Tootfinder

Challenge: "Name 20 female authors you admire, 1 per day"
Day 17: Vicki Jarrett
So far she's published a couple of really good novels and a collection of short stories. She strikes me as the type of author who aims for quality, not quantity.
I adored her first novel "Nothing is Heavy", based on real life experiences in Edinburgh. Her other novel, "Always North" is an eco-thriller set in Svalbard, a Norwegian arctic island.
Both great…

life is too short for 1080p displays

The Bills are going to win the Super Bowl*, plus Alcaraz's reign https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6609558/2025/09/08/bills-ravens-comeback-week-1-the-pulse/

false alarm, folx

Door Dasher Life Fun Facts: This might be useful to think of when you're rating your Dasher.... Who's at fault in this situation?
Let's say I accept an offer for McDonalds.
I head straight there... pull up to the store, and as I walk in the app buzzes again with a 2nd order for the same McDs.
Naturally, I accept. (not accepting reduces my Acceptance rate and potentially my ability to get new offers).
Now I have two orders at the same place! Great! Efficient!
The first order comes up quickly, I put it in my bag, 'pick it up' in the app, and wait for the 2nd order.
Now the fun begins. The restaurant says the 2nd order will be 10 minutes beyond the pickup time. I notify the app, and both customers of the wait... and I wait... and wait... if I remove the 2nd order from my app it affects my completion rate *and* means the customer has to wait for another dasher to come along.
Eventually the 2nd order is ready and I head out to make the deliveries. Both of course now late.. the first potentially cold (even in an insulated bag) *and* late.
In addition, sometimes, often a day or two later, the dasher will receive a “Contract Violation” for the lateness. 3 Contract Violations in a short period and you can be deactivated.
So... there ya go. It happens. I'm never sure what the best course of action is... unless both orders are immediately ready, which you can never predict, someone will end up losing; the store, customer, dasher, or a mix of all three.
#DasherLife #GigWork #DoorDash #Uber
P.S. It's worth noting that Door Dash is the only service I know of that is this strict. Uber Eats does not have mechanisms like this (at least in my experience). Never used Skip, so can't say on that.

Remaining Time Prediction in Outbound Warehouse Processes: A Case Study (Short Paper)
Erik Penther, Michael Grohs, Jana-Rebecca Rehse
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.18986 https://…

BOE-XSUM: Extreme Summarization in Clear Language of Spanish Legal Decrees and Notifications
Andr\'es Fern\'andez Garc\'ia, Javier de la Rosa, Julio Gonzalo, Roser Morante, Enrique Amig\'o, Alejandro Benito-Santos, Jorge Carrillo-de-Albornoz, V\'ictor Fresno, Adrian Ghajari, Guillermo Marco, Laura Plaza, Eva S\'anchez Salido
https://

BOE-XSUM: Extreme Summarization in Clear Language of Spanish Legal Decrees and Notifications
The ability to summarize long documents succinctly is increasingly important in daily life due to information overload, yet there is a notable lack of such summaries for Spanish documents in general, and in the legal domain in particular. In this work, we present BOE-XSUM, a curated dataset comprising 3,648 concise, plain-language summaries of documents sourced from Spain's ``Bolet\'ın Oficial del Estado'' (BOE), the State Official Gazette. Each entry in the dataset includes a short summary, t…

Day 22: Yuki Urushibara
I've got a few more mangaka left on my short list, and might very well get to at least one more, but Urushibara is the author of Mushishi and anyone who knows either the manga or anime understands immediately why she appears here.
Mushishi is a "seinen" anime, which means it's written for adults, not children or teenagers (although it's very accessible for all ages). It deals with a vast array of life's circumstances through the lens of a traveling mushi expert and the various whimsical supernatural creatures he is called on to deal with. He's not an exorcist though, instead understanding that humans must live in harmony with the mushi, and working like an ecologist to sort things out. As is probably obvious, Urushibara is an incredible world-builder; she's also a top-notch artist and above all, her stories are overflowing with kindness, humanity, and respect for the natural world.
Besides Mushishi, I've read "Suiiki", and it's one of the few manga I stumbled through in the original Japanese, which says a lot given my limited reading vocabulary (and the fact that it doesn't include rubi). It weaves the supernatural into a story of childhood innocence and curiosity in a lovely way.
Much like Shirahama who I mentioned earlier, Urushibara's stories are full of gentle wisdom for all ages, but Urushibara's work is quieter and less dramatic, with an adult main character confident in his expertise instead of a young-and-learning protagonist.
#30AuthorsNoMen

