Tootfinder

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.

The number of primes not in a numerical semigroup
Yong-Gao Chen, Hui Zhu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03625 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.…

The number of primes not in a numerical semigroup
For two coprime positive integers $a,b$, let $π^* (a, b)$ be the number of primes that cannot be represented as $au+bv$, where $u,v$ are nonnegative integers. In this paper, we prove that $π^* (a, b)\ge 0.014 π(ab-a-b)$ and pose following conjecture: $π^* (a, b)\ge \frac 12 π(ab-a-b)$, where $π(x)$ denotes the number of primes not exceeding $x$. This conjecture is confirmed for $1\le a\le 8$.

#KKR, the US company that has withdrawn from bidding for Thames Water is a pro-Zionist, fracking lobbier that is feeling the heat from BDS.
Good riddance and just #nationalise water now!
Economía | El fondo proisraelí KKR se hace con los grandes festivales españoles de música - El Salto - Edici…

El fondo proisraelí KKR se hace con los grandes festivales españoles de música
Controla eventos como Sónar, Viña Rock o Resurrection Fest mientras expande su negocio con la promoción inmobiliaria en territorios palestinos ocupados ilegalmente y la creación de centros de datos para las grandes tecnológicas.

Physical Observers and Quantum Reconstructions
Dorian Daimer, Susanne Still
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01561 https://arxiv.org/pdf/25…

Physical Observers and Quantum Reconstructions
There is a multitude of interpretations of quantum mechanics, but foundational principles are lacking. Relational quantum mechanics views the observer as a physical system, which allows for an unambiguous interpretation as all axioms are purely operational, describing the observer's information acquisition. The approach, however, is based on the premise that the observer retains only predictive information about the observed system. Here, we justify this premise using the following principle: P…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.07792 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csAI_…

Efficient Neural Clause-Selection Reinforcement
Clause selection is arguably the most important choice point in saturation-based theorem proving. Framing it as a reinforcement learning (RL) task is a way to challenge the human-designed heuristics of state-of-the-art provers and to instead automatically evolve -- just from prover experiences -- their potentially optimal replacement. In this work, we present a neural network architecture for scoring clauses for clause selection that is powerful yet efficient to evaluate. Following RL principle…

Principal Context-aware Diffusion Guided Data Augmentation for Fault Localization
Shihao Fu, Yan Lei
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24079 https://

Principal Context-aware Diffusion Guided Data Augmentation for Fault Localization
Test cases are indispensable for conducting effective fault localization (FL). However, test cases in practice are severely class imbalanced, i.e. the number of failing test cases (i.e. minority class) is much less than that of passing ones (i.e. majority class). The severe class imbalance between failing and passing test cases have hindered the FL effectiveness. To address this issue, we propose PCD-DAug: a Principal Context-aware Diffusion guided Data Augmentation approach that generate syn…

For Trump,
“it’s no billionaire left behind
— and good luck to everyone else.”
“It’s telling that President Trump has chosen to release his budget on a Friday night with no fanfare whatsoever,”
said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee,
following the administration’s release of approximately 1,200 pages of budget documents.
“That’s probably because his budget would raise costs for working people,
destroy basic s…

'No Billionaire Left Behind' in Trump Budget Request That Trashes Workers, Struggling Families | Common Dreams
One expert critic said the updated request "confirms once again that the president continues to break his promises to lower families' costs and help people who are struggling to make ends meet."

Someone in my LinkedIn network posted this, and I have no inkling if it is genuine or sarcasm (see: Poe's Law).
Full text of the post in the image Alt Text.
NOTE: Please do not dogpile this person due to my toot.
#LLMs #WorkerReplacement

@… I don't know who or what you are, but your name sounds promising 😊

Swalwell: You were promised lower prices on day one. How many of you are feeling those lower prices?
You were promised an end to all wars on day one. How many of you have seen an end to those wars?
Donald Trump is 0 for 150. He made those promises on day one—and now we’re on day 150.
https://