Tootfinder

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…

Roland Kayn's discography is 70% off on Bandcamp this month: https://rolandkayn.bandcamp.com/music
Any Kaynheads out there have recommendations? At 72 releases, it's a lot to digest.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #Roadhouse
The Mothers of Invention:
🎵 Hungry Freaks, Daddy
#TheMothersofInvention
https://open.spotify.com/track/3Zwcr6lymZaeTXtEMxlfXA

Understanding the atomically precise evolution of the miscibility of newly prepared face-centered cubic W-Cu nanoalloys and its asymmetry
Yongxin Zhang, Weihan Zhang, Luneng Zhao, Zixiang Zhao, Siqi Lu, Yangrui Liu, Dongsheng Song, Changzheng Wei, Zhentao Pang, Yifeng Ren, Junfeng Gao, Weiwei Gao, Di Wu, Jijun Zhao, Kuo-Juei Hu, Wei Ji, Yu Deng, Binghui Ge, Fengqi Song

Understanding the atomically precise evolution of the miscibility of newly prepared face-centered cubic W-Cu nanoalloys and its asymmetry
According to classical Miedema theory, reducing crystals to the order of nanometer sizes might greatly modulate the mixing enthalpy of elements, thus enabling the invention of a lot of new bulk-immiscible alloys. Although numerous alloys with higher mixing enthalpies remain unexplored, this strategy is approaching its limit, as reflected by the critical diameter of recent alloys of 1.8 nm, which corresponds to ~150 atoms and hardly provides a crystalline order. Future development requires not o…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #DriveTime
The Diabolic Soul Invention:
🎵 Mephisto
#TheDiabolicSoulInvention
https://open.spotify.com/track/0Hcbrt7nbzHYzGKlvtxqhG

Sonnet 059 - LIX
If there be nothing new, but that which is
Hath been before, how are our brains beguil'd,
Which labouring for invention bear amiss
The second burthen of a former child.
Oh that record could with a backward look,
Even of five hundred courses of the sun,
Show me your image in some antique book,
Since mind at first in character was done,
That I might see what the old world could say
To this composed wonder of your …

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

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

Generation and Evaluation in the Human Invention Process through the Lens of Game Design
Katherine M. Collins, Graham Todd, Cedegao E. Zhang, Adrian Weller, Julian Togelius, Junyi Chu, Lionel Wong, Thomas L. Griffiths, Joshua B. Tenenbaum
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10914

Generation and Evaluation in the Human Invention Process through the Lens of Game Design
The human ability to learn rules and solve problems has been a central concern of cognitive science research since the field's earliest days. But we do not just follow rules and solve problems given to us by others: we modify those rules, create new problems, and set new goals and tasks for ourselves and others. Arguably, even more than rule following and problem solving, human intelligence is about creatively breaking and stretching the rules, changing the game, and inventing new problems wort…

I'm pretty sure I've seen this guy and his contraption before. It's really cool though. #palindromes #emordnilap #aibohphobia

14M views · 459K reactions | emordnilap❤️palindrome #palindrome #emordnilap #wordplay #English #language #engineering #gears #invention #lego #legotechnic #build #machine #spelling #reverse | VSAUCE
emordnilap❤️palindrome #palindrome #emordnilap #wordplay #English #language #engineering #gears #invention #lego #legotechnic #build #machine #spelling #reverse.

Patent citations and patent importance
Gaetan de Rassenfosse
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20503 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20503

Patent citations and patent importance
This article reviews the empirical evidence on the use of patent citations as a proxy for invention importance. It distinguishes between technical merit, private economic value, and social value, and surveys validation studies using expert ratings, market data, renewal records, and compensation reports. The findings confirm that while the count of citations is positively associated with various dimensions of value, it remains a noisy indicator -- correlated but far from definitive.

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…

Based on John Geiger's book Chapel of Extreme Experience,
Nik Sheehan's FLicKeR is a fascinating voyage into the life of artist and mystic Brion Gysin
and his legendary invention the dream machine,
a device that projects stroboscopic light, provoking a "drugless high" and cinematic hallucinations.
In this Hot Docs world premiere Sheehan captures the dynamic, supernatural world of Gysin,
the queer cultural terrorist who fused science, magic…

Research on Evaluation Methods for Patent Novelty Search Systems and Empirical Analysis
Shu Zhang, LiSha Zhang, Kai Duan, XinKai Sun
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17782 https://

Research on Evaluation Methods for Patent Novelty Search Systems and Empirical Analysis
Patent novelty search systems are critical to IP protection and innovation assessment; their retrieval accuracy directly impacts patent quality. We propose a comprehensive evaluation methodology that builds high-quality, reproducible datasets from examiner citations and X-type citations extracted from technically consistent family patents, and evaluates systems using invention descriptions as inputs. Using Top-k Detection Rate and Recall as core metrics, we further conduct multi-dimensional ana…

Bloke on Gardener's World: "My first real invention was a perpetual motion machine ..."
Me: "No it wasn't"
Him: "... which didn't work"
That's better.

Ever since Homo sapiens came out of Africa, migration has been part and parcel of humanity's history and culture. Immigration, however, is just a byproduct of arbitrary borders, which are a much more recent invention than is commonly realised. Passports and visa became mandatory for crossing borders only in the era of modern nationalism, around the time of WW I.

Apple invention of hot water: sleep score.
Apple Watch might have the most accurate sleep phase detection. But sleep scores were invented and used for quite a while.

Gemini Invents a New Language
As a Boles.ai experiment, I asked three AI Bots -- Claude.ai and Gemini and ChatGPT -- to create a language and then I asked them if the language was actually created by them or not. Because of the length of the responses, I created three separate articles demonstrating the language invention capabilities of each Bot. You can decide which language Bot was most effective and inventive.

