Tootfinder

After my role was found redundant, I have some time to learn new stuff and even to #volunteer more. This week (May 26-31) you can see me volunteering at the #Fringe Festival in #Prague. Say "Hi" if you see …

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #Roadhouse
Steel Fringe:
🎵 I Wanna Live
#SteelFringe
https://curation-records.bandcamp.com/track/i-wanna-live
https://open.spotify.com/track/3qrMqy8UNEPNGF7JInFvy4

Alloharmonics in Burst Intensification by Singularity Emitting Radiation
K. Ogura, M. S. Pirozhkova, A. Sagisaka, T. Zh. Esirkepov, A. Ya. Faenov, T. A. Pikuz, H. Kotaki, Y. Hayashi, Y. Fukuda, J. K. Koga, S. V. Bulanov, H. Daido, N. Hasegawa, M. Ishino, M. Nishikino, M. Koike, T. Kawachi, H. Kiriyama, M. Kando, D. Neely, A. S. Pirozhkov
https://

Alloharmonics in Burst Intensification by Singularity Emitting Radiation
Burst Intensification by Singularity Emitting Radiation (BISER) in underdense relativistic laser plasma is a bright source of coherent extreme ultraviolet (XUV) and x-ray radiation. In contrast to all harmonic generation mechanisms, high-resolution experimental BISER spectra in the XUV region contain spectral fringes with separation much finer (down to 0.12 eV) than the initial driving laser frequency (~1.5 eV). We show that these fringe separations result from two main factors: laser frequency…

5 Fringe Cowboys who could be traded during training camp before roster cuts https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/06/23/5-cowboys-who-could-be-traded-before-roster-cutdowns/8…

A bench without shade. This should be against the law.

"What is different, is that before what were largely fringe anti-Semitic and white supremacist theories floating around the far corners of the Alt-Right, have now become the backbone of the Republican party. 'The Great Replacement,' once a conspiracy pushed by only hardline neo-Nazis and white supremacists, is now being touted by everyone from pharma billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, Swason frozen foods heir and Twitter troll Tucker Carlson, to the billionaire backed Turning Point US…

I'm beyond excited that we're taking Heiner Müller's "Quartet" to the Edinburgh Fringe from Aug 4 thru Aug 9.
If you're in town, check us out. (Or if not, consider coming - the Fringe is a great place for a vacation!)
https://www.theater-u34.de/quartet/

Laura Loomer's White House access erases the line between the fringe and mainstream (Steve Benen/MSNBC)
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/laura-loomers-white-house-access-erases-line-fringe-mainstream-rcna210863
http://www.memeorandum.com/250604/p51#a250604p51

In its December 2023 lawsuit against OpenAI, The New York Times produced dozens of examples where GPT-4 exactly reproduced significant passages from Times stories.
In its response, OpenAI described this as a “fringe behavior” and a “problem that researchers at OpenAI and elsewhere work hard to address.”
But is it actually a fringe behavior?
And have leading AI companies addressed it? 
New research—focusing on books rather than newspaper articles and on different compa…

Study: Meta AI model can reproduce almost half of Harry Potter book
The research could have big implications for generative AI copyright lawsuits.

Researchers find Llama 3.1 recalls large parts of popular copyrighted books, possibly weakening AI industry claims that such memorization is fringe behavior (Timothy B. Lee/Understanding AI)
https://www.understandingai.org/p/metas-llama-31-can-recall-42-perc…

Meta's Llama 3.1 can recall 42 percent of the first Harry Potter book
New research could have big implications for copyright lawsuits against generative AI.

One of my takeaways from reading _War and Peace_ last year was that Napoleon, whose warmongering killed millions across Europe, was basically a buffoon, a clown. Many of the most destructive men in history were ridiculous and laughable, and it just added insult to injury for contemporaries watching them come to power. There's nothing new under the sun.

Velocity-modulated drag-trapping of nanoparticles by moving fringe pattern in hollow-core fiber
Soumya Chakraborty, Gordon K. L. Wong, Philip St. J. Russell, Nicolas Y. Joly
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04770

Velocity-modulated drag-trapping of nanoparticles by moving fringe pattern in hollow-core fiber
We report optical trapping and transport at atmospheric pressure of nanoparticles in a moving interference pattern in hollow-core photonic crystal fiber. Unlike in previous work at low pressure, when the viscous drag forces are weak and the particles travel at the fringe velocity, competition between trapping and drag forces causes the particle velocity to oscillate as it is momentarily captured and accelerated by each passing fringe, followed by release and deceleration by viscous forces. As a…

What a story….
#measles

How measles tore through a remote West Texas city
Anti-vaccine activists seized on a measles outbreak in Seminole, Texas, and turned the small Mennonite city into a battleground between fringe doctors and mainstream medicine.

