Tootfinder

Is #AI really just dumb statistics? "Olympiad-level physics problem-solving presents a significant challenge for both humans and artificial intelligence (AI), as it requires a sophisticated integration of precise calculation, abstract reasoning, and a fundamental grasp of physical principles," says the (abstract of the) paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.10515: "The Chinese Physics Olympiad (CPhO), renowned for its complexity and depth, serves as an ideal and rigorous testbed for these advanced capabilities. In this paper, we introduce LOCA-R (LOgical Chain Augmentation for Reasoning), an improved version of the LOCA framework adapted for complex reasoning, and apply it to the CPhO 2025 theory examination. LOCA-R achieves a near-perfect score of 313 out of 320 points, solidly surpassing the highest-scoring human competitor and significantly outperforming all baseline methods." Oops ...?

🦾 Meet the teens behind RedSnapper: a smart Arduino-powered prosthetic arm
https://blog.arduino.cc/2025/08/21/meet-the-teens-behind-redsnapper-a-smart-arduino-powered-prosthetic-arm/

Meet the teens behind RedSnapper: a smart Arduino-powered prosthetic arm | Arduino Blog
An affordable, AI-assisted, wearable robotic arm? That’s not science fiction – it’s RedSnapper, an open-source prosthesis built by PAC Tech, a team of high school students from Istituto Maria Immacolata in Gorgonzola, Italy. Powered entirely by Arduino boards, their project won the national “Robot Arm Makers” title at the 2025 RomeCup – and we think […]

"Scientists Develop Cigarette Butt Asphalt to Build Stronger Roads"
#Roads #Recycling
https://hap…

Scientists Develop Cigarette Butt Asphalt to Build Stronger Roads | Happy Eco News
Scientists in Spain and Italy are developing cigarette butt asphalt by turning discarded cigarette filters into road-strengthening pellets. The innovation makes asphalt more durable, extends road lifespans, and reduces toxic waste in the environment. Pilot projects show promise for scaling, offering cities a sustainable solution to improve infrastructure and cut pollution.

Idealo-Prozess: Google zu 465 Millionen Euro Schadenersatz verurteilt
Der Preisvergleichsanbieter Idealo hat vor Gericht gegen Google gesiegt. Der Schadenersatz ist beträchtlich, aber auch beträchtlich kleiner als gefordert.
<…

"…Another attempt was thwarted last year when…Rampinis threatened to blow…house up, Zaia said."
"Tito said…eviction…carefully planned. '…reaction was so violent…it was hard to predict,'…prosecutor said."
Hard to predict people who threatened to blow up house might...do it?

3 Italian carabinieri killed in apparently deliberate farmhouse explosion
Authorities have reported that three carabinieri officers were killed and 13 others injured in an explosion near Verona, Italy, on Tuesday. The blast occurred during an eviction. Two brothers and a sister have been detained in connection with the incident. Verona’s carabinieri commander described the explosion as intentional, triggered by a gas tank. This was the second eviction attempt after a previous threat by the siblings to blow up the house. Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni and Defense Mi…

🪧 When Values Eat Their Young: How Ideal-Driven Groups Drift into Their Own Shadow
#politics

Three Distributional Approaches for PM10 Assessment in Northern Italy
Marco F. De Sanctis, Andrea Gilardi, Giacomo Milan, Laura M. Sangalli, Francesca Ieva, Piercesare Secchi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13886

Three Distributional Approaches for PM10 Assessment in Northern Italy
We propose three spatial methods for estimating the full probability distribution of PM10 concentrations, with the ultimate goal of assessing air quality in Northern Italy. Moving beyond spatial averages and simple indicators, we adopt a distributional perspective to capture the complex variability of pollutant concentrations across space. The first proposed approach predicts class-based compositions via Fixed Rank Kriging; the second estimates multiple, non-crossing quantiles through a spatial…

Worked on some more #Gentoo global #jobserver goodies today.
Firstly, Portage jobserver support patch: #PyTest jobs will also be counted towards total job count.
Again, it's not a perfect solution, but it works reasonably. The plugin still starts -n jobs as specified by the arguments, but it acquired job tokens prior to executing every test, therefore delaying actual testing until tokens are available. It doesn't seem to cause noticeable overhead either.

Absolutely Abelian Hilbert Class Fields and $\ell$-torsion conjecture
Mahesh Kumar Ram, Prem Prakash Pandey, Nimish Kumar Mahapatra
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10725 https://

Absolutely Abelian Hilbert Class Fields and $\ell$-torsion conjecture
There are several recent works where authors have shown that number fields $K$ with `sufficiently many' units and cyclic class group contain a Euclidean ideal class provided the Hilbert class field $H(K)$ is an abelian extension of $\mathbb{Q}$. In this article, we explore the latter hypothesis: how often a number field $K$ satisfies that its Hilbert class field $H(K)$ is an abelian extension of $\mathbb{Q}$? We also noticed that for such number fields, when the Hilbert class field is an abelia…

"""
Traditional politics of assistance and the repression of unemployment were now called into question. The need for reform became urgent.
Poverty was gradually separated from the old moral confusions. Economic crises had shown that unemployment could not be confused with indolence, as indigence and enforced idleness spread throughout the countryside, to precisely the places that had previously been considered home to the purest and most immediate forms of moral life. This demonstrated that poverty did not solely fall under the order of the fault: ‘Begging is the fruit of poverty, which in turn is the consequence of accidents in the production of the earth or in the output of factories, of a rise in the price of basic foodstuffs, or of growth of the population, etc.’ Indigence became a matter of economics.
But it was not contingent, nor was it destined to be suppressed forever. There would always be a certain quantity of poverty that could never be effaced, a sort of fatal indigence that would accompany all forms of society until the end of time, even in places where all the idle were employed: ‘The only paupers in a well governed state must be those born in indigence, or those who fall into it by accident.’ This backdrop of poverty was somehow inalienable: whether by birth or accident, it formed an inevitable part of society. The state of lack was so firmly entrenched in the destiny of man and the structure of society that for a long time the idea of a state without paupers remained inconceivable: in the thought of philosophers, property, work and indigence were terms linked right up until the nineteenth century.
This portion of poverty was necessary because it could not be suppressed; but it was equally necessary in that it made wealth possible. Because they worked but consumed little, a class of people in need allowed a nation to become rich, to release the value of its fields, colonies and mines, making products that could be sold throughout the world. An impoverished people, in short, was a people that had no poor. Indigence became an indispensable element in the state. It hid the secret but most real life of society. The poor were the seat and the glory of nations. And their noble misery, for which there was no cure, was to be exalted:
«My intention is solely to invite the authorities to turn part of their vigilant attention to considering the portion of the People who suffer … the assistance that we owe them is linked to the honour and prosperity of the Empire, of which the Poor are the firmest bulwark, for no sovereign can maintain and extend his domain without favouring the population, and cultivating the Land, Commerce and the Arts; and the Poor are the necessary agents for the great powers that reveal the true force of a People.»
What we see here is a moral rehabilitation of the figure of the Pauper, bringing about the fundamental economic and social reintegration of his person. Paupers had no place in a mercantilist economy, as they were neither producers nor consumers, and they were idle, vagabond or unemployed, deserving nothing better than confinement, a measure that extracted and exiled them from society. But with the arrival of the industrial economy and its thirst for manpower, paupers were once again a part of the body of the nation.
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)