Tootfinder

War is an unconscionable horror. The illusions of "international law" and "rules of war" have lead us to believe that war can be clean, managed, and "civilized."
But wars are fought by humans and humans are messy. Humans are not well suited to following orderly rules. Humans respond to their environment. Humans in extraordinary situations can be extraordinarily vindictive and brutal. Sufficiently traumatized humans can act without a conscience, spreading trauma like an infection. If humans respond to their situation, then there can be no "civilized" war because war is itself an situation outside of the society. It is a place that promotes antisocial behavior and punishes pro-social behavior. War cannot be expected to follow "international law" because it is what fills the void created by the failure of "international law" (so long as we rely on nations).
To call for war is to inflict atrocities on civilians. It is to kill the parents and children who serve, and to destroy the combatants who survive. It is to infect both sides with a trauma that will spread if untreated, when soldiers come home or when they become mercenaries in other wars.
And yet... there are times when the brutality, the incompetence, the evil becomes so unbearable that no other option exists, when taking up arms is simply bringing symmetry to an existing asymmetric conflict. There are times when the worst possible thing is inescapable, though it can never be justified.
In this new era of war, in the scramble of conflict under the collapsing of the (poorly named) "Pax Americana," I hope that we, the people, can understand that war is not a tool to fulfill an objective. It is not part of a larger strategy. It is not an extension of deplomacy.
War is a failure.
While it may be the only way to deal with the irrational - the genocidal, the slaver, the dictator - it is still a failure. It is a failure to build a world in which these people can't control armies and economies, can't turn populations in to cults and bend nations to their will.
And we will continue to have such wars until we unite against those who would use as as pawns, who would control our lives and lead us to our deaths. We will have these wars until we unite, as one world, against those rulers. This is what I mean, and what a lot of other people mean, when we say, "No War, but Class War."

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Whatever other people are…

As usual we watched the "Stoertebekker" stage play at Ralswiek on Rügen Island. The stage setups and wardrobes were as awesome as always. They really try to improve on that every year and come up with clever mechanisms to transform the building for the various acts of the play. The script this year left room for desire ;) Nevertheless a happing worth attending
htt…

Run-Time Monitoring of ERTMS/ETCS Control Flow by Process Mining
Francesco Vitale, Tommaso Zoppi, Francesco Flammini, Nicola Mazzocca
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10419 https://…

Run-Time Monitoring of ERTMS/ETCS Control Flow by Process Mining
Ensuring the resilience of computer-based railways is increasingly crucial to account for uncertainties and changes due to the growing complexity and criticality of those systems. Although their software relies on strict verification and validation processes following well-established best-practices and certification standards, anomalies can still occur at run-time due to residual faults, system and environmental modifications that were unknown at design-time, or other emergent cyber-threat sce…

Jaime Alanís died a day after a frenzied immigration raid of Glass House Farms in Ventura county
where authorities arrested at least 200 workers.
The 57-year-old, who was from the town of Huajúmbaro in Michoacšn, Mexico, is the first known person to die during the Trump administration’s enhanced immigration enforcement operations in southern California.
The federal government’s ramped up enforcement activities have brought chaos across southern California as Ice agents des…

Replaced article(s) found for cond-mat.other. https://arxiv.org/list/cond-mat.other/new
[1/1]:
- Free Electron Theory for Thin Metal Films
Philip B. Allen

Orthogonal polynomials, quantum walks and the Prouhet-Tarry-Escott problem
Frederico Can\c{c}ado, Gabriel Coutinho, Thom\'as Jung Spier
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09948 http…

Orthogonal polynomials, quantum walks and the Prouhet-Tarry-Escott problem
This paper is motivated by the following problem. Define a quantum walk on a positively weighted path (linear chain). Can the weights be tuned so that perfect state transfer occurs between the first vertex and any other position? We do not fully answer this question - in fact, we show that a particular case of this problem is equivalent to a solution of a particular case of the well known Prouhet-Tarry-Escott problem, deeming our original task certainly harder than anticipated. In our journey, …

Hmmmm… here is a problem I did not anticipate.
Every time I empty the main pond hole of water, (the actual hole under the liner) water returns within an hour or two. I’ve done it 4 times now, and it keeps filling back up with water.
Obviously there is water underground infiltrating into the pond hole, and/or the water table itself is above the bottom of the hole. It is not coming from either of the other holes because they both have the same amount of water in them as they did this morning.
I have “watered” the blueberry patch and hazelnut tree a lot with the water that I have been cleaning the filter with… and we also had lots of water flying around outside the liners yesterday as I tested the pump. So it is quite possible that the ground around the pond is simply well saturated.
I think I am going to have to just keep removing the water (and putting it into the sewer) until it does not refill. We have a week of hot weather coming. Surely that will be enough time for everything to dry out completely.
Otherwise I might run into some issues if the rains return before I can anchor down the pond liner with gravel and get the plumbing in!
How is time already running short!?
Never underestimate the ability of water to find a place where it is not wanted. 😆
#poolpond #backyardProject #diy

