Tootfinder

Lou Cannon, a veteran Washington Post reporter who wrote several influential biographies of Ronald Reagan, has died at 92 (Robert D. McFadden/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/20/books/lou-cannon-dead.html

Lou Cannon Dies at 92; Journalist Chronicled Reagan as an Author
He was a foremost authority on the president, tracing his career in unvarnished accounts from his time as California governor through his years in the White House.

Police were no longer pursuing Marshawn Kneeland at time of crash, report says https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6825131/2025/11/20/marshawn-kneeland-police-crash-report/

found the website of a dog-obsessed german couple, then the page where they memorialize their dead dogs
http://www.cmf-dogs.at/index.php/in-memoriam

Police were no longer pursuing Marshawn Kneeland at time of crash, report says https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6825131/2025/11/20/marshawn-kneeland-police-crash-report/

50 years ago tonight, the jerry garcia band open a 2-night superbill at winterland, their only time playing there, along with the keith & donna band & weir’s kingfish. all dead members present minus lesh & hart, though the only sit-ins happen on the 20th.
soundboard: https://archive.org/de…

I'd been meaning to switch off T-Mobile for years because of their dead zone in the Mission but never got around to it. This boycott that begins this weekend is pushing me to finally do it
https://tmobileboycott.org/

It's time to hang up on authoritarianism. It's time to hang up on T-Mobile.
TAKE THE PLEDGE TO BOYCOTT T-MOBILE

I recently researched the etymology of two interesting German words:
- "nonchalant" (informal, relaxed, casual, carefree, easy-going): I found that interesting because it's obviously a negation and I never read the non-negated form "chalant". Turns out that the non-negated form goes back to latin "calēre" (warm, to be hot, to be alarmed, to be fired up)
- "verschollen" (lost, missing, nothing has been known about the whereabouts of sth. or sb. for a long time). I found it weird because I couldn't make any sense of "schollen". This might be related to "verschallen" (stop making noise) and might go back to old high German "skellan" (which is also related to German "Schelle", a small bell). So, "verschollen" can be seen as a euphemistic expression because stop making noise is used to refer to being lost (and maybe dead).
#etymology #linguistics #German

@… I totally ignored Facebook for three years or so.
I'm not sure why I revisited this year, it was probably to tell whether someone is still alive, after one of my 'death-of-friends-and-family' nightmares.
I found only two acquaintances dead, and one in a wheelchair following a stroke … not too bad, given our ages and the length of time th…

60 years ago tonight, the big beat acid test, on the grateful dead’s home turf in palo alto, at a soon-to-open go-go club on the outskirts of town. full chaos, with the dead & prankster band playing at the same time. local historian @… on the big beat:

the best thing about our ring camera is the battery is dead 95% of the time.
#privacy
https://mastodon.social/@eff/115697276823039413

Maybe this whole AI era is a mash-up of Terminator meets Brewster’s Millions.
Sam Altman (Brewster) is sent back in time to start such a laughably bad AI hype cycle that it effectively changes the course of human history, steering us away from our doom.
Through his efforts, what could have been a human-eradicating AI leaves us with hallucinations, weird sex bots, AI avatars of our dead loved ones, and AI-powered toys telling children to hurt themselves.

*new role has a script called `test:turbo`*
*runs it*
Time elapsed: 1303 seconds (21 minutes)
Dead.

Hong Kong’s deadliest fire in decades burned through the night,
leaving at least 44 people dead and 279 reported missing
with rescuers still pulling residents from blazing high-rise apartment buildings into the morning.
Police had arrested three men on suspicion of manslaughter in connection with fire
which began Wednesday afternoon in a housing complex in Tai Po district, a suburb in the New Territories.
By Thursday morning local time, the fire was yet to be pu…

3 arrested in Hong Kong, as a high-rise fire leaves at least 44 dead and 279 reported missing
HONG KONG (AP) — Hong Kong’s deadliest fire in decades burned through the night, leaving at least 44 people dead and 279 reported missing with rescuers still pulling residents from blazing high-rise a...

