Tootfinder

It's unusually hot in the UK, so it seemed a good time for a bit more cataloguing of my 'private' library on https://www.librarything.com/ It's free and once you get going it's quite an insight finding similar collections and recommendations.
It's good for collections by societies, …

Measurement of the Dispersion–Galaxy Cross-Power Spectrum with the Second CHIME/FRB Catalog: #CHIME collaboration helps identify location of "missing" matter in the universe: https://www.mcgill.ca/newsroom/channels/news/chime-collaboration-helps-identify-location-missing-matter-universe-373578 - researchers from McGill, MIT and partner institutions combined fast radio bursts and incoming light from galaxies to locate a vast source of previously unaccounted-for matter.

🔐 Provider keys are AES-256-GCM encrypted in #SQLite and decrypted in memory per request — your apps only ever see one unified bearer token.
🔄 The catalog self-updates from a signed feed twice a day, verified against a pinned Ed25519 key, so new models and quota changes land without a git pull.

The Next Generation Virgo Cluster Survey (NGVS). II. A Catalog of Galaxies in the Virgo Cluster
Laura Ferrarese, Patrick Cote, Lauren A. MacArthur, Joel C. Roediger, John P. Blakeslee, Michele Cantiello, Jean-Charles Cuillandre, Puragra Guhathakurta, Stephen Gwyn, Max M. Kurzner, Eric W. Peng, Matthew Santos, Eleanore B. Todd, Elisa Toloba, Pierre-Alain Duc, Patrick R. Durrell, Nicholas Fantin, Yuting Feng, Ariane Lancon, Sungsoon Lim, Chengze Liu, Deborah Lokhorst, Alessia Longobardi, Simona Mei, J. Christopher Mihos, Sanjaya Paudel, Thomas H. Puzia, Anand Raichoor, Ruben Sanchez-Janssen, Kaixiang Wang, Hongxin Zhang, Alessandro Boselli, Michael L. Balogh, Samuel Boissier, Eric Emsellem, J. J. Kavelaars, Alan W. McConnachie, Cameron R. Morgan, Chelsea Spengler, James E. Taylor, Matthew A. Taylor, Toby Brown, Sebastien Fabbro, Raphael Gavazzi, Hendrik Hildebrandt, Rashi Jain, Andres Jordan, Rory Smith, Solveig Thompson, Haruka Yoshino, Wim van Driel, Ludovic van Waerbeke, Tyrone E. Woods, Jade Yeung
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18414 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.18414 https://arxiv.org/html/2607.18414
arXiv:2607.18414v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The Next Generation Virgo Cluster Survey (NGVS) is a deep, high resolution imaging campaign that used the 1 deg$^2$ MegaCam instrument on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope to carry out a comprehensive optical survey of the Virgo cluster, from its core to its virial radius. The NGVS covers a contiguous area of 104 deg$^2$ (8.63 Mpc$^2$ at the 16.5 Mpc distance of Virgo) in the $u^*$-,$g$-,$i$-, and $z$-band, with additional limited coverage in $r$. In this paper, we present the final catalog of Virgo galaxies across the entire NGVS area. The catalog includes 3680 galaxies considered to be $bona~fide$ members of the cluster, spanning a factor of 2.5 million in luminosity, from $g = 8.42$ mag to $g = 24.41$ mag ($M_g = -22.67$ mag to $M_g = -6.68$ mag). With 2100 previously uncataloged galaxies, the NGVS catalog augments the number of known Virgo members by a factor 2.3. The catalog is complete down to $g = 18.6$ mag ($M_g=-12.5$ mag, corresponding to a stellar mass $M_* \sim 1.6\times10^7~M_{\odot}$ for an old stellar population) and 50% complete at $g = 22.0$ mag ($M_g=-9.1$ mag, $M_* \sim 6.2\times10^5~M_{\odot}$), three magnitudes deeper than the venerable Virgo Cluster Catalog (VCC), which for over 40 years has served as the reference standard for Virgo. Photometric and structural parameters are derived for all NGVS galaxies and presented in a series of tables, alongside nuclear and morphological classification, as well as stellar masses and, when available, radial velocities.
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Sony Music Publishing completes its acquisition of the full music rights portfolio of Recognition Music Group, backed by Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC (Tim Ingham/Music Business Worldwide)
https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/d…

Done deal: Sony Music Publishing completes acquisition of Recognition Music Group’s catalog
Sony Music Publishing already administered the Recognition catalog before completing the acquisition.

