Tootfinder

“zpool import -FX” is not my favorite command. But when the hosting system panics and leaves the virtual devices backing a FreeBSD VM’s zfs filesystem in an inconsistent state, I'm sure glad it exists.
(I do have hourly zfs snapshots mirrored to a different system that I could restore from if necessary, which comforts me in situations like this. But it's nice not to have to roll back by even a few minutes, other than for the few affected files identified by “zpool scrub” checks…

Friedman's $ \mathsf{WD} $ is not parameter-free sequential
Juvenal Murwanashyaka
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14222 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14222

Friedman's $ \mathsf{WD} $ is not parameter-free sequential
Harvey Friedman's $ \mathsf{WD} $ is a weak set theory given by the following non-logical axioms: $ \mathsf{(W)} \; \forall x y \, \exists z \, \forall u \left[ \, u \in z \leftrightarrow ( \, u \in x \; \vee \; u = y \, ) \, \right] $; $ \mathsf{(D)} \; \forall x y \, \exists z \, \forall u \, \left[ \, u \in z \leftrightarrow ( \, u \in x \; \wedge \; u \neq y \, ) \, \right] $. We answer a question raised by Albert Visser which asks whether $ \mathsf{WD} $ is parameter-free sequential. Let $…

TL;DR: what if instead of denying the harms of fascism, we denied its suppressive threats of punishment
Many of us have really sharpened our denial skills since the advent of the ongoing pandemic (perhaps you even hesitated at the word "ongoing" there and thought "maybe I won't read this one, it seems like it'll be tiresome"). I don't say this as a preface to a fiery condemnation or a plea to "sanity" or a bunch of evidence of how bad things are, because I too have honed my denial skills in these recent years, and I feel like talking about that development.
Denial comes in many forms, including strategic information avoidance ("I don't have time to look that up right now", "I keep forgetting to look into that", "well this author made a tiny mistake, so I'll click away and read something else", "I'm so tired of hearing about this, let me scroll farther", etc.) strategic dismissal ("look, there's a bit of uncertainty here, I should ignore this", "this doesn't line up perfectly with my anecdotal experience, it must be completely wrong", etc.) and strategic forgetting ("I don't remember what that one study said exactly; it was painful to think about", "I forgot exactly what my friend was saying when we got into that argument", etc.). It's in fact a kind of skill that you can get better at, along with the complementary skill of compartmentalization. It can of course be incredibly harmful, and a huge genre of fables exists precisely to highlight its harms, but it also has some short-term psychological benefits, chiefly in the form of muting anxiety. This is not an endorsement of denial (the harms can be catastrophic), but I want to acknowledge that there *are* short-term benefits. Via compartmentalization, it's even possible to be honest with ourselves about some of our own denials without giving them up immediately.
But as I said earlier, I'm not here to talk you out of your denials. Instead, given that we are so good at denial now, I'm here to ask you to be strategic about it. In particular, we live in a world awash with propaganda/advertising that serves both political and commercial ends. Why not use some of our denial skills to counteract that?
For example, I know quite a few people in complete denial of our current political situation, but those who aren't (including myself) often express consternation about just how many people in the country are supporting literal fascism. Of course, logically that appearance of widespread support is going to be partly a lie, given how much our public media is beholden to the fascists or outright in their side. Finding better facts on the true level of support is hard, but in the meantime, why not be in denial about the "fact" that Trump has widespread popular support?
To give another example: advertisers constantly barrage us with messages about our bodies and weight, trying to keep us insecure (and thus in the mood to spend money to "fix" the problem). For sure cutting through that bullshit by reading about body positivity etc. is a better solution, but in the meantime, why not be in denial about there being anything wrong with your body?
This kind of intentional denial certainly has its own risks (our bodies do actually need regular maintenance, for example, so complete denial on that front is risky) but there's definitely a whole lot of misinformation out there that it would be better to ignore. To the extent such denial expands to a more general denial of underlying problems, this idea of intentional denial is probably just bad. But I sure wish that in a world where people (including myself) routinely deny significant widespread dangers like COVID-19's long-term risks or the ongoing harms of escalating fascism, they'd at least also deny some of the propaganda keeping them unhappy and passive. Instead of being in denial about US-run concentration camps, why not be in denial that the state will be able to punish you for resisting them?

Between proportionnality and envy-freeness: k-proportionality
Guillaume Ch\`eze (UT)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12903 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12903

Between proportionnality and envy-freeness: k-proportionality
This article deals with the cake cutting problem. In this setting, there exists two notions of fair division: proportional division (when there are n players, each player thinks to get at least 1/n of the cake) and envy-free division (each player wants to keep his or her share because he or she does not envy the portion given to another player). Some results are valid for proportional division but not for envy-free division. Here, we introduce and study a scale between the proportional divisio…

The rectangle condition does not detect the strong irreducibility
Bo-hyun Kwon, Sungmo Kang, Jung Hoon Lee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11701 https://arxiv.o…

The rectangle condition does not detect the strong irreducibility
The rectangle condition for a genus $g$ Heegaard splitting of a 3-manifold, defined by Casson and Gordon, provides a sufficient criterion for the Heegaard splitting to be strongly irreducible. However it is unknown whether there exists a strongly irreducible Heegaard splitting which does not satisfy the rectangle condition. In this paper we provide a counterexample of a genus 2 Heegaard splitting of a 3-manifold which is strongly irreducible but fails to satisfy the rectangle condition. The way…

