Tootfinder

Series A, Episode 10 - Breakdown
BLAKE: Jenna, you take my place. Brief Cally.
[Computer room, Gan tries to pull piping from wall]
AVON: Gan, no! You'll break the computer links, we'll never get them started. [Avon tries to stop Gan, who thows him off]
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/110/295

Abuse in Buddhism: The Law of Silence https://openbuddhism.org/library/videos/2022/elodie-emery-wandrille-lanos-present-buddhism-the-unspeakable-truth/

‘Abuse in Buddhism: The Law of Silence’
In a brief video in English, the French filmmakers Élodie Emery and Wandrille Lanos introduce their documentary ‘Abuse in Buddhism: The Law of Silence’ (Arte, 2022). It can be watched here.

Evidence for a brief appearance of gamma-ray periodicity after a compact star merger
Run-Chao Chen, Bin-Bin Zhang, Chen-Wei Wang, Wen-Jun Tan, Shao-Lin Xiong, Jun Yang, Yi-Han Iris Yin, Shuang-Nan Zhang, Bing Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15824

Evidence for a brief appearance of gamma-ray periodicity after a compact star merger
The product of a compact star merger is usually hypothesized to be a hyperaccreting black hole, typically resulting in a gamma-ray burst (GRB) with a duration shorter than 2~s. However, recent observations of GRB~211211A and GRB~230307A, both arising from compact star mergers, challenge this model due to their minute-long durations. The data from both events are consistent with having a nascent, rapidly spinning highly magnetized neutron star (a millisecond magnetar) as the merger product and G…

Read all about Chatcontrol and why we should resist it. This sentence is extremely scary.... "Specifically, this AI will have to be built by WhatsApp/Meta so they can monitor us on behalf of the EU" 😱
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/chatcontrol-in-brief/

Chatcontrol 2025 edition in Brief - Bert Hubert's writings
In short, led by Denmark, many EU member states are arguing for forcing WhatsApp/Signal/etc to inspect all our photos and links, using AI. If the AI is in any “doubt” if this might be child pornography, your photo, location, phone number & other details get reported to Europol and a local police force. What happens next is not specified, but your holiday in Cyprus might end up with you having to explain your photos over at the local police station.

Don't miss today's Metacurity for the critical infosec developments you might have missed over the weekend, including
--Embargo may be a rebranded version of ALPHV ransomware group,
--Russian threat group GreedyBear is stealing crypto,
--Israel beat Iran in the brief war's cyber conflicts,
--M&S resumes click and collect orders,
--GPT-5 was a disaster and easy to hack,
--Hacker breached dealership portal and could hack customers' cars,

New Embargo group may be a rebranded version of ALPHV ransomware gang
Russian threat group GreedyBear is stealing crypto, Israel beat Iran in the brief war's cyber conflicts, M&S resumes click and collect orders, GPT-5 was a disaster and easy to hack, Hacker breached dealership portal and could hack customers' cars, Korea's Yes24 ransomwared again, much more

UK's Channel 4 plans to mark Trump's UK visit with an hours-long program cataloging 100 falsehoods, punctuated by "brief text-based fact checks", on Sept. 17 (Lily Ford/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-ne

Channel 4 to Mark Trump’s U.K. Visit With “Longest Uninterrupted Reel of Untruths Ever Broadcast on Television”
Trump v the Truth' will run for several hours on Sept. 17 and is set to be punctuated by "brief text-based fact-checks."

Materials folks: I'm looking for a removable sacrificial masking material that:
* Can be applied as a thixotropic gel and cures quickly, preferably under UV
* Sticks reasonably well to silicon, tin plated copper and epoxy-glass composites
* Can be removed with no residue
* Will survive repeated brief exposure to concentrated or fuming nitric and sulfuric acids at ~80C followed by washing in cold acetone
I'm currently using a Dymax peelable UV polyurethane…

"State of the climate: 2025 on track to be second or third warmest year on record"
#Climate #ClimateChange

State of the climate: 2025 on track to be second or third warmest year on record - Carbon Brief
As it passes its midway point, 2025 is on track to be the second or third warmest year on record, Carbon Brief analysis shows.

