Tootfinder

These are mostly indigenous communities in Alaska that have been slammed by the storm.
The local manager of a small airline fleet says he is the only one doing evacuations right now!
Defund FEMA and people are abandoned. Defund public media and no-one knows.
FYI, today is Indigenous Peoples Day.
https://

News Eye (@newseye.bsky.social)
These are mostly indigenous communities in Alaska that have been slammed by the storm. The local manager of a small airline fleet says he is the only one doing evacuations right now! Defund FEMA and people are abandoned. Defund public media and no-one knows. FYI, today is Indigenous Peoples Day.

Having just one alcoholic drink every day is linked to brain damage - Earth.com
https://www.earth.com/news/having-just-one-alcoholic-drink-every-day-linked-to-damaged-brain-vessels/

Titans part ways with veteran offensive line coach Bill Callahan one day after firing son Brian Callahan

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/titans-

🇺🇦 Auf radioeins läuft...
FredAtlast:
🎵 One Day (Radio Edit)
#NowPlaying #FredAtlast
https://fredatlast.bandcamp.com/track/one-day

Day 20: bell hooks.
Despite having decided to continue to 30, number 20 feels important, and hooks gets the spot in part because I haven't yet included a non-fiction feminist author, which feels like an obvious thing to include on such a list. The one category of author being bumped out of the first 20 here is anime writers, but I'll follow up with one of them, along with more academics and mangaka who I've been itching to include.
In any case, hooks is absolutely legendary as a feminist writer for good reason, and as a teacher I've especially appreciated her writing on pedagogy like "Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom" and "Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom". These have challenged me to teach at a higher level, and while I'm not sure I've completely succeeded, they're important to me. They also pair well with Paolo Friere's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed", but hooks always seems to be focused on very practical advice and it's incredibly direct in her writing, even though her advice isn't always straightforward to implement. In fact, that's one of the things I value about her writing: when the truth is complicated or the real work is messy interpersonal relationships that need to be negotiated with each student, she's not afraid to say so and give good advice for navigating those waters instead of trying to dispense simple-seeming platitudes or formulas for success that paper over the deeper issues. Her concern has always been truth, rather than simplicity or audience comfort and the popularity it might seem to entail, which I think is part of why her legacy endures so well.
#20AuthorsNoMen
#30AuthorsNoMen

Pogačar's (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) return to racing at the Grand Prix Cycliste de Québec on Friday was the scene of a rare miss, as the World Champion finished in 29th place – his worst one-day result in three years.
Julian Alaphilippe (Tudor Pro Cycling Team) claimed a brilliant solo victory, while Pogačar finished 26 seconds back in the chase group, his lowest placing in a one-day race since 2022.

Care for some toes in these trying times? 🐾

Challenge: "Name 20 living female authors you admire, 1 per day"
Day 20: Eleanor Catton
I was fortunate to hear Catton do a reading at the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2013, and just a couple of months later she became the youngest ever winner of the Man Booker Prize for her second novel, The Luminaries - one of the strangest books I've ever read.
So, yay! I made it to 20 posts. Not hard actually, as there are so many fantastic

The day ‘Return’ became ´Enter’
In the popular imagination, the transition from the world of typewriters to the universe of computers was orderly and simple.
But the reality is much more fascinating and convoluted.
https://aresluna.org/the-day-return-became-enter/…

I know one day one of my normie friends is gonna tell me something nice and I'll awoo at them and there will be no way out of that situation

Helping clean up from the #AustinDay #OpenStreet. #BikeNYC @…

sp_infectious: Art exhibit dynamic contacts (2011)
This dataset contains the daily dynamic contact networks collected during the Infectious SocioPatterns event that took place at the Science Gallery in Dublin, Ireland, during the artscience exhibition INFECTIOUS: STAY AWAY. Each file in the downloadable package contains a tab-separated list representing the active contacts during 20-second intervals of one day of data collection. Each line has the form “t i j“, where i and j are the a…

Slack considers this to be acceptable release notes for an update

Is there a long term graph of https://esq.social/@icymi_law posts seen vs posts reposted? Just curious about how law mastodon has changed over the years.

ICYMI (Law) (@icymi_law@esq.social)
45.7K Posts, 1.51K Following, 3.05K Followers · In Case You Missed It (Law). I follow attorneys, law profs, et al.—distilling their posts into the feed below. I post around ~100 times a day. So you can catch up in one sitting or follow to flesh out a sparse timeline. @colarusso@mastodon.social is always fiddling with my algo. So, I should improve with age. If you have suggestions for folks I should follow, let me know. 🔁 ≠ 👍 See algo explanation in links below. Sibling to @lolscotus…

I know I've looked at too many daffodil pictures in one day when I can't stand it and try a different color grade: these are in front of the Greenstar market
#photo #photography #daffodils

One of the more bonkers ideas I've seen this year: #cats

I’ve always felt a deep resentment toward the wealthy, not just for their excessive privilege, but for how they hoard resources that could ease so much human suffering. It infuriates me that their fortunes grow while people sleep on the streets and struggle to survive another day.
I believe everyone deserves the fundamentals that make life dignified, secure housing, nourishment, healthcare, education, and fair social support. No one should have to beg for what should already belong to …

Happy International Left Handed Day to all those afflicted, including my oldest daughter. Just over 10% of people are left-handed, and only 5% to 6% for women. Some studies have reported that rightys have higher IQs than lefties. Hey, it's just science people, don't shoot the messenger. Things have improved for left-handers, and rarely are they seen as evil because of how they write. The word sinister comes from the Latin word for left-handed.
My daughter being a southpaw was a huge advantage during her competitive softball years. As one of only 2 left-handed pitchers in a league of 1,200 girls, she was very effective league play and in travel tournaments despite being slower than average. She did have a wicked curve that broke in sharply on right-handed batters.
#LeftHanderDay

Day 21: Aya Yoshinaga
I'm actually generally much less aware of the creators involved in the anime I watch, for a number of reasons, and the few anime directors I could name without looking them up were all men before I started this list. I've now got a short list of anime directors/writers who are women, and the first I'll include here is Yoshinaga, in part because she was pivotal to one of my favorite lesser-known anime, "Kurau Phantom Memory". It was actually one of the first anime I watched ever, but I didn't like it just because of that, since I've rewatched it at least twice and still regard it highly. It's got a pretty cool science fiction setting, an extremely cool barely-comprehensible alien race, a female protagonist who is not sexualized and not subjected to romance, and it centers a platonic relationship torn apart by technological hubris. Very "cool seinen stuff that wouldn't make it past the focus groups today" stuff.
Besides Kurau, Yoshinaga has worked on other great stuff like Golden Kamuy, Azumanga Daioh, Durarara, and Fullmetal Alchemist, and when you see a correlation like that between well-written shows and the same writer showing up again and again, it's clear there's talent there, even if most of these are manga-based.
Probably going to circle back to at least one more anime writer, but for tomorrow I'll move on to manga probably, since I want to space out all my YA enthusiasm a bit.
#30AuthorsNoMen

This is very telling but my favorite super power would be to stop time. Not for any creepy reasons, but rather because I sometimes believe there's so much happening and I'd love to take the adequate time to respond to it all or process it. Just take one day and do everything I have been wanting to do and that has been piling up in my mind for years!
The biggest tragedy of life is that there will always be too little time for it all.