Good Morning #Canada
After recently moving to Belle Ewart (Bell You-wart), I find myself making strange pronunciations of my town to see people's reactions. Life is short... take pleasure where you can. But if you're a Canadian living in one of the towns mentioned in this CBC article, do you proudly tell people where you live, or do you mumble the answer and hope no one responds. I think you embrace the fun and show pride in your community by investing in t-shirts and hats emblazoned with your town name. But that's just me - some old retired guy with no reputation worth saving.
BTW, if you're looking for a conversation starter, here's a Geographic Fact - the distance between Dildo Newfoundland and Climax Saskatchewan is 5,551 km, about 2 days and 16 hours by car.
#CanadaIsAwesome #CivicPride
https://www.cbc.ca/television/stillstanding/the-most-hilarious-town-names-in-canada-1.5440187

Here's the cover from a really great book of short stories, from 2010, named "Shadow Show".
The stories, written by a wide variety of top-notch authors, such as Margaret Atwood and Harlan Ellison, each celebrate Ray Bradbury's life and writing.
(The book cover art is by Tom Gauld--I found it searching online for Gauld's cartoons.)
#Writing

Feeding frenzy in the mighty black holes: what we could learn from them?
Swayamtrupta Panda, Hygor Benati Gon\c{c}alves, Thaisa Storchi-Bergmann, Marzena \'Sniegowska, Bo\.zena Czerny, Edi Bon, Paola Marziani, Nata\v{s}a Bon, Alberto Rodr\'iguez Ardila, Daniel May, Marcos Fonseca Far\'ia, Luciano Fraga, Francisco Pozo Nu\~nez, Eduardo Ba\~nados, Jochen Heidt, Karla Garnica, Deborah Dultzin

Feeding frenzy in the mighty black holes: what we could learn from them?
Eddington ratio is a paramount parameter governing the accretion history and life cycles of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs). This short review presents a multi-faceted view of the importance of the Eddington ratio spanning varied AGN studies. We find that the Eddington ratio is crucial for standardizing the Radius-Luminosity (R-L) relation - a necessary step for employing quasars (QSOs) as standardizable cosmological probes to help clarify the standing of the Hubble tension. In this data-driven e…

OneLoc: Geo-Aware Generative Recommender Systems for Local Life Service
Zhipeng Wei, Kuo Cai, Junda She, Jie Chen, Minghao Chen, Yang Zeng, Qiang Luo, Wencong Zeng, Ruiming Tang, Kun Gai, Guorui Zhou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14646

OneLoc: Geo-Aware Generative Recommender Systems for Local Life Service
Local life service is a vital scenario in Kuaishou App, where video recommendation is intrinsically linked with store's location information. Thus, recommendation in our scenario is challenging because we should take into account user's interest and real-time location at the same time. In the face of such complex scenarios, end-to-end generative recommendation has emerged as a new paradigm, such as OneRec in the short video scenario, OneSug in the search scenario, and EGA in the advertising sce…

Complex three-dimensional rearing environments amplify compensatory plasticity following early blindness (in opossums) https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.02.651847v1 "underscoring the role of experience in directing compensatory plasticity following early s…

Seedlings (XPd on PC)
There's some strange new forms of life in the New Zealand forests, take control of one and explore.
So this is a short puzzle platformer with a neat catch: most of what you'll see on the screen are images captured directly from the forests of New Zealand. Using real images as a backdrop is certainly not a new idea, but it's used remarkably well here.
The gameplay is simple enough: as an apparently sentient seed, you are tasked with travers…

Life is short, so check out today's Metacurity for a concise rundown of the most critical infosec developments you should know, including
--California sets global standards with new landmark AI and data privacy laws,
--UK highly significant cyberattacks jumped by 50% over the past year,
--Australian cyber incidents rose 11% over the past year,
--Ofcom fined 4chan under new online safety regime,
--Researchers eavesdropped on sensitive satellite comms,
--…