Oh no I just found out that one of my favorite Buddhist teachers has just gone all AI grifter
Tara Brach, WYD this is not the dharma

https://lnkd.in/p/gcynwNDX

Very niche goss in the spiritual business world: esteemed Buddhist teacher Tara Brach announced yesterday that she is launching "AvaTara" — a generative AI that has been trained on her vast catalog… | Amanda Baudier | 18 comments
Very niche goss in the spiritual business world: esteemed Buddhist teacher Tara Brach announced yesterday that she is launching "AvaTara" — a generative AI that has been trained on her vast catalog of teachings and can create custom meditations for the user... yikes. As you can imagine — there was lots of uproar in the spiritual / Buddhist community (including my own) which is not overwhelmingly friendly to the AI revolution. A thread I posted went so semi-viral that it inspired me to wr…

Aardman props auction...
https://propstoreauction.com/auctions/catalog/id/549?items=100&page=1

➡️ Open Library
#bookmarks

Allegory of Satan is stunning! I’ve never seen a more appropriate depiction of the devil in the arts!
https://zbiory.mnk.pl/en/search-result/catalog/429353

Galaxy Clusters Selected via the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect in 5 year data from the SPT-3G Main Survey: #GalaxyClusters: https://www.anl.gov/article/south-pole-telescope-analysis-yields-catalog-of-more-than-7000-galaxy-clusters - new cosmic census, detailed by lead co-authors from Argonne, is based on five years of data.

Pagination and batch jobs both get brutally slow once your catalog gets big — for two completely different, fixable reasons. Shopware has a mode and an iterator behavior that solve each, and the docs mention neither. One of them the docblock even gets wrong.
http:/…

Shopware 6 Hidden Gems #9: Pagination without the pain — NEXT_PAGES mode and the self-optimizing iterator - Winkelwagen GmbH
Two classics of the "shop got big, code got slow" genre:

How long will MAHA hold together?
However long Kennedy lasts in government, his
"Make America Healthy Again" coalition already lies in shambles,
its catalog of achievements short.
What happened?
At present, there is no confirmed head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
or of the Food and Drug Administration.
There is no surgeon general and no head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease,
effectively…

Has the MAHA Movement Given Up?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his allies promised public-health libertarianism. The idea couldn’t survive once they took power.

🛠️ What shipped: two meta-tools, search_tools and execute_tools. Declare a catalog via ToolSearch::class in the server's $tools. Frequently used tools stay advertised, the rest become discoverable on demand.
Search is deterministic lexical scoring over tool names, descriptions and input schemas, no embeddings. Each batched call runs as a real JsonRpcRequest through ToolInvoker, and conditional registration is re-checked at execution.

i live in a small apartment without a lot of storage space. for LPs, i have two three-foot shelves, one for jazz, the other for everything else. last week, i made a new resolution to play at least one non-jazz record every day. here's how it's going.
#vinyl #OldVinyl

Found a partition name catalog, some were not included in https://troopers.de/downloads/troopers17/TR17_ME11_Static.pdf and I haven't seen them myself.

Physical Properties of 6.7 Million Galaxies from the DESI Bright Galaxy Survey: Spectral Fitting and Systematic Tests with Mock Spectra
Niu Li, Hu Zou, Jinfu Gou, Weijian Guo, Wenxiong L, Haoming Song, Jipeng Sui, Xi Tan, Yunao Xiao, Jingyi Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19162 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.19162 https://arxiv.org/html/2607.19162
arXiv:2607.19162v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We present a comprehensive analysis of the physical properties of galaxies in the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Data Release 1 (DR1) Bright Galaxy Survey (BGS), based on full spectral fitting of $\sim 6.7$ million galaxy spectra. Using a customized spectral fitting pipeline, we derive key physical parameters including stellar mass, stellar velocity dispersion, stellar population age, dust attenuation, and emission-line properties. To quantify the reliability and systematic uncertainties of our measurements, we construct a large set of mock spectra that closely reproduce the observed properties of DESI data, including realistic noise and spectral features. By comparing the recovered parameters with the known inputs, we assess the performance of the spectral fitting as a function of stellar continuum signal-to-noise ratio (S/N, defined as the ratio of the median continuum flux to its associated error) and redshift. We find that stellar masses can be robustly recovered with negligible bias for spectra with $\mathrm{S/N} \gtrsim 5$, while low-S/N spectra ($\mathrm{S/N} \lesssim 5$) show a mild systematic overestimation of $\sim 0.1$ dex and increased scatter. Similar trends are observed for stellar population parameters, while emission-line fluxes are recovered with high accuracy and minimal bias. We further validate our stellar mass estimates by comparison with independent measurements from photometric spectral energy distribution fitting, finding good overall consistency within the expected systematic uncertainties. The value-added catalog presented in this work enables a wide range of statistical studies of galaxy evolution with DESI, and provides a foundation for future analyses.
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/2a
De kaart laat zich (voor een deel) heel aardig vergelijken met
📸 Nationaal georegister
#PFAS #drinkwater #waterwingebieden