I realized how many people say how it’s awesome they can ask AI stupid questions they’d be embarrassed to ask someone, and what does it day about an environment we created.
I guess one of the reasons some people get less curious as they age?

"One day, the people that didn’t believe in you will tell everyone how they met you."
—Johnny Depp
#acting #coaching #inspiration

Day 9 - Windy
I slowly woke up to the morning sun pouring into my tent. My bag is packed, my bike is set, and I’m ready for my last breakfast in HillerŸd. One last stroll through the Frederikssund Gardens before I say goodbye to my host.
The weather gods listened to me regarding the rain, but they really fucked me up with the wind—42 km of headwind! And for anyone who says that Denmark is flat, then Pamela Anderson is flat too! While I was fighting with the wind with lots of open…

I am our family doctor would come to our house in the day or evening if one of my brothers or I were sick years old.
#oldPeopleOfMastodon

sp_infectious: Art exhibit dynamic contacts (2011)
This dataset contains the daily dynamic contact networks collected during the Infectious SocioPatterns event that took place at the Science Gallery in Dublin, Ireland, during the artscience exhibition INFECTIOUS: STAY AWAY. Each file in the downloadable package contains a tab-separated list representing the active contacts during 20-second intervals of one day of data collection. Each line has the form “t i j“, where i and j are the a…

TL;DR: what if nationalism, not anarchy, is futile?
Since I had the pleasure of seeing the "what would anarchists do against a warlord?" argument again in my timeline, I'll present again my extremely simple proposed solution:
Convince the followers of the warlord that they're better off joining you in freedom, then kill or exile the warlord once they're alone or vastly outnumbered.
Remember that even in our own historical moment where nothing close to large-scale free society has existed in living memory, the warlord's promise of "help me oppress others and you'll be richly rewarded" is a lie that many understand is historically a bad bet. Many, many people currently take that bet, for a variety of reasons, and they're enough to coerce through fear an even larger number of others. But although we imagine, just as the medieval peasants might have imagined of monarchy, that such a structure is both the natural order of things and much too strong to possibly fail, in reality it takes an enormous amount of energy, coordination, and luck for these structures to persist! Nations crumble every day, and none has survived more than a couple *hundred* years, compared to pre-nation societies which persisted for *tends of thousands of years* if not more. I'm this bubbling froth of hierarchies, the notion that hierarchy is inevitable is certainly popular, but since there's clearly a bit of an ulterior motive to make (and teach) that claim, I'm not sure we should trust it.
So what I believe could form the preconditions for future anarchist societies to avoid the "warlord problem" is merely: a widespread common sense belief that letting anyone else have authority over you is morally suspect. Given such a belief, a warlord will have a hard time building any following at all, and their opponents will have an easy time getting their supporters to defect. In fact, we're already partway there, relative to the situation a couple hundred years ago. At that time, someone could claim "you need to obey my orders and fight and die for me because the Queen was my mother" and that was actually a quite successful strategy. Nowadays, this strategy is only still working in a few isolated places, and the idea that one could *start a new monarchy* or even resurrect a defunct one seems absurd. So why can't that same transformation from "this is just how the world works" to "haha, how did anyone ever believe *that*? also happen to nationalism in general? I don't see an obvious reason why not.
Now I think one popular counterargument to this is: if you think non-state societies can win out with these tactics, why didn't they work for American tribes in the face of the European colonizers? (Or insert your favorite example of colonialism here.) I think I can imagine a variety of reasons, from the fact that many of those societies didn't try this tactic (and/or were hierarchical themselves), to the impacts of disease weakening those societies pre-contact, to the fact that with much-greater communication and education possibilities it might work better now, to the fact that most of those tribes are *still* around, and a future in which they persist longer than the colonist ideologies actually seems likely to me, despite the fact that so much cultural destruction has taken place. In fact, if the modern day descendants of the colonized tribes sow the seeds of a future society free of colonialism, that's the ultimate demonstration of the futility of hierarchical domination (I just read "Theory of Water" by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson).
I guess the TL;DR on this is: what if nationalism is actually as futile as monarchy, and we're just unfortunately living in the brief period during which it is ascendant?

Cowboys' George Pickens taking 'one day at a time' mentality after blistering start https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nfl/dallas-cowboys/news/cowboys-george-pickens-taking-one-day…

Have to share another cool picture from Lost Dot. 😁
Caption: Christoph Tapken (314) arrived at noon, sharing how close he’d come to scratching at CP5. At one point, he was ready to jump in a taxi and call it a day, but standing at the Finish in Constanța, he was glad he’d pushed through. More proud of his mental resilience than the physical effort, Christoph is now looking forward to reuniting with his family in Germany.
Source: Lost Dot

While I'm starting to getting into the photos from our holidays, I just saw that it's #FootpathFriday !
This one is a really nice path to walk - when the weather is a bit more stable than it was during our visit two years ago. But I learned a couple of lessons that day 😄

The optical photometric variability of Herbig Ae/Be stars from TESS
Ann Marie Cody, Lynne A. Hillenbrand, Shreya Chandragiri, Marvin Morgan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08633 http…

The optical photometric variability of Herbig Ae/Be stars from TESS
We have carried out a photometric time domain study of 188 intermediate-mass young stars observed in Full Frame Image mode with the TESS satellite over the first 3.3 years of its mission. The majority of these targets are classified as Herbig Ae/Be stars (HAeBes). All were monitored at optical wavelengths for at least one 27-day TESS sector, with many having multiple sectors of data. From a custom aperture photometry pipeline, we produced light curves and analyzed the variability therein, as a …

I had a bit of a problem. When I was carrying an open chocolate bar in my table, the paper would sometimes unfold and pieces would fall into the recesses of the bag. Lately, after getting wet in the rain, it became so loose That I had to put the whole thing into a plastic bag. But still, I was pondering over a more permanent solution.
Then, I accidentally discovered it. One day I forgot to break the chocolate bar into pieces before packing it. When I took it out, it occurred to me that as long as it's in one piece, it won't fall out of the paper wrapping! 🤦
Such a #LifeHack.