Liquid Crystal-Based RIS Loss-Trade-Off Analysis
Bowu Wang, Mohamadreza Delbari, Robin Neuder, Alejandro Jim\'enez-S\'aez, Vahid Jamali
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11489 …

Liquid Crystal-Based RIS Loss-Trade-Off Analysis
Liquid crystal (LC) technology has emerged as a promising solution for large reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) at millimeter wave (mmWave) bands, offering advantages such as low power consumption, scalability, and continuously tunable phase shifts. For LC-RIS based on the delay-line architecture, i.e., with dedicated phase shifters, there exists a trade-off between the maximum achievable phase-shift range and the corresponding insertion loss, which has not been studied for LC-RIS-assis…

The Virginia Senate just told UVA it’s not getting state funding if it accepts the compact since UVA exists to serve Virginia, its residents, & their interests
—not be a tool of the federal govt.
Scoop from our student newspaper, who’ve been doing vital reporting https://www.

Virginia Senate leaders express “unequivocal opposition” to Compact
The letter calls upon the University to immediately cease consideration of the Compact, and if not, the state will work to negatively impact the University’s funding.

$\epsilon$-Optimal Multi-Agent Patrol using Recurrent Strategy
Deepak Mallya, Arpita Sinha, Leena Vachhani
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11640 https://arxiv.o…

$ε$-Optimal Multi-Agent Patrol using Recurrent Strategy
The multi-agent patrol problem refers to repeatedly visiting different locations in an environment using multiple autonomous agents. For over two decades, researchers have studied this problem in various settings. While providing valuable insights into the problem, the works in existing literature have not commented on the nature of the optimal solutions to the problem. We first show that an $ε$-approximate recurrent patrol strategy exists for every feasible patrol strategy. Then, we establish…

Gawd the Thunderbird people have really scrod the pooch when it comes to vectoring incoming (or marked) gunk to a spam folder.
Thunderbird (141.0 on MacOS) now insists on using a "Junk" folder, whether that exists or not. And even if one tries to override that T-bird puts it back to "Junk".
I guess the new slogan at Thunderbird is "If it worked, break it".
Thunderbird is certainly trying to circle the drain, as is Firefox.
Oh, and I woul…

The fallacy I've experienced in both personal relations and international politics is the belief that there exists an option in which everything stays the same. Not touching the steering wheel, simply continuing as is, will mean all is well, and it's seemingly not as much of a decision as actively interfering is.
The trolly problem exposes this belief, yet we have not really overcome it.

On the Number of Small Points for Rational Maps
Jit Wu Yap
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12039 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12039…

On the Number of Small Points for Rational Maps
Let $K$ be a number field and $f: \mathbb{P}^1 \to \mathbb{P}^1$ a rational map of degree $d \geq 2$ with at most $s$ places of bad reduction, where we include all archimedean places. We prove that there exists constants $c_1,c_2 > 0$, depending only on $d$ and not on $f$ or $K$, such that $$ \# \left\{ x \in \mathbb{P}^1(K) \mid \widehat{h}_f(x) \leq \frac{c_1}{s} h_{\operatorname{rat}_d}(\langle f \rangle) \right\} \leq c_2 s \log(s). $$ Here, $\operatorname{rat}_d$ is the moduli space of rat…

Can a small Gaussian perturbation break subadditivity?
Paolo Leonetti
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11432 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11432

Can a small Gaussian perturbation break subadditivity?
Given an integer $a\ge 1$, a function $f: \mathbb{R}\to \mathbb{R}$ is said to be $a$-subadditive if $$ f(ax+y) \le af(x)+f(y) \,\,\,\text{ for all }x,y \in \mathbb{R}. $$ Of course, $1$-subadditive functions (which correspond to ordinary subadditive functions) are $2$-subadditive. % and $3$-subadditive. Answering a question of Matkowski, we show that there exists a continuous function $f$ satisfying $f(0)=0$ which is $2$-subadditive but not $1$-subadditive. In addition, the same example is not…

"Whenever anyone asks me for advice, I tell them: we don’t realize how deeply the nine-to-five fractures us. The weekends, the holidays, the fixed friend group—whatever rigidness exists in your behavior will exist in your perception, and it will exist in your ability to think critically."
Victoria Brugger, "Last Words of an Ego on Death Row"

Last Words of an Ego on Death Row
Hello.I don’t know who you are. But I hope we meet in the next pages—across whichever dimension I had to cross to embody these feelings.This is not a book. It is not a journal.It is the autopsy of an ego and the birth certificate of the woman I am today.It carries the blueprints I bled for: how to build something from nothing, how to love yourself when the mirror is a battlefield, how to decode the nature of existence and drag purpose out of the dark.But more than all of that—this is my b…

Abelian motives and Shimura varieties in nonzero characteristic
James S. Milne
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09972 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09972

Abelian motives and Shimura varieties in nonzero characteristic
Much of the work on Shimura varieties over the last thirty years has been devoted to constructing the theory that would follow from a good notion of motives, one incorporating the Hodge, Tate, and standard conjectures. These conjectures are believed to be beyond reach, and may not even be correct as stated. I argue in this article that there exists a theory of motives, accessible to proof, weaker than Grothendieck's, but with many of the same consequences.