FYI, from now until midnight (CST) Sunday, all physical items in the Elevator Bath catalog are 25% off with code AUGUST. If you want recommendations, lemme know. https://elevatorbath.bandcamp.com/music

Elevator Bath
Elegant abstract music. Since 1998. Distributed by Clandestine → https://clandestinedistribution.com/ Not currently accepting demos.

Universal Music Group partners with ElevenLabs to launch a new AI-powered platform that will let users create song remixes, mashups, and more from its catalog (Emma Roth/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/993465/universal-m…

Universal Music is launching an AI music platform with ElevenLabs
Universal Music Group is partnering with the AI voice generator ElevenLabs to launch a new AI-powered music creation platform.

Jury Duty: Theatre You Cannot Leave
The envelope looks like a bill and behaves like a warrant. It arrives in the plain mail between a seed catalog and a credit offer, your name printed the way only a government database can print it, and inside is a summons: report to the courthouse on a Monday in March, at half past eight in the morning, prepared to stay....

Found the 1982 Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog at my parents' today. For just $20,000, you could get the LaserTour by Perceptronics, a computerized system that lets you bicycle different routes via an exercise bike and laser disc player connected by a specialized computer.

📊 Measured tools/list payload: 10 tools 5,843 − 1,431 bytes (-75.5%), 40 tools 23,423 − 1,431 bytes (-93.9%), 100 tools 58,585 − 1,431 bytes (-97.6%). Rule of thumb: past 10-15 tools, a catalog pays off.
⚖️ Trade-off: search adds a round trip and batches have no loops or branching. Small servers with always-used tools should keep advertising directly; agents needing control flow still need a sandbox like

Universal Music Group partners with ElevenLabs to launch a new AI-powered platform that will let users create song remixes, mashups, and more from its catalog (Emma Roth/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/993465/universal-m…

Universal Music is launching an AI music platform with ElevenLabs
Universal Music Group is partnering with the AI voice generator ElevenLabs to launch a new AI-powered music creation platform.

The TESS All-Sky #Rotation Survey - Periods for 1,046,317 Stars within 500 pc: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4365/ae6657 -> A New Catalog of Stellar Rotation Periods for Over a Million Stars: https://aasnova.org/2026/07/01/a-new-catalog-of-stellar-rotation-periods-for-over-a-million-stars/

Bookmarked: HTRMoPo App #HTR Kraken model catalog, built on the HTRMoPo scheme.

🧠 Lazy discovery is the core trick: instead of dumping every tool definition into context on each request, the gateway advertises 3 meta-tools (toolport_status, toolport_search_tools, toolport_call_tool) and the agent searches on demand.
📊 3 servers with 62 tools cost ~24,000 tokens of definitions up front; via meta-tools it drops to ~660. Benchmarked at up to 91% fewer total tokens at equal task success, 97% less tool-definition overhead per request, 99.6% on a 415-tool catalog.

Just finished reading "The Beast Player" by Nahoko Uehashi. I had already watched the anime, but it had been so king I didn't remember all the details. While the anime was great, the book is even better, and it's going to be high on my list of things to recommend to my children when they're old enough to read for fun.
The neurodivergent representation is cool, as is the deep central question of interspecies bonds and the political possibilities and dangers they entail. Uehashi handles the exploration of that question well in my judgment, including appropriate ambiguity without muddying moral clarity. Elin is a truly fantastic protagonist, not without flaws but nevertheless a excellent role model and a very sympathetic figure without being pitiful.
One thing I really love about Uehashi's writing is that she's not shy about using interior narration to tell the reader directly what a variety of characters are feeling, but when she does this she focuses on human contradictions, quirks, and weaknesses that make those characters feel much richer, and that remind the reader of all the ways our weird and sometimes contradictory or inexplicable quirks guide our actions just as much as both logical thought and predictable/expected feelings. None of the characters is an unerring source of wisdom, with every grand principle presented shown to have its weaknesses and biases, and even the wisest characters making mistakes and learning from them.
Overall, a wonderful book, and having also seen the "Seirei no Moribito" anime but not read the books, I'm excited to dig into more of Uehashi's extensive catalog.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