@… My family is from Poland, but I grew up in Denmark, so I’ve been through, but never really to, Rostock ~4 times a year for the first 20 years of my life.
Maybe one day I will actually make the trip to see the city itself 🤔

Deb Haaland:
Thanks to one of Donald Trump’s executive orders,
National Parks gift shops are looking at removing books about slavery, the Civil War — and me. 
That’s right. On their list is a children’s picture book about the day I was sworn in as Secretary of the Interior.
That day, I honored my Pueblo pride by wearing my white moccasins and a handmade ribbon skirt adorned with butterflies, stars, and corn. 
A Parks book ban is the Trump playbook in action: 𝘥𝘪…

Flow-Based Detection and Identification of Zero-Day IoT Cameras
Priyanka Rushikesh Chaudhary, Rajib Ranjan Maiti
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08485 https://a…

Flow-Based Detection and Identification of Zero-Day IoT Cameras
The majority of consumer IoT devices lack mechanisms for administrators to monitor and control them, hindering tailored security policies. A key challenge is identifying whether a new device, especially a streaming IoT camera, has joined the network. We present zCamInspector, a system for identifying known IoT cameras with supervised classifiers (zCamClassifier) and detecting zero-day cameras with one-class classifiers (zCamDetector). We analyzed ~40GB of traffic across three datasets: Set I (s…

"Plastic Overshoot Day: One-third of global plastic waste won’t be properly managed in 2025"
#Plastic #Plastics #Environment

openflights: Openflights airport network
A network of regularly occurring flights among airports worldwide, extracted from the openflights.org dataset. Nodes represent airports, and direction of edge (i,j) indicates a regularly occurring commercial flight by a particular airline from airport i to airport j. Multiple edges may exist between a pair of airports if multiple airlines offer that flight, or if one airline offers multiple such flights each day.
This network has 3214 node…

Some notes as a tiny blogpost on #BerlinFediDay: https://blog.johl.io/berlin-fediverse-day-2025/

Trump promised lower grocery prices ‘on Day One.’ Here’s what happened
https://thehill.com/homenews/nexstar_media_wire/5441550-trump-promised-lower-grocery-prices-on-day-one-heres-what-happened/

@m7moudfamily@troet.cafe @… Hi, I am seeing lots of accounts for the same fundraiser on many servers. One of them – with hundreds of posts even though it joined a day ago – even linked to gaza-verified.org.
I don’t know which, if any, is the real one or whether there is a real one.
If you want to video chat with me and Joy from Gaza on Signal we can a…

Dolphins LB Robinson (rib) returns to practice https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/45974495/dolphins-lb-chop-robinson-rib-returns-practice

Day 8 - One night, two nights
This place… how can I say it? I think I’ve been here a day too long. HillerŸd Castle and its gardens are the highlight of this location; they are beautiful, that’s a fact. But besides that, this place is so boring. It’s so boring that I decided to go swimming and relax in a sauna, which I shared with four fat Danish men complaining about their wives or something.
Maybe staying at this place for one night and then moving on to the next location would…

Just in one day Israel has bombed civil targets in Qatar and Tunisia. We need a map of countries assaulted by Netanyahu under Trump's passive approval
https://theintercept.com/2025/09/09/israel-attacks-doha-qatar/

Israel’s Peace Plan: Assassinate the Ceasefire Negotiators
In “a mockery of international law,” per one expert, Israel has bombed the residence of Hamas officials negotiating peace in Doha, Qatar.

Basis for a hands free blood flow measurement with automated vessel focus
Reinhard Fuchs, Nathalie Sumrah, Johannes Schwerdt, Michael Unger, Georg Stachel, Michael Schultz, Karsten Lenk, Thomas Neumuth
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11060

Basis for a hands free blood flow measurement with automated vessel focus
Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is one of the essential tools to ensure oxygen supply during cardiac arrest. However, the precise effects of chest compression are not quantifiable to this day. This often results in a low quality of chest compressions even if performed by health-care professionals. One solution could be provided by quantification of blood flow via ultrasonic Doppler measurements, to guide first responders in their efforts. This paper presents an approach to address the issue…

Historic preservation is bad for affordability #296903.
Parking lot preserved as historic landmark (yes, this is not the Onion) in Cleveland Park, DC raises price to $26 for parking less than one hour -- even less than 15 minutes. https://www.popville.com/2025/08/cleveland

“Anyone else experience the new parking scheme at Sam’s Park n’ Ride?” - PoPville
"Dear PoPville, I wanted to write to you to see if anyone else has experienced the new parking scheme at Sam's Park n' Ride in Cleveland Park. I went to pull into the lot the other day, and it said "just pull through" with no ticket to pull. I did so, and it looks like

one of the admins of a discord server i'm in added a "scatman john" bot that posts a random scatman john lyric every day and i would like to also have this on fedi
side note: i managed to figure out how to get a link to invite the bot myself so if you wanna do that here you go https://disc…

Discord - Group Chat That’s All Fun & Games
Discord is great for playing games and chilling with friends, or even building a worldwide community. Customize your own space to talk, play, and hang out.

I wonder if the US will eventually overcome it's cultural (wilful?) obliviousness to irony, because it's settling in drifts as far south as Te Wāiponamu (the South Island) of Aotearoa (NZ).
Perhaps, one day, they might develop an appreciation of irony as I have since emigrating. And even savour it.

Beyond the widely discussed celebration in #China, #Vietnam featured
"one of the largest parades in decades, featuring fighter jets, warships, tanks and stirring moments of pride."
As in, odd military pride worth noting.

Iconic photos showcase Vietnam’s historic 80th National Day celebrations
Millions of people filled Hanoi’s streets and Ba Dinh Square on Sept. 2 as Vietnam marked its 80th National Day with one of the largest parades in decades, featuring fighter jets, warships, tanks and stirring moments of pride captured in a series of unforgettable images.