@… @… it’s the next sentence that intrigues me now.
If we don’t need to remove the content, just not use an algorithm to show it to children in a “feed”, then the content still exists, is still indexable etc.
Non…

Line Graphs of Non-Word-Representable Graphs are Not Always Non-Word-Representable
Khyodeno Mozhui, Tithi Dwary, K. V. Krishna
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03339 https://

Line Graphs of Non-Word-Representable Graphs are Not Always Non-Word-Representable
A graph is said to be word-representable if there exists a word over its vertex set such that any two vertices are adjacent if and only if they alternate in the word. If no such word exists, the graph is non-word-representable. In the literature, there are examples of non-word-representable graphs whose line graphs are non-word-representable. However, it is an open problem to determine whether the line graph of a non-word-representable graph is always non-word-representable or not? In this work…

Generative Data Refinement: Just Ask for Better Data
Minqi Jiang, Jo\~ao G. M. Ara\'ujo, Will Ellsworth, Sian Gooding, Edward Grefenstette
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08653 h…

Generative Data Refinement: Just Ask for Better Data
For a fixed parameter size, the capabilities of large models are primarily determined by the quality and quantity of its training data. Consequently, training datasets now grow faster than the rate at which new data is indexed on the web, leading to projected data exhaustion over the next decade. Much more data exists as user-generated content that is not publicly indexed, but incorporating such data comes with considerable risks, such as leaking private information and other undesirable conten…

On singular points in the essential spectrum
Alexander Plakhotnikov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11025 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11025

On singular points in the essential spectrum
The paper investigates the existence of a limit in the operator norm for a family of operators $T_z(H)= F(H-z)^{-1}F^*$ for $z$ tending to the real axis. The conditions for the $H$ operator and the rigging operator $F$ are established, under which the limit exists. Special attention is paid to the separation of cases when the limit point belongs and does not belong to the point spectrum $H$.

@… My answer hinges a bit on the meaning of “ok”: Yes it is ok (Meaning the network itself shouldn’t discriminate against any kind of speech and should accommodate this kind too), but participants should feel welcome to mute/block that speech if they want. I don’t believe it’s *valuable* to me that this speech exists. But the point of the network is not to accommodate one …

A non-computable c.e. closed subset of $[0,1]$
Serikzhan Badaev, Nikolay Bazhenov, Sergey Goncharov, Birzhan Kalmurzayev, Alexander Melnikov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06187 htt…

A non-computable c.e. closed subset of $[0,1]$
We prove that there exists a $Σ^0_1$ closed subset of $[0,1]$ that is not homeomorphic to any computably compact space. We show that the index set of c.e. subspaces of $[0,1]$ that admit a computably compact presentation is not arithmetical, as witnessed by subsets of $[0,1]$. The index set result is new for computable Polish spaces in general, not only for those realised as c.e. closed subsets of $[0,1]$.

Minimality of Tree Tensor Network Ranks
Jana Jovcheva, Tim Seynnaeve, Nick Vannieuwenhoven
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09463 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.0946…

Minimality of Tree Tensor Network Ranks
For a given tree tensor network $G$, we call a tuple of bond dimensions minimal if there exists a tensor $T$ that can be represented by this network but not on the same tree topology with strictly smaller bond dimensions. We establish necessary and sufficient conditions on the bond dimensions of a tree tensor network to be minimal, generalizing a characterization of Carlini and Kleppe about existence of tensors with a given multilinear rank. We also show that in a minimal tree tensor network, t…

"..that old web, the small web, the indie web, whatever you want to call it, it still exists, it will still exist! People haven't stopped making websites, people haven't stopped blogging earnestly (i.e. not just for ad views), they (we) are still out there! Posting away on our little web sites, not really caring that we don't get a lot of traffic.."
Great piece by @…

the web as a space to be explored · roytang.net

people are nostalgic for forums but i'm not very
github sends me to the forum
forum has a post from 2019 with a hotlink to some storage service
the storage service is dead
this is exactly how using forums was like in their heyday, except that rapidshare no longer exists
edit: i think it was temporarily down or something

Simple totally disconnected locally compact groups separated by finiteness properties
Laura Bonn, Sebastian Giersbach
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05101 https://

Simple totally disconnected locally compact groups separated by finiteness properties
We construct a sequence of simple non-discrete totally disconnected locally compact (tdlc) groups separated by finiteness properties; that is, for every positive integer $n$ there exists a simple non-discrete tdlc group that is of type $F_{n-1}$ but not of type $FP_n$. This generalizes a result of Skipper--Witzel--Zaremsky for discrete groups. Furthermore, we construct a simple non-discrete tdlc group that is of type $FP_2$ but not compactly presented. Our examples arise as Smith groups $\mathc…

Languages of Words of Low Automatic Complexity Are Hard to Compute
Joey Chen, Bj{\o}rn Kjos-Hanssen, Ivan Koswara, Linus Richter, Frank Stephan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07696 …

Languages of Words of Low Automatic Complexity Are Hard to Compute
The automatic complexity of a finite word (string) is an analogue for finite automata of Sipser's distinguishing complexity (1983) and was introduced by Shallit and Wang (2001). For a finite alphabet $Σ$ of at least two elements, we consider the non-deterministic automatic complexity given by exactly - yet not necessarily uniquely - accepting automata: a word $x \in Σ^*$ has exact non-deterministic automatic complexity $k \in \mathbb{N}$ if there exists a non-deterministic automaton of $k$ st…