I've had a few of these thoughts stuck in my craw all day because I watched this liberal historian talk about the Galleanisti.
https://youtube.com/shorts/93yHEn8BYE4
Basically, she says that "of course the government had the right to target them." Then she goes on to talk about how it became an excuse to carry out a bunch of attacks on other marginalized people. Now, the Galleanisti had been bombing the houses of politicians and such. I get where she's coming from saying that one of their targets "was in the right" to try to catch them. But there's some context she's not talking about at all.
These were Italian anarchists, so they were not white and they were part of an already marginalized political group. Basically all of Europe and the US was trying to wipe out anarchists at the time. Meanwhile, the sitting president at the time showed the first movie in the White House. That movie was KKK propaganda, in which he was favorably quoted. The US was pretty solidly white supremacist in the 1920's.
Like... A major hidden whole premise of the game "Bioshock: Infinite" is that if you went back to the US in the 1920's, and you had magic powers, you would absolutely use them to kill as many cops as possible and try to destroy society. There's a lot of other stuff in there, I don't want to get distracted, but "fuck those racists," specifically referring to the US in the 1920's, was a major part of a major game.
Those Italian anarchists were also stone cutters. They carved grave stones. But the dust from that can kill you, much like black lung for coal miners. So they were dying from unsafe working conditions, regularly raising money to support dying coworkers and then carving gravestones for those same coworkers.
Now, I personally think insurrectionary anarchism is a dead end. I disagree with it as a strategy. We've seen it fail, and it failed there. But of course it makes sense that they wanted to blow up the government.
...And that's the correct way to structure that. When you say, "of course they were in the right" you're making a very clear political statement. You could easily say, "the cops in Vichy France had every right to hunt down the French Resistance." You would technically be correct, I guess. But it would really say something about your politics if you justified the actions of Nazi collaborators over those fighting against the Nazis.
And you may say, "oh, but the Nazis didn't have justification for anything. They invaded a sovereign nation, so their government wasn't legitimate anyway."
To which I would reply, "have you considered a history book about the US?"

The group chat is dead. It’s stunning that people keep saying it’s where the action is when it’s been dead for a long time.

Good Weights: Proactive, Adaptive Dead Reckoning Fusion for Continuous and Robust Visual SLAM
Yanwei Du, Jing-Chen Peng, Patricio A. Vela
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22910 https:…

Good Weights: Proactive, Adaptive Dead Reckoning Fusion for Continuous and Robust Visual SLAM
Given that Visual SLAM relies on appearance cues for localization and scene understanding, texture-less or visually degraded environments (e.g., plain walls or low lighting) lead to poor pose estimation and track loss. However, robots are typically equipped with sensors that provide some form of dead reckoning odometry with reasonable short-time performance but unreliable long-time performance. The Good Weights (GW) algorithm described here provides a framework to adaptively integrate dead reck…

Vyacheslav Leontyev, ex-publisher of Soviet newspaper Pravda, is found dead in Moscow; a police source says he is suspected to have thrown himself from a window (Marc Bennetts/The Times)
https://www.thetimes.com/world/russia-ukraine…

Former Soviet media executive among Russia’s suspicious suicides
The long time head of the Soviet newspaper Pravda has been found dead in Moscow, heightening concerns over a pattern of similar deaths

60 years ago today (maybe), the muir beach acid test, during which the grateful dead & owsley stanley encounter one another for the very first time & owsley promptly freaks out & drives his car into a ditch. muir beach photo from later in the '60s. (sometimes the palo alto acid test is placed on 12/11 & muir beach on 12/18, but rosie mcgee says she met phil lesh for the 1st time on 12/11 & attended palo alto the following week, which seems to settle the matter.) [1/4]…

unplanned unemployment event. oops.
well, not an emergency. I have 4mo income in cash and several years income in capitalism collectibles. I can reduce expenses 100% by hibernating everyone. hm, maybe that's a bad idea. I should avoid making major decisions for a week.
so, no rush to get a new job. maybe after Trump is dead. hello Secret Service agent. yes, this is a credible threat. it's not a waste of time to investigate. if you give me a good spanking I'll reveal a…

Real-Time Markov Modeling for Single-Photon LiDAR: $1000 \times$ Acceleration and Convergence Analysis
Weijian Zhang, Hashan K. Weerasooriya, Prateek Chennuri, Stanley H. Chan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20500

Real-Time Markov Modeling for Single-Photon LiDAR: $1000 \times$ Acceleration and Convergence Analysis
Asynchronous single-photon LiDAR (SP-LiDAR) is an important imaging modality for high-quality 3D applications and navigation, but the modeling of the timestamp distributions of a SP-LiDAR in the presence of dead time remains a very challenging open problem. Prior works have shown that timestamps form a discrete-time Markov chain, whose stationary distribution can be computed as the leading left eigenvector of a large transition matrix. However, constructing this matrix is known to be computatio…

evidently, Tom Stoppard passed away recently. Reminds me of:
https://wrog.dreamwidth.org/20761.html
(tl;dr: Tom Stoppard and Auditory Processing Disorder are two things that do not go well together.)
(... could be time to rent "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" again -…

Oh, right. Also, the giant 36" spider I finished #3dprinting in the nick of time, on the porch on some dead tomato plants from the garden. #halloween

Time to cleanup my GitHub profile of a bunch of dead-abandoned experimental projects.

