Tootfinder

Frequentist Cosmological Constraints from Full-Shape Clustering Measurements in DESI DR1
James Morawetz, Hanyu Zhang, Marco Bonici, Will Percival, Andrea Crespi, Jessica Nicole Aguilar, Steven Ahlen, Davide Bianchi, David Brooks, Francisco Javier Castander, Todd Claybaugh, Shaun Cole, Andrei Cuceu, Axel de la Macorra, Arnaud de Mattia, Biprateep Dey, Peter Doel, Simone Ferraro, Andreu Font-Ribera, Jaime E. Forero-Romero, Enrique Gazta\~naga, Satya Gontcho A Gontcho, Gaston Gutierrez, C…

Frequentist Cosmological Constraints from Full-Shape Clustering Measurements in DESI DR1
We perform a frequentist analysis using the standard profile likelihood method for clustering measurements from Data Release 1 of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). While Bayesian inferences for Effective Field Theory models of galaxy clustering can be highly sensitive to the choice of priors for extended cosmological models, frequentist inferences are not susceptible to such effects. We compare Bayesian and frequentist constraints for the parameter set $\{σ_8, H_0, Ω_{\rm{m}}, …

Epstein shit and adjacent, Rural America, Poverty, Abuse
Everyone who's not a pedophile thinks pedophiles are bad, but there's this special obsessed hatred you'll find among poor rural Americans. The whole QAnon/Epstein obsession may not really make sense to folks raised in cities. Like, why do these people think *so much* about pedophiles? Why do they think that everyone in power is a pedophile? Why would the Pizzagate thing make sense to anyone? What is this unhinged shit? A lot of folks (who aren't anarchists) might be inclined to ask "why can't these people just let the cops take care of it?"
I was watching Legal Eagle's run down on the Trump Epstein thing earlier today and I woke up thinking about something I don't know if I've ever talked about. Now that I'm not in the US, I'm not at any risk of talking about it. I don't know how much I would have been before, but that's not something I'm gonna dig into right now. So let me tell you a story that might explain a few things.
I'm like 16, maybe 17. I have my license, so this girl I was dating/not dating/just friends with/whatever would regularly convince me to drive her and her friends around. I think she's like 15 at the time. Her friends are younger than her.
She tells me that there's a party we can go to where they have beer. She was told to invite her friends, so I can come too. We're going to pick her friends up (we regularly fill the VW Golf well beyond the legal limit and drive places) and head to the party.
So I take these girls, at least is 13 years old, down to this party. I'm already a bit sketched out bringing a 13 year old to a party. We drive out for a while. It's in the country. We drive down a long dark road. Three are some barrel fires and a shack. This is all a bit strange, but not too abnormal for this area. We're a little ways outside of a place called Mill City (in Oregon).
We park and walk towards the shack. This dude who looks like a rat comes up and offers us beer. He laughs and talks to the girl who invited me, "What's he doing here? You're supposed to bring your girl friends." She's like, "He's our ride." I don't remember if he offered me a beer or not.
We go over to this shed and everyone starts smoking, except me because I didn't smoke until I turned 18. The other girls start talking about the rat face dude, who's wandered over by the fire with some other guys. They're mainly teasing one of the 13 year old girls about having sex with him a bunch of times. They say he's like, 32 or something. The other girls joke about him only having sex with 13 year olds because he's too ugly to have sex with anyone closer to his own age.
Somewhere along the line it comes out that he's a cop. I never forgot that, it's absolutely seared in to my memory. I can picture his face perfectly still, decades later, and them talking about how he's a deputy, he was in his 30's, and he was having sex with a 13 year old girl. I was the only boy there, but there were a few older men. This was a chunk of the good ol' boys club of the town. I think there were a couple of cops besides the one deputy, and a judge or the mayor or some kind of big local VIP.
I kept trying to get my friend to leave, but she wanted to stay. Turns out under age drinking with cops seems like a great deal if you're a kid because you know you won't get busted. I left alone, creeped the fuck out.
I was told later that I wasn't invited and that I couldn't talk about it, I've always been good at compartmentalization, so I never did.
Decades later it occurred to me what was actually happening. I'm pretty sure that cop was giving meth he'd seized as evidence to these kids. This wasn't some one-off thing. It was regular. Who knows how many decades it went on after I left, or how many decades it had been going on before I found out. I knew this type of thing had happened at least a few times before because that's how that 13 year old girl and that 32 year old cop had hooked up in the first place.
Hearing about Epstein's MO, targeting these teenage girls from fucked up backgrounds, it's right there for me. I wouldn't be surprised if they were involved in sex trafficking of minors or some shit like that... but who would you call if you found out? Half the sheriff's department was there and the other half would cover for them.
You live in the city and shit like that doesn't happen, or at least you don't think it happens. But rural poor folks have this intuition about power and abuse. It's right there and you know it.
Trump is such a familiar character for me, because he's exactly that small town mayor or sheriff. He'll will talk about being tough on crime and hunting down pedophiles, while hanging out at a party that exists so people can fuck 8th graders.
The problem with the whole thing is that rural folks will never break the cognitive dissonance between "kill the peods" and "back the blue." They'll never go kill those cops. No, the pedos must be somewhere else. It must be the elites. It must be outsiders. It can't be the cops and good ol' boys everyone respects. It can't be the mayor who rigs the election to win every time. It can't be the "good upstanding" sheriff. Nah, it's the Clintons.
To be fair, it's probably also the Clitnons, a bunch of other politicians, billionaires, etc. Epstein was exactly who everyone thought he was, and he didn't get away with it for so long without a whole lot of really powerful help.
There are still powerful people who got away with involvement with #Epstein. #Trump is one of them, but I don't really believe that he's the only one.
#USPol #ACAB