Abuse in Buddhism: The Law of Silence https://openbuddhism.org/library/videos/2022/elodie-emery-wandrille-lanos-present-buddhism-the-unspeakable-truth/

‘Abuse in Buddhism: The Law of Silence’
In a brief video in English, the French filmmakers Élodie Emery and Wandrille Lanos introduce their documentary ‘Abuse in Buddhism: The Law of Silence’ (Arte, 2022). It can be watched here.

@… This seems like the kind of thing you'd like
https://bsky.app/profile/ukrainewarpod.bsky.social/post/3ltnhr654ks26

Asymptotic quasinormal modes, echoes, and black hole spectral instability: a brief review
Shui-Fa Shen, Guan-Ru Li, Ramin G. Daghigh, Jodin C. Morey, Michael D. Green, Wei-Liang Qian, Rui-Hong Yue
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11663

Asymptotic quasinormal modes, echoes, and black hole spectral instability: a brief review
We present a short review of the analytical aspects of recent progress in the study of black hole spectral instability and its potential observational consequences. This topic, inspired by earlier foundational works, has attracted considerable attention in the recent literature. It has been demonstrated that both the low-lying modes and high overtones of black hole quasinormal spectra can be substantially influenced by ultraviolet metric perturbations. The temporal evolution of gravitational wa…

Our English-language MA program in #ReligiousStudies attracts students from all over the world. Sometimes it can be a challenge to handle the diversity of undergrad training and disciplinary knowledge that our students bring with them. But this semester’s “ethics and politics of religious heritage” class was a delight. After a brief introduction, I let my students bring their topics, texts,…

hi yall! weird and arty movies used to be a massive part of my psyche for a brief, intense time when i was younger. but then i had a particularly bad depressive slump that killed the habit. now i wanna get back into it. each day for the next week, im gonna watch one Andrei Tarkovsky film (i found a free collection on archive.org!) and post my initial reaction afterward. i saw one of his movies, Stalker, when i was about 15, and while i liked it, i know i was too young and stupid to actually …

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:

TL;DR: what if nationalism, not anarchy, is futile?
Since I had the pleasure of seeing the "what would anarchists do against a warlord?" argument again in my timeline, I'll present again my extremely simple proposed solution:
Convince the followers of the warlord that they're better off joining you in freedom, then kill or exile the warlord once they're alone or vastly outnumbered.
Remember that even in our own historical moment where nothing close to large-scale free society has existed in living memory, the warlord's promise of "help me oppress others and you'll be richly rewarded" is a lie that many understand is historically a bad bet. Many, many people currently take that bet, for a variety of reasons, and they're enough to coerce through fear an even larger number of others. But although we imagine, just as the medieval peasants might have imagined of monarchy, that such a structure is both the natural order of things and much too strong to possibly fail, in reality it takes an enormous amount of energy, coordination, and luck for these structures to persist! Nations crumble every day, and none has survived more than a couple *hundred* years, compared to pre-nation societies which persisted for *tends of thousands of years* if not more. I'm this bubbling froth of hierarchies, the notion that hierarchy is inevitable is certainly popular, but since there's clearly a bit of an ulterior motive to make (and teach) that claim, I'm not sure we should trust it.
So what I believe could form the preconditions for future anarchist societies to avoid the "warlord problem" is merely: a widespread common sense belief that letting anyone else have authority over you is morally suspect. Given such a belief, a warlord will have a hard time building any following at all, and their opponents will have an easy time getting their supporters to defect. In fact, we're already partway there, relative to the situation a couple hundred years ago. At that time, someone could claim "you need to obey my orders and fight and die for me because the Queen was my mother" and that was actually a quite successful strategy. Nowadays, this strategy is only still working in a few isolated places, and the idea that one could *start a new monarchy* or even resurrect a defunct one seems absurd. So why can't that same transformation from "this is just how the world works" to "haha, how did anyone ever believe *that*? also happen to nationalism in general? I don't see an obvious reason why not.
Now I think one popular counterargument to this is: if you think non-state societies can win out with these tactics, why didn't they work for American tribes in the face of the European colonizers? (Or insert your favorite example of colonialism here.) I think I can imagine a variety of reasons, from the fact that many of those societies didn't try this tactic (and/or were hierarchical themselves), to the impacts of disease weakening those societies pre-contact, to the fact that with much-greater communication and education possibilities it might work better now, to the fact that most of those tribes are *still* around, and a future in which they persist longer than the colonist ideologies actually seems likely to me, despite the fact that so much cultural destruction has taken place. In fact, if the modern day descendants of the colonized tribes sow the seeds of a future society free of colonialism, that's the ultimate demonstration of the futility of hierarchical domination (I just read "Theory of Water" by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson).
I guess the TL;DR on this is: what if nationalism is actually as futile as monarchy, and we're just unfortunately living in the brief period during which it is ascendant?