A new angle on stacking faults: Breaking the edge-on limit in high-resolution defect analysis
Nicolas Karpstein, Lukas M\"uller, Andreas Bezold, Steffen Neumeier, Erdmann Spiecker
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15510

A new angle on stacking faults: Breaking the edge-on limit in high-resolution defect analysis
The nature of stacking faults - whether intrinsic or extrinsic - plays a pivotal role in defect-mediated processes in crystalline materials. Yet, current electron microscopy techniques for their reliable analysis remain limited to either conventional fringe-contrast imaging of inclined faults or atomic-resolution imaging of edge-on configurations. Here, we overcome this dichotomy by introducing a high-resolution scanning transmission electron microscopy (HRSTEM) method that enables full structu…

Cowboys 53-man pre-training camp projection: Does Diggs make it? 2nd rounder cut? https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/06/23/cowboys-53-man-pre-training-camp-projec…

Once Champions of Fringe Causes, Now in a ‘Trap of Their Own Making’
Top leaders at the Justice Department and the F.B.I. are struggling to fulfill Trump campaign promises often rooted in misinformation and conspiracy theories.
h…

Law Enforcement Officials Struggle to Fulfill Trump Promises Rooted in Conspiracy Theories
Top leaders at the Justice Department and the F.B.I. are struggling to fulfill Trump campaign promises often rooted in misinformation and conspiracy theories.

Evaluating interventions for Plasmodium vivax forest malaria using a three-scale mathematical model
Shoshana Elgart, Mark B. Flegg, Jennifer A. Flegg
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10040

Evaluating interventions for Plasmodium vivax forest malaria using a three-scale mathematical model
The rising proportion of Plasmodium vivax cases concentrated in forest-fringe areas across the Greater Mekong Subregion highlights the importance of pharmaceutical and mosquito control techniques specifically targeted towards forest-going populations. To mathematically assess best-possible antimalarial interventions in the context of hypnozoite reactivation and seasonal forest migration, we extend a previously developed three-scale integro-differential equations model of P. vivax transmission. …

Traveling supersolid stripe patterns in spin-orbit-coupled Bose-Einstein condensates
G. I. Martone, G. V. Shlyapnikov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.07322 http…

Traveling supersolid stripe patterns in spin-orbit-coupled Bose-Einstein condensates
We consider a traveling supersolid stripe pattern in a spin-orbit-coupled Bose gas. This configuration is associated with an unequal occupation of the two single-particle energy minima, giving rise to a chemical potential difference that sets the fringe velocity. Unlike stationary stripes, the moving pattern is spin-polarized, with decreasing contrast as momentum increases, eventually leading to stripe melting and transition to the uniform plane-wave phase. The Bogoliubov spectrum of the moving…

fftvis: A Non-Uniform Fast Fourier Transform Based Interferometric Visibility Simulator
Tyler A. Cox, Steven G. Murray, Aaron R. Parsons, Joshua S. Dillon, Kartik Mandar, Zachary E. Martinot, Robert Pascua, Piyanat Kittiwisit, James E. Aguirre
#toXiv_bot_toot

BBC bias on Israel
From Jonathan Cook. (Substack link, sorry.)
"In a confrontation with BBC news chief Richard Burgess, journalist Peter Oborne sets out six ways the state broadcaster has wilfully misled audiences on Israel's destruction of Gaza"
For example,
"... the distinguished Israeli historian Avi Shlaim lives in the UK and teaches at Oxford University. ... Shlaim is both knowledgeable about the history of Israeli colonisation of Palestine and truly independent. He is in a position to dispassionately provide the context BBC audiences need to make judgments about what is going on and who is responsible for it.
"And yet extraordinarily, Shlaim has never been invited on by the BBC. ... He is one of the prominent Israelis we are never allowed to hear from, because they are likely to make more credible and mainstream a narrative the BBC wishes to present as fringe, loopy and antisemitic."
Plus some media analysis stats such as:
"The BBC mentioned “occupation” – the essential context for understanding the relationship between Israel and Palestinians – only 14 times in news articles when providing context to the events of 7 October 2023. That amounted to 0.3% of articles. Additional context – decades of Israeli apartheid rule and Israel’s 17-year blockade of Gaza — were entirely missing from the coverage."
#Israel #Palestine #history #Gaza #media #BBC #JonathanCook