Jordan homomorphisms and T-ideals
Matej Bre\v{s}ar, Efim Zelmanov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07191 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07191

Jordan homomorphisms and T-ideals
Let $A$ and $B$ be associative algebras over a field $F$ with {\rm char}$(F)\ne 2$. Our first main result states that if $A$ is unital and equal to its commutator ideal, then every Jordan epimorphism $φ:A\to B$ is the sum of a homomorphism and an antihomomorphism. Our second main result concerns (not necessarily surjective) Jordan homomorphisms from $H(A,*)$ to $B$, where $*$ is an involution on $A$ and $H(A,*)=\{a\in A\,|\, a^*=a\}$. We show that there exists a ${\rm T}$-ideal $G$ having…

Sad but funny😆
From: @…
https://social.coop/@afewbugs/114929620840207383

I have to update my take on iOS 26: going from “meh” to “I really like it”! The redesign is a lot more thoughtful than the outrage-hungry takesmen wanted you to believe. This might be a good time to introspct whom not to boost in the future.
(My understanding is that macOS 26.0 is indeed pretty buggy, so I’m waiting for the .1 here. We really need an Apple CEO who knows the Mac exists.)

100% I've never seen graphical glitches this prevalent on any Apple software since I started using MacOS in 2003. Definitely the glitchiest iOS I've ever seen. @… https://pdx.social/@louie/115280388834

"Nothing exists in isolation. Not a single thing." -- more @ #activism

Everything is Connected (In a Giant Tangled Knot)
welcome to the existential hairball 🐈

Listening to part 4, Beer brings up an interesting point. Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety proposes that, for all humans, there exists a maximum complexity that can be understood.
Beer suggests that we may not even be able to understand our own modern lives (this is from 1977). I wonder if we might think of conspiracy theories as a mechanism to decrease variety within models that have internal contradictions.

Blow-up phenomena for the constant scalar curvature and constant boundary mean curvature equation (after Chen and Wu)
Pak Tung Ho, Jinwoo Shin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21343 h…

Blow-up phenomena for the constant scalar curvature and constant boundary mean curvature equation (after Chen and Wu)
In this paper, the compactness of the solutions to the constant scalar curvature and constant boundary mean curvature equation is considered. Chen and Wu constructed a smooth counterexample showing that the compactness of the set of ``lower energy" solutions to the above equation fails when the dimension of the manifold is not less than 62. We prove that a smooth counterexample still exists when the dimension of the manifold is not less than 35.

Teaching STEM Courses using Ignatian Pedagogy
Gintaras Duda
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05806 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.05806

Teaching STEM Courses using Ignatian Pedagogy
Despite the impact of the Jesuit educational endeavor on the rise of science, the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm (IPP), the signature Jesuit pedagogy, is not frequently used to teach courses in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), and very little literature exists documenting any such attempts. In this paper, I describe a framework for how to apply the IPP to STEM courses using active-engagement strategies and assessment tools from disciplinary educational research (DBER). I …

Equivalence via surjections
Tom Leinster
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20555 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20555

Equivalence via surjections
Many types of categorical structure obey the following principle: the natural notion of equivalence is generated, as an equivalence relation, by identifying $A$ with $B$ when there exists a strictly structure-preserving map $A \to B$ that is genuinely (not just essentially) surjective in each dimension and faithful in the top dimension. We prove this principle for four types of structure: categories, monoidal categories, bicategories and double categories. The last of these theorems suggests th…

Finiteness and infiniteness of gradings of Noetherian rings
Cheng Meng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01628 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01628

Finiteness and infiniteness of gradings of Noetherian rings
In this paper we show that for a torsion-free abelian group $G$, $\operatorname{rank}_\mathbb{Z}G<\infty$ if and only if there exists a Noetherian $G$-graded ring $R$ such that the set $\{R_g \neq 0\}$ generates the group $G$. For every $G$ of finite rank, we construct a $G$-graded ring $R$ such that $R_g \neq 0$ for all $g \in G$. We prove such rings give examples of PIDs which are not ED. We also use the relations between the graded division ring and the group cohomology to prove some vanishi…

The federal government under Trump, can’t be trusted on really anything, because everything in this government exists to serve Dear Leader — not the American people
https://www.publicnotice.co/p/dallas-shooting-charlie-kirk-fbi-patel

You cannot trust the federal government
Everything they say should be assumed to be a lie.

Slow convergence almost everywhere of ergodic averages
Valery V. Ryzhikov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00463 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00463

Slow convergence almost everywhere of ergodic averages
For an ergodic action of the group $Z^n$ on a probability space and a given arbitrarily slowly decreasing to zero sequence, there exists an integrable function such that the standard ergodic time averages for it converge almost everywhere to the spatial average of the function at a rate that is not asymptotically majorized by this sequence. This generalizes the Krengel effect about the absence of universal estimates for the rate of convergence in Birkhoff's ergodic theorem. The proof uses a wea…

Nonunique tangent maps at isolated singularities of minimizing $p$-harmonic maps
Jonas Hirsch
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02740 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.0…

Nonunique tangent maps at isolated singularities of minimizing $p$-harmonic maps
The analysis of ``tangent maps'' at singular points of energy minimizing maps plays an important role in our understanding of the fine structure of the singular set. This note presents the first example of a minimizing (not just stationary) $p$-harmonic map with nonunique tangent maps at an isolated singularity. We construct a $n$-dimensional manifold $N$ such that for every admissible tuple $p< m\le n+2$, there exists a map from $B_1^m$ into $N$ that minimizes the $p$-energy, has an isolated s…

"Poverty exists, not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we cannot satisfy the rich."
- Unknown or Martin M. McLaughlin with the Overseas Development Council. In June of 1980.

