Tootfinder

'Wolken' #FotoVorschlag 'Clouds'
I chose this one becasue without clouds, this photo wouldn't have been possible.
The photo came totally unplanned. I just walked a mountain in winter with my photo-backpack. I was looking for a completely different spot when I turned around and saw that scene in the distance. -- Knowing it wouldn't last for long, I suddenl…

Is it too late for someone early 50s to decide they want to abandon their data analytics career (BA, MS, 30 years experience), and start a new path studying television academically? Uh, asking for a friend.
Incidentally, what would be a good title for a thesis studying the left-at-the-altar trope, and how and why it appears much more frequently in sitcoms than in real life, and maybe explore some sociological intersections with that?

First world problem of the day: would be great if you hose nozzle manufacturers could make internal seals and springs that… y'know… withstand *water* for more than a season. These *rarely* work when I dig them out after winter. I never let them freeze; I manually drain them when they come in for the winter…
Anyway, adding Stanley Fatmax to my never-going-to-buy-again-because-you-cheaped-out-on-the-spring list. Next up… Dramm? Lee Valley brass twist? (prefer lever to twist, but… des…

The US political news today features conservative nitwits lamenting declining birthrates. What do they have to offer as a solution? Some kind of vague shaming of folks who choose not to have the “proper” number of kids.
Housing, daycare, food, energy, health care have all gotten much more expensive in the last 5 years, but Republicans have no interest in making these things more affordable so that people who want to have kids can do so.

Personalization systems are actually the AI technology I have the most beef with: I don't think we've fully reckoned with the algorithmic manipulation of information they do. Suddenly the info sphere is not an object you can interrogate, but you become the object, and the infosphere around us is made into a mirror.
Weirdly, LLMs used well are actually _better_ about this because they're somewhat more able to be interrogated (though naive questioning is not probing so much why as one would hope). But the breadth of the corpus and the freedom we have to query within it are currently new capabilities. Not to say that some companies aren't well on their way to researching how to personalize that into a reflection again. Google must be stopped, and I trust OpenAI just as little. People's chats still end up adding quite a reflective lens on things, but the raw access is still there if we want to make use of it.

A geometry aware framework enhances noninvasive mapping of whole human brain dynamics
Song Wang, Kexin Lou, Chen Wei, Zhiyuan Sheng, Jiahao Tang, Kaining Peng, Xinke Shen, Shuhao Mei, Liang Chen, Dongfeng Gu, Quanying Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.25592 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.25592 https://arxiv.org/html/2604.25592
arXiv:2604.25592v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Non-invasive electrophysiology lacks methods that accurately reconstruct whole-brain spatiotemporal dynamics while incorporating individual cortical geometry, leaving current electroencephalography and magnetoencephalography source imaging limited by simplistic or biologically implausible priors. Here, we show that embedding participant-specific Geometric Basis Functions (GBFs), eigenmodes derived from each individual's cortical surface, provides a powerful anatomic constraint that resolves the inverse problem and improves reconstruction fidelity. The method reconstructs neural sources as linear combinations of geometric basis functions, thereby aligning source estimates with the geometric organization of neural dynamics. We validate GBF across the Meta-Source Benchmark, task-evoked data, resting-state networks, intracranial stimulation, and epilepsy data. The results demonstrate that GBF yields high localization accuracy and captures fast spatiotemporal dynamics consistent with anatomical pathways. These findings suggest that both spontaneous and evoked whole-brain activity can be described by hundreds of geometric modes, providing a compact yet accurate representation of neural sources. By linking cortical geometry to electrophysiological dynamics, GBF offers a versatile source imaging tool for both scientific and clinical applications.
toXiv_bot_toot

I've finished reading Simon Winder's "#Germania" a while ago, but I've been slacking with the review. This is a book about the history of #Germany, in the wide meaning of word. However, it's not your boring detailed history book. The author takes us on a deeply personal journey across German landscape, across tiny towns and great forests, Schlosses, churches and monuments, and uses that as a context to bring the country's surprisingly interesting history to light. And honestly, it works — it is deeply enjoyable, to the point of making me wonder if one day I should actually move to Germany, get a Bahncard 100 and start exploring myself.
I didn't quote the book here, but if I were to choose one quote that really resonated with me, it would be:
"""
Solitary tourism is something that everybody should indulge in. Of course it is a fraudulent solitude because its enjoyment comes from its limited duration and having a cheerful, only very temporarily abandoned main base area. […] And then, suddenly, I am in Vienna, standing in the shadow of a monstrous, derelict flak tower, and completely alone. The virtue of solitary tourism is its infinite ability to absorb boredom. I often find myself almost crippled with anxiety that the companion or companions on a journey might be finding everything wholly without interest, would rather be eating somewhere else, are secretly angry that we have wound up walking down this street rather than that, are contemptuous of my own interests. Solitary tourism cauterizes all this: if a museum is boring beyond all measure there is no pressure to feign interest, you just leave. I am perfectly happy, in a zoned-out way, to crisscross a town, walking for hours, just for the off-chance something curious might be round the next corner – indeed in the confidence that there will always be something curious (there always is). But for each street, each bar, each folklore museum to be converted into an inter-human negotiation creates an entirely different dynamic.
[…]
Quite possibly the pleasure of this way of life would be much reduced in some other countries, particularly more insistently gregarious places such as Italy. German culture puts a high value on temporary solitude of a stagey kind. Perhaps this is its great gift. In some moods I think there is no need to do anything other than read German writers from the first half of the nineteenth century – a sort of inexhaustible storehouse of attitudes flattering to those who just like sometimes to be left alone. Everyone must have at least a part of them that wants to live in a stairless, doorless tower as a sort of intellectual Rapunzel, setting aside, at least in part, the complicated sexual frisson laid out by such an idea. Germany really is thick with ivy-covered turrets and the promise of solitude (Kepler staring at the planets above Prague, Faust conjuring demons) – the great majority presumably built in the nineteenth century in response to the whole literature devoted to the subject. There is one turret in Lübeck, built onto a city guard tower of just outrageous fakeness, which would do me for life.
"""
(Simon Winder, Germania)
And if you follow me, you have evidence that the part about crisscrossing towns is so true: the best things I've posted here I found by complete accident, especially the murals.
#books #bookstodon