Tootfinder

"""
Customarily, the honour of having liberated hysteria from the ancient myths about a displacement of the uterus goes to Le Pois and Willis. Jean Liebaud, translating or rather adapting Marinello’s work for the seventeenth century, still accepted (with a small number of caveats) the idea of a spontaneous movement of the womb. If it moved, it was “to be more at ease; not that this came about through prudence, nor was it a conscious decision or an animal stimulus, but by a natural instinct, to safeguard health and to have the pleasure of something delectable.” The idea that it could change its place and move around the body, bringing convulsions and spasms everywhere it travelled, had been abandoned, for it was now taken to be ‘tightly held in place’ by the cervix, ligaments, vessels and the sheath of the peritoneum; yet in some senses it could change its location. “The womb therefore, even though it is tightly fixed to the parts that we have described and cannot easily change its place, still manages to roam, making strange, petulant movements around the woman’s body. These diverse movements include ascensions and descents, convulsions, wanderings and prolapses. It can wander up to the liver, spleen, diaphragm, stomach, chest, heart, lung, throat and head.” Physicians of the classical age are more or less unanimous in refusing this explanation.
[…] Yet these analyses were not sufficient to break the theme of an essential link between hysteria and the womb. But the link is now conceived in different terms. It is no longer considered to be the trajectory of a real displacement through the body, but rather a sort of mute propagation through the paths of the organism and its functional proximities. It cannot be said that the seat of the malady has become the brain, nor that thanks to Willis a psychological explanation of hysteria was now possible. But the brain does take on the role of a relay that distributes a malady whose origins are visceral, and the womb brings it on just as the other viscera do. Up until the end of the eighteenth century, and Pinel, the uterus and the womb are still present in the pathology of hysteria, but thanks to a privileged diffusion by the humours and nerves, not because of any particular prestige of their nature.
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

Smith argues the threat of Iran having a nuclear weapon was "all made up. In other words, Donald Trump has all the time in the world to take this to Congress and let the American system, which is supposed to be the people get to decide through their representatives whether or not we declare a war. There was no imminent threat here.”
Comedian Dave Smith Voted for Trump. Now He’s Calling for His Impeachment Over Iran
https://zeteo.com/p/libertarian-comedian-and-ex-trump-supporter-says-maga-will-turn-on-trump

Speculative politics
As an anarchist (okay, maybe not in practice), I'm tired of hearing why we have to suffer X and Y indignity to "preserve the rule of law" or "maintain Democratic norms." So here's an example of what representative democracy (a form of government that I believe is inherently flawed) could look like if its proponents had even an ounce of imagination, and/or weren't actively trying to rig it to favor a rich donor class:
1. Unicameral legislature, where representatives pass laws directly. Each state elects 3 statewide representatives: the three most-popular candidates in a statewide race where each person votes for one candidate (ranked preference voting would be even better but might not be necessary, and is not a solution by itself). Instead of each representative getting one vote in the chamber, they get N votes, where N is the number of people who voted for them. This means that in a close race, instead of the winner getting all the power, the power is split. Having 3 representatives trades off between leisure size and ensuring that two parties can't dominate together.
2. Any individual citizen can contact their local election office to switch or withdraw their vote at any time (maybe with a 3-day delay or something). Voting power of representatives can thus shift even without an election. They are limited to choosing one of the three elected representatives, or "none of the above." If the "none of the above" fraction exceeds 20% of eligible voters, a new election is triggered for that state. If turnout is less than 80%, a second election happens immediately, with results being final even at lower turnout until 6 months later (some better mechanism for turnout management might be needed).
3. All elections allow mail-in ballots, and in-person voting happens Sunday-Tuesday with the Monday being a mandatory holiday. (Yes, election integrity is not better in this system and that's a big weakness.)
4. Separate nationwide elections elect three positions for head-of-state: one with diplomatic/administrative powers, another with military powers, and a third with veto power. For each position, the top three candidates serve together, with only the first-place winner having actual power until vote switches or withdrawals change who that is. Once one of these heads loses their first-place status, they cannot get it again until another election, even if voters switch preferences back (to avoid dithering). An election for one of these positions is triggered when 20% have withdrawn their votes, or if all three people initially elected have been disqualified by losing their lead in the vote count.
5. Laws that involve spending money are packaged with specific taxes to pay for them, and may only be paid for by those specific revenues. Each tax may be opted into or out of by each taxpayer; where possible opting out of the tax also opts you out of the service. (I'm well aware of a lot of the drawbacks of this, but also feel like they'd not necessarily be worse than the drawbacks of our current system.) A small mandatory tax would cover election expenses.
6. I'm running out of attention, but similar multi-winner elections could elect panels of judges from which a subset is chosen randomly to preside in each case.
Now I'll point out once again that this system, in not directly confronting capitalism, racism, patriarchy, etc., is probably doomed to the same failures as our current system. But if you profess to want a "representative democracy" as opposed to something more libratory, I hope you'll at least advocate for something like this that actually includes meaningful representation as opposed to the current US system that's engineered to quash it.
Key questions: "Why should we have winner-take-all elections when winners-take-proportionately-to-votes is right there?" and "Why should elected officials get to ignore their constituents' approval except during elections, when vote-withdrawal or -switching is possible?"
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#Democracy

