Tootfinder

Lately I've been approached by #UNICEF volunteer. I wanted to help. It turned out the only way to do that was… to sign a "direct debit" form. Of course, I can't imagine giving someone my PII in the middle of a street, and signing authorizations like that. She was particularly insistent too; I managed to get her to tell me that I can get the account number for regular wire from the website.
Well, I understand the logic there. They need repeated donations, not one-time. A lot of people would just forget about it after talking to her. However, if they fill the form there, they will have to actively put an effort to cancel it afterwards. And if I understood her correctly, she suggested you can cancel anytime by calling *them* — so effectively giving them an additional opportunity to convince you not to. Still, I am dismayed by such psychological games.

A woman who has carried the name “Sparkle” all the way to the Federal bench is likely to have no difficulty asserting her authority over even Fash litigants. https://federate.social/@mattblaze/115126421803416035

Thank you all for your donations so far. It’s the middle of the week and we’re almost half way there.
Can we get this to $500 by the end of the week so Aseel can feed her family?
Please share.
💕 https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/115095609666982728

Rose of Sharon in the Flats of Ithaca -- I saw a lot of these when I was walking about this Monday
#photo #photography #flowers

Perfect way to end the middle of summer: at the same time, an interesting parcours for the final TdF stage (with the usual scenic Paris shots), and a *gripping* cricket match finale. Very little comes close to a 5th day rearguard action: the excitement of a game that has no result! (Maybe.)

Here's the thing about university museums: our art doesn't just sit in storage. During the semester, not a week goes by that we aren't pulling selections from the vaults for classes in a wide variety of disciplines.
https://georgiamuseum.org/gmoa_blog/mu

On Middle Grounds for Preference Statements
Anne-Marie George, Ana Ozaki
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09553 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09553

On Middle Grounds for Preference Statements
In group decisions or deliberations, stakeholders are often confronted with conflicting opinions. We investigate a logic-based way of expressing such opinions and a formal general notion of a middle ground between stakeholders. Inspired by the literature on preferences with hierarchical and lexicographic models, we instantiate our general framework to the case where stakeholders express their opinions using preference statements of the form I prefer 'a' to 'b', where 'a' and 'b' are alternative…

every single AI-for-coding experiment i've conducted ended up the same way: it was clearly faster, even if only a little bit, to do the same thing without the LLM in the middle https://mastodon.social/@janl@narrativ.es/115014692424751266

This weekend I went out past Newark Valley to Oakley Corners State Forest which has two fair sized ponds -- this one has an island in it
#photo #photography #landscape

3 years after car-free JFK/Overlook/Middle/MLK was made permanent, the signage for the non-JFK parts of the route is still so bad. No one but us nerds knows a car-free path to the beach even exists!
There should be a big banner on this overpass telling you to turn left then right. Instead there’s a tiny sign no one will see and even if you do it’s unclear (this isn’t “slow streets,” it’s car-free!)

There's a German "explain-the-world" kind of youtube channel that has really pushed its CG art style forwards in recent months. And their content is interesting. But I will never get used to the current way youtubers are inserting their sponsor's ad in the middle of sentences. Like "The unabomber hid in a hut in the forest and while taking a hike in the forest you may want to check out SuperHikePlus using this promo code..."
WTF.

See the man without a head? Using an AI image is a way of broadcasting that you are careless

Measuring the Magnetic Field of a Coronal Mass Ejection from Low to Middle Corona
Xingyao Chen, Bin Chen, Sijie Yu, Surajit Mondal, Muriel Zo\"e Stiefel, Peijin Zhang, Dale E. Gary, S\"am Krucker, Marin M. Anderson, Judd D. Bowman, Ruby Byrne, Morgan Catha, Sherry Chhabra, Larry D'Addario, Ivey Davis, Jayce Dowell, Gregg Hallinan, Charlie Harnach, Greg Hellbourg, Jack Hickish, Rick Hobbs, David Hodge, Mark Hodges, Yuping Huang, Andrea Isella, Daniel C. Jacobs, Ghislain Ke…

Measuring the Magnetic Field of a Coronal Mass Ejection from Low to Middle Corona
A major challenge in understanding the initiation and evolution of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) is measuring the magnetic field of the magnetic flux ropes (MFRs) that drive CMEs. Recent developments in radio imaging spectroscopy have paved the way for diagnosing the CMEs' magnetic field using gyrosynchrotron radiation. We present magnetic field measurements of a CME associated with an X5-class flare by combining radio imaging spectroscopy data in microwaves (1--18 GHz) and meter-wave (20--88 M…

Verification power of rational-valued automata with deterministic and affine states
Zeyu Chen, Abuzer Yakary{\i}lmaz, Junde Wu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07857 https://

Verification power of rational-valued automata with deterministic and affine states
We investigate the verification power of rational-valued affine automata within Arthur--Merlin proof systems. For one-way verifiers, we give real-time protocols with perfect completeness and tunable bounded error for two benchmark nonregular languages, the balanced-middle language and the centered-palindrome language, illustrating a concrete advantage over probabilistic and quantum finite-state verifiers. For two-way verifiers, we first design a weak protocol that verifies every Turing-recogniz…

I went into the Breazzano Family Center for Business Education which is an extension of the Johnson School of Business in Collegetown, here a stairwise rises into an atrium from out of the lobby
#cornell #photo #photography

The International Mountain Biking Association helped build this trail in Shindagin Hollow State forest to train our local club how to build and maintain trails
#photo #photography #forest

Making my way back to the base camp after Forest Frolic 2025 in the James Kennedy State Forest through a mostly flat and ferny forest
#photo #photography #forests