Tootfinder

Calamus 44 Here my last words
In which the poet outs himself through talking about his poetry.
It's a short piece of Whitman talking about his own writing. But he's so twisted up!
Here I shade down and hide my thoughts—I do not expose them,
And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.
I read this as him talking about Calamus, the cluster of gay poems. And directly telling us that he's censored and hidden what he really wants to say. And yet still these poems still expose his true self. It makes me feel sad for Whitman, imagine his writing if he felt less fettered.
Still, he published some of the most clear gay poems of the 19th century. And got famous and mainstream doing it.

I'm now getting several political spam texts a day. This is a recent escalation and I've done my best to keep my cell phone number a secret for several years now. Politicians are ruining text messaging, just like they ruined phone lines.
So far my Google Pixel is doing a pretty good job blocking most of them as spam. But that's going to be a losing battle.

Power quotients of surface groups and mapping class groups
R\'emi Coulon, Alessandro Sisto, Henry Wilton
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13701 https://

Power quotients of surface groups and mapping class groups
Let $Γ$ be the fundamental group of a closed, orientable, hyperbolic surface $S$. The $n$-power quotient, $Γ(n)$, is the quotient of $Γ$ by the $n$th powers of simple closed curves. We prove an analogue of the Dehn--Nielsen--Baer theorem for suitable large values of $n$: the outer automorphism group of $Γ(n)$ is isomorphic to the quotient of the extended mapping class group of $S$ by $n$th powers of Dehn twists. There is also a corresponding description of the automorphism group as the quot…

Non-Adaptive Evaluation of $k$-of-$n$ Functions: Tight Gap and a Unit-Cost PTAS
Mads Anker Nielsen, Lars Rohwedder, Kevin Schewior
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05877

Non-Adaptive Evaluation of $k$-of-$n$ Functions: Tight Gap and a Unit-Cost PTAS
We consider the Stochastic Boolean Function Evaluation (SBFE) problem in the well-studied case of $k$-of-$n$ functions: There are independent Boolean random variables $x_1,\dots,x_n$ where each variable $i$ has a known probability $p_i$ of taking value $1$, and a known cost $c_i$ that can be paid to find out its value. The value of the function is $1$ iff there are at least $k$ $1$s among the variables. The goal is to efficiently compute a strategy that, at minimum expected cost, tests the vari…