Hadamard ranks of algebraic varieties
Dario Antolini, Guido Mont\'ufar, Alessandro Oneto
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05231 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.05…

Hadamard ranks of algebraic varieties
Motivated by the study of decompositions of tensors as Hadamard products (i.e., coefficient-wise products) of low-rank tensors, we introduce the notion of Hadamard rank of a given point with respect to a projective variety: if it exists, it is the smallest number of points in the variety such that the given point is equal to their Hadamard product. We prove that if the variety $X$ is not contained in a coordinate hyperplane or a binomial hypersurface, then the generic point has a finite $X$-Had…

Swan modules and homotopy types after a single stabilisation
Tommy Hofmann, John Nicholson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21975 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.2197…

Swan modules and homotopy types after a single stabilisation
We study Swan modules, which are a special class of projective modules over integral group rings, and their consequences for the homotopy classification of CW-complexes. We show that there exists a non-free stably free Swan module, thus resolving Problem A4 in the 1979 Problem List of C. T. C. Wall. As an application we show that, in all dimensions $n \equiv 3$ mod $4$, there exist finite $n$-complexes which are homotopy equivalent after stabilising with multiple copies of $S^n$, but not after …

Addiction (Speculatve)
Kind of a fucked-up metaphor, but I was thinking yesterday that parenting is a lot like addiction. If you separate me from my child, I'll take completely irrational and desperate actions to get them back, driven by a deep instinct that goes well beyond "love." I'll also make self-disadvantageous long-term decisions like forgoing sleep, working an extra job, or quitting a job to do some combination of providing for and/or being present with my child.
Even in parenting situations where love is absent, and beyond, I think, the possessiveness that sometimes festers in those situations, there's often (although not always) a craving for simple presence of the child.
In a healthy relationship, there's a whole lot more than this, but it's interesting to me that the same obsessive craving and absolute priority that we think of as diseased and/or monstrous in someone addicted to a hard drug can be healthy in the right context (that is, when it doesn't contribute to abusive or twisted parental relationships but instead exists alongside a healthy amount of love and respect).
Makes me wonder if there are ways to have a truly healthy drug addiction, although I recognize the answer might well be "no" and that even if it's "technically/theoretically yes" it might still be harmful to hype up or even merely discuss that possibility since it might help addicted people in harmful addictions more easily justify inaction. At minimum I think any "yes" answer here involves assuming utopian-level differences from our current society.
#Parenting #Addiction

Zero variance self-normalized importance sampling via estimating equations
Art B. Owen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00389 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.00389

Zero variance self-normalized importance sampling via estimating equations
In ordinary importance sampling with a nonnegative integrand there exists an importance sampling strategy with zero variance. Practical sampling strategies are often based on approximating that optimal solution, potentially approaching zero variance. There is a positivisation extension of that method to handle integrands that take both positive and negative values. Self-normalized importance sampling uses a ratio estimate, for which the optimal sampler does not have zero variance and so zero va…

A Late-Time Rise in Planet Occurrence Reproduces the Galactic Height Trend in Planet Occurrence
Christopher Lam, Sarah Ballard, Sheila Sagear, Kathryne J. Daniel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21250

A Late-Time Rise in Planet Occurrence Reproduces the Galactic Height Trend in Planet Occurrence
While stellar metallicity has long been known to correlate with planetary properties, the galactic metallicity gradient alone does not account for the trend. It is therefore possible that there exists some time-dependent component to planet occurrence in the Milky Way over Gyr timescales, driven by something other than the metal enrichment of the ISM. In this paper, we investigate the observable effect of a time-dependent planet occurrence rate upon a Kepler-like sample of stars. Using a novel …

Let's be honest. I've been a strong supporter of #OpenPGP (or #PGP in general) for a long time. And I still can't think of any real alternative that exists right now. And I kept believing it's not "that hard" — but it doesn't seem like it's getting any easier. The big problem with standards like that are tools.
#WebOfTrust is hard, and impractical for a lot of people. It doesn't really help how many tools implement trust. I mean, I sometimes receive encrypted mail via #EvolutionMail — and Evolution makes it really hard for me to reply encrypted without permanently trusting the sender!
The whole SKS keyserver mess doesn't help PGP at all. Nowadays finding someone's key is often hard. If you're lucky, WKD will work. If you're not, you're up for searching a bunch of keyservers, GitHub, or perhaps random websites. And it definitely doesn't help that some of these may hold expired keys, with people uploading their new key only to a subset of them or forgetting to do it.
On top of that, we have interoperability issues. Definitely doesn't speak well when GnuPG can't import keys from popular keyservers over lack of UIDs. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Now with diverging OpenPGP standards around the corner, we're a step ahead from true interoperability problems. Just imagine convincing someone to use OpenPGP, only to tell them afterwards that they've used non-portable tool / settings, and their key doesn't work for you.
That's really not how you advocate for #encryption.

