Tootfinder

recent-ish reading/rereading. #books @…

Simulating Chirality: Solving Distance-$k$-Dispersion on an 1-Interval Connected Ring
Brati Mondal, Pritam Goswami, Buddhadeb Sau
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14723

Simulating Chirality: Solving Distance-$k$-Dispersion on an 1-Interval Connected Ring
We study the Distance-$k$-Dispersion (D-$k$-D) problem for synchronous mobile agents in a 1-interval-connected ring network having $n$ nodes and with $l$ agents where $3 \le l \le \lfloor \frac{n}{k}\rfloor$, without the assumption of chirality (a common sense of direction for the agents). This generalizes the classical dispersion problem by requiring that agents maintain a minimum distance of $k$ hops from each other, with the special case $k=1$ corresponding to the standard dispersion. The …

Newly daylighted Canyon Creek brings lost habitat back to Spanish Banks
A long-hidden urban stream in Spanish Banks Beach Park has been brought back to the surface thanks to efforts by the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation.
Local Nations, community members and elected officials gathered today to celebrate the public opening of Canyon Creek, a previously buried waterway that ran through Pacific Spirit Regional Park and under the western parking lot at Spanish Banks

Newly daylighted Canyon Creek brings lost habitat back to Spanish Banks
A long-hidden urban stream in Spanish Banks Beach Park has been brought back to the surface thanks to efforts by the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation.

Found in Naomi Klein's Doppelganger. The one lesson I wish the modern left would internalize more than anything.
Use shared language.
Don't use lefty jargon when the person you're talking to doesn't subscribe to these ideas. No white privilege, no colonial oppression, no intersectionality. Translate to a shared language, built on reasonable, common assumptions and do the work required to bring people on board.
Because you can be damned sure the MAGA crowd ar…

board_directors: Norwegian Boards of Directors (2002-2011)
224 networks of the affiliations among board directors due to sitting on common boards of Norwegian public limited companies (as of 5 August 2009), from May 2002 onward, in monthly snapshots through August 2011. Some metadata is included, such as director and company names, city and postal code for companies, and gender for directors. The 'net2m' data are bipartite company-director networks, while the 'net1m' ar…

LDI: Localized Data Imputation
Soroush Omidvartehrani, Davood Rafiei
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16616 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.1661…

LDI: Localized Data Imputation
Missing values are a common challenge in real-world tabular data and can significantly impair downstream analysis. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown promise in data imputation, existing methods often rely on broad, unfiltered prompts that compromise accuracy, scalability, and explainability. We introduce LDI (Localized Data Imputation), a novel framework that improves both the accuracy and transparency of LLM-based imputation by selecting a compact, contextually relevant su…

A single paragraph buried deep in a spending bill that passed the GOP-controlled House of Representatives earlier this month is causing growing concern among democracy watchdogs
-- who warn the provision will make it so only the well-to-do would be in a good position to launch legal challenges against a Trump administration that has shown over and over again its disdain and disregard for oversight or judicial restraint of any kind.
Coming just about half-way through what Presiden…

'This Is What Autocrats Do': Concern Grows Over Single Paragraph Buried Deep in GOP Bill | Common Dreams
The provision would force those challenging Trump "to pay up in the form of a posted bond—something many people can't afford to do. That means only the wealthy will be able to even attempt to challenge the most powerful man in the country."

Common Raven, collecting nesting material. Descanso Gardens, La Canada Flintridge, California, USA. April, 2023. #descansogardens #bird #birds

This short paper gets deep in the weeds of a particular kind of physics, he is sharing a rare example where we were able to both reduce a system and then construct the aggregate behavior. But the broad systems conclusion is what's interesting.
The arrogance of the particle physicist and his intensive research may be behind us (the discoverer of the positron said "the rest is chemistry"), but we have yet to recover from that of some molecular biologists, who seem determined to try to reduce everything about the human organism to "only" chemistry, from the common cold and ailmental disease to the religious instinct. Surely there are more levels of organization between human ethology and DNA than there are between DNA and quantum electrodynamics, and each level can require a whole new conceptual structure.

board_directors: Norwegian Boards of Directors (2002-2011)
224 networks of the affiliations among board directors due to sitting on common boards of Norwegian public limited companies (as of 5 August 2009), from May 2002 onward, in monthly snapshots through August 2011. Some metadata is included, such as director and company names, city and postal code for companies, and gender for directors. The 'net2m' data are bipartite company-director networks, while the 'net1m' ar…