Integrated cosmological memory: A dark-siren method to probe dark energy
Indranil Chakraborty, Sayantan Ghosh, Susmita Jana, Archana Pai, S. Shankaranarayanan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03739 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.03739 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.03739
arXiv:2608.03739v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Gravitational-wave (GW) cosmology is currently bottlenecked by the scarcity of electromagnetic counterparts for bright sirens and the systematic uncertainties of galaxy catalogs for dark sirens. We propose a purely gravitational resolution using the Integrated Cosmological Memory (ICM)-the cumulative GW strain encoded in the spacetime geometry of an expanding Universe. While the GW transient emitted by the source provides the luminosity distance, the ICM accumulates a mathematically distinct integral of the cosmic expansion history. We demonstrate that extracting both observables from a single binary merger completely breaks the distance-redshift degeneracy within the gravitational sector. This establishes a novel, catalog-free dark siren framework for third-generation GW detector networks. Crucially, the resulting constraints on late-time dark energy are only weakly sensitive to the local expansion rate, providing a robust cosmological probe that can potentially mitigate the impact of the H0 tension.
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Replaced article(s) found for astro-ph.GA. https://arxiv.org/list/astro-ph.GA/new
[2/3]:
- Hunting Wandering 3<z<8 Black Holes: Spatial Offsets in Ionization Ratio and Continuum Emission
Urvi Thakurdesai, et al.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.30715 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_astrophGA_bot/116843669196485332
- Spectral Energy Distributions of Globular Clusters in VV191a
Ashton Cardona, et al.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10352 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_astrophGA_bot/116917375134409194
- The different methods to calculate cluster membership probabilities
Tahereh Ramezani, Prapti Mondal, Katerina Neumannova, Ernst Paunzen, Johana Supikova, Gabriel Szasz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13711 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_astrophGA_bot/116928584338673264
- On the current status of tidal tails of Galactic open clusters
Tahereh Ramezani, Prapti Mondal, Katerina Neumannova, Ernst Paunzen, Johana Supikova, Gabriel Szasz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13747 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_astrophGA_bot/116928607930493156
- The Stripped-Star Ultraviolet Magellanic Cloud Survey (SUMS): The UV Photometric Catalog and Stri...
Bethany Ludwig, Maria R. Drout, Ylva Gotberg, Dustin Lang, Alexander Laroche
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18632 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_astrophSR_bot/114578704405418342
- Observable signature of magnetic tidal coupling in hierarchical triple systems
Marta Cocco, Gianluca Grignani, Troels Harmark, Marta Orselli, Davide Panella, Daniele Pica
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.24897 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_grqc_bot/115462391818777276
- Periodic Gravitational Lensing with Oscillating Boson Stars
Xing-Yu Yang, Tan Chen, Rong-Gen Cai
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19606 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_grqc_bot/115615137595636545
- Search for Dark Matter Annihilation and Decay with H$\alpha$ Line Emission
Rebecca K. Leane
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09019 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_hepph_bot/115700041751825685
- Reanalyzing DESI DR1: 5. Cosmological Constraints with Simulation-Based Priors
Anton Chudaykin, Mikhail M. Ivanov, Oliver H. E. Philcox
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18554 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_astrophCO_bot/116124504277603946
- Can wormholes have vanishing Love numbers?
Shauvik Biswas
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03025 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_grqc_bot/116526586864139338
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Licensed shows account for ~40% of Netflix's global series titles but generate 50% of series-driven sign-ups, meaningfully outpacing their share of the catalog (Christofer Hamilton/The Wrap)
https://www.thewrap.com/media-platforms/streaming/net…

Licensed Shows Now Drive Over Half of Netflix's New Subscribers | Chart
Over half of new subscribers to Netflix sign up to watch licensed shows and live events, while Bridgerton drove a lot of new sign-ups.

