Tootfinder

Beautiful porphyritic granodiorite, part of the Variscan basement, on the Costa Brava, Mediterranean Spain. #geology

FC Barcelona, La Liga champions again. There has been no discussion, it has been the best team by far and, on top of that, with players from the youth academy as a fundamental part of the title. Bravo.

hi yall! weird and arty movies used to be a massive part of my psyche for a brief, intense time when i was younger. but then i had a particularly bad depressive slump that killed the habit. now i wanna get back into it. each day for the next week, im gonna watch one Andrei Tarkovsky film (i found a free collection on archive.org!) and post my initial reaction afterward. i saw one of his movies, Stalker, when i was about 15, and while i liked it, i know i was too young and stupid to actually …

Okay, I tried not to make it overly complex. Just a very brief cut and some music.
Here's the clip of today's walk 🙂
https://video.franzgraf.de/w/vaEHJN15GYZ7BUtgVaT81m
(powered by my own Peertube instance :))

Next stop on our NLP timeline (as part of the #ISE2025 lecture) was Terry Winograd's SHRDLU, an early natural language understanding system developed in 1968-70 that could manipulate blocks in a virtual world.
Winograd, T. Procedures as a Representation for Data in a Computer Program for Understanding Natural Language. MIT AI Technical Report 235.

This is the first I've heard of this:
“They’re finding backdoors in Barbie dolls,” said Antani, now CEO of Horizon3.ai, a cybersecurity firm, referring to concerns from researchers who successfully hacked the microphone of a digitally connected version of the toy."
https://

Smartphones have become an intelligence treasure trove
Hackers tied to China's government have tried repeatedly to access the phones of prominent Americans, part of Beijing's sprawling cyberespionage efforts. Smartphones and other mobile devices present significant national security and cybersecurity risks, as foreign government hackers exploit vulnerabilities in mobile networks and apps to spy on people and steal secrets. And people's careless use of mobile devices to share sensitive information is another concern. National security experts say th…

A propos of nothing in particular:

"Senators Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) and Herbert Lehman (D-NY) lamented that the act subjected deportees to the tyranny of bureaucrats and that deportations “without review, would be the beginning of a police state.”"
Reactions to the US Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952
Source:

IXPE Observations of the Blazar Mrk 501 in 2022: A Multiwavelength View
L. Lisalda, E. Gau, H. Krawczynski, F. Tavecchio, I. Liodakis, A. Gokus, N. Rodriguez Cavero, M. Nowak, M. Negro, R. Middei, M. Perri, S. Puccetti, S. G. Jorstad, I. Agudo, A. P. Marscher, B. Ag\'is-Gonz\'alez, A. V. Berdyugin, M. I. Bernardos, D. Blinov, G. Bonnoli, G. A. Borman, I. G. Bourbah, C. Casadio, V. Casanova, A. J. Castro-Tirado, E. Fern\'andez-Garc\'ia, M. Garc\'ia-Comas, T. S. Grish…

IXPE Observations of the Blazar Mrk 501 in 2022: A Multiwavelength View
The blazar Markarian 501 (Mrk 501) was observed on three occasions over a 4-month period between 2022 March and 2022 July with the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE). In this paper, we report for the first time on the third IXPE observation, performed between 2022 July 9 and 12, during which IXPE detected a linear polarization degree of $Π_X=6\pm2$ per cent at a polarization angle, measured east of north, of $Ψ_X=143^\circ\pm11^\circ$ within the 2-8 keV X-ray band. The X-ray polarizati…

#TerryPratchett

DNA Unzipping Transition
Somendra M. Bhattacharjee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.24064 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.24064

DNA Unzipping Transition
This review focuses on the force-induced unzipping transition of double-stranded DNA. It begins with a brief history of DNA melting, which emerged alongside the growth of the field of molecular biology, juxtaposed with the advancements in physics during the same post-World War II period. The earlier theories of melting of DNA were based on the Ising model and its modifications, but gradually moved towards polymer-based models. The idea of force-induced unzipping was first introduced in 1999 as …