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Day 30: Elizabeth Moon
This last spot (somehow 32 days after my last post, but oh well) was a tough decision, but Moon brings us full circle back to fantasy/sci-fi, and also back to books I enjoyed as a teenager. Her politics don't really match up to Le Guin or Jemisin, but her military experience make for books that are much more interesting than standard fantasy fare in terms of their battles & outcomes (something "A Song of Ice and Fire" achieved by cribbing from history but couldn't extrapolate nearly as well). I liked (and still mostly like) her (unironically) strong female protagonists, even if her (especially more recent) forays into "good king" territory leave something to be desired. Still, in Paksenarion the way we get to see the world from a foot-soldier's perspective before transitioning into something more is pretty special and very rare in fantasy (I love the elven ruins scene as Paks travels over the mountains as an inflection point). Battles are won or lost on tactics, shifting politics, and logistics moreso than some epic magical gimmick, which is a wonderful departure from the fantasy norm.
Her work does come with a content warning for rape, although she addresses it with more nuance and respect than any male SF/F author of her generation. Ex-evangelicals might also find her stuff hard to read, as while she's against conservative Christianity, she's very much still a Christian and that makes its way into her writing. Even if her (not bad but not radical enough) politics lead her writing into less-satisfying places at times, part of my respect for her comes from following her on Twitter for a while, where she was a pretty decent human being...
Overall, Paksenarrion is my favorite of her works, although I've enjoyed some of her sci-fi too and read the follow-up series. While it inherits some of Tolkien's baggage, Moon's ability to deeply humanize her hero and depict a believable balance between magic being real but not the answer to all problems is great.
I've reached 30 at this point, and while I've got more authors on my shortlist, I think I'll end things out tomorrow with a dump of also-rans rather than continuing to write up one per day. I may even include a man or two in that group (probably with at least non-{white cishet} perspective). Honestly, doing this challenge I first thought that sexism might have made it difficult, but here at the end I'm realizing that ironically, the misogyny that holds non-man authors to a higher standard means that (given plenty have still made it through) it's hard to think of male authors who compare with this group.
Looking back on the mostly-male authors of SF/F in my teenage years, for example, I'm now struggling to think of a single one whose work I'd recommend to my kids (having cheated and checked one of my old lists, Pratchett, Jaques, and Asimov qualify but they're outnumbered by those I'm now actively ashamed to admit I enjoyed). If I were given a choice between reading only non-men or non-woman authors for the rest of my life (yes I'm giving myself enby authors as a freebie; they're generally great) I'd very easily choose non-men. I think the only place where (to my knowledge) not enough non-men authors have been allowed through to outshine the fields of male mediocrity yet is in videogames sadly. I have a very long list of beloved games and did include some game designers here, but I'm hard-pressed to think of many other non-man game designers I'd include in the genuinely respect column (I'll include at least two tomorrow but might cheat a bit).
TL;DR: this was fun and you should do it too.
#30AuthorsNoMen

The #fediverse is the best verse.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@cheeaun/115415146417702654
After looking at this, got curious to know the limits in most servers.
So I did a little data analysis. Servers list from @…

A curated list of UI clients for accessing the ActivityPub Fediverse social network.
https://delightful.coding.social/delightful_fediverse_clients

delightful fediverse clients
Delightful curated lists of free software, open science and information sources.

Single conflict coloring, adaptable choosability and separation choosability
Carl Johan Casselgren, Kalle Eriksson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13913 https://

Single conflict coloring, adaptable choosability and separation choosability
We study relations between three interrelated notions of graph (list) coloring: single conflict coloring, adapted list coloring and choosability with separation (with $1$ overlapping color between lists of adjacent vertices), and their respective invariants single conflict chromatic number $χ_{\nleftrightarrow}$, adaptable choosability $ch_{ad}$ and separation choosability $ch_{sep}$. We investigate graphs with small values of these invariants, and construct explicit families of graphs $G$ wit…

Russia publishes a list of locally developed apps it says will function during mobile internet shutdowns, excluding foreign services like WhatsApp and YouTube (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/technology/russia-lists-local-apps-…

Solid list:
https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2025/10/06/102-lessons-from-102-books/?ck_subscriber_id=389259318
Don't run through LLM, it's already a very concise list. Take time and look through it.

Broncos' Patrick Surtain II lists five toughest QBs to face: How has star CB fared against NFL's best arms?

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/bronco…

Understanding Distribution Structure on Calibrated Recommendation Systems
Diego Correa da Silva, Denis Robson Dantas Boaventura, Mayki dos Santos Oliveira, Eduardo Ferreira da Silva, Joel Machado Pires, Frederico Ara\'ujo Dur\~ao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13568

Understanding Distribution Structure on Calibrated Recommendation Systems
Traditional recommender systems aim to generate a recommendation list comprising the most relevant or similar items to the user's profile. These approaches can create recommendation lists that omit item genres from the less prominent areas of a user's profile, thereby undermining the user's experience. To solve this problem, the calibrated recommendation system provides a guarantee of including less representative areas in the recommended list. The calibrated context works with three distributi…

The latest flurry of activity on the @… users mailing list arguing against my complaint that mailing lists are not fun to operate seems to have caused two lurkers to unsubscribe so far. Presumably because the sudden influx of email made them remember they are on a mailing list.

List Recoverable Codes: The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown (hopefully not Ugly)
Nicolas Resch, S. Venkitesh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07597 https://arxiv.…

List Recoverable Codes: The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown (hopefully not Ugly)
List recovery is a fundamental task for error-correcting codes, vastly generalizing unique decoding from worst-case errors and list decoding. Briefly, one is given ''soft information'' in the form of input lists S_1,...,S_n of bounded size, and one argues that there are not too many codewords that agree a lot with this soft information. This general problem appears in many guises, both within coding theory and in theoretical computer science more broadly. In this article we survey recent resu…

On three-dimensional associative algebras
U. Bekbaev, I. Rakhimov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04104 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04104

On three-dimensional associative algebras
The paper is devoted to the classification problem of associative algebras over any base field. We provide a list of three-dimensional associative algebras with canonical representatives of the isomorphism classes over a base field of the characteristic is not two and three. Comparisons of our lists with the most recent lists over the field of complex number in dimensions three, with some comments, are given.