Exploring Gender Bias in Alzheimer's Disease Detection: Insights from Mandarin and Greek Speech Perception
Liu He, Yuanchao Li, Rui Feng, XinRan Han, Yin-Long Liu, Yuwei Yang, Zude Zhu, Jiahong Yuan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12356

Exploring Gender Bias in Alzheimer's Disease Detection: Insights from Mandarin and Greek Speech Perception
Gender bias has been widely observed in speech perception tasks, influenced by the fundamental voicing differences between genders. This study reveals a gender bias in the perception of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) speech. In a perception experiment involving 16 Chinese listeners evaluating both Chinese and Greek speech, we identified that male speech was more frequently identified as AD, with this bias being particularly pronounced in Chinese speech. Acoustic analysis showed that shimmer values in…

🥳 New Kitten Release
Housekeeping:
• Updated runtime version to Node version 22.18.0 (latest LTS).
• Removed `--experimental-global-customevent` in node launch command (as `CustomEvent` is no longer behing the CLI flag since Node v19.0.0)
• Renamed `--experimental-loader` flag to `--loader` as the experimental prefix is no longer required.
…

Lower Bounds for the Shadiness Constant of Finite-Dimensional Normed Spaces
Jeremias Epperlein
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14819 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.…

Lower Bounds for the Shadiness Constant of Finite-Dimensional Normed Spaces
By the Hahn-Banach theorem, every normed space admits rank-one projections with operator norm one. However, this is not true for higher rank projections. Bosznay and Garay showed that for every $d \geq 3$ there exist $d$-dimensional normed spaces $X$ for which all projections of rank $k$, with $2 \leq k \leq d-1$, have norm larger than or equal to some constant $c>1$. We call the maximal such constant the shadiness constant of $X$. Although constructing such spaces is not difficult, few explici…

Mamdani was out in Forest Hills yesterday. My sister-in-law and a bunch of other folks got to see him, but I didn't get to (venue was full).
Meanwhile Grace Meng showed up to our shindig yesterday, which was cool, but I still would've rather had Mamdani!

Trump complained that domestic violence was being counted in the crime statistics,
which he claimed meant that the influence of his policy was not being seen as significant enough.
“They said, ‘Crime’s down 87%,’” the president claimed, not explaining who “they” were.
“I said, no, no, no. It’s more than 87%, virtually nothing.
And much lesser things, things that take place in the home they call crime.
You know, they’ll do anything they can to find something.

Had a great time at Good Vibrations Society this weekend.
First act I saw was the most entrancing. Rozsa stroking a harp and singing angelically with a backing track. She was great.
The North London Gospel Choir doing Graceland was pretty cool. They got some mad energy, all those gospel synced dance moves. Lovely to hear that album in a new way.
Enjoyed the Gentlemen Dub Club and Riot Jazz and So Solid Crew. Watched a nice sunset at camp.
Lovely small site, great crowd. Hung with some friends and met old ones I hadn't seen for years.
Also tripped over a guy rope in the dark on the first night and hurt my wrist pretty bad.
Walked away after a moment on the floor assessing damage but visited the medical tent. My wrist swelled up so much the next day I had to have my wristband replaced. Drive home somewhat more perilous as a result. Thank goodness for automatic gear boxes.
#goodVibrationsSociety #festival #uk