Tootfinder

Day 6: Kamome Shirahama
Before I wander much father afield, I'd be remiss not to include at least one Mangaka (I've got 8 on my planning list; if you think Manga is pushing it just wait until you see what the next few days have in store).
I'm currently following "Witch Hat Atelier," and it's absolutely amazing in several dimensions: first class world-building, deep philosophical themes, nuanced diverse cast, tightly-constructed interwoven plots, deep mysteries that keep everything churning and show up in unexpected places, absolutely stellar art both in terms of in-panel depictions and page layouts (some are Watchmen-quality), especially if you are sartorially inclined, and general kindness of its core messages. This is a series I wish every programmer would read, because it includes excellent advice about software design in multiple ways (did I mention there's an intricate and logical magic system within which the main character innovates in legible-to-the-reader-as-innovation ways?). Also, I bet I would have enjoyed this just a much as a 10-year-old as I'm enjoying it in my 30's, which is something that takes well-honed skill to pull off.
Shirahama is a master of her craft, and I'm honestly kinda surprised to see Witch Hat is only her second series. Definitely thinking how I can get my hands on her earlier work in English.
#20AuthorsNoMen

The DOGE team at SSA might have violated FISMA and other laws by not following security protocols as spelled out in NIST's SP 800-53, which are mandatory for all government agencies.
It's no surprise then that a whistleblower is warning that we have lost the ability to see who is accessing 300 million Americans' most sensitive information after DOGE moved SSA data to their own Amazon cloud instance.
Thanks to John Skinner, former project lead for 18F, for his expert i…

Whistleblower: DOGE put Social Security database covering 300 million Americans on insecure cloud
The complaint accuses DOGE of bypassing security protocols to move Americans’ sensitive personal data outside federal oversight and onto an insecure AWS cloud instance, potentially violating established security practices and several laws.

Hierarchy and ranking in pairwise sports contests
Bogd\'an Asztalos, Boldizs\'ar Bal\'azs, Gergely Palla, Tam\'as Vicsek
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19848 https:/…

Hierarchy and ranking in pairwise sports contests
Ranking athletes by their performance in competitions and tournaments is common in every popular sport and has significant benefits that contribute to both the organization and strategic aspects of competitions. Although rankings are perhaps the most concise and most straightforward representation of the relative strength among the competitors, beyond this one-dimensional characterization, it is also possible to capture the relationships between athletes in greater detail. Following this approa…

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

On the first Neumann eigenvalue for critical points of a weighted area functional with asymptotically flat ends
A. L. Mart\'inez-Trivi\~no
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20955 h…

On the first Neumann eigenvalue for critical points of a weighted area functional with asymptotically flat ends
In the following work, we obtain a lower bound for the first Neumann eingevalue of the drift Laplacian $Δ^φ$ for a family of properly embedded $[φ,\vec{e}_{3}]$-minimal surfaces in $\mathbb{R}^3$ with concave function $φ$ and asymptotically flat ends. As application, we obtain a control on the topology for that surfaces with finite total curvature. The strategy will consists in an integration of the Bouchner's formula by the works of A. Lichnerowicz and S. Brendle, R. Tsiamis and relate sai…

Since leaving the US, things have gotten a lot better for me but it's still hard existing under capitalism. Just being a human is hard enough, but parenting is an order or magnitude harder.
Even here, with all the complexity of being an immigrant, it's somehow still less emotionally challenging than being in the US.
I wrote up a reflection on some of my feelings before leaving tangled up with some of the challenges I still have. I hope this helps some folks feel less alone, or makes it easier for other folks to understand why some parents are having a hard time.
CW: just.... Lots... Death, gun violence, trauma, etc
#USPol

Here are two of the #photos of last Saturday's hike. We went to the #wallberg above the #tegernsee .
Usually it's a quite crowded way because it's easily reachable and really very sc…

Series C, Episode 02 - Powerplay
DAYNA: Avon, what are you doing?
AVON: In a way, I am making us invisible.
[Scene - the corridor with the hatch, Tarrant, Klegg, Harmon and a guard]
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/302/190 B7B6

Currently testing Star Wars Jedi: Survivor with FSR 4 on Linux (thanks to Optiscaler oc). I must say I'm finally enjoying this and any other game I have tried so far to the fullest. There's just this nagging feeling of resentment that AMD doesn't seem to be in a hurry to do their own job and release officially FSR 4 for RDNA 3 on Windows and Linux, hence the turncoat hesitations. For what it's worth, I'd choose Linux over Windows any day.
Comments are from this vide…

Line bundles and exact sequences for the ideal class group and the Picard group
Abolfazl Tarizadeh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19889 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2…

Line bundles and exact sequences for the ideal class group and the Picard group
For any extension of commutative rings $A\subseteq B$ we first naturally define a group $\Cl(A,B)$, that we call the ideal class group of this extension (we will see that both the classical ideal class group and, surprisingly, the Picard group are special cases of this structure), then, as a first main result, we obtain the following exact sequence of Abelian groups: ...