Stabbing Faces By a Convex Curve
David Eppstein
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17549 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17549…

Stabbing Faces By a Convex Curve
We prove that, for every plane graph $G$ and every smooth convex curve $C$ not on a single line, there exists a straight-line drawing of $G$ for which every face is crossed by $C$.

Three Generalizations of Erd\H{o}s Szekeres: $k$-Modal Subsequences
Charles Gong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20360 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20360

Three Generalizations of Erdős Szekeres: $k$-Modal Subsequences
Erdős and Szekeres showed that given a permutation $p$ of $[n]$, and the sequence defined by \newline $(p(1), p(2), \ldots, p(n))$, there exists either a decreasing or increasing subsequence, not necessarily contiguous, of length at least $\sqrt{n}$. Fan Chung considered subsequences that can have at most one change of direction, i.e. an increasing and then decreasing subsequence, or a decreasing and then increasing subsequence. She called these unimodal subsequences, and showed there exists a…

Optical characterization of deep level defects in n-type Al$_x$In$_y$Ga$_{1-x-y}$P for development of solid-state photomultiplier analogs
Andrew M. Armstrong, Evan M. Anderson, Lisa N. Caravello, Eduardo Garcia, Joseph P. Klesko, Samuel D. Hawkins, Eric A. Shaner, John F. Klem, Aaron J. Muhowski
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02880

Optical characterization of deep level defects in n-type Al$_x$In$_y$Ga$_{1-x-y}$P for development of solid-state photomultiplier analogs
Characterizing intrinsic defects is an important step in evaluating materials for new optoelectronic device applications. For photomultipliers, suppressing dark currents is critical, but there exists a tradeoff between maximizing the band gap while remaining sensitive to the wavelength of interest, and minimizing the incorporation of new defects by growing not-yet-optimized alloys. We present a series of capacitance-based measurements, including deep level optical spectroscopy, steady-state pho…

The US is a slave state founded on genocide that *still* hasn't actually abolished slavery. Nazi race law came from Jim Crow, but you won't find that taught in a single classroom in the US. The Senate and Electoral College are *explicitly* anti-democratic institutions... Like, they were designed to prevent democracy. The whole punitive legal system exists to suppress dissent and legitimize slavery. The genocide of indigenous folks *has not even ended* much less has there been any attempt at reparations.
How exactly are you going to fix that by voting harder in the mid terms, and finding a more acceptable candidate for 2028? Seriously, someone explain it to me.

Smith normal forms of bivariate polynomial matrices
Dong Lu, Dingkang Wang, Fanghui Xiao, Xiaopeng Zheng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20889 https://arxiv.org…

Smith normal forms of bivariate polynomial matrices
In 1978, Frost and Storey asserted that a bivariate polynomial matrix is equivalent to its Smith normal form if and only if the reduced minors of all orders generate the unit ideal. In this paper, we first demonstrate by constructing an example that for any given positive integer s with s >= 2, there exists a square bivariate polynomial matrix M with the degree of det(M) in y equal to s, for which the condition that reduced minors of all orders generate the unit ideal is not a sufficient condit…

Strict Comparisons of Infinite Utility Streams
Michael Greinecker, Michael Nielsen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20567 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.20567…

Strict Comparisons of Infinite Utility Streams
There exists a preference relation on infinite utility streams that does not discriminate between different periods, satisfies the Pareto criterion, and so that almost all pairs of utility streams are strictly comparable. Such a preference relation provides a counterexample to a claim in [Zame, William R. ``Can intergenerational equity be operationalized?'' Theoretical Economics 2.2 (2007): 187-202.]

Spiraling conformal geodesics
Wojciech Kami\'nski
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00606 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.00606

Spiraling conformal geodesics
In this short note, we construct an example of spiraling conformal geodesic in Euclidean signature in dimension $3$, answering the question posed by Helmuth Friedrich and Paul Tod, if such objects exists. Our example is not real analytic, but similar constructions can lead also to real analytic metrics in arbitrary dimensions.

Odd relaxation in three-dimensional Fermi liquids
Seth Musser, Sankar Das Sarma, Johannes Hofmann
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18342 https://arxiv.org/pdf/25…

Odd relaxation in three-dimensional Fermi liquids
Recent theoretical works predict a hierarchy of long-lived, non-hydrodynamic modes in two-dimensional Fermi liquids arising from the feature -- supposedly unique to two dimensions -- that relaxation by head-on scattering is not efficient in the presence of Pauli blocking. This leads to a parity-based separation of scattering rates, with odd-parity modes relaxing much more slowly than even-parity ones. In this work, we establish that a similar effect exists in isotropic three-dimensional Fermi l…

Fair Division Among Couples and Small Groups
Paul G\"olz, Hannane Yaghoubizade
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13432 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13432

Fair Division Among Couples and Small Groups
We study the fair allocation of indivisible goods across groups of agents, where each agent fully enjoys all goods allocated to their group. We focus on groups of two (couples) and other groups of small size. For two couples, an EF1 allocation -- one in which all agents find their group's bundle no worse than the other group's, up to one good -- always exists and can be found efficiently. For three or more couples, EF1 allocations need not exist. Turning to proportionality, we show that, when…

Fresh from intimidating ABC and CBS with meritless lawsuits,
Donald Trumpis suing Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal reporters who broke the story of a lewd birthday message for Jeffrey Epstein.
But, unlike with the frivolous allegations against the big broadcasters,
there’s clearly a fact of the matter here:
an authentic letter either exists or it does not;
-- and there is plenty to be revealed in the process of finding out.
Trump’s time-proven …

Unique equilibrium states for Viana maps with small potentials
Kecheng Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00136 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00136

Unique equilibrium states for Viana maps with small potentials
We investigate the thermodynamic formalism for Viana maps-skew products obtained by coupling an expanding circle map with a slightly perturbed quadratic family on the fibers. For every Hölder potential $φ$ whose oscillation is below an explicit threshold, we show that an equilibrium state not only exists but is unique and satisfies an upper level-2 large-deviation principle. All of these conclusions persist under sufficiently small perturbations of the reference map.