Variable aggregation-based formulations for pumped storage hydro model in the day-ahead unit commitment problem
Shaoze Li, Junhao Wu, Zhibin Deng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07751

Variable aggregation-based formulations for pumped storage hydro model in the day-ahead unit commitment problem
Pumped storage hydro (PSH) plants can improve the flexibility of power systems. A well-designed formulation for a PSH model is essential when incorporating the PSH units into a day-ahead unit commitment model. In the literature, the formulation of a PSH model is generally based on the individual PSH unit. This formulation is tight if there is only one PSH unit in the reservoir. However, when there are multiple units sharing the same reservoir in a PSH plant, the existing formulation may introdu…

One day prosecutors will use AI enhancement on surveillance images (if this happened already).
https://www.theverge.com/news/776793/charlie-kirk-fbi-person-of-interest-photos-shooter

Internet detectives are misusing AI to find Charlie Kirk’s alleged shooter
The FBI shared two blurry photos of a person of interest in the shooting of Charlie Kirk, and people are misusing AI to make the images seem clearer.

This post made my day, and I kinda wanna save it forever because I might actually print it and hang it on my wall.
#Solidarity

"Chatbots are turning on the flattery, patience, and support. Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman said the “cool thing” about the company’s AI personal assistant is that it doesn’t “judge you for asking a stupid question.” It exhibits “kindness and empathy.” Here’s the rub: We need people to judge us. We need people to call us out for making stupid statements. Friction and conflict are key to developing resilience and learning how to function in society."

Love Algorithmically | No Mercy / No Malice
For six hours, my AI avatar roamed the Earth. I receive 20 to 30 thoughtful emails a day asking for professional and investment advice. I can only answer a fraction of them. One of my former graduate student instructors, now at Google, approached me with a solution. The Google Labs project ingested my podcasts, newsletters, […]

Day 19 (a bit late): Alice Oseman
As I said I've got 14 authors to fit into two days. Probably just going to extend to 30? But Oseman gets this spot as an absolute legend of queer fiction in both novel & graphic novel form, and an excellent example of the many truths queer writers have to share with non-queer people that can make everyone's lives better. Her writing is very kind, despite in many instances dealing with some dark stuff.
I started out on Heartstopper, which is just so lovely and fun to read, and then made my way through several of her novels. The one I'll highlight here which I think it's her greatest triumph is "Loveless", which is semi-autobiographical and was at least my first (but no longer only) experience with the "platonic romance" sub-genre. It not only helped me work through some crufty internal doubts about aro/ace identities that I'd never really examined, but in the process helped improve my understanding of friendship, period. Heck, it's probably a nice novel for anyone questioning any sort of identity or dealing with loneliness, and it's just super-enjoyable as a story regardless of the philosophical value.
To cheat a bit more here on my author count, I recently read "Dear Wendy" by Ann Zhao, which shouts out "Loveless" and offers a more expository exploration of aro/ace identities, but "Loveless" is a book with more heart and better writing overall, including the neat plotting and great pacing. I think there are also parallels with Becky Albertalli's work, though I think I like Oseman slightly more. Certainly both excel at writing queer romance (and romance-adjacent) stuff with happy endings (#OwnVoices wins again with all three authors).
In any case, Oseman is excellent and if you're not up for reading a novel, Heartstopper is a graphic novel series that's easy to jump into and very kind to its adorable main characters.
I think I've now decided to continue to 30, which is a relief, so I'm tagging this (and the next post that rounds out 20) two ways.
#20AuthorsNoMen
#30AuthorsNoMen

One first step people should do to respond to this is start using the “report a speed trap” function in Apple Maps to report where ICE is operating. Make Apple party to the attempt to protect people. https://www.theverge.com/news/791533/google-a…

Google removes ICE-spotting app following Apple’s ICEBlock crackdown
Google has removed Red Dot, an app people could use to report ICE sightings from Google Play, one day after Apple removed similar apps, including Red Dot and ICEBlock.

@… you have 18 followers... meaning that if one of those 18 people check their account on the day you did post something, there is a high chance that it will be read... because there is no selection algorithm here...
I did read your post as well. 😉

Yes it is a funky little dial. I don't have enough characters to fully explain it here without starting a thread, so I cheated and shoved it all in the alt text. 🤷
#WristCheck (but not really, since it is a pocket watch).

outlive hate <3
here's a preview of my upcoming zine
https://jackiejude.me/e-zines/

One day, I might sit in my local cafe,
caught up in angst,
trying to find euphemisms to explain to my children the wherefores and whys of it all.
Perhaps, one day, to sit in silence and think of nothing will no longer be ease but an act of defiance
— of remembering what it means to belong to a world once rooted in continuity again.
What kind of world allows a family to sit in a parlour and think of nothing?
What kind of world might let them look through …

Andy Marshall's Genius Loci Digest: 10 Oct 2025
For Fiona and Tom

Ex-Raiders Starter Signs With AFC Contender One Day After Release https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/germaine-pratt-colts-contract/?adt_ei=[email]

Reminder - Historical Fiction in / and the Anthropocene
https://ift.tt/VKCus4z
updated: Thursday, September 11, 2025 - 3:35pmfull name / name of organization: One-Day Online…
via Input 4 RELCFP

Six microlensing planets detected via sub-day signals during the 2023 -- 2024 season
Cheongho Han, Chung-Uk Lee, Andrzej Udalski, Ian A. Bond, Michael D. Albrow, Sun-Ju Chung, Andrew Gould, Youn Kil Jung, Kyu-Ha Hwang, Yoon-Hyun Ryu, Yossi Shvartzvald, In-Gu Shin, Jennifer C. Yee, Weicheng Zang, Hongjing Yang, Sang-Mok Cha, Doeon Kim, Dong-Jin Kim, Seung-Lee Kim, Dong-Joo Lee, Yongseok Lee, Byeong-Gon Park, Richard W. Pogge, Przemek Mr\'oz, Micha{\l} K. Szyma\'nski, Jan Skowron…

Six microlensing planets detected via sub-day signals during the 2023 -- 2024 season
We present analyses of six microlensing events: KMT-2023-BLG-0548, KMT-2023-BLG-0830, KMT-2023-BLG-0949, KMT-2024-BLG-1281, KMT-2024-BLG-2059, and KMT-2024-BLG-2242. These were identified in KMTNet data from the 2023 -- 2024 seasons, selected for exhibiting anomalies shorter than one day -- potential signatures of low-mass planetary companions. Detailed modeling of the light curves reveals that the anomalies in all six events are caused by planetary companions to the lenses. The brief durations…

Morning!
Back at my desk for a day working on logos, illustrations and profile pics.
I'm about half way done with my YETI of coffee... already planning the next one 😄
#Coffee

This is husband's and my first fathers day without any of our father figures still living.
Husband's father died last September. My grandfather, who with my grandmother raised me, died years ago. As did my father.
So, my father in law became my "Dad" too and for many decades he was only one we could call on fathers day.
It will be sad and strange not making the video call to him today. He was a darling man, and although his last few years were somewhat blu…

Appfigures: Sora saw 56K iOS installs on its first day, on par with Grok but ahead of Claude and Copilot; ChatGPT and Gemini each had ~80K installs on day one (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/02/openais-sora-soars-to-no-3-on-the-u-s-a…

OpenAI's Sora soars to No. 3 on the US App Store | TechCrunch
Sora becomes the No. 3 US app after 164K downloads in 2 days, making the AI video app an early hit.

