Tootfinder

wild improv benefit for roulette feat. 5 minute miniatures by combos of john zorn, laurie anderson, marc ribot, ikue mori, kenny wolleson, john medeski, brian chase, jim staley, simon hanes, & jorge roeder, any of which i'd happily watch for a full night. tactile sound explosions. #nyc #jazz

A second #planetesimal collision in the #Fomalhaut system: #Hubble Sees Asteroids Colliding at Nearby Star for First Time / Zerstörerische Kollisionen in einem jungen Planetensystem: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Hubble_sees_asteroids_colliding_around_nearby_star / https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/nasas-hubble-sees-asteroids-colliding-at-nearby-star-for-first-time/ / https://www.mpg.de/24356362/fomalhaut-staubwolken-durch-kollisionen

Blast heavily damages Pennsylvania nursing home, prompting search-and-rescue efforts (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/explosion-rips-through-pennsylvania-nursing-home-2025-12-23/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251223/p101#a251223p101

been faffing around with 3d geometry in build123d recently, and failing to get the cad kernel to produce geometric objects that do what i want
so i sat down to do some algebra
it’s annoying that the usual material about conic sections explains how ellipses and parabolas and hyperbolas work … but not how to derive them given a cone and a plane
so i worked it out for my particular problem, and happily things cancelled out very nicely, making the result nice and simple
(…

Who's the real enemy now? Extremely wealthy people (oligarchs) and large corporations (especially in health, fossil fuels, media, & tech). Everything else is probably manageable. We need to hobble the extremely wealthy and the mega corporations. We need to end the 'corporations-as-person' model. as well. It is untenable. That also means rejecting, explicitly & systemically, groups like the Atlas Network/Project 2025.
For the record, these have long been the enemy, b…

@… I see that a painting of Dr John Rae, owned by the Hudson Bay Co is up for sale - relatively reasonable price...crowdfund?
https://www.

Trust in Transparency: How Explainable AI Shapes User Perceptions
Allen Daniel Sunny
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04968 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04968

Trust in Transparency: How Explainable AI Shapes User Perceptions
This study explores the integration of contextual explanations into AI-powered loan decision systems to enhance trust and usability. While traditional AI systems rely heavily on algorithmic transparency and technical accuracy, they often fail to account for broader social and economic contexts. Through a qualitative study, I investigated user interactions with AI explanations and identified key gaps, in- cluding the inability of current systems to provide context. My findings underscore the lim…

New Gist: AI, The Sound and Fury
I try to explain all of this AI thing in one article, and suggest why it is hostile to democracy, to humanity but also happily likely to end with the would-be tech Sun Kings taking trips to the financial guillotine.
https://www.thegist.ie/the-gist-ai-the-sou

The Gist: AI, The Sound and Fury
We can calculate the amount of money flowing into AI. But what will the full cost be to society when the bubble pops? This is the Gist.

"Stephen and Katie Miller's heavily armed security team greeted us and explicitly told us that we were legally allowed to chalk on the sidewalks, which we did,” the group wrote on Instagram. “We graciously obliged their request to not chalk directly in front of the Millers' home, despite it also being a public sidewalk.”
Stephen Miller’s wife claimed they were targeted by ‘terroristic’ threats outside their home. The reality may be more mundane | The Independent
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/katie-miller-stephen-miller-chalk-protest-b2881380.html

Finally an RGB image of comet #3IATLAS from images taken by #GeminiNorth during the 26 November #shadowTheScientists session: https://noirlab.edu/public/news/noirlab2532/ - the coma has become bluer due to more gas emission. Also published today: an X-ray image by XMM-Newton at https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2025/12/XMM-Newton_sees_comet_3I_ATLAS_in_X-ray_light with explanations in http://www.cbat.eps.harvard.edu/iau/cbet/005600/CBET005646.txt which also contains more 3I news.
Meanwhile the paper https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/ae2915 claims an upper limit for 3I's nucleus diameter of only some 750 meters from the measured non-gravitational acceleration (NGA) parameters: that would be waaay more stringent than the 5.6 km upper limit from early Hubble observations reported in https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/adf8d8 (where also a lower limit of 440 meters is stated).