Tootfinder

Maximum Spread of Vertex Degrees in a Simple Graph
Sergey Dmitrievich Onishchenko
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21429 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.21429

Maximum Spread of Vertex Degrees in a Simple Graph
We consider the following problem: let $n>k$ be natural numbers, and let $G$ be a graph on $n$ vertices (undirected, without loops or multiple edges). Denote by $h_k(G)$ the number of unordered pairs of vertices in the graph $G$ whose degrees differ by less than $k$. We aim to determine the smallest possible value $f(n,k)$ of the quantity $h_k(G)$. Interest in this question is motivated by the fact that the bipartite analogue of the problem enabled S. Cichomski and F. Petrov to prove the Burdzy…

A regret minimization approach to fixed-point iterations
Joon Kwon
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21653 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.21653

A regret minimization approach to fixed-point iterations
We propose a conversion scheme that turns regret minimizing algorithms into fixed point iterations, with convergence guarantees following from regret bounds. The resulting iterations can be seen as a grand extension of the classical Krasnoselskii--Mann iterations, as the latter are recovered by converting the Online Gradient Descent algorithm. This approach yields new simple iterations for finding fixed points of non-self operators. We also focus on converting algorithms from the AdaGrad family…

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

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #MiddayShow
Jackie Stoudmire:
🎵 Flying High
#JackieStoudmire
https://eccentricdisco.bandcamp.com/track/flying-high

As SBOMs slowly progress at the federal level and in enterprises, the rise of AI coding assistants is fueling optimistic—and, some experts argue, “kind of insane”—claims about a future with vulnerability-free software.
Check out my latest CyberScoop piece.
Many thanks to @…, @…

The slow rise of SBOMs meets the rapid advance of AI
Despite progress from CISA and global regulators, SBOM adoption in the private sector remains slow as experts debate if AI-driven coding will improve or undermine software security and transparency.

Decentralized Detection with Many Sensors: Optimality of Exchangeable and Identical Encoding Policies
Sina Sanjari, Naci Saldi, Sinan Gezici, Serdar Y\"uksel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21724

Decentralized Detection with Many Sensors: Optimality of Exchangeable and Identical Encoding Policies
We study a class of binary detection problems involving a single fusion center and a large or countably infinite number of sensors. Each sensor acts under a decentralized information structure, accessing only a local noisy observation related to the hypothesis. Based on this observation, sensors select policies to transmit a quantized signal through their actions to the fusion center, which makes the final decision using only these actions. This paper makes the following contributions: i) In th…

call me crazy but I don't think competitive sports should have moneyback guarantees. if you only support your club when you're winning you should just stick to watching sports films
#fedifc

Im using case_when() quite a lot, case_match() is new to me: #rstats

A general vectorised switch() — case_match
This function allows you to vectorise multiple switch() statements. Each case is evaluated sequentially and the first match for each element determines the corresponding value in the output vector. If no cases match, the .default is used. case_match() is an R equivalent of the SQL "simple" CASE WHEN statement. Connection to case_when() While case_when() uses logical expressions on the left-hand side of the formula, case_match() uses values to match against .x with. The following two statement…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #MiddayShow
Cate Le Bon:
🎵 Heaven Is No Feeling
#CateLeBon
https://catelebon.bandcamp.com/track/heaven-is-no-feeling
https://open.spotify.com/track/6QyDopDgclGYNXf3UeuDZv

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #MiddayShow
The Autumn Defense:
🎵 Ever Flowing Light
#TheAutumnDefense
https://theautumndefense.bandcamp.com/track/ever-flowing-light
https://open.spotify.com/track/0kT0MagIOzK1JaJ33J6Wfz