Tootfinder

Earlier today I was at the post office, and overheard the clerk give the following advise to a gentleman who was seeking information on applying for a passport:
“Do not Google USPS passport, you’ll end up in a world of pain you don’t want.”
It’s unfortunate how, even as a seasoned technology professional myself, I think I actually agree with the guy.

"""
But now consider another accident. A report in the British Medical Journal describes the case of a construction worker who had jumped off some scaffolding. Beneath him, to his horror, was a 15 cm nail that pierced clean through his boot when he landed. The man […] was in agony, tortured by every small movement of his foot. He was given some even more powerful sedatives, fentanyl and midazolam. But when doctors removed the boot they discovered that the nail had not penetrated his foot at all. In fact, it had passed safely between his toes. There was no bodily injury causing the excruciating pain he felt, though it was completely genuine. In his case, however, the experience was produced entirely by his own powerful prediction machinery. Those searing pains were false perceptions created by his brain's predictions (based on the visual evidence) of serious injury and the kinds of feelings that might result.
"""
(Andy Clark, The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality)
Honestly, I think the biggest conceptual leap here is realizing that pain that is neither caused by an injury, nor neuropathic in nature, can be very real and people aren't just "making up" or "imagining" things. The wiring of their brain fires up as in any other instance of pain.

"""
Predictive processing also sheds considerable light on a wide range of typical and atypical forms of human experience. A good starting point is to notice that there are two very broad ways for such processing to go wrong. The first is for the brain to underweight predictions and expectations. This will make it hard to detect faint but predictable patterns in a noisy or ambiguous environment. But the second general way to go wrong is for the brain to overweight expectations. In extreme cases, overweighting results in hallucinations. You seem to see and hear things that aren't there, just because […] they are at some level strongly expected.
Autism spectrum condition was initially thought to reflect a specific imbalance of the first kind — a systematic underweighting of prior expectations. […] Underweighting prior knowledge would make weak or elusive patterns hard to detect, and hard to learn too. Such patterns would include things like facial expressions, intonation, or body language, things that delicately hint, in context, at other people's mental states and attitudes. An imbalance of that kind would also make it very hard to learn these patterns in the first place, and even harder to recognize them in situations that are complicated or ambiguous. Recent evidence casts subtle doubt, however, on this bald initial hypothesis. Rather than weakened predictions, intriguing evidence is emerging that suggests that the core issue involves (not underweighting knowledge-based predictions but) actively overweighting the incoming sensory evidence.
[…]
She doesn't just feel "hunger," instead the more fine-grained specifics of the bodily signals dominate. You are feeling a whole lot of something — but what is it? According to the overweighted sensory information theory, autism spectrum condition individuals constantly encounter an excess of highly detailed and apparently very salient sensory information of this kind, coming from both inside their own body and the outside world. This sensory excess impedes the moment-by-moment identification of the broader context or scenario (in this case, hunger). In other words, the emphasis on every aspect of sensory detail effectively makes it impossible to spot the larger forest for the trees.
"""
(Andy Clark, The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality)
#ActuallyAutistic

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.17190 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_grqc_…

Conservation of distortion of gravitationally lensed images
We recently hypothesized that a distortion parameter exists such that its signed sum for all images of singular gravitational lensing of a source vanishes identically [K. S. Virbhadra, Phys. Rev. D {\bf 106}, 064038 (2022)]. We found a distortion parameter (the ratio of the tangential to radial magnifications) that satisfied the hypothesis for the images of Schwarzschild lensing with flying colors. We now show that another distortion parameter (the difference of tangential and radial magnificat…

During our morning walk I saw this Melolontha (Maikäfer) on the street.
I took him up and brought it to the next patch of grass.
It's the second one I see this year. It's causes a bit mixed feelings. I'm happy that I find them and watch them closely.
But it also makes me sad because when I was a child, I saw them ways more often.
#maikäfer

Better coloring of 3-colorable graphs
Ken-ichi Kawarabayashi, Mikkel Thorup, Hirotaka Yoneda
https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.00357 https://

Better coloring of 3-colorable graphs
We consider the problem of coloring a 3-colorable graph in polynomial time using as few colors as possible. This is one of the most challenging problems in graph algorithms. In this paper using Blum's notion of ``progress'', we develop a new combinatorial algorithm for the following: Given any 3-colorable graph with minimum degree $\ds>\sqrt n$, we can, in polynomial time, make progress towards a $k$-coloring for some $k=\sqrt{n/\ds}\cdot n^{o(1)}$. We balance our main result with the best-…

Trump was found guilty on all counts! Sentencing will be in a few days. Let's hope he gets to wear a jumper in colors matching his hair 😜
CNN reporter had to speak really fast to say "Count X, guilty, felony charge, falsifying business records in the first degree" 34 times...

As I just posted one of the photos of the day anyways, I thought I could share a bit of a background story with you as well.
A frosty and chill day - but I went there alone as I wanted to focus more on #photography than just #hiking the summit.

Embracing the Elements: A Frosty Photo Journey
Embark on a chilly adventure with me as I navigate the brisk winds and icy terrain of a winter hike. Join me as I brave the elements, capturing the raw beauty of snow-laden landscapes and gusty summits through the lens of my camera.

As I just posted one of the photos of the day anyways, I thought I could share a bit of a background story with you as well.
A frosty and chill day - but I went there alone as I wanted to focus more on #photography than just #hiking the summit.

Embracing the Elements: A Frosty Photo Journey
Embark on a chilly adventure with me as I navigate the brisk winds and icy terrain of a winter hike. Join me as I brave the elements, capturing the raw beauty of snow-laden landscapes and gusty summits through the lens of my camera.

Hey friends!
The weather forecast today was "a lot of rain". In the morning it had changed to "rain from 3pm".so we decided to do a small hike on the local #blomberg.
In the photos you see a couple of impressions from our 3h activity. It was really the best decision to go out.
We just returned, had a coffee are relaxing on the couch and the rain and thunder …