Tootfinder

Just finished "The Raven Boys," a graphic novel adaptation of a novel by Maggie Stiefvater (adaptation written by Stephanie Williams and illustrated by Sas Milledge).
I haven't read the original novel, and because of that, this version felt way too dense, having to fit huge amounts of important details into not enough pages. The illustrations are gorgeous and the writing is fine; the setting and plot have some pretty interesting aspects... It's just too hard to follow a lot of the threads, or things we're supposed to care about aren't given the time/space to feel important.
The other thing that I didn't like: one of the central characters is rich, and we see this reflected in several ways, but we're clearly expected to ignore/excuse the class differences within the cast because he's a good guy. At this point in my life, I'm simply no longer interested in stories about good rich guys very much. It's become clear to me how in real life, we constantly get the perspectives of the rich, and rarely if ever hear the perspectives of the poor (same applies across racial and gender gradients, among others). Why then in fiction should I get more of the same, spending my mental bandwidth building empathy for yet another dilettante who somehow has a heart of gold? I'm tired of that.
#AmReading #ReadingNow

"In a key scene of the 2012 blockbuster film “Skyfall”, MI6 quartermaster Q realizes too late that plugging a cable into the laptop of a notoriously skilled terrorist like Raoul Silva was a terrible idea. After a few seconds, the laptop infects the systems of MI6, releasing all physical doors and disabling all security guards, prompting Silva to escape and wreak havoc. A message appears on the laptop screen, taunting Q, reading “Not such a clever boy”."

Joanna Rutkowska
In a key scene of the 2012 blockbuster James Bond film "Skyfall", MI6 quartermaster Q, played by Ben Whishaw, realizes too late that plugging a cable into the laptop of a notoriously skilled terrorist like Raoul Silva (one of Javier Bardem's most remarkable roles) was a terrible idea. After a few seconds of connection, the laptop infects the systems of MI6, releasing all physical doors and disabling all security guards, prompting Silva to escape and wreak havoc through the London Underground. A…

#Mastodon #Fediverse #Outreach #Ottawa #OttawaPlace #Media #politicians
I was reading this funny story about a Jeopardy! question that featured Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/who-is-mark-sutcliffe-ottawa-s-mayor-stumps-jeopardy-champ-9.7013496
It features a link to his X where he (manually) recorded the Answer/Question. So then I ended up on his X profile.
He has 33,000 followers.
He posted 12 minutes ago.
75 engagements - 0 likes - 0 boosts - 0 replies
1h ago
313 engagements - 0 likes - 1 boost - 1 reply
another 1h ago
354 - 3 - 1 - 0
another 1h ago
669 - 3 - 1 - 1
another 1h ago
570 - 1 - 0 - 0
2h ago
461 - 7 - 1 - 2
———
Like... what good is 33 000 followers if less than 1/3rd potentially see your post and you get nearly no real engagement?
My Theory: While Politicians think they are using X/FB because “that's where the people are”, the data shows that the "people" beyond clicking ‘follow' never actually see them or engage with that person. Instead, what the profile is actually used for is self promotion. A known place where the *media* can pick up the relevant happenings of a politician.
Which then begs the question. Would said Mayor of Ottawa be able to do exactly the same thing, and engage with the same or more constituents on ottawa.place?

I’m reading Civilization Before Greece and Rome, by H. W. F. Saggs. Published in ‘89 so some interpretations are outdated, but a section on the emergence and rise of the god king in Mesopotamia for instance shows how the evangelical butt kissing of 🍊💩 and their efforts to sanctify him have been a part of human behavior for the past 5KY that we have written records of, and likely for a long while before that. Our constitution tries to buck the trend, but the odds for success look slim.

Analysis of pine tar caulking shows that the #Hjortspring boat—a raiding vessel preserved in a Danish bog in the 4th century BCE—originated in the #Baltic, and not in northwestern Germany, as had been previously suspected.

A 2,000-Year-Old Fingerprint May Solve Mystery of Scandinavia’s Oldest Wooden Boat
A single fingerprint in ancient tar is rewriting the story of one of Scandinavia’s earliest seaborne raids. Researchers have identified a fingerprint preserved in the tar used to seal the oldest known wooden plank boat in Scandinavia, offering a rare physical connection to the sea raiders who use

CAGE: An Internal Source Scanning Cryostat for HPGe Characterization
G. Othman, C. Wiseman, T. H. Burritt, J. A. Detwiler, M. P. Held, R. Henning, T. Mathew, D. Peterson, W. Pettus, G. Song, T. D. Van Wechel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06289 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.06289 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.06289
arXiv:2602.06289v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The success of current and future-generation neutrinoless double beta decay experiments relies on the ability to eliminate or reduce extraneous backgrounds. In addition to constructing experiments using radiopure materials and handling in underground laboratories, it is necessary to understand and reduce known backgrounds in data analysis. The Large Enriched Germanium Experiment for Neutrinoless double beta Decay is searching for this decay using 76Ge-enriched high-purity germanium detectors submerged in an active liquid argon veto. A significant background in LEGEND is surface events from shallowly-impinging radiation on detector surfaces. In this paper we introduce the Collimated Alphas, Gammas, and Electrons (CAGE) scanning system, an internal-source scanning vacuum cryostat, designed to perform studies of surface events on sensitive surfaces of HPGe in a surface-lab. CAGE features a collimated radionuclide source inside a movable infrared shield that is able to perform precision scans of detector surfaces by utilizing three independent motor stages for source positioning. This allows detailed studies of pulse shapes as a function of source position and incident angle, where defining features can be extracted and exploited for removing surface backgrounds in data analysis in LEGEND. In this paper, we describe CAGE and demonstrate its performance with a commissioning run with 241Am. The commissioning run was completed with the source at normal incidence, and we estimate a beam spot precision of 3.1 mm, which includes positioning uncertainties and the beam-spot size. Using the 59.5 keV gamma population from 241Am, we show that low-energy photon events near the passivated surface feature risetimes that increase with radial distance from the detector center. We suggest a specific metric that can be used to discriminate low-energy gamma backgrounds in LEGEND with similar characteristics.
toXiv_bot_toot

A friend of mine rooted my #Roborock S7 robot vacuum and installed custom software called #Valetudo. Now it runs completely without needing to connect to the manufacturer's servers in China, which gives me more peace of mind. I was surprised that almost all the original fun…

from my link log —
How we made Python's packaging library 3x faster.
https://iscinumpy.dev/post/packaging-faster/
saved 2026-01-27 https://

How we made Python's packaging library 3x faster
Along with a pip (and now packaging) maintainer, Damian Shaw, I have been working on making packaging, the library behind almost all packaging related tools, faster at reading versions and specifiers, something tools like pip have to do thousands of times during resolution. Using Python 3.15’s new statistical profiler and metadata from every package ever uploaded to PyPI, I measured and improved core Packaging constructs while keeping the code readable and simple. Reading in Versions can be u…