Request-Only Optimization for Recommendation Systems
Liang Guo, Wei Li, Lucy Liao, Huihui Cheng, Rui Zhang, Yu Shi, Yueming Wang, Yanzun Huang, Keke Zhai, Pengchao Wang, Timothy Shi, Xuan Cao, Shengzhi Wang, Renqin Cai, Zhaojie Gong, Omkar Vichare, Rui Jian, Leon Gao, Shiyan Deng, Xingyu Liu, Xiong Zhang, Fu Li, Wenlei Xie, Bin Wen, Rui Li, Xing Liu, Jiaqi Zhai

Request-Only Optimization for Recommendation Systems
Deep Learning Recommendation Models (DLRMs) represent one of the largest machine learning applications on the planet. Industry-scale DLRMs are trained with petabytes of recommendation data to serve billions of users every day. To utilize the rich user signals in the long user history, DLRMs have been scaled up to unprecedented complexity, up to trillions of floating-point operations (TFLOPs) per example. This scale, coupled with the huge amount of training data, necessitates new storage and tra…

Speculative politics
As an anarchist (okay, maybe not in practice), I'm tired of hearing why we have to suffer X and Y indignity to "preserve the rule of law" or "maintain Democratic norms." So here's an example of what representative democracy (a form of government that I believe is inherently flawed) could look like if its proponents had even an ounce of imagination, and/or weren't actively trying to rig it to favor a rich donor class:
1. Unicameral legislature, where representatives pass laws directly. Each state elects 3 statewide representatives: the three most-popular candidates in a statewide race where each person votes for one candidate (ranked preference voting would be even better but might not be necessary, and is not a solution by itself). Instead of each representative getting one vote in the chamber, they get N votes, where N is the number of people who voted for them. This means that in a close race, instead of the winner getting all the power, the power is split. Having 3 representatives trades off between leisure size and ensuring that two parties can't dominate together.
2. Any individual citizen can contact their local election office to switch or withdraw their vote at any time (maybe with a 3-day delay or something). Voting power of representatives can thus shift even without an election. They are limited to choosing one of the three elected representatives, or "none of the above." If the "none of the above" fraction exceeds 20% of eligible voters, a new election is triggered for that state. If turnout is less than 80%, a second election happens immediately, with results being final even at lower turnout until 6 months later (some better mechanism for turnout management might be needed).
3. All elections allow mail-in ballots, and in-person voting happens Sunday-Tuesday with the Monday being a mandatory holiday. (Yes, election integrity is not better in this system and that's a big weakness.)
4. Separate nationwide elections elect three positions for head-of-state: one with diplomatic/administrative powers, another with military powers, and a third with veto power. For each position, the top three candidates serve together, with only the first-place winner having actual power until vote switches or withdrawals change who that is. Once one of these heads loses their first-place status, they cannot get it again until another election, even if voters switch preferences back (to avoid dithering). An election for one of these positions is triggered when 20% have withdrawn their votes, or if all three people initially elected have been disqualified by losing their lead in the vote count.
5. Laws that involve spending money are packaged with specific taxes to pay for them, and may only be paid for by those specific revenues. Each tax may be opted into or out of by each taxpayer; where possible opting out of the tax also opts you out of the service. (I'm well aware of a lot of the drawbacks of this, but also feel like they'd not necessarily be worse than the drawbacks of our current system.) A small mandatory tax would cover election expenses.
6. I'm running out of attention, but similar multi-winner elections could elect panels of judges from which a subset is chosen randomly to preside in each case.
Now I'll point out once again that this system, in not directly confronting capitalism, racism, patriarchy, etc., is probably doomed to the same failures as our current system. But if you profess to want a "representative democracy" as opposed to something more libratory, I hope you'll at least advocate for something like this that actually includes meaningful representation as opposed to the current US system that's engineered to quash it.
Key questions: "Why should we have winner-take-all elections when winners-take-proportionately-to-votes is right there?" and "Why should elected officials get to ignore their constituents' approval except during elections, when vote-withdrawal or -switching is possible?"
2/2
#Democracy

"A tree a minute for 24 hours: the young Victorian forest that was planted in a day"
#Australia #Trees #Environment

"""
Once the distinctions had been made, and the first punishments applied, the venereal were accepted into the hospital. And they were crammed inside. In 1781, 138 men occupied 60 beds in the Saint-Eustache quarter of Bicêtre, and in the Miséricorde in the Salpêtrière there were 125 beds for 224 women. Patients in the terminal stages of the disease were simply left to die. 'Grand Remedies' were applied to the others: never more, and rarely less than six weeks of care, starting of course with blood-letting and purging, then a week of baths for two hours per day, then purging again, followed by a full and complete confession to bring this first part of the treatment to a close. Rubbing with mercury could then begin, with all its efficacy. Each course of treatment lasted one month, and was followed by two more purges and one final bleeding to chase out the remaining morbific humours. Fifteen days of convalescence were then granted. After he had definitively made his peace with God, the patient was declared cured and sent away.
This 'therapeutic' demonstrates a rich tapestry of fantasy, and above all a profound complicity between medicine and morality, which give their full meaning to these purification practices. For the classical age, venereal disease was less a sickness than an impurity to which physical symptoms are correlated. Accordingly, medical perception is ruled by ethical perception, and on occasion even effaced by it. The body must be treated to remove the contagion, but the flesh must be punished, for it is the flesh that attaches us to sin. Mere corporal punishment was not enough: the flesh was to be pummelled and bruised, and leaving painful traces was not to be feared, as good health, all too frequently, transformed the human body into another opportunity for sinful conduct. The sickness was to be treated, but the good health that could lead to temptation was to be destroyed.
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

"The question of whether we’re in a constitutional crisis or whether authoritarianism has arrived is kind of an academic one. It’s either here or it’s going to be here very soon. **We’re still short of them openly defying a supreme court ruling or intentionally deporting US citizens or attempting to shut down a news media operation. But we’re not very far short.**"
Trump promised to be a dictator on day one. We’re now past day 200 | Donald Trump | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/10/donald-trump-authoritarian-democracy

