Tootfinder

Really silly dream
I had a really silly #dream recently. I dreamt that my CFL broke. Or more specifically, it kept trying to turn out, successive parts of it were lighting up, then it all went off and tried again. And it looked like it had a bunch of cuts across it, and around these cuts little thunder sparks started appearing, like some kind of STALKER-like anomaly.
I finally flipped the switch, but the anomaly remained, and I wanted to get rid of it in case the sparks could jump onto my hardware and damage something. So I threw a metal bowl towards it, supposing the thunder would jump onto it. While it was flying near the anomaly, it slowed down and started turning back like a boomerang. On top of that, pieces of cat food (don't ask me why I threw a full bowl) were getting out of it and staying in the air levitating. When the bowl reached the floor and started turning again, Mr Ek came close to it and started levitating himself; he was sitting a few centimeters above the floor.
In the middle of all this, I've figured out I should record it. I took a bunch of photos with my phone, before I managed to switch to recording video.
Once I've recorded the fascinating flying bowls and levitating cat food, I needed to go back to discharging the thing. I threw a second metal bowl, and that one started levitating as well. I've figured out that's stupid, and I've found some big ass hammer with a metal end and a wooden handle. I held the end near the lamp to charge it, then tried to find something to discharge it to. I've tried some small stuff like the door handle, but obviously that wasn't sufficient. Finally, I've figured out to use the electricity box, since it is grounded. I held the hammer to it, watching sparks light the semi-darkness; I've recorded that as well.
And that's how much of it I remember.

Day 3: Octavia Butler.
Incredibly dark, graphic, and disturbing near-future science fiction, which has proved absolutely prophetic. In the 1990's she was writing about a charismatic Conservative Christian and white nationalist president elected in 2024, and the horrors his paramilitary followers would unleash, including forced labor & indoctrination camps. Did I mention those books include ebikes & pseudo-cellphones too? Characters fleeing north from a disastrous social collapse in Loss Angeles? This is "The Parable of the Sower" and "The Parable of the Talents" and the later was tragically rushed to an end because of Butler's declining health.
Her work deals unflinchingly with racism and the darker parts of society, and to those who might say "her depiction of social collapse is overblown," I'd say that while it's not literally the world we live in, it's *effectively* the world that the poorest of us live in. If you're a homeless undocumented latinx person in LA right now, I'm not sure how meaningfully different your world is from the one she depicts.
Her work comes with a strong content warning for lots of things, including racial violence, sexual abuse and slavery, including of children, animal harm, etc., so it's not for everyone. Reading it in 2023 was certainly an incredible trip. Her politics are really cool though; with explicit pro-LGBTQ themes and tinges of what might today be considered #SolarPunk.
#20WomenAuthors

Signatures of spin-glass superconductivity in nickelate (La, Pr, Sm)3Ni2O7 films
Haoran Ji, Zheyuan Xie, Yaqi Chen, Guangdi Zhou, Longxin Pan, Heng Wang, Haoliang Huang, Jun Ge, Yi Liu, Guang-Ming Zhang, Ziqiang Wang, Qi-Kun Xue, Zhuoyu Chen, Jian Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16412

Signatures of spin-glass superconductivity in nickelate (La, Pr, Sm)3Ni2O7 films
The discovery of Ruddlesden-Popper (R-P) nickelate superconductors under high pressure heralds a new chapter of high-transition temperature (high-Tc) superconductivity. Recently, ambient-pressure superconductivity is achieved in R-P bilayer nickelate thin films through epitaxial compressive strain, unlocking in-depth investigations into the superconducting characteristics. Here, through electrical transport study, we report the observation of spin-glass superconductivity with hysteretic magneto…

I am quite sick and tired of the D-party doing little more than useless posturing (such as writing letters to El Cheeto) or simply asking for money. (The purpose of that money is almost never sufficiently described, if the purpose is described at all.)
So it is good to hear that new candidates are arising who will challenge the fuddy-duddy-crats of the D-party. (My own Congress Critter included.)
Note to others: We need good, fresh faces filling elective posts at *all* levels -…

First Electron Acceleration in a Tunable-Velocity Laser Wakefield
Aaron Liberman, Anton Golovanov, Slava Smartsev, Anda-Maria Talposi, Sheroy Tata, Victor Malka
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21098

First Electron Acceleration in a Tunable-Velocity Laser Wakefield
We present the first experimental confirmation that a laser-wakefield accelerator produced by a flying focus pulse is able to maintain the coherent structures necessary to accelerate electrons to relativistic energies. Through a combination of spatio-temporal near-field shaping of the beam and focusing with an axiparabola - a long-focal-depth mirror that produces a quasi-Bessel beam - the propagation velocity of the wakefield is tuned to control the maximum electron energy achievable. The exper…

Filing: Newsmax agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $67M to settle a defamation lawsuit over false claims about the 2020 election, with $27M due this month (CNN)
http://www.cnn.com/2025/08/18/media/newsmax-dominion-settle-2020-election-defamatio…

Newsmax will pay $67 million to settle Dominion lawsuit over network’s 2020 election lies
Egregious lies about the 2020 presidential election are going to cost Newsmax millions.