California sets global standards with new landmark AI and data privacy laws
UK highly significant cyberattacks jumped by 50% over the past year, Australian cyber incidents rose 11% over the past year, Ofcom fined 4chan under new online safety regime, Researchers eavesdropped on sensitive satellite comms, Stingrays were used near Portland protest, much more

#Blakes7 Series A, Episode 09 - Project Avalon
SERVALAN: [To Travis] Project Avalon has failed totally. There will be a full inquiry. Until that time you are relieved of your command.
TRAVIS: [To himself] If it takes all my life, I will destroy you, Blake. I will destroy you. I will destroy you.

@… the Internet is huge, life is short, there'll always be someone positive to fill the tiny gap created by a block.

In short: I’ve spent over 500 hours watching the Moomins, and it’s still my favorite series of all time.
I truly love the world of the Moomins from the 90s. It is not only a way for me to escape today's shit. but a place that feels alive inside me, where friends cook together, wander through the woods, and make each other laugh in the sunshine. It gives me a sense of direction whenever the outside world feels too shit and broken.
I love it because life in the valley shows tha…

NLO Corrections to Dimuonium Production in Photon-Photon Collision
Qi-Ming Feng, Si-Mao Guo, Qi-Wei Hu, Cong-Feng Qiao, Qi-Ming Qiu, Yu-Jie Tian, Bai-Rong Zhang, Hao Zhang, Xuan-Heng Zhang, Bo-Ting Zhou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14424

NLO Corrections to Dimuonium Production in Photon-Photon Collision
Dimuonium ($μ^+ μ^-$) is one of the pure QED bound systems of leptons, together with positronium and ditauonium. The former had been observed in experiment in 1951, while the search for dimuonium and ditauonium ($τ^+ τ^-$) are still in vain. The ditauonium is thought to be hard to measure due to its short life time, whereas the dimuonium is very likely to be observed in current running experiments. We calculate in this work the para and ortho dimuonium production in photon-photon collision …

Game-Theoretic and Reinforcement Learning-Based Cluster Head Selection for Energy-Efficient Wireless Sensor Network
Mehrshad Eskandarpour, Saba Pirahmadian, Parham Soltani, Hossein Soleimani
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12707

Game-Theoretic and Reinforcement Learning-Based Cluster Head Selection for Energy-Efficient Wireless Sensor Network
Energy in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is critical to network lifetime and data delivery. However, the primary impediment to the durability and dependability of these sensor nodes is their short battery life. Currently, power-saving algorithms such as clustering and routing algorithms have improved energy efficiency in standard protocols. This paper proposes a clustering-based routing approach for creating an adaptive, energy-efficient mechanism. Our system employs a multi-step clustering st…

Extending a Phylogeny-based Method for Detecting Signatures of Multi-level Selection for Applications in Artificial Life
Matthew Andres Moreno, Sanaz Hasanzadeh Fard, Luis Zaman, Emily Dolson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14232

Extending a Phylogeny-based Method for Detecting Signatures of Multi-level Selection for Applications in Artificial Life
Multilevel selection occurs when short-term individual-level reproductive interests conflict with longer-term group-level fitness effects. Detecting and quantifying this phenomenon is key to understanding evolution of traits ranging from multicellularity to pathogen virulence. Multilevel selection is particularly important in artificial life research due to its connection to major evolutionary transitions, a hallmark of open-ended evolution. Bonetti Franceschi & Volz (2024) proposed to detect m…

Read the first of Martha Well's Murderbot books, "All Systems Red" in which a security drone rescues it's crew from violence and death on the planet they're exploring.
The robot seems barely distinguished from the cyborgs and the humans really. Certainly organic parts, autonomy, inner life. Seems to not particularly like the humans but also seems to be pretty much like one.
Seemed short, like the first episode of a show rather than the whole series. Which I suppose I should have expected if I'd noticed it was a novella. There is indeed a whole series of them. Given I bought 'em in a bundle expect I'll read more.
#reading #murderBot #marthaWells #allSystemsRed