Long; central Massachusetts colonial history
Today on a whim I visited a site in Massachusetts marked as "Huguenot Fort Ruins" on OpenStreetMaps. I drove out with my 4-year-old through increasingly rural central Massachusetts forests & fields to end up on a narrow street near the top of a hill beside a small field. The neighboring houses had huge lawns, some with tractors.
Appropriately for this day and this moment in history, the history of the site turns out to be a microcosm of America. Across the field beyond a cross-shaped stone memorial stood an info board with a few diagrams and some text. The text of the main sign (including typos/misspellings) read:
"""
Town Is Formed
Early in the 1680's, interest began to generate to develop a town in the area west of Natick in the south central part of the Commonwealth that would be suitable for a settlement. A Mr. Hugh Campbell, a Scotch merchant of Boston petitioned the court for land for a colony. At about the same time, Joseph Dudley and William Stoughton also were desirous of obtaining land for a settlement. A claim was made for all lands west of the Blackstone River to the southern land of Massachusetts to a point northerly of the Springfield Road then running southwesterly until it joined the southern line of Massachusetts.
Associated with Dudley and Stoughton was Robert Thompson of London, England, Dr. Daniel Cox and John Blackwell, both of London and Thomas Freak of Hannington, Wiltshire, as proprietors. A stipulation in the acquisition of this land being that within four years thirty families and an orthodox minister settle in the area. An extension of this stipulation was granted at the end of the four years when no group large enough seemed to be willing to take up the opportunity.
In 1686, Robert Thompson met Gabriel Bernor and learned that he was seeking an area where his countrymen, who had fled their native France because of the Edict of Nantes, were desirous of a place to live. Their main concern was to settle in a place that would allow them freedom of worship. New Oxford, as it was the so-named, at that time included the larger part of Charlton, one-fourth of Auburn, one-fifth of Dudley and several square miles of the northeast portion of Southbridge as well as the easterly ares now known as Webster.
Joseph Dudley's assessment that the area was capable of a good settlement probably was based on the idea of the meadows already established along with the plains, ponds, brooks and rivers. Meadows were a necessity as they provided hay for animal feed and other uses by the settlers. The French River tributary books and streams provided a good source for fishing and hunting. There were open areas on the plains as customarily in November of each year, the Indians burnt over areas to keep them free of underwood and brush. It appeared then that this area was ready for settling.
The first seventy-five years of the settling of the Town of Oxford originally known as Manchaug, embraced three different cultures. The Indians were known to be here about 1656 when the Missionary, John Eliott and his partner Daniel Gookin visited in the praying towns. Thirty years later, in 1686, the Huguenots walked here from Boston under the guidance of their leader Isaac Bertrand DuTuffeau. The Huguenot's that arrived were not peasants, but were acknowledged to be the best Agriculturist, Wine Growers, Merchant's, and Manufacter's in France. There were 30 families consisting of 52 people. At the time of their first departure (10 years), due to Indian insurrection, there were 80 people in the group, and near their Meetinghouse/Church was a Cemetery that held 20 bodies. In 1699, 8 to 10 familie's made a second attempt to re-settle, failing after only four years, with the village being completely abandoned in 1704.
The English colonist made their way here in 1713 and established what has become a permanent settlement.
"""
All that was left of the fort was a crumbling stone wall that would have been the base of a higher wooden wall according to a picture of a model (I didn't think to get a shot of that myself). Only trees and brush remain where the multi-story main wooden building was.
This story has so many echoes in the present:
- The rich colonialists from Boston & London agree to settle the land, buying/taking land "rights" from the colonial British court that claimed jurisdiction without actually having control of the land. Whether the sponsors ever actually visited the land themselves I don't know. They surely profited somehow, whether from selling on the land rights later or collecting taxes/rent or whatever, by they needed poor laborers to actually do the work of developing the land (& driving out the original inhabitants, who had no say in the machinations of the Boston court).
- The land deal was on condition that there capital-holders who stood to profit would find settlers to actually do the work of colonizing. The British crown wanted more territory to be controlled in practice not just in theory, but they weren't going to be the ones to do the hard work.
- The capital-holders actually failed to find enough poor suckers to do their dirty work for 4 years, until the Huguenots, fleeing religious persecution in France, were desperate enough to accept their terms.
- Of course, the land was only so ripe for settlement because of careful tending over centuries by the natives who were eventually driven off, and whose land management practices are abandoned today. Given the mention of praying towns (& dates), this was after King Phillip's war, which resulted in at least some forced resettlement of native tribes around the area, but the descendants of those "Indians" mentioned in this sign are still around. For example, this is the site of one local band of Nipmuck, whose namesake lake is about 5 miles south of the fort site: #LandBack.

A dark money group that was founded by one of former President Trump’s key allies raised over $20 million in 2020 and used the money to help finance various conservative groups.
Leonard Leo’s The 85 Fund received the money through the Donors Trust, a donor-advised nonprofit group that funnels money from wealthy conservative financiers to other organizations, according to a tax filing first seen by CNBC.
Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA received $200,000 for a “TP Campus Project” fr…

Trump ally's fund received over $20 million last year, then funneled cash to other right-leaning groups
A dark money group that was founded by one of ex-President Trump's key allies raised over $20 million in 2020.