Ben Meiselas is a very busy man.
His “pro-democracy” channel MeidasTouch,
which he runs with his younger brothers Jordan and Brett,
puts out 15 or more videos a day, most of them presented by Meiselas himself.
The prolific output is part of the reason The MeidasTouch has become one of the most listened-to podcasts in the US,
routinely beating the mighty Joe Rogan in both video and audio,
and even overtaking Fox News in YouTube views.
Rogan and oth…

🇺🇦 Auf radioeins läuft...
FredAtlast:
🎵 One Day (Radio Edit)
#NowPlaying #FredAtlast
https://fredatlast.bandcamp.com/track/one-day

Yeah! Last night, this morning and just now, I finished and uploaded the Blog post, the photos and a short video of our rain-walk in the #schwarzwald
I haven't written a LOT this time as I recorded more video than photos. But having the camera in the rain wasn't my preferred option that day ;)
But the motto of the day was:
We Fear No Rain!

Day 2 in the Schwarzwald / We Fear no Rain
Day three in the Black Forest brought a mix of misty mornings, challenging humidity, and expected rain on one of Baiersbronn’s certified Genießerpfade trails.

A Seven-Day Multi-Wavelength Flare Campaign on AU Mic III: Quiescent and Flaring Properties of the X-ray Spectra and Chromospheric lines
Yuta Notsu, Isaiah I. Tristan, Rachel A. Osten, Alexander Brown, Adam F. Kowalski, Carol A. Grady
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06908

A Seven-Day Multi-Wavelength Flare Campaign on AU Mic III: Quiescent and Flaring Properties of the X-ray Spectra and Chromospheric lines
We present the X-ray quiescent and flaring properties from a unique, 7-day multiwavelength observing campaign on the M1 flare star AU Mic. Combining the XMM-Newton X-ray spectra with the chromospheric line and broadband NUV and optical continuum observations provides a dataset that is one of the most comprehensive to date. We analyze the sample of 38 X-ray flares and study in detail the X-ray flare temperature ($T$) and emission measure (EM) evolutions of three largest flares with the X-ray fla…

Micah Parsons makes Packers history one day after Cowboys trade https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/micah-parsons-makes-green-bay-packers-history-one-day-after-dallas-cowboys-trade

Challenge: "Name 20 female authors you admire, 1 per day"
Day 14:
Anne Donovan
Her novel "BuddhaDa" is one of the most clever, hilarious, uplifting and yet very serious works of literature I've ever read. It sits on my favourites shelf. As she writes the dialogues the way people talk, you will learn some Scots Glasgow dialect along the way. I had the pleasure of attending a reading with her at a local library in Edinburgh and she signed this much-love…

NFL sack leader Nik Bonitto excited to chase Von Miller's team record: 'Maybe one day I can be in those shoes'

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/nfl-sack-leade…

NFL insider has the worst Las Vegas Raiders take you'll read all day https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/news/nfl-insider-has-worst-las-vegas-raiders-take-youll-read-all-day/ac…

(Please don’t explain why large organizations can have seemingly contradictory goals, I know)
It’s funny how one part of Apple made a notification pop up on my watch this morning reminding me that tomorrow is world mental health day.
And another part of Apple is very busy appeasing fascists, the very thing that is hurting my mental health the most.

WORKSHOP
Yes, you can(vass)!
Virtual Training · Hosted by California Democratic Party
Tuesdays
7 – 8pm PDT
Join from anywhere
Hosted in Santa Barbara, CA 93103
https://www.mobilize.us/mobilize/event/842992/

WORKSHOP | Yes, you can(vass)! · Mobilize
**One voter and one conversation at a time ... that's how Democrats win!** Studies have shown that turnout increases by up to 9 percentage points through door-to-door canvassing! Are you thinking about canvassing, but don't feel quite ready? If you've never canvassed before (and even if you're a fellow introvert), or just need a refresher, join the Bay Area Coalition Tuesdays, 7 pm (PST) and other dates to talk about what your canvassing day will look like, including .......... - How to h…

AWESOME! The video I did together with our lead-trail-maintenance guy for the #deutscheralpenverein Sektion Bad Tölz is online on the official website!
I know that it is WAYS beyond professional video makers. But well - I was the only one available and I learned SO MUCH that day.
It's the one about 'Hanspeter Mair'.

openflights: Openflights airport network
A network of regularly occurring flights among airports worldwide, extracted from the openflights.org dataset. Nodes represent airports, and direction of edge (i,j) indicates a regularly occurring commercial flight by a particular airline from airport i to airport j. Multiple edges may exist between a pair of airports if multiple airlines offer that flight, or if one airline offers multiple such flights each day.
This network has 3214 node…

Among the vast number of characters in the Chinese language
— around 100,000, by some estimates
— there are hundreds that no one alive knows how to pronounce.
They are written down, plain as day, in old books, but their sounds, even their meanings, have been lost.
Sitting in his office, wondering at how something seemingly immortalized in print could be forgotten, Dr. Mullaney went down a mental rabbit hole.
It would have been physically impossible to build a t…

A Professor’s Search for the MingKwai, a Lost Chinese Typewriter
A historian went down an 18-year rabbit hole in search of obsolete machines. But there was one he thought he’d never find.

"""
But there is no certainty that madness was content to sit locked up in its immutable identity, waiting for psychiatry to perfect its art, before it emerged blinking from the shadows into the blinding light of truth. Nor is it clear that confinement was above all, or even implicitly, a series of measures put in place to deal with madness. It is not even certain that in this repetition of the ancient gesture of segregation at the threshold of the classical age, the modern world was aiming to wipe out all those who, either as a species apart or a spontaneous mutation, appeared as 'asocial'. The fact that the internees of the eighteenth century bear a resemblance to our modern vision of the asocial is undeniable, but it is above all a question of results, as the character of the marginal was produced by the gesture of segregation itself. For the day came when this man, banished in the same exile all over Europe in the mid-seventeenth century, suddenly became an outsider, expelled by a society to whose norms he could not be seen to conform; and for our own intellectual comfort, he then became a candidate for prisons, asylums and punishment. In reality, this character is merely the result of superimposed grids of exclusion.
The gesture that proscribed was as abrupt as the one that had isolated the lepers, and in both cases, the meaning of the gesture should not be mistaken for its effect. Lepers were not excluded to prevent contagion, any more than in 1657, 1 per cent of the population of Paris was confined merely to deliver the city from the 'asocial'. The gesture had a different dimension: it did not isolate strangers who had previously remained invisible, who until then had been ignored by force of habit. It altered the familiar cityscape by giving them new faces, strange, bizarre silhouettes that nobody recognised. Strangers were found in places where their presence had never previously been suspected: the process punctured the fabric of society, and undid the familiar. Through this gesture, something inside man was placed outside of himself, and pushed over the edge of our horizon. It is the gesture of confinement, in short, which created alienation.
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