Les énergies renouvelables dépasseront le charbon pour devenir la première source d'électricité au monde "d'ici 2026 au plus tard" selon les nouvelles prévisions de l'Agence internationale de l'énergie.
#énergie #transitioénergétique

Something to always be aware of: Many wheelchair users can stand and move around for brief periods of time. Not all wheelchair users are paralysed. Reasons for wheelchair use are numerous and varied.

Some wheelchair users choose not to stand in public because chances are they will be chastised and harassed if they do. With more awareness and understanding this risk can hopefully diminish over time.

For example, if a wheelchair user is able to retrieve their own wheelchair from…

Short Proof: Exact Solution to the Finite Frobenius Coin Problem
Lorenzo De Gaspari, Marco Ronzani
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08464 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2…

Short Proof: Exact Solution to the Finite Frobenius Coin Problem
The Frobenius Coin Problem is a classic question in mathematics: given coins of specified denominations, what is the largest amount that cannot be formed using only those coins? This brief work covers a variation of such question, posing a limit on the number of coins available for each denomination. Thus, the new problem becomes finding the count of distinct values that can be represented, and those that cannot, within the finite set of integers ranging from zero to the sum of all coins. We re…

The disclosure of a SEAL Team 6 mission into North Korea in 2019 has heightened interest in
when the executive branch must tell congressional oversight committees about important military and intelligence operations.
The Trump administration did not inform Congress of what happened.
But in 2021, the Biden administration decided to brief top congressional officials.
The difference in approach raises the question of whether the Trump team improperly or illegally withheld…

Trump Didn’t Notify Congress About a High-Stakes SEALs Mission. That Could Be an Issue.
The Trump administration failed to tell lawmakers about a 2019 SEAL Team 6 incursion into North Korean territory that went awry.

Got my water/utility bill for the spring/summer yesterday. (we get billed 3 times a year as part of our general city utilities bill including water, sewer and garbage/recycling fees).
Figured it would be a big water year this year so I've been wanting to see this. And of course, I have data going back to 2019ish.
Today's bill only goes to August 1st, so it doesn't include when we started to fill the #pondpool!
This was already a dry year in the spring and we were doing lots of watering in the front yard for the new ground cover in the modified driveway and the 3 new fruit trees.
Verdict:
2024: Apr 12 - Aug 7: 122, 200L
2025 Apr 14 - Aug 1 (7 less days!): 136,600L
It will be interesting to see if the August pond filling will add a big chunk onto our summer/fall consumption or if that is offset by both the brief August water restrictions, and the departure of both kids this fall to consume other people's water. ;=)
If you want an indication of how much water people use vs. yards: look at our August 2022 bill, which captures when we were on our cross-Canada roadtrip for 30 days in July/August of the 100 day period.
#water #consumption #gardening #utility #PortAlberni

Towards Efficient Pixel Labeling for Industrial Anomaly Detection and Localization
Jingqi Wu, Hanxi Li, Lin Yuanbo Wu, Hao Chen, Deyin Liu, Peng Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05034

Towards Efficient Pixel Labeling for Industrial Anomaly Detection and Localization
Industrial product inspection is often performed using Anomaly Detection (AD) frameworks trained solely on non-defective samples. Although defective samples can be collected during production, leveraging them usually requires pixel-level annotations, limiting scalability. To address this, we propose ADClick, an Interactive Image Segmentation (IIS) algorithm for industrial anomaly detection. ADClick generates pixel-wise anomaly annotations from only a few user clicks and a brief textual descript…

"OBR: Net-zero is much cheaper than thought for UK – and unchecked global warming far more costly"
#UK #UnitedKingdom #NetZero

OBR: Net-zero is much cheaper than thought for UK – and unchecked global warming far more costly - Carbon Brief
Reaching net-zero will be much cheaper for the UK government than previously expected – and the economic damages of climate change far more severe.