«Esto Es Amor» colaboración entre Mon Laferte y Conociendo Rusia.
#MonLaferte

Dieser Kommentar auf @… von Tim Elsner - "Hingewurschtelt in Germany" - trifft viele Nägel auf den Kopf: https://www.golem.de/news/ki-aus-…

KI aus Deutschland: Hingewurschtelt in Germany - Golem.de
EU-Milliarden fließen in KI-Projekte, doch es kommt wenig dabei heraus - gerade in Deutschland. Das liegt vor allem am falschen Fokus.

Piritakua: the atmosphere as a high-energy physics laboratory
Hermes Le\'on Vargas, Antonio Galv\'an, Andr\'es Sandoval, Ernesto Belmont, Cindy Castell\'on Salguero, Adiv Gonz\'alez Mu\~noz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21373

Piritakua: the atmosphere as a high-energy physics laboratory
The atmosphere provides a large set of experimental conditions on which cosmic-ray induced high-energy hadron interactions can take place. These conditions include: sudden changes in the atmospheric pressure, temperature, and in the local electric and magnetic fields. In this talk we introduce the Piritakua (flash of lightning, in the language of the pre-Columbian Purépecha Empire in Mexico) project, a cosmic-ray detector located at the Instituto de Física of UNAM, in Mexico City at 2280 m. a…

Realisability and Complementability of Multiparty Session Types
Cinzia Di Giusto (C,A, I3S), Etienne Lozes (I3S, Laboratoire I3S - COMRED), Pascal Urso (I3S, SCALE, Laboratoire I3S - COMRED)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17354

Realisability and Complementability of Multiparty Session Types
Multiparty session types (MPST) are a type-based approach for specifying message-passing distributed systems. They rely on the notion of global type specifying the global behaviour and local types, which are the projections of the global behaviour onto each local participant. An essential property of global types is realisability, i.e., whether the composition of the local behaviours conforms to those specified by the global type. We explore how realisability of MPST relates to their complement…

Heute vor 80 Jahren: Am 20.08.1945 kam es bei Experimenten mit einem #Plutoniumkern versehentlich zu einer kritischen Reaktion. Harry Daghlian erlitt dabei eine tödliche Strahlendosis. Er war der erste bekannte Todesfall durch einen #Kritikalitätsunfall.

Leveraging Transfer Learning and User-Specific Updates for Rapid Training of BCI Decoders
Ziheng Chen, Po T. Wang, Mina Ibrahim, Shivali Baveja, Rong Mu, An H. Do, Zoran Nenadic
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14120

Leveraging Transfer Learning and User-Specific Updates for Rapid Training of BCI Decoders
Lengthy subject- or session-specific data acquisition and calibration remain a key barrier to deploying electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) outside the laboratory. Previous work has shown that cross subject, cross-session invariant features exist in EEG. We propose a transfer learning pipeline based on a two-layer convolutional neural network (CNN) that leverages these invariants to reduce the burden of data acquisition and calibration. A baseline model is traine…

Unobtrusive Reflectance Photoplethysmography for Detecting and Severity Grading of Sleep Apnea via Oxygen Desaturation Index
Karen Adam, Cl\'ementine Aguet, Patrick Theurillat, Florent Baty, Maximilian Boesch, Damien Ferrario, Mathieu Lemay, Martin Brutsche, Fabian Braun
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08399

Unobtrusive Reflectance Photoplethysmography for Detecting and Severity Grading of Sleep Apnea via Oxygen Desaturation Index
Sleep apnea is a common chronic sleep-related disorder which is known to be a comorbidity for cerebro- and cardio-vascular disease. Diagnosis of sleep apnea usually requires an overnight polysomnography at the sleep laboratory. In this paper, we used a wearable device which measures reflectance photoplethysmography (PPG) at the wrist and upper arm to estimate continuous SpO2 levels during sleep and subsequently derive an oxygen desaturation index (ODI) for each patient. On a cohort of 170 patie…