Uspol, genocide
In case you're wondering whether "political violence" is escalating in the U.S.A. right now, of *course* it is as we move into an era of concentration campus and domestic military deployments. But both domestic genocides and purges as well as political violence targeted at individual prominent figures has been a *constant* throughout American history, from gun duels fought between political rivals to massacres of Native Americans in order to steal their land, to pogroms against Catholics, to literal wars on local Black success and political participation, all dating back before the American Revolution to the beginning of colonization. Thanks to Wikipedia, here's a *small sampling* where I attempted to whittle things down to about one event per decade before recent times.
Sources:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_the_United_States
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_massacres_in_North_America
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_assassination_attempts_and_plots
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incidents_of_political_violence_in_Washington,_D.C.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_racial_violence_in_the_United_States
Killings, woundings, and plots against political figures:
Aaron Burr killing Alexander Hamilton in 1804
Sam Houston beats Rep. William Stanbery in 1832
Attempted Assassination of Andrew Jackson in 1835
Fight between Representatives Churchwell & Cullom in 1854
Caning of Sen. Charles Summer in 1856
Brawl on the House floor in 1858
Assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865
Assassination of President James A. Garfield in 1881
Assassination of President William McKinley in 1901
Attempted Assassination of William Howard Taft and Porfirio Díaz in 1909
Wounding of former President Theodore Roosevelt in 1912
Bombing of the U.S. Senate reception room in 1915
Attempted Assassination of President Herbert Hover in 1928 (in Argentina)
Attempted Assassination of President Harry S. Truman in 1947
Attempted Assassination of President Harry S. Truman in 1950
The United States Capitol Shooting in 1954
Planned Assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1960
Attempted Assassination of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1963
Assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963
Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968
Weather Underground bombings in 1970, 1971, and 1975
Planned Assassination of President Richard Nixon in 1972 (Alabama Governor George Wallace was targeted & injured instead)
Planned Assassination of President Richard Nixon in 1974
Planned Assassination of President Gerald Ford in 1974
Attempted Assassinations (x2) of President Gerald Ford in 1975
Wounding of President Ronald Reagan in 1981
Attempted Kidnapping of Federal Reserve Board members in 1981
Planned Assassination of President George Bush in 1993 (in Kuwait)
Attempted Assassinations (x3) of President Bill Clinton in 1994
Attempted Assassination of President Bill Clinton in 1996
Anthrax attacks on US senators in 2001
Attempted Assassination of President George W. Bush in 2005 (in the foreign country of Georgia)
Planned Assassination of President-Elect Barrack Obama in 2008
Planned Assassination of President Barrack Obama in 2009 (in Turkey)
Attempted Assassination of President Barrack Obama in 2011
Shooting of Rep. Gabby Gliffords in 2011
Planned Assassinations (x2) of President Barrack Obama in 2012
Attempted Assassinations (x2) of President Barrack Obama in 2013
Planned Assassination of President Barrack Obama in 2015
Attempted Assassinations (x2) of President Donald Trump in 2017
Attempted Assassination of President Donald Trump in 2018
Pipe bombs mailed to Democratic leaders in 2018, including former President Barack Obama
Planned Assassination of President Barrack Obama in 2019
Attempted Assassination of President Donald Trump in 2020
Kidnapping plot against Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020
Planned Assassination of Former President George W. Bush in 2022
Planned Assassination of Former President Barrack Obama in 2023
Attempted Assassination of President Joe Biden in 2023
Planned Assassinations (x2) of Presidential Candidate Donald Trump in 2024
Wounding of Presidential Candidate Donald Trump in 2024
Massacres and other mass killings, mostly with genocidal motivations:
The Acoma Massacre in 1599
The Paspaheg Massacre in 1610
The Wessagusset affair in 1623
The Mystic Massacre in 1637
The Pound Ridge Massacre in 1644
The Susquehannock chiefs massacre in 1675
The Apalachee Massacre in 1704
The Massacre at Fort Narhantes in 1712
The Norridgewock Massacre in 1724
The 1745 Massacre at Walden (in 1745)
The 1756 Massacre at Walden (in 1756)
The Killings by the Paxton Boys in 1763
The Yellow Creek Massacre in 1774
The Gnadenhütten Massacre in 1782
The Canyon del Muerto Massacre in 1805
The Battle of Tallushatchee in 1813
The Philadelphia Nativist Riots in 1844
The Bloody Island Massacre in 1850
The Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857
The Sand Creek Massacre in 1864
The Opelousas Massacre in 1868
The Chinese Massacre in 1871
The Election Riot of 1874
The Haymarket Affair in 1886
The Buffalo Gap Massacre in 1890
The Wilmington Massacre in 1898
The 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre (in 1906)
The Ludlow Massacre in 1914
The Elaine massacre in 1919
The Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921
The Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921
The Bonus Army Conflict in 1932
The 1937 Memorial Day massacre (in 1937)
The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963
The Kent State shootings in 1970
The Greensboro massacre in 1979
The MOVE Bombing in 1985
The 4 O'Clock murders in 1988
The Oklahoma City bombing in 1995
The September 11 Attacks in 2001
The Fort Hood Shooting in 2009
The Holocaust Memorial Shooting in 2009
The Isla Vista killings in 2014
The Charleston Church shooting in 2015
The San Bernardino attack in 2015
The Orlando Nightclub Shooting in 2016
The Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting in 2018
The El Paso Walmart shooting in 2019
The January 6th Capitol Attack in 2021
The 2022 Buffalo Shooting (in 2022)

What Vance expressed to the friendly Claremont audience was a dramatically reduced vision of American citizenship.
It’s one in which having ancestors who have lived here for generations entitles you to more;
a vision of citizenship that’s long existed around the world, with a notable and aspirational exception in the United States.
“Identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence — that’s a definition that is way ove…

JD Vance: Some Americans Are More American Than Others
The day after President Trump signed a bill that throws unprecedented amounts...