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…

In the spring, I gave the participants of the fine arts pedagogy course at INN a glimpse into what I’ll be researching this fall. While the connections have developed since then, I still like the map and refer to it regularly.
A brief overview – fredsnotes https://filmschoolteacher.info…

"It was Tragic": Exploring the Impact of a Robot's Shutdown
Agam Oberlender, Hadas Erel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06934 https://arxiv.org/pd…

"It was Tragic": Exploring the Impact of a Robot's Shutdown
It is well established that people perceive robots as social entities, even when they are not designed for social interaction. We evaluated whether the social interpretation of robotic gestures should also be considered when turning off a robot. In the experiment, participants engaged in a brief preliminary neutral interaction while a robotic arm showed interest in their actions. At the end of the task, participants were asked to turn off the robotic arm under two conditions: (1) a Non-designed…

P.808 Multilingual Speech Enhancement Testing: Approach and Results of URGENT 2025 Challenge
Marvin Sach, Yihui Fu, Kohei Saijo, Wangyou Zhang, Samuele Cornell, Robin Scheibler, Chenda Li, Anurag Kumar, Wei Wang, Yanmin Qian, Shinji Watanabe, Tim Fingscheidt
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11306

P.808 Multilingual Speech Enhancement Testing: Approach and Results of URGENT 2025 Challenge
In speech quality estimation for speech enhancement (SE) systems, subjective listening tests so far are considered as the gold standard. This should be even more true considering the large influx of new generative or hybrid methods into the field, revealing issues of some objective metrics. Efforts such as the Interspeech 2025 URGENT Speech Enhancement Challenge also involving non-English datasets add the aspect of multilinguality to the testing procedure. In this paper, we provide a brief reca…

I've written a brief -- and very preliminary -- note on what I've learned playing with #Friendica so far.
https://www.journeyman.cc/blog/posts-outpu…

Initial thoughts on Friendica
If you've been browsing through your Mastodon feed, and you come upon a post with nice formatting — perhaps words emboldened or italicised, perhaps with an embedded link — and you've wondered how that post was written, the answer may be Friendica.

Interleaving Logic and Counting
Johan van Benthem, Thomas Icard
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05219 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05219

Interleaving Logic and Counting
Reasoning with quantifier expressions in natural language combines logical and arithmetical features, transcending strict divides between qualitative and quantitative. Our topic is this cooperation of styles as it occurs in common linguistic usage and its extension into the broader practice of natural language plus "grassroots mathematics". We begin with a brief review of first-order logic with counting operators and cardinality comparisons. This system is known to be of high complexity, and …

Particle Swarm Optimization for Quantum Circuit Synthesis: Performance Analysis and Insights
Mirza Hizriyan Nubli Hidayat, Tan Chye Cheah
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02898

Particle Swarm Optimization for Quantum Circuit Synthesis: Performance Analysis and Insights
This paper discusses how particle swarm optimization (PSO) can be used to generate quantum circuits to solve an instance of the MaxOne problem. It then analyzes previous studies on evolutionary algorithms for circuit synthesis. With a brief introduction to PSO, including its parameters and algorithm flow, the paper focuses on a method of quantum circuit encoding and representation as PSO parameters. The fitness evaluation used in this paper is the MaxOne problem. The paper presents experimental…

Cubic spline functions revisited
Florian Jarre
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05083 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05083

Cubic spline functions revisited
In this paper a fourth order asymptotically optimal error bound for a new cubic interpolating spline function, denoted by Q-spline, is derived for the case that only function values at given points are used but not any derivative information. The bound seems to be stronger than earlier error bounds for cubic spline interpolation in such setting such as the not-a-knot spline. A brief analysis of the conditioning of the end conditions of cubic spline interpolation leads to a modification of the n…

Standards in the Preparation of Biomedical Research Metadata: A Bridge2AI Perspective
Harry Caufield, Satrajit Ghosh, Sek Wong Kong, Jillian Parker, Nathan Sheffield, Bhavesh Patel, Andrew Williams, Timothy Clark, Monica C. Munoz-Torres
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10432