Part of why #Trump has always been so hard to pin down politically is that he was always representing highly conflicting interests. Now, as that eats him alive, the GOP is fracturing in to two main groups: the Pinochet/Franco wing and the Hitler wing.
The Pinochet/Franco wing (let's call them PF) are lead by Vance. PF are also a coalition with some competing interests, but basically it's evangelical leaders, Opus Dei (fascist catholics), tech fascists (Yarvinites), pharma, and the other normal big republican donors. They support Israel, some because apartheid is extremely profitable and some because they support the genocide of Palestinian in order to bring the end of the world. They are split between extremely antisemitic evangelicals and Zionists, wanting similar things for completely different reasons. PF wants strong immigration enforcement because it lets them exploit immigrants, they don't want actual ethnic cleansing (just the constant threat). They want H1B visas because they want to a precarious tech work force. They want to end tariffs because they support free trade and don't actually care about things being made here.
The Hitler wing are lead by Nick Fuentes. I think they're a more unified group, but they're going to try to pull together a coalition that I don't think can really work. They're against Israel because they believe in some bat shit antisemitic conspiracy theory (which they are trying to inject along side legitimate criticism of Israel). They are focused on release of the #EpsteinFiles because they believe that it shows that Epstein worked for Mossad. They don't think that the ICE raids are going far enough, they oppose H1Bs because they are racists. They want a full ethnic cleansing of the US where everyone who isn't "white" is either enslaved for menial labor, deported, or dead. But they're also critical of big business (partially because of conspiracy theories but also) because they think their best option is to push for a white socialism (red/brown alliance).
Both of them want to sink Trump because they see him as standing in the way of their objectives. Both see #Epstein as an opportunity. Both of them have absolutely terrifying visions of authoritarian dictatorships, but they're different dictatorships.with opposing interests. Even within these there may be opportunities to fracture these more.
While these fractures decrease the likelihood of either group getting enough people together, their vision is more clear and thus more likely to succeed if they can make that happen. Now is absolutely *not* the time to just enjoy the collapse, we need to keep up or accelerate anti-fascist efforts to avoid repeating some of the mistakes of history.
Edit:
I should not that this isn't *totally* original analysis. I'll link a video later when I have time to find it.
Here it is:
#USPol

"""
[…] Paradoxically, the more a population grew, the more precious it became, as it offered a supply of cheap labour, and by lowering costs allowed a greater expansion of production and trade. In this infinitely open labour market, the ‘fundamental price’, which for Turgot meant a subsistence level for workers, and the price determined by supply and demand ended up as the same thing. A country was all the more commercially competitive for having at its disposal the virtual wealth that a large population represented.
Confinement was therefore a clumsy error, and an economic one at that: there was no sense in trying to suppress poverty by taking it out of the economic circuit and providing for a poor population by charitable means. To do that was merely to hide poverty, and suppress an important section of the population, which was always a given wealth. Rather than helping the poor escape their provisionally indigent situation, charity condemned them to it, and dangerously so, by putting a brake on the labour market in a period of crisis. What was required was to palliate the high cost of products with cheaper labour, and to make up for their scarcity by a new industrial and agricultural effort. The only reasonable remedy was to reinsert the population in the circuit of production, being sure to place labour in areas where manpower was most scarce. The use of paupers, vagabonds, exiles and émigrés of any description was one of the secrets of wealth in the competition between nations. […]
Confinement was to be criticised because of the effects it had on the labour market, but also because like all other traditional forms of charity, it constituted a dangerous form of finance. As had been the case in the Middle Ages, the classical era had constantly attempted to look after the needs of the poor by a system of foundations. This implied that a section of the land capital and revenues were out of circulation. In a definitive manner too, as the concern was to avoid the commercialisation of assistance to the poor, so judicial measures had been taken to ensure that this wealth never went back into circulation. But as time passed, their usefulness diminished: the economic situation changed, and so did the nature of poverty.
«Society does not always have the same needs. The nature and distribution of property, the divisions between the different orders of the people, opinions, customs, the occupations of the majority of the population, the climate itself, diseases and all the other accidents of human life are in constant change. New needs come into being, and old ones disappear.» [Turgot, Encyclopédie]
The definitive character of a foundation was in contradiction with the variable and changing nature of the accidental needs to which it was designed to respond. The wealth that it immobilised was never put back into circulation, but more wealth was to be created as new needs appeared. The result was that the proportion of funds and revenues removed from circulation constantly increased, while that of production fell in consequence. The only possible result was increased poverty, and a need for more foundations. The process could continue indefinitely, and the fear was that one day ‘the ever increasing number of foundations might absorb all private funds and all private property’. When closely examined, classical forms of assistance were a cause of poverty, bringing a progressive immobilisation that was like the slow death of productive wealth:
«If all the men who have ever lived had been given a tomb, sooner or later some of those sterile monuments would have been dug up in order to find land to cultivate, and it would have become necessary to stir the ashes of the dead in order to feed the living.» [Turgot, Lettre Š Trudaine sur le Limousin]
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