Instead of •judging• people who are stuck between a rock and a hard place, we all — but especially us tech folks! — should spend some time •actually learning• what’s locking people in to a platform going bad. There are some answers in the original QP. Here are some guesses of my own:
- Is prohibitively hard to migrate their catalog / inventory?
- Are they unsure how to proceed?
- Are they burned out on platform switching?
- Do they have some larger process that really, really works and are loath to abandon it?
- Do the alternatives not provide the same functionality?
- Will they lose contact with their supporters if they switch?
- etc.
Those are all made-up guesses, but they're all examples of •perfectly good reasons• for someone to be resistant to switching.

yes, you can shop from the macwarehouse catalog (go ahead, get that Mac clone you always wanted). https://morphing.cloud/macwarehouse/1997/

🔨 Skill Forge explores a site once, discovers its APIs and data patterns, then generates a deploy-ready skill package that runs at scale without re-exploration
📦 A solutions catalog ships 30 pre-built skills for sites like Amazon, Google Maps, YouTube and Reddit
💻 Runs on Windows, macOS and Linux with any agent that can execute shell commands. MIT licensed, most features free

Watch how easy it is to redeem your physical game discs for digital licenses in your Xbox Live digital catalog...
...so you can play the game on any Xbox, Xbox Ally, Windows PC or via xCloud Gaming.
▶️ I Bought Used Games to Test Xbox Disc to Digital
#xbox #digitallicense

From Continuous Dynamics to Practical Gradient-Based Samplers
James Chok
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05425 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.05425 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.05425
arXiv:2608.05425v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Gradient-based Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are often introduced as a catalog of algorithms: Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC), the Metropolis-adjusted Langevin algorithm (MALA), the No-U-Turn Sampler (NUTS), and several underdamped variants. This presentation obscures the common structure of the methods and, more importantly, the reasons why a sampler that is correct in principle may be ineffective in practice. We develop a unified account, beginning with exact continuous-time dynamics that represent idealized sampling methods and for which Metropolis adjustments are not required. Numerical discretization makes the dynamics computationally feasible but introduces bias. Metropolis adjustment removes the asymptotic bias by converting numerical errors into rejection, leading to HMC, MALA, NUTS, and the Metropolis-adjusted kinetic Langevin algorithm (MAKLA).
The second half of the paper presents geometric design choices that determine practical performance, namely, although MAKLA and NUTS have nice theoretical properties, their sampling efficiency may be slow in practice. Importantly, a fixed mass matrix can whiten globally anisotropic targets, often fixing sampling inefficiency in Bayesian posteriors with large data. Whereas hierarchical posteriors introduce their own problem, causing state-dependent variation in the Hessian (e.g., Neal's funnel). We explain how a randomized step size can be used effectively to sample from such a distribution. The resulting paper is both a tutorial on the mechanics of gradient-based sampling and a set of practical recipes to improve sampler performance.
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At Berlin Buzzwords 2026, Gülçin Yıldırım Jelinek joined us with "What you should know about constraints in PostgreSQL 18" and gave a detailed walkthrough of the pg_constraint catalog, what’s new in PostgreSQL 18 and what’s coming in PostgreSQL 19.
Full session: #bbuzz

So the actual practice of mutual support in my community looks like:
- Knowing the semi-official funds for big problems. There's a fire relief fund, and groups who are reliable about getting out the hat for the big problems
- A Discord where people get to know each other
- A tool library, just an informal listing of who has what and enough of a forum to inquire about using something
- Proactively saying "hey, can I drop you a meal?" or "hey, I'm dropping off cookies, want some?" to people.
- People who actively look for opportunities to help in their way. Mine is usually bicycle things, or computer things.
- People who talk about what's in their little free libraries
- People who catalog small resources like classes the library offers or where has open public restrooms
- Where to take donations, and enough chatter that if someone needs something, someone who sees it at a thrift shop might pick it up
It's all super informal, but I keep my eye on the pulse of it because I have conversational habits that let me connect people. That's really all it takes: awareness and connecting people.

The LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA Gravitational Wave Transient Catalog (GWTC) Release 4: #GravitationalWave Events from LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA: https://aasnova.org/2026/07/29/monthly-roundup-the-fourth-catalog-of-gravitational-wave-events-from-ligo-virgo-and-kagra/

i'm in the hefti bag tonight
#jazz #basie #countbasie #CountBasieandHisOrchestra

Rubin Observatory Opens Deep Window on Famous Cosmic Field: #Rubin image featuring hundreds of thousands of distant galaxies in and around the #COSMOSField marks the Observatory’s first #LSST Camera image and catalog release for science.