Standards in the Preparation of Biomedical Research Metadata: A Bridge2AI Perspective
AI-readiness describes the degree to which data may be optimally and ethically used for subsequent AI and Machine Learning (AI/ML) methods, where those methods may involve some combination of model training, data classification, and ethical, explainable prediction. The Bridge2AI consortium has defined the particular criteria a biomedical dataset may possess to render it AI-ready: in brief, a dataset's readiness is related to its FAIRness, provenance, degree of characterization, explainability, …

Hamiltonian Systems as an Example of Invariant Measure
Daniel Ferreira Lopes
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04248 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04248

Hamiltonian Systems as an Example of Invariant Measure
Hamiltonian systems are a classical example in the ergodic theory of flows with an invariant measure. In this matter, we present a brief introduction to measure theory and prove the Poincare recurrence theorem to present the conditions for a system to be conservative. In the following, we discuss the Hamiltonian differential equations, vector fields, and its respective flows as an example of this invariance.

Anomalous superconductivity and unusual normal state properties of bilayer and twisted graphene (Brief review)
M. Yu. Kagan, M. M. Korovushkin, V. A. Mitskan, K. I. Kugel, A. L. Rakhmanov, A. V. Rozhkov, A. O. Sboychakov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19903

Anomalous superconductivity and unusual normal state properties of bilayer and twisted graphene (Brief review)
It has been shown that the Kohn--Luttinger superconductivity mechanism interplaying with other types of ordering can be implemented in systems with a hexagonal lattice. A number of unusual properties of such systems in the normal phase have also been considered. Our previous results on Kohn--Luttinger superconductivity with $p$-, $d$-, and $f$-wave pairing in monolayer and AB bilayer graphene, obtained disregarding the effect of substrate potential and impurities, have been presented in the fir…

Configurational density of states of power-law potentials and the virial theorem in steady states
Sergio Davis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22624 https://arx…

Configurational density of states of power-law potentials and the virial theorem in steady states
In this brief note, the configurational density of states of a system of particles interacting via power-law pair potentials is computed exactly. The result is consistent with a constant microcanonical heat capacity. The well-known form of the virial theorem for this class of systems is recovered using only the obtained configurational density of states, and shown to be valid beyond the canonical and microcanonical ensembles, in general steady states.

Superintegrable bosonic star networks
Angela Foerster, Jon Links
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05590 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.05590

Superintegrable bosonic star networks
We introduce a class of bosonic star networks involving a central site interacting with the surrounding environment sites. These networks are shown to be superintegrable. We present two forms of Bethe Ansatz solution providing expressions for the energy eigenvalues. A brief discussion is included on the potential applications.

Abuse in Buddhism: The Law of Silence https://openbuddhism.org/library/videos/2022/elodie-emery-wandrille-lanos-present-buddhism-the-unspeakable-truth/

Now that we have had our brief bit of fun with the #poolpond, it’s time to drain it so work on completing it can continue! It took just over 12 hours for my little spare pond pump to empty the main pond of about 80% of its water.
It will be empty by morning. I will empty the filter and intake bay as well just to clean everything out. The movement of the past couple weeks through the system will have loosened up a bunch of the gunk still on the various rocks in the filter so a full pump out should remove all that.
I will then concentrate on finishing the piping in the bottom of the main pond for the intake for the second pond and the “periscope” for the bottom returns.
Then I can work on building the rock wall to line the inside of the pond. Or at least experimenting to see if it will work at all!
If it *does* work and I have enough rock to at least start on the bottom layers of the inside wall, then I’ll be able to achieve another milestone: placing the final pebble on the bottom. Important, because that will prevent any groundwater from infiltrating and causing the rubber liner to bubble out.
Really really want to get past that mark before the autumn rains come! For obvious reasons! ☔️
Other jobs that need to be done before winter:
- finish the manifold for the second pump to distribute water to the sprayers and filter and figure out how and where to house and conceal it.
- Dig the electrical trench from the house all the way around the long side of the pond to the back tool shed so we can start wiring it in.
- Clipping the wires on the pumps and adding extension wire to them so they can reach said electrical supplies.
- permanently shore up/modify the borders of the ponds where they were found to be low.
- make a few other minor terraforming modifications for the stream and some of the edges so the water goes a little more where I want it to and a little less where I don’t.
#poolpond #backyardProject #portalberni #ponds #watergarden