Tootfinder

The #NixOS moderation team resigns "effective immediately, in protest of the Steering Committee’s ongoing pattern of attempting to interfere with moderation team operation, membership and specific moderation decisions."

This is the second year that I’m teaching a short session on Open Science and Reproducibility with Quarto, GitHub, and R for students in the European Doctoral School of Demography (EDSD) programme (by @…, INED, EAPS, and others).
This year, I demoed everything in Positron (Posit PBC), switching back to RStudio only occasionally. I also made a point to discuss a…

I'm running an improvised tutorial on #Zotero at my work tomorrow. Do you all have useful tips that I could share with my "students" - beyond the basics? Or specific use cases that you might use it for, beyond citing references in papers that you write?
For example I recently moved on to using its integrated PDF reader for peer-reviewing and it works well…

In eigener Sache:
Dafür, dass über diesen Account alle paar Wochen mal ein sehr spezifischer Beitrag zum Thema #Stadtnatur #Berlin veröffentlicht wird, finde ich es überwältigend, dass inzwischen 1000 Leute diesem Nischen-Account folgen. Danke! 🌳💚🌿

MIT researchers have developed a new method for designing 3D structures that can be transformed from a flat configuration into their curved, fully formed shape with only a single pull of a string.
This technique could enable the rapid deployment of a temporary field hospital at the site of a disaster such as a devastating tsunami
— a situation where quick medical action is essential to save lives.
The researchers’ approach converts a user-specified 3D structure into a flat s…

One pull of a string is all it takes to deploy these complex structures
MIT researchers developed a method that converts a user’s design into a flat series of interconnected tiles that can be converted to a 3D structure with one pull of a single string.

Shanahan hopeful but admits Aiyuk case 'unusual' https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/47065408/niners-shanahan-admits-aiyuk-contract-situation-unusual

What’s a great example you love of a technical blog post (or similarly shaped writing) that:
- explains a tool, technique, technical idea
- by trying it to the author’s specific project or experience
- but also illuminates a larger concept, a bigger picture?
I don’t just want tutorials; I want writing that illuminates. I’m thinking of things where you read it and had a reaction like:
“Oh, FINALLY, I get it now!”
“What a nice example of _____!”
“This is great. I’m going to bookmark this for the next time I need to use / explain / teach a colleague to use _____.”
Looking for writing examplars to share with students. I want your favorites.

NIH specifies how grant reviewers should ensure alignment with Trump priorities (Anil Oza/STAT)
https://www.statnews.com/2025/12/15/nih-specifies-how-grant-reviewers-should-ensure-alignment-with-trump-priorities/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251215/p125#a251215p125

In their PostScript Type 1 font specifications, Adobe makes a very clear statement: The source code of font programs is protected by copyright laws, but not the shapes of the fonts: "the typeface shapes are not protected, but the program text is. A copyright on
a Type 1 font program that generates a particular typeface does not preclude anyone from independently creating a different program for that same typeface."

Active Subspaces in Infinite Dimension
Poorbita Kundu, Nathan Wycoff
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11871 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11871

Active Subspaces in Infinite Dimension
Active subspace analysis uses the leading eigenspace of the gradient's second moment to conduct supervised dimension reduction. In this article, we extend this methodology to real-valued functionals on Hilbert space. We define an operator which coincides with the active subspace matrix when applied to a Euclidean space. We show that many of the desirable properties of Active Subspace analysis extend directly to the infinite dimensional setting. We also propose a Monte Carlo procedure and discus…