Stability and optical quality of liquid crystal films as high repetition rate plasma mirrors in staged laser-plasma accelerators
A. Vazquez, A. Jewell, M. Cole, A. Abdi, T. K. Le, A. McIlvenny, N. Czapla, A. J. Gonsalves, K. Nakamura, D. W. Schumacher, Z. Eisentraut, C. B. Schroeder, J. van Tilborg, J. Osterhoff, E. Esarey, L. Obst-Huebl
https://

Stability and optical quality of liquid crystal films as high repetition rate plasma mirrors in staged laser-plasma accelerators
Staging multiple laser-plasma accelerators (LPAs), each driven by its own laser pulse, is a promising technique for reaching higher particle energies than achievable in a single LPA. However, introducing subsequent laser pulses for post-acceleration in staged LPA geometries presents a significant challenge for conventional optics. Due to the focused, high-intensity nature of the laser beam interacting with the electron beam, the fluence on the coupling mirror surpasses the damage threshold of a…

Effect of C additives with 0.5% in weight on structural, optical and superconducting properties of Ta-Nb-Hf-Zr-Ti high entropy alloy films
Tien Le, Yeonkyu Lee, Dzung T. Tran, Woo Seok Choi, Won Nam Kang, Jinyoung Yun, Jeehoon Kim, Jaegu Song, Yoonseok Han, Tuson Park, Duc H. Tran, Soon-Gil Jung, Jungseek Hwang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.2…

Effect of C additives with 0.5% in weight on structural, optical and superconducting properties of Ta-Nb-Hf-Zr-Ti high entropy alloy films
We investigated the superconducting (SC) properties of Ta-Nb-Hf-Zr-Ti high-entropy alloy (HEA) thin films with 0.5% weight C additives. The C additives stabilize the structural properties and enhance the SC critical properties, including $μ_0$Hc$_2$ (13.45 T) and Tc (7.5 K). The reflectance of the C-added HEA film is enhanced in the low-energy region, resulting in a higher optical conductivity, which is consistent with the lower electrical resistivity. In addition, we observed SC vortices in t…

THz electrodynamics and superconducting energy scales of ZrN thin films
Ozan Saritas, Frederik Bolle, Yayi Lin, Martin Dressel, Roman Potjan, Marcus Wislicenus, Andre Reck, Marc Scheffler
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17272

THz electrodynamics and superconducting energy scales of ZrN thin films
The terahertz (THz) properties of ZrN thin films grown with CMOS-techniques on industry-standard 300 mm silicon wafers are investigated in order to explore their superconducting behavior. The films have thicknesses ranging from 18 to 48 nm, and their critical temperatures Tc are between 5 and 7.3 K. We probe the real and imaginary parts of the complex dynamical conductivity sigma in the frequency range from 100 - 540 GHz (0.4 - 2.2 meV) and as a function of temperature. The experiments provide …

Unveiling the landscape of Mottness and its proximity to superconductivity in 4Hb-TaS$_2$
Ping Wu, Zhuying Wang, Yunmei Zhang, Ziyan Chen, Shuikang Yu, Wanru Ma, Min Shan, Zeyu Liang, Xiaoyu Wei, Junzhe Wang, Wanlin Cheng, Zuowei Liang, Xuechen Zhang, Tao Wu, Yoshinari Okada, Kun Jiang, Zhenyu Wang, Xianhui Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.…

Unveiling the landscape of Mottness and its proximity to superconductivity in 4Hb-TaS$_2$
Mott physics is at the root of a plethora of many-body quantum phenomena in quantum materials. Recently, the stacked or twisted structures of van der Waals (vdW) materials have emerged as a unique platform for realizing exotic correlated states in the vicinity of the Mott transition. However, the definitive feature of Mottness and how it rules the low-energy electronic state remain elusive and experimentally inaccessible in many interesting regimes. Here, we quantitatively describe a filling-co…