Tootfinder

Looking for something to do this evening in SF? Come learn about municipal social housing!
https://actionnetwork.org/events/municipal-social-housing-panel?source=mastodon

Municipal Social Housing: Learning from Seattle's Win
Two DSA SF backed ballot props in 2020 were meant to enable and fund social housing, but mayoral opposition has blocked the funds being spent for that purpose. Seattle's victory offers a lesson in how we might beat that blockage. In February, Seattle's House Our Neighbors passed a ballot proposition with dedicated funds for a social housing developer. The campaign won by 26 points over opposition from Seattle's mayor and most of their city council. Join us for a conversation with Seattle orga…

Interview mit mir bei Stephano
Wer mir auf Mastodon folgt, hat das Interview vermutlich ohnehin längst gelesen. Ich verlinke es direkt hier, damit es nicht übersehen wird: Stephano hat mich selbst angeschrieben, und ich war ziemlich erstaunt, nachdem ich die Webseite durchgeschaut habe. Es ist offensichtlich, dass wir eine Philosophie beim Schreiben verfolgen, die unterschiedlicher fast nicht sein könnte. Er hat sich durch unzählige Kurse qualifiziert und…

organizing this panel about social housing and how Seattle’s success can inspire SF to get around roadblocks. please come if you’re in SF! Friday evening
https://actionnetwork.org/events/municipal-social-housing-panel?source=mastodon

Municipal Social Housing: Learning from Seattle's Win
Two DSA SF backed ballot props in 2020 were meant to enable and fund social housing, but mayoral opposition has blocked the funds being spent for that purpose. Seattle's victory offers a lesson in how we might beat that blockage. In February, Seattle's House Our Neighbors passed a ballot proposition with dedicated funds for a social housing developer. The campaign won by 26 points over opposition from Seattle's mayor and most of their city council. Join us for a conversation with Seattle orga…

Campfire, an AI-powered ERP and accounting services provider, raised a $65M Series B co-led by Accel and Ribbit Capital, after raising a $35M Series A in June (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)
https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/ai-fintech-campfire-raise-…

Why Accel Led A Round For Fintech Startup Campfire For The Second Time In Under 4 Months
Campfire, a San Francisco-based AI-powered accounting startup, has raised $65 million in a Series B round just months after closing on its Series A.

"Among Republicans younger than 45, the decline is particularly glaring: 61% say the country is headed in the wrong direction, a spike of 30 percentage points since June, the last time the question was asked."
https://apnews.com/article/poll-r…

More Republicans say US is headed in wrong direction, poll finds
A new poll shows Republicans’ outlook on the direction of the country has soured dramatically. The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll was conducted shortly after last week's assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in Utah. The poll shows the share of Republicans who see the country headed in the right direction has fallen sharply in recent months. Today, only about half in the GOP see the nation on the right course, down from 70% in June. Overall, about …

DiskJoin: Large-scale Vector Similarity Join with SSD
Yanqi Chen, Xiao Yan, Alexandra Meliou, Eric Lo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18494 https://arxiv.org/pd…

DiskJoin: Large-scale Vector Similarity Join with SSD
Similarity join--a widely used operation in data science--finds all pairs of items that have distance smaller than a threshold. Prior work has explored distributed computation methods to scale similarity join to large data volumes but these methods require a cluster deployment, and efficiency suffers from expensive inter-machine communication. On the other hand, disk-based solutions are more cost-effective by using a single machine and storing the large dataset on high-performance external stor…

