Tootfinder

In 1588, Galileo had not yet looked through a telescope.
Microscopes, pendulum clocks, barometers, and steam pumps were decades away.
Francis Bacon,
a member of parliament still in his twenties,
was only beginning his writing on science.
Robert Boyle wouldn’t be born for another 39 years,
Isaac Newton for another 55.
But a subtle shift in perspective was already taking place,
heralding the
‘culture of growth’
that would blossom i…

The Renaissance book that heralded growth - Works in Progress Magazine
Long before modern science, Europeans learned to see their own time as an age of invention rather than decline.

Disney's fascinating & original Sodium Vapor technique for creating 'transparency' like today's green screens.
Blur, fluids, fine particulates, see-through/greens/blues!
▶️ This Invention Made Disney MILLIONS, but Then They LOST It!
https://youtube.com/watch?v=UQuIVsNzqD

So in another dream I just woke up from, I was talking to someone about "the idea problem" (that it's becoming harder to monitize ideas, from a vox article written by an AI cooked reporter).
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/episode/executive-disorder-white-house-weekly-46-313675864/
Basically, I was arguing that the majority of inventions target men because patriarchy puts economic control in men's hands. As men have started to help more with childcare, there have been more inventions related to childcare. (I don't have any idea if this is true. Seems legit, but I'm just relating my dream. I think I was also oversimplifying a bit to "men" and "women" because of my audience, but anyway it was a dream.) There's actually more low-hanging fruit, I pointed out, related to making care work easier.
So I argued that the real problem was a failure to invest in research into solving that problem. Today there are all these boondoggles built around killing people. What if, instead of all this government research into killing people, we dumped a ton of money into making it easier to support a household? That would be great for the economy. (Being asleep, I seem to have forgotten that working people need money.)
In the blur of being just awake I started thinking about how you could kickstart the US economy by taking the money from the AI boondoggle and other autonomous murder bots and create something like a program to build robots for housekeepers. You'd still be funding tech with government money, so the same horrible people get paid, but you're now actually solving real problems. It wouldn't even matter if it was a boondoggle, honestly. Just dumping money into something other than murdering people is good enough.
I imagined first if there was a program to fund a robot housecleaner, like robot dog with AI some laundry pickup, that would be provided, free of charge, to help people with children. It would work the same as the military boondoggle where a private company makes the government buy a piece of hardware from them and then also pay them to service it for some number of years. But instead of that hardware sitting around waiting to kill someone, it would be getting brought to people's houses to help them.
Then I thought, hey, you could even boost the economy more if you just had government funding for doulas and housecleaners and paid them a living wage. Hey, you could really kickstart the economy by nationalizing healthcare and including doula support as part of all births. Oh, and you could also just include the optional household help for families with children until the kids turn 18.
None of this is perfect (I don't actually think most of this is possible from any state), but the point is that it's actually wildly easy to figure out all kinds of ways to invest in the economy and monitize ideas as long as you aren't entirely focused on the same old "make money from spying on people and killing them." Funny that. Like they said in the podcast, maybe "finding ideas" isn't the problem.
Hope you enjoyed the weird semi-awake brain dump/rant.

Turns out that what hit flight #UA1093 was most likely a balloon from https://windbornesystems.com - this was brought up first in the thread https://x.com/vk5qi/status/1980386581497409891 and now the company confirms that it's a very strong possibility: https://x.com/johndeanl/status/1980462264974209292. See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZzbS30xdjM for a short video about the company and how it's filling the atmosphere with long-duration balloons carrying weather sensors. They had just been hailed as one of the best inventions of 2025: https://time.com/collections/best-inventions-2025/7318250/windborne-systems-atlas/ ...

Here’s my 35th “Long Links” outing, curation of long-form offerings, which assume that nobody has time to read all this stuff but one or two of the pieces might brighten your day. This one is mostly political but some of the politics are from France and China. Plus a way-cool analytical history of blogging and a section labeled “wonderful things”.

Male circumcision is made easier by a clever South African invention - we trained healthcare workers to use it
https://theconversation.com/male-circumcision-is-made-easier-by-a-clever-south-african-invention-we-trained-healthcare-workers-to-use-it-265307

Last night we went to Timbl's interview at the #CheltLitFest on his memoir, This is for Everyone. It was both sad and evidence of courage with his devotion to openness in our little land of Web.
The book tour has evidently been exhausting. Whatever neurological event he's going through with the physical difficulty of speaking and his occasional aphasia, his brain is still ther…

History of Rock Paper Scissors

Symskill: Symbol and Skill Co-Invention for Data-Efficient and Real-Time Long-Horizon Manipulation
Yifei Simon Shao, Yuchen Zheng, Sunan Sun, Pratik Chaudhari, Vijay Kumar, Nadia Figueroa
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01661

Symskill: Symbol and Skill Co-Invention for Data-Efficient and Real-Time Long-Horizon Manipulation
Multi-step manipulation in dynamic environments remains challenging. Two major families of methods fail in distinct ways: (i) imitation learning (IL) is reactive but lacks compositional generalization, as monolithic policies do not decide which skill to reuse when scenes change; (ii) classical task-and-motion planning (TAMP) offers compositionality but has prohibitive planning latency, preventing real-time failure recovery. We introduce SymSkill, a unified learning framework that combines the b…

"Fish-inspired filter removes 99% of microplastics from washing machine wastewater"
#Microplastics #Plastic #Plastics

Fish-inspired filter removes 99% of microplastics from washing machine wastewater
Wastewater from washing machines is considered a major source of microplastics—tiny plastic particles that are suspected of harming human and animal health. Researchers at the University of Bonn have now developed a filter to curb this problem. Their invention was inspired by the gill arch system in fish.