Tootfinder

Day 29: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
I've been sitting on Simpson for a while because there's some overlap in her writing with Robin Wall Kimmerer, and I've had a lot of different genres/styles/subjects/media I've wanted to post at least one author from. But I've now hit repeats on at least YA romance and manga, and Simpson's writing is actually quite different from Kimmerer's in a lot of ways. While Kimmerer is a biologist by training and literally braids that knowledge together with her knowledge of Potawatomi cosmology and ethics, Simpson is an Anishinaabe philosopher and anarchist, and her position as a scholar of Indigenous philosophy adds a different depth to her work: she talks in more depth about knowledge relationships and her connections with specific elders, and she has more citations to other Indigenous theorists, which is the one criticism I've ever seen of Kimmerer's work. Rather than being Indigenous and a scientist, she's Indigenous and a scholar of indigenous studies.
I've only read "Theory of Water" by Simpson, but it was excellent, and especially inspiring to read as an anarchist. Simpson's explicit politics are another difference from Kimmerer's work, which is more implicitly than explicitly political. This allows Simpson to draw extremely interesting connections to other anarchist theorists and movements. "Theory of Water" is probably a bit less accessible than "Braiding Sweetgrass," but it's richer from a theory perspective as a result.
In any case, Simpson is a magnificent writer, sharing personal insights and stories along with (and inseparable from) her theoretical ideas.
#30AuthorsNoMen

"What’s clear is that when we share music — whether at backyard barbecues, holiday gatherings, or road trips with the radio blaring — we’re doing something deeply meaningful. Our brains are literally synchronizing, creating shared neural patterns across generations and differences. In those moments when everyone finds themselves humming the same chorus or tapping to the same beat, we’re experiencing one of life’s simplest yet most profound connections."
When Your Favorite Song Plays, Your Brain 'Physically Embodies' Music
https://studyfinds.org/brain-cells-synchronize-to-music/

Globally Coupled Particle Swarm Optimization
Liguo Yuan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21721 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21721

Globally Coupled Particle Swarm Optimization
All things in the world are interconnected, the only difference is the strength of their connections.Particle swarm optimization(PSO) simulates the foraging behavior of a flock of birds, information is transmitted to quickly find the location of food. This is a process of information exchange, where birds influence each other, constantly adjusting their position and speed values,and updating the optimal position information.In this paper, we propose a globally coupled particle swarm ptimization…

Q-Learning--Driven Adaptive Rewiring for Cooperative Control in Heterogeneous Networks
Yi-Ning Weng, Hsuan-Wei Lee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01057 https://

Q-Learning--Driven Adaptive Rewiring for Cooperative Control in Heterogeneous Networks
Cooperation emergence in multi-agent systems represents a fundamental statistical physics problem where microscopic learning rules drive macroscopic collective behavior transitions. We propose a Q-learning-based variant of adaptive rewiring that builds on mechanisms studied in the literature. This method combines temporal difference learning with network restructuring so that agents can optimize strategies and social connections based on interaction histories. Through neighbor-specific Q-learni…

An introduction to $(G,c)$-bands
Luca Francone, Bernard Leclerc
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19066 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19066

An introduction to $(G,c)$-bands
We give an introduction to our results on cluster structures for schemes of $(G,c)$-bands emphasizing their connections with seminal works of Frenkel and Reshetikhin in the 90's. In particular we construct using $(G,c)$-bands a discrete analogue of the difference Miura transformation of the loop group $LG$, and we show that it calculates the $q$-characters of the finite-dimensional representations of the quantum affine algebra $U_q(\widehat{\mathfrak{g}})$ of the same $A$, $D$, $E$ type as $G$,…