2/2 Reflection on #citizenship:
I do not treat the concept of “#democracy" lightly. I was born into the aftermath of centuries of totalitarian oppression that ended suddenly, leaving the nascent Ukrainian state of the late 90s and early 2000s floundering in the turbulent whirlpool of hopes and fears felt by millions of people who were finally allowed to ponder: how to build a free democratic state in the place of Soviet and imperial ruins?
I was taught the words "democracy", "citizen", "freedom", "voting", “liberty" (and more) by people who, less than two decades prior, weren't allowed to leave the borders of their country. I was told about self-determination by people whose political choices were ridiculed, punished, and eviscerated form most of their lives. The duty of governing ourselves felt to us ephemeral - a nice fantasy, akin to a fairytale or a utopia from fictional works.
And then I saw those same people fight with their bodies and souls once the previously unfathomable democracy was threatened. Protests in 2004, then again in 2014, then the unthinkable war against foreign invasion in 2022. Democracy no longer felt abstract or silly. It became as tangible as saying "I love you".
I write of Ukraine as I reflect on becoming a citizen of another country because the history and values of my adopted United States feel as real as the skin on my legs, the significance of its legacy lays as heavy as the weight of my waist-long hair, and the desire to uphold the freedoms of its Constitution burns my throat as harshly as dehydration after a long day in the sun.
People have asked me why I even want to join this country, when the present moment is shrouded in impenetrable darkness. And I answer: because I've felt the warmth of a newly lit fire of freedom breaking through shadows that for centuries looked like solid walls. I have seen kindness, and solidarity heal the fear and hate of oppression. I've seen liberty emerge from nothing but the human soul.
I am not a religious person, but I have faith. Faith in the ideals at the foundation of the American project. Faint but powerful recognition that "we the people" now includes me.
I love #America. And I hope to keep loving my home for the rest of my life.

Looking into the faintEst WIth MUSE (LEWIS): Exploring the nature of ultra-diffuse galaxies in the Hydra-I cluster IV. A study of the Globular Cluster population in four UDGs
Marco Mirabile, Michele Cantiello, Marina Rejkuba, Steffen Mieske, Enrichetta Iodice, Chiara Buttitta, Maria Luisa Buzzo, Johanna Hartke, Goran Doll, Luca Rossi, Magda Arnaboldi, Marica Branchesi, Giuseppe D'Ago, Jesus Falcon-Barroso, Katja Fahrion, Duncan A. Forbes, Marco Gullieuszik, Michael Hilker, Felipe S…

Looking into the faintEst WIth MUSE (LEWIS): Exploring the nature of ultra-diffuse galaxies in the Hydra-I cluster IV. A study of the Globular Cluster population in four UDGs
As old stellar systems, globular clusters (GCs) are key fossil tracers of galaxy formation and interaction histories. This paper is part of the LEWIS project, an integral-field spectroscopic survey of ultra-diffuse galaxies (UDGs) in the Hydra I cluster. We use MUSE spectroscopy and new VIRCAM $H$-band imaging data to study the GC populations and dark matter content in four dwarf galaxies. We retrieved line-of-sight velocities for all sources in the observed MUSE fields. Since the spectroscopic…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #SundayMorning
Sarah Feigin, Maria Du Toit & Vera Kooper:
🎵 Fantasia for Clarinet and Piano
#SarahFeigin #MariaDuToit #VeraKooper
https://open.spotify.com/track/56jW8momUKsJHRqLsghgzL

Tracking Electron, Proton, and Solvent Motion in Proton-Coupled Electron Transfer with Ultrafast X-rays
Abdullah Kahraman, Michael Sachs, Soumen Ghosh, Benjamin I. Poulter, Estefan\'ia Sucre-Rosales, Elizabeth S. Ryland, Douglas Garratt, Sumana L. Raj, Natalia Powers-Riggs, Subhradip Kundu, Christina Y. Hampton, David J. Hoffman, Giacomo Coslovich, Georgi L. Dakovski, Patrick L. Kramer, Matthieu Chollet, Roberto A. Mori, Tim B. van Driel, Sang-Jun Lee, Kristjan Kunnus, Amy A. Cordo…

Tracking Electron, Proton, and Solvent Motion in Proton-Coupled Electron Transfer with Ultrafast X-rays
Proton-coupled electron transfer (PCET) is foundational to catalysis, bioenergetics, and energy conversion, yet capturing and disentangling the coupled motions of electrons, protons, and solvent has remained a major experimental challenge. We combine femtosecond optical spectroscopy, site-specific ultrafast soft X-ray absorption spectroscopy, and time-resolved X-ray scattering with advanced calculations to disentangle the elementary steps of PCET in solution. Using a ruthenium polypyridyl model…