Computability of dimension groups
Maria Sabitova
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04350 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04350

Computability of dimension groups
We investigate the computability of the isomorphism set $\operatorname{Iso}(G_A,G_B)$ between $G_A$ and $G_B$, where $G_A$ is a subgroup of $\mathbb{Q}^n$ generated by columns of integer powers of a non-singular $n \times n$-matrix $A$ with integer entries. Assuming that the characteristic polynomial of $A$ is irreducible -- and under an additional condition when $n$ is not prime -- we prove that $\operatorname{Iso}(G_A,G_B)$ is computable; that is, there exists an algorithm that determines the…

The It{\^o}-F\"ollmer formula -- nonstandard cases
W. M. Bednorz, R. M. {\L}ochowski, P. L. Zondi, F. J. Mhlanga, D. Hove
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14617 https://

The It{ô}-Föllmer formula -- nonstandard cases
The purpose of this note is to prove the It{ô}-Föllmer formula for the càdlàg paths possessing quadratic variation in a possibly ``weakest'' sense along some sequence of partitions. By this we mean, for example, that we do not require the jumps of the quadratic variation to occur exactly at the times when the path itself jumps or that the quadratic variation exists at all time instances. Moreover, we deal with more general partitions than partitions with vanishing mesh used by Föllmer, als…

Bounds on the propagation radius in power domination
Imran Allie, Brandon du Preez, Dean Reagon, Adriana Roux
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02211 https://arxi…

Bounds on the propagation radius in power domination
Let $G$ be a graph and let $S \subseteq V(G)$. It is said that $S$ \textit{dominates} $N[S]$. We say that $S$ \textit{monitors} vertices of $G$ as follows. Initially, all dominated vertices are monitored. If there exists a vertex $v \in G$ which is not monitored, but has all but one of its neighbours monitored, then $v$ becomes monitored itself. This step is called a \textit{propagation} step and is repeated until the process terminates. The process terminates when the there are no unmonitored …

Lax functoriality of Hochschild cochain complex
Yang Han, Xukun Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14620 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14620

Lax functoriality of Hochschild cochain complex
Unlike the Hochschild chain complex of an algebra, the Hochschild cochain complex of an algebra is not functorial. Nonetheless, we show that the Hochschild cochain complex of an algebra even a dg category is of lax functoriality, i.e., there exists a lax functor from bicategory of dg categories to bicategory of $B_\infty$-algebras which sends every dg category to its Hochschild cochain complex. This result is a homotopy version of the lax functoriality of center of an algebra obtained by Davydo…

