Tootfinder

Crows in the Cemetery on a Hot June Afternoon (2024-06) - Corvids chatting in a green space between a suburban recycling centre and a building site under airport flight path #fieldRecording #London #crows

Crows in the Cemetery on a Hot June Afternoon (2024-06)
Corvids chatting in a green space between a suburban recycling centre and a building site under airport flight path #fieldRecording #London #crows

Very grateful for Mastodon's filters

It's been a day with a lot of input. The absolute opposite of this where I was completely alone.
#FootpathFriday #photography #nature

Trash icon over the years

Day 28: Samira Ahmed
As foreshadowed, we're back to YA land, which represents a lot of what I've been enjoying from the library lately.
I've read "Hollow Fires", "This Book Won't Burn", and "Love, Hate, and other Filters" by Ahmed, along with "Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know" which is quite different. All four are teen ~romances with interesting things to say about racism & growing up as a South Asian Muslim, but whereas the first three are set in small-town Indiana, the third is set in France and includes a historical fiction angle involving Dumas and a hypothetical Muslim woman who was (in this telling) the inspiration for several Lord Byron poems.
Ahmed's novels all include a strong and overt theme of social justice, and it's refreshing to see an author not try to wade around the topic or ignore it. Her romances are complex, with imperfect protagonists and endings that aren't always "happily ever after" although they're satisfying and believable.
My library has a plethora of similar authors I've been enjoying, including Adiba Jaigirdar (who appeared earlier in this list), Sabaa Tahir ("All my Rage" is fantastic but I'm less of a fan of her fantasy stuff), Sabina Khan ("The Love and Lies of Rukhsana Ali"), and Randa Abdel-Fattah ("Does My Head Look Big In This?"; from an earlier era). Ahmed gets the spot here because I really like her politics and the way she works them into her writing. Her characters are unapologetic advocates against things like book bans, and Ahmed doesn't second-guess them or try to make things more palatable for those who want to ban books (or whatever). Her historical fiction in "Mad..." is also really cool in terms of "huh that could actually totally be true" and grappling with literary sexism from ages past.
#30AuthorsNoMen

i went to campus today (free lunch friday!) and i was so excited when one of my favorite profs sat next to me at the faculty meeting. i admire him SO MUCH, my heart was a-flutter! omg and we chatted about the transformer paper! <swoon>
later in the day, he was installed as the arthur w. burks professor of etc. and i nearly burst bc in this entire room full of our most (and less heh) distinguished faculty, i was the ONLY ONE who had studied with burks!

'Slop Evader' Lets You Surf the Web Like It’s 2022 https://www.404media.co/slop-evader-browser-extension-pre-generative-ai-search-filter/

Teleportation-based filtering for gravitational-wave detectors
Yohei Nishino
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20812 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20812

Teleportation-based filtering for gravitational-wave detectors
Employing the principle of quantum teleportation in gravitational-wave detectors provides a method to address technical challenges associated with implementing quantum filters for squeezed-light injection. A recent proposal has shown that an arbitrary number of effective squeezing-angle rotations can be achieved by cascading quantum teleportation, yielding sensitivity equivalent to frequency-dependent pre-filtering. A natural question is whether the teleportation-based protocol can also realize…

Why was I today years old when I learned about bio-photovoltaics?
This is a technology which instead of using silicon wafers as the basis for photovoltaic cells, uses a sandwich comprising
1. A transparent window, to allow sunlight in;
2. Algae, to photosynthesise sugars;
3. A membrane to keep the algae separate from the bacteria;
4. Bacteria, which consume sugar and generate electricity;
5. A filter, to allow the biological components to breathe.
#1/2

Hey all, there are some photos from a hike in the #schwarzwald
Actually we thought that it would just take us less than an hour - but it wasn't simply a straight walk :-D
It was raining from time to time - which was indeed pretty cool. A) there was noone around except us and B) the colors were often just insane. Fully saturated green, the brown from the wood - and sometimes…