Gemini Invents a New Language | David Boles, Blogs
As a Boles.ai experiment, I asked three AI Bots — Claude.ai and Gemini and ChatGPT — to create a language and then I asked them if the language was actually created by them or not. Beca…

The most prominent invention in the century is certainly #wikipedia, right? If not convinced, this text gives a very interesting angle to how important it is:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/05/be-

Learned something new from the Veritasium YouTube channel: why are escalator handrails moving faster?
And there's more in there: the history of that invention, the things that made it uncomfortable or dangerous in the first few decades... and the fact that downwards escalators with lots of people on it are actually creating energy!
(slight warning: video starts with an escalator accident in Rome)

"""
All of which was of the utmost importance for subsequent developments in the medicine of the mind. In its positivist incarnation, this was little more than the combination of the two experiences that classicism had juxtaposed without ever joining them together: a social, normative and dichotomous experience of madness that revolved entirely around the imperative of confinement, formulated in a style as simple as ‘yes or no’, ‘dangerous or harmless’, and ‘good or not good for confinement’, and a finely differentiated, qualitative, juridical experience, well aware of limits and degrees, which looked into all the aspects of the behaviour of the subject for the polymorphous incarnations that insanity might assume. The psychopathology of the nineteenth century (and perhaps our own too, even now) believes that it orients itself and takes its bearings in relation to a homo natura, or a normal man pre-existing all experience of mental illness. Such a man is in fact an invention, and if he is to be situated, it is not in a natural space, but in a system that identifies the socius to the subject of the law. Consequently a madman is not recognised as such because an illness has pushed him to the margins of normality, but because our culture situates him at the meeting point between the social decree of confinement and the juridical knowledge that evaluates the responsibility of individuals before the law. The ‘positive’ science of mental illness and the humanitarian sentiments that brought the mad back into the realm of the human were only possible once that synthesis had been solidly established. They could be said to form the concrete a priori of any psychopathology with scientific pretensions.
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

5 Stunden Frank Zappa
One Size Fits All (50th Anniversary Super Deluxe)
by Frank Zappa / The Mothers Of Invention
#frankzappa #zappa #music

"it feels silly to take what federal officers are doing in the city even a little bit seriously, because the fantasy of D.C. as some crime-addled hellhole is a deliberate invention. "
I Walked Through Trump’s D.C. Hellscape. It’s Now Clear What Exactly the Feds Are Doing Here.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/08/trumps-washington-dc-takeover-heres-what-the-feds-are-really-doing.htm

ChatGPT Invents a New Language
As a Boles.ai experiment, I asked three AI Bots -- Claude.ai and Gemini and ChatGPT -- to create a language and then I asked them if the language was actually created by them or not. Because of the length of the responses, I created three separate articles demonstrating the language invention capabilities of each Bot. You can decide which language Bot was most effective and inventive.

ChatGPT Invents a New Language | David Boles, Blogs
As a Boles.ai experiment, I asked three AI Bots — Claude.ai and Gemini and ChatGPT — to create a language and then I asked them if the language was actually created by them or not. Beca…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #EssentialClassics
Johann Sebastian Bach, Martin Frost, Göran Fröst & Göran Fröst:
🎵 Invention no.6 in E major, BVW.777 arr clarinet and viola
#JohannSebastianBach #MartinFrost #newRelease 🆕 album
https://open.spotify.com/track/3ra22nF3Vi6JlY6pooWTnC

Sonnet 076 - LXXVI
Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods, and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?
O! know sweet love I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument;…

Claude.ai Invents a New Language
As a Boles.ai experiment, I asked three AI Bots -- Claude.ai and Gemini and ChatGPT -- to create a language and then I asked them if the language was actually created by them or not. Because of the length of the responses, I created three separate articles demonstrating the language invention capabilities of each Bot. You can decide which language Bot was most effective and inventive.

Claude.ai Invents a New Language | David Boles, Blogs
As a Boles.ai experiment, I asked three AI Bots — Claude.ai and Gemini and ChatGPT — to create a language and then I asked them if the language was actually created by them or not. Beca…

Plasma wakefield: from accelerators to black holes
Pisin Chen, Yung-Kun Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03880 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03880

Plasma wakefield: from accelerators to black holes
Commemorating the 2024 S. Chandrasekhar Prize, this review provides a retrospective on the genesis and evolution of plasma wakefield acceleration. It traces the journey from prehistory and the invention of the Plasma Wakefield Accelerator (PWFA), the establishment of its theoretical cornerstones, to its profound reverberations across fundamental physics, including astrophysics and analog gravity. The narrative emphasizes conceptual evolution, key theoretical breakthroughs, and future outlook, c…

Efficient Patent Searching Using Graph Transformers
Krzysztof Daniell, Igor Buzhinsky, Sebastian Bj\"orkqvist
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10496 https://

Efficient Patent Searching Using Graph Transformers
Finding relevant prior art is crucial when deciding whether to file a new patent application or invalidate an existing patent. However, searching for prior art is challenging due to the large number of patent documents and the need for nuanced comparisons to determine novelty. An accurate search engine is therefore invaluable for speeding up the process. We present a Graph Transformer-based dense retrieval method for patent searching where each invention is represented by a graph describing its…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #BBCProms
Johann Sebastian Bach & Andršs Schiff:
🎵 Three-Part Invention in B minor, BWV 801
#JohannSebastianBach #AndrásSchiff
https://open.spotify.com/track/6wLJ2nVEHjbo0zJ6M0hbgM

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #WoPop
Noa:
🎵 Invention #01
#Noa