Epstein shit and adjacent, Rural America, Poverty, Abuse
Everyone who's not a pedophile thinks pedophiles are bad, but there's this special obsessed hatred you'll find among poor rural Americans. The whole QAnon/Epstein obsession may not really make sense to folks raised in cities. Like, why do these people think *so much* about pedophiles? Why do they think that everyone in power is a pedophile? Why would the Pizzagate thing make sense to anyone? What is this unhinged shit? A lot of folks (who aren't anarchists) might be inclined to ask "why can't these people just let the cops take care of it?"
I was watching Legal Eagle's run down on the Trump Epstein thing earlier today and I woke up thinking about something I don't know if I've ever talked about. Now that I'm not in the US, I'm not at any risk of talking about it. I don't know how much I would have been before, but that's not something I'm gonna dig into right now. So let me tell you a story that might explain a few things.
I'm like 16, maybe 17. I have my license, so this girl I was dating/not dating/just friends with/whatever would regularly convince me to drive her and her friends around. I think she's like 15 at the time. Her friends are younger than her.
She tells me that there's a party we can go to where they have beer. She was told to invite her friends, so I can come too. We're going to pick her friends up (we regularly fill the VW Golf well beyond the legal limit and drive places) and head to the party.
So I take these girls, at least is 13 years old, down to this party. I'm already a bit sketched out bringing a 13 year old to a party. We drive out for a while. It's in the country. We drive down a long dark road. Three are some barrel fires and a shack. This is all a bit strange, but not too abnormal for this area. We're a little ways outside of a place called Mill City (in Oregon).
We park and walk towards the shack. This dude who looks like a rat comes up and offers us beer. He laughs and talks to the girl who invited me, "What's he doing here? You're supposed to bring your girl friends." She's like, "He's our ride." I don't remember if he offered me a beer or not.
We go over to this shed and everyone starts smoking, except me because I didn't smoke until I turned 18. The other girls start talking about the rat face dude, who's wandered over by the fire with some other guys. They're mainly teasing one of the 13 year old girls about having sex with him a bunch of times. They say he's like, 32 or something. The other girls joke about him only having sex with 13 year olds because he's too ugly to have sex with anyone closer to his own age.
Somewhere along the line it comes out that he's a cop. I never forgot that, it's absolutely seared in to my memory. I can picture his face perfectly still, decades later, and them talking about how he's a deputy, he was in his 30's, and he was having sex with a 13 year old girl. I was the only boy there, but there were a few older men. This was a chunk of the good ol' boys club of the town. I think there were a couple of cops besides the one deputy, and a judge or the mayor or some kind of big local VIP.
I kept trying to get my friend to leave, but she wanted to stay. Turns out under age drinking with cops seems like a great deal if you're a kid because you know you won't get busted. I left alone, creeped the fuck out.
I was told later that I wasn't invited and that I couldn't talk about it, I've always been good at compartmentalization, so I never did.
Decades later it occurred to me what was actually happening. I'm pretty sure that cop was giving meth he'd seized as evidence to these kids. This wasn't some one-off thing. It was regular. Who knows how many decades it went on after I left, or how many decades it had been going on before I found out. I knew this type of thing had happened at least a few times before because that's how that 13 year old girl and that 32 year old cop had hooked up in the first place.
Hearing about Epstein's MO, targeting these teenage girls from fucked up backgrounds, it's right there for me. I wouldn't be surprised if they were involved in sex trafficking of minors or some shit like that... but who would you call if you found out? Half the sheriff's department was there and the other half would cover for them.
You live in the city and shit like that doesn't happen, or at least you don't think it happens. But rural poor folks have this intuition about power and abuse. It's right there and you know it.
Trump is such a familiar character for me, because he's exactly that small town mayor or sheriff. He'll will talk about being tough on crime and hunting down pedophiles, while hanging out at a party that exists so people can fuck 8th graders.
The problem with the whole thing is that rural folks will never break the cognitive dissonance between "kill the peods" and "back the blue." They'll never go kill those cops. No, the pedos must be somewhere else. It must be the elites. It must be outsiders. It can't be the cops and good ol' boys everyone respects. It can't be the mayor who rigs the election to win every time. It can't be the "good upstanding" sheriff. Nah, it's the Clintons.
To be fair, it's probably also the Clitnons, a bunch of other politicians, billionaires, etc. Epstein was exactly who everyone thought he was, and he didn't get away with it for so long without a whole lot of really powerful help.
There are still powerful people who got away with involvement with #Epstein. #Trump is one of them, but I don't really believe that he's the only one.
#USPol #ACAB

Covering rings by proper ideals
Malcolm Hoong Wai Chen, Eric Swartz, Nicholas J. Werner
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.18915 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18915…

Counterexample to the conjectured coarse grid theorem
Sandra Albrechtsen, James Davies
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15342 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15342

Counterexample to the conjectured coarse grid theorem
We show that for every $M,A,n \in \mathbb{N}$ there exists a graph $G$ that does not contain the $(154\times 154)$-grid as a $3$-fat minor and is not $(M,A)$-quasi-isometric to a graph with no $K_n$ minor. This refutes the conjectured coarse grid theorem by Georgakopoulos and Papasoglu and the weak fat minor conjecture of Davies, Hickingbotham, Illingworth, and McCarty. Our construction is a slight modification of the recent counterexample to the weak coarse Menger conjecture from Nguyen, Sco…

Strong Kurtz Randomness and Binary Expansions of Reordered Computable Numbers
Peter Hertling, Philip Janicki
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22406 https://arxiv…

Strong Kurtz Randomness and Binary Expansions of Reordered Computable Numbers
A real number is called left-computable if there exists a computable increasing sequence of rational numbers converging to it. In this article we investigate the Kolmogorov complexity and the binary expansions of a very specific subset of the left-computable numbers. We show in our main result that a real number is reordered computable if, and only if, it is left-computable and not strongly Kurtz random. In preparation of this, we characterize strong Kurtz randomness by a suitable notion of ran…

General Strong Bound on the Uncrossed Number which is Tight for the Edge Crossing Number
Gaspard Charvy, Tom\'a\v{s} Masa\v{r}\'ik
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20937 https…

General Strong Bound on the Uncrossed Number which is Tight for the Edge Crossing Number
We investigate a very recent concept for visualizing various aspects of a graph in the plane using a collection of drawings introduced by Hliněný and Masařík [GD 2023]. Formally, given a graph $G$, we aim to find an uncrossed collection containing drawings of $G$ in the plane such that each edge of $G$ is not crossed in at least one drawing in the collection. The uncrossed number of $G$ ($unc(G)$) is the smallest integer $k$ such that an uncrossed collection for $G$ of size $k$ exists. The …

Monochromatic 4-AP avoidance in 2-colorings of Z/pZ for primes 5 <= p <= 997
Keane Maverick Irawan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14595 https://arxiv.org…

Monochromatic 4-AP avoidance in 2-colorings of Z/pZ for primes 5 <= p <= 997
We study 2-colorings of Z/pZ that avoid monochromatic 4-term arithmetic progressions for every step d with p not dividing d. We completely classify all primes 5 <= p <= 997: such a coloring exists if and only if p is in {5, 7, 11}. For larger primes, nonexistence is consistent with lower bounds of Wolf and Lu--Peng on the number of monochromatic 4-APs in 2-colorings of Z_p. When solutions exist, the minimal period equals p, and we enumerate them up to dihedral symmetries and a global color swap…