community. The main objective of the CAI framework is to accelerate the widespread adoption and effective use of artificial intelligence-based cybersecurity solutions, pathing the way to vibe-hacking, the cybersecurity analogon to vibe-coding. CAI Fluency builds upon the Framework for AI F…

Join us today for 'Relational Ecologies of Knowledge and Practice: A Workshop of the Epistemic Justice Network', following from the UNESCO Chairs Forum in Dakar.
UKFIET Conference in Oxford, Wednesday, 17 September, 13:30-15:00
We will brainstorm actionable ideas for achieving epistemic justice as we face broader global challenges of opposition, to imagine visions and learn from lived experiences of reparative partnerships for research and knowledge co-creation.

Experimental overview on the charmed baryon decays
Pei-Rong Li, Xiao-Rui Lyu, Yangheng Zheng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19141 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19…

Experimental overview on the charmed baryon decays
The charmed baryon was first observed experimentally in 1975, one year after the charm quark's confirmation via the discovery of the $J/ψ$ particle. Studying charmed baryon decays provides a pathway to investigate both strong and weak interactions, leveraging the weak decays of the embedded charm quark. However, for approximately three decades following its discovery, experimental knowledge of charmed baryons remained significantly limited compared to those of the hidden-charm $ψ$ mesons and …

The maximum number of triangles in $K_{1,s,t}$-free graphs
Asier Calbet, Ritesh Goenka
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10611 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10611

The maximum number of triangles in $K_{1,s,t}$-free graphs
We consider the following generalized Turán problem: For $2 \le s \le t$, what is the maximum number of triangles in a $K_{1,s,t}$-free graph on $n$ vertices? The previously best known lower and upper bounds are $Ω(n^2)$ and $o(n^{3-1/s})$, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, all known proofs of the upper bound use the triangle removal lemma. We give a new elementary proof that avoids the use of the triangle removal lemma and improves the upper bound to $O\left(n^{3-1/s}(\log n)^{-1+1…

Thyme: Think Beyond Images
Yi-Fan Zhang, Xingyu Lu, Shukang Yin, Chaoyou Fu, Wei Chen, Xiao Hu, Bin Wen, Kaiyu Jiang, Changyi Liu, Tianke Zhang, Haonan Fan, Kaibing Chen, Jiankang Chen, Haojie Ding, Kaiyu Tang, Zhang Zhang, Liang Wang, Fan Yang, Tingting Gao, Guorui Zhou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11630

Thyme: Think Beyond Images
Following OpenAI's introduction of the ``thinking with images'' concept, recent efforts have explored stimulating the use of visual information in the reasoning process to enhance model performance in perception and reasoning tasks. However, to the best of our knowledge, no open-source work currently offers a feature set as rich as proprietary models (O3), which can perform diverse image manipulations and simultaneously enhance logical reasoning capabilities through code. In this paper, we make…