Tootfinder

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

Stability of surfactant-laden double-layered viscoelastic fluids flowing over an inclined plane
Md. Mouzakkir Hossain, Mohamin B. M. Khan, Youchuang Chao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04250

Stability of surfactant-laden double-layered viscoelastic fluids flowing over an inclined plane
The linear dynamics and instability mechanisms of double-layered weakly viscoelastic fluid flowing over an inclined plane are analyzed in the presence of insoluble surfactant at both the free surface and interface. The constitutive equation of the non-Newtonian flow field follows the rheological property of Walters' $B^{''}$ model. The Orr-Sommerfeld-type boundary value problem is derived using the classical normal-mode approach and numerically solved within the framework of the Chebyshev spect…

As I’m writing, the season is “Crickets chirp around the door.” By the time you read it, it will be “First Frost.” In New York, where I live, autumn is taking hold. Darkness in the early morning, leaves and branches coming down in high winds, and in the afternoon, low light floods the avenues, catching the tops of trees.
https://

Ways of Seeing: Seasonal Feeling
Autumn is taking hold

Design of a Josephson diode based on double magnetic impurities
Yu-Fei Sun, Yue Mao, Qing-Feng Sun
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03984 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2…

Design of a Josephson diode based on double magnetic impurities
We theoretically propose a universal superconducting diode device based on double magnetic impurities which are coupled to the connection region of the Josephson junction. The positive and negative currents flowing across the junction can generate opposite magnetic fields, flipping the magnetic moment of the side magnetic impurity to the opposite directions, and in turn, the two impurities will have different impacts on the opposite currents. This results in the phenomenon that the positive and…

Notes on the topology of independence structures
Kevin Ivan Piterman, Volkmar Welker
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12971 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12971

Notes on the topology of independence structures
Following Welsh, a pre-independence space (pi-space) is a set $M$ together with a non-empty collection $I(M)$ of subsets of $M$, called independent sets, which is closed under taking subsets, and finite independent sets satisfy the exchange property from matroid theory. We show that $I(M)$, viewed as a poset, is contractible if it is infinite-dimensional, and Cohen-Macaulay otherwise. Moreover, the proper part of the associated poset of flats is also contractible in the infinite-dimensional c…

Non-Altermagnetic Origin of Exchange Bias Behaviors in Incoherent RuO$_2$/Fe Bilayer Heterostructures
Shelby S. Fields, Joseph C. Prestigiacomo, Cory D. Cress, Nicholas G. Combs, Olaf van 't Erve, Patrick G. Callahan, Keith E. Knipling, Michelle E. Jamer, Frank M. Abel, Feng Ye, Arianna Minelli, Zachary J. Morgan, Haile Ambaye, Masaaki Matsuda, Avishek Maity, Valeria Lauter, Steven P. Bennett

Non-Altermagnetic Origin of Exchange Bias Behaviors in Incoherent RuO$_2$/Fe Bilayer Heterostructures
Initially identified as a promising altermagnetic (AM) candidate, rutile RuO$_2$ has since become embroiled in controversy due to contradictory findings of modeling and measurements of the magnetic properties of bulk crystals and thin films. For example, despite observations of a bulk non-magnetic state using density functional theory, neutron scattering, and muon spin resonance measurements, patterned RuO$_2$ Hall bars and film heterostructures display magnetotransport signatures of magnetic o…

Isofrequency spin-wave imaging using color center magnetometry for magnon spintronics
Samuel Ma\~nas-Valero, Yasmin C. Doedes, Artem Bondarenko, Michael Borst, Samer Kurdi, Thomas Poirier, James H. Edgar, Vincent Jacques, Yaroslav M. Blanter, Toeno van der Sar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18775

Isofrequency spin-wave imaging using color center magnetometry for magnon spintronics
Magnon spintronics aims to harness spin waves in magnetic films for information technologies. Color center magnetometry is a promising tool for imaging spin waves, using electronic spins associated with atomic defects in solid-state materials as sensors. However, two main limitations persist: the magnetic fields required for spin-wave control detune the sensor-spin detection frequency, and this frequency is further restricted by the color center nature. Here, we overcome these limitations by de…

Multiple sign-changing solutions for semilinear subelliptic Dirichlet problem
Hua Chen, Hong-Ge Chen, Jin-Ning Li, Xin Liao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10120 https://

Multiple sign-changing solutions for semilinear subelliptic Dirichlet problem
We study the following perturbation from symmetry problem for the semilinear subelliptic equation \[ \left\{ \begin{array}{cc} -\triangle_{X} u=f(x,u)+g(x,u) & \mbox{in}~Ω, \\[2mm] u\in H_{X,0}^{1}(Ω),\hfill \end{array} \right. \] where $\triangle_{X}=-\sum_{i=1}^{m}X_{i}^{*}X_{i}$ is the self-adjoint sub-elliptic operator associated with Hörmander vector fields $X=(X_{1},X_{2},\ldots,X_{m})$, $Ω$ is an open bounded subset in $\mathbb{R}^n$, and $H_{X,0}^{1}(Ω)$ denotes the weigh…