Tootfinder

from my link log —
A brief history of Erlang’s BEAM compiler.
https://www.erlang.org/blog/beam-compiler-history/
saved 2025-03-31

What an amazing conclusion of the IMPRS retreat today! The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science welcomed us for a brief but intense visit, and young solar system researchers got to discuss with researchers studying the history of solar eclipse excursions and other intriguing topics. Thank you for having us!
#IMPRS

"#Serendipity is generally defined as the accidental discovery of something valuable while searching for something else. It’s also a hotly contested component of the library research process: is it a failure of #library systems or facilitated by the physical design of libraries, the cat…

The First Compute Arms Race: the Early History of Numerical Weather Prediction
Charles Yang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21816 https://…

The First Compute Arms Race: the Early History of Numerical Weather Prediction
This paper traces the global race to apply early electronic computers to numerical weather prediction in the decades following World War Two. A brief overview of the early history of numerical weather prediction in the United States, United Kingdom, Sweden, Canada, and Japan is provided. Three critical factors that shaped the development of a national numerical weather prediction are identified: compute capabilities, institution building and state capacity, and talent. Several generalizable les…

My favorite historical mystery is “what really happened in the 6th century???”
We have few clues. We know there were at least 2 big eruptions in the 530s, most likely in Iceland, Kamchatka, or Alaska: nowhere with a surviving writing culture. Then a wave of Plague. Then probably other shit no one bothered writing down. It shattered the recording of history for many decades. We will never have a comprehensive history of the “Dark Ages” because no one wrote the pieces.

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 …

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:

Refining Text Generation for Realistic Conversational Recommendation via Direct Preference Optimization
Manato Tajiri, Michimasa Inaba
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19918 https://

Refining Text Generation for Realistic Conversational Recommendation via Direct Preference Optimization
Conversational Recommender Systems (CRSs) aim to elicit user preferences via natural dialogue to provide suitable item recommendations. However, current CRSs often deviate from realistic human interactions by rapidly recommending items in brief sessions. This work addresses this gap by leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate dialogue summaries from dialogue history and item recommendation information from item description. This approach enables the extraction of both explicit user s…

Gravitational wave standard sirens: A brief review of cosmological parameter estimation
Shang-Jie Jin, Ji-Yu Song, Tian-Yang Sun, Si-Ren Xiao, He Wang, Ling-Feng Wang, Jing-Fei Zhang, Xin Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12965

Gravitational wave standard sirens: A brief review of cosmological parameter estimation
Gravitational wave (GW) observations are expected to serve as a powerful and independent probe of the expansion history of the universe. By providing direct and calibration-free measurements of luminosity distances through waveform analysis, GWs provide a fundamentally different and potentially more robust approach to measuring cosmic-scale distances compared to traditional electromagnetic observations, which is known as the standard siren method. In this review, we present an overview of recen…

Anisotropic Gravitational Waves from Anisotropic Axion Rotation
Arushi Bodas, Keisuke Harigaya, Keisuke Inomata, Takahiro Terada, Lian-Tao Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08249 …

Anisotropic Gravitational Waves from Anisotropic Axion Rotation
Gravitational waves (GWs) provide a powerful probe of the early universe due to their ability to free-stream across cosmic history. We study GW production in a compelling scenario where a rotating axion(-like) field becomes relevant for a brief period in the early universe before transitioning into a kination fluid and rapidly dissipating its energy through cosmic expansion. During this short epoch, the curvature perturbation can be predominantly sourced by the rotating axion and may significan…

“Our Jewish identity is not conditional on support for any government’s policies. Our commitment to justice is not separate from our Jewishness or from Jewish history – it flows directly from it.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/12/ha…