Kavanagh. Every time, that guy. 6’ of stoppage? Let’s play a full minute more because Palace have a throw. I have zero doubt he’d have blown it dead at 95:45 if #LFC were on a counter.
Given that Palace played better in composite, Liverpool being decidedly better in the second half, and that I think Salah did handle the ball that VAR somehow missed… seems the result is justice served.
Glas…

Burnup Measurement using Bent Crystal Spectrometer for Pebble Bed Reactors
Ian Kolaja, Lee Bernstein, Ludovic Jantzen, Eleanor Tubman, Tatiana Siaraferas, Massimiliano Fratoni
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08835

Burnup Measurement using Bent Crystal Spectrometer for Pebble Bed Reactors
Burnup measurement is essential for monitoring and controlling pebble bed reactors (PBRs), where fuel pebbles circulate rapidly through the core. However, conventional gamma spectroscopy using high purity germanium (HPGe) detectors is difficult due to high activity levels in discharge pebbles, leading to excessive dead time and Compton scattering. This study explores the use of bent crystal diffraction (BCD) spectrometers to filter the emitted gamma spectrum and isolate key peaks for improved m…

#RoryStewart is dead right on #BBCNewsnight
Far too much time spent on Andrew Windsor, far too little spent on Trump's destruction of the world order.

Looking back on Marshawn Kneeland's time on the field with the Cowboys https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6787870/2025/11/07/marshawn-kneeland-cowboys-career-review/

Series A, Episode 04 - Time Squad
VILA: Could I read yours?
CALLY: You could receive my thought if I wished you to.
BLAKE: Cally, how do we contact the resistance force?
CALLY: There is no resistance force. They're all dead.
BLAKE: All of them?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/104/377

RIP Udo Kier. I loved him in many things but he's particularly great opposite River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho. Later he appeared again with Keanu Reeves in Johnny Mnemonic.
Perhaps it is time to watch Spermula in honor of his divers oeuvre. I think he had a lot of fun in his career.

Kimi Onoda, Japan's new Minister of State for Economic Security, is a 43 year old half-Irish ex-game industry PR femcel with an extensive history of defending her exclusive attraction to anime boys on twitter

Deadly floods in Mexico another sign of need for improved severe weather warnings #Mexico

Deadly floods in Mexico another sign of need for improved severe weather warnings
The most recent torrential rains in east-central Mexico, which have left at least 76 dead and dozens more missing, have raised questions again about the government's ability to alert people to severe weather in time.

60 years ago tonight, the #GratefulDead (& bill graham's) 1st fillmore auditorium gig, at the #sanfrancisco mime troupe’s appeal II, maybe the 1st actual time the dead name was used. not in ads (“formerly the warlocks” was january), no tape.

Time to cleanup my GitHub profile of a bunch of dead-abandoned experimental projects.

this evening in greenpoint #nyc, come honor the dead, enact the spiritual banishment of malevolent ghoul-forces, & celebrate the illusion of time. https://heads.social/@bourgwick/115452165171059648

only just put together that, for a time in 1980, nico's group was a duo of john gilmore of @… & cheetah chrome of the dead boys?! https://heads.social/@livetapes/115273