Now, one thing i truly hate about #GrapheneOS updates is the Microsoft-like approach where you can't "just" disable automatic updates.
Yeah, I get it. The updates are important. The updates have been rock solid so far. And anyway, I need to reboot manually for them to actually start applying.
Still, it's so damn disrespectful for developers to make this decision for me, and have the phone start automatically updating just as I'm about to leave for the whole day, and turn my phone into a potential time bomb where a reboot could leave me without a working phone until I can get home and reflash it.
Yes, there's a bunch of options to disable updates based on Internet connection type, battery state and whether the phone is charging. Still, why should I need to explain myself to my phone?! Really, this isn't what we dumped Microsoft for.

Commuting day today. Walking to the train station.
#goodmorning #tgif

Banner day for Eagles as champs hold off Cowboys in wild one https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/46155720/dallas-cowboys-philadelphia-eagles-dak-prescott-saquon-barkley

Using generative AI in most capacities is wrong for the exact same reason using steroids in sports or at work is wrong (also for additional bonus reasons, too, of course).
We may one day invent safer tools, but that's not meaningfully an objective of any of the biggest players right now.
#AI #GenAI #LLMs

openflights: Openflights airport network
A network of regularly occurring flights among airports worldwide, extracted from the openflights.org dataset. Nodes represent airports, and direction of edge (i,j) indicates a regularly occurring commercial flight by a particular airline from airport i to airport j. Multiple edges may exist between a pair of airports if multiple airlines offer that flight, or if one airline offers multiple such flights each day.
This network has 3214 node…

How the US democracy is designed to avoid representation
Right now in the US, a system which proclaims to give each citizen representation, my interests are not represented very well by most of my so-called representatives at any level of government. This is true for a majority of Americans across the political spectrum, and it happens by design. The "founding fathers" were explicit about wanting a system of government that would appear Democratic but which would keep power in the hands of rich white landowners, and they successfully designed exactly that. But how does disenfranchisement work in this system?
First, a two-party system locked in by first-post-the-post winner-takes-all elections immediately destroys representation for everyone who didn't vote for the winner, including those who didn't vote or weren't eligible to vote. Single-day non-holiday elections and prisoner disenfranchisement go a long way towards ensuring working-class people get no say, but much larger is the winner-takes all system. In fact, even people who vote for the winning candidate don't get effective representation if they're really just voting against the opponent as the greater of two evils. In a 51/49 election with 50% turnout, you've immediately ensured that ~75% of eligible voters don't get represented, and with lesser-of-two-evils voting, you create an even wider gap to wedge corporate interests into. Politicians need money to saturate their lesser-of-two-evils message far more than they need to convince any individual voter to support their policies. It's even okay if they get caught lying, cheating, or worse (cough Epstein cough) as long as the other side is also doing those things and you can freeze out new parties.
Second, by design the Senate ensures uneven representation, allowing control of the least-populous half of states to control or at least shut down the legislative process. A rough count suggests 284.6 million live in the 25 most-populous states, while only 54.8 million live in the rest. Currently, counting states with divided representation as two half-states with half as much population, 157.8 million people are represented by 53 Republican sensors, while 180.5 million people get only 45 seats of Democratic representation. This isn't an anti-Democrat bias, it's a bias towards less-populous states, whose residents get more than their share it political power.
I haven't even talked about gerrymandering yet, or family/faith-based "party loyalty," etc. Overall, the effect is that the number of people whose elected representatives meaningfully represent their interests on any given issue is vanishingly small (like, 10% of people tops), unless you happen to be rich enough to purchase lobbying power or direct access.
If we look at polls, we can see how lack of representation lets congress & the president enact many policies that go against what a majority of the population wants. Things like abortion restrictions, the current ICE raids, and Medicare cuts are deeply unpopular, but they benefit the political class and those who can buy access. These are possible because the system ensures at every step of the way that ordinary people do NOT get the one thing the system promises them: representation in the halls of power.
Okay, but is this a feature of all democracies, inherent in the nature of a majority-decides system? Not exactly...
1/2
#uspol #democracy

More than 2 million people across Italy rallied in over 100 cities Friday for a one-day general strike to support the residents of Gaza and a humanitarian aid mission, Italy’s largest union said.
Italian unions proclaimed the strike after the Global Sumud Flotilla that was trying to break Israel’s naval blockade to deliver aid to Gaza was intercepted by Israeli naval forces Wednesday night.
Protests and demonstrations have sprung up all over Europe and globally since then,

Millions rally in Italy in solidarity with Gaza amid clashes and disruptions
Over 2 million people across Italy have rallied in more than 100 cities for a one-day general strike. Italy’s largest union announced the strike on Friday to support Gaza residents and a humanitarian mission. Italian unions called for the strike after the Global Sumud Flotilla, trying to break Israel’s naval blockade, was intercepted by Israeli forces Wednesday night. Italy’s conservative Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni criticized the strike, calling it politically motivated. In Rome, 300,0…

Day 11: Bee Johnson
As promised, back to printed books, and since I hadn't yet done any authors of picture or board books, here's one. It looks like Johnson is primarily an illustrator and has only written a single kids' book, but it's a magnificent one: "What Can A Mess Make?"
Naturally, the illustrations are rich and evocative, but it's also got one of my favorite formats (just a few lines per page, with consistent meter and rhymes throughout) and has the incredibly charming theme of two sisters who are constantly making messes, except it highlights the fun (and other emotions) they get out of their messy play, reminding parents cleaning up messes that there's a benefit to letting your kids make the mess in the first place, which is an idea that's stuck with me as I clean up my own kids' messes. This book checks *all* of my boxes for a good picture book (which is kinda hard).
#20AuthorsNoMen
P.S. at this point, I think I've exhausted the range of "author" definitions I wanted to include in my list, and I've now got the unenviable task of balancing between genres and trying to hit some of my favorite authors before we get to 20. We'll see how that goes...

Earth's rotation is randomly speeding up,
and nobody is quite sure why.
These speedups, which have occurred several times over the last few years, haven't had any effect on daily life,
but they also haven't gone unnoticed by science.
Tuesday, Aug. 5 is the next date when Earth's rotation is expected to speed up, shortening the day by between 1.25 and 1.51 milliseconds. 
On Aug. 5, 2025, the moon will be quite a bit further south than the equato…

Earth Is Spinning Weirdly Faster, Making This Tuesday One of the Shortest Days Ever
The Earth will complete its daily rotation between 1.25 and 1.51 milliseconds faster than usual, and scientists aren't quite sure why.

Day 16: Mayra Cuevas & Marie Marquardt
Okay so this is cheating, but they're co-authors of multiple books together, and there's no way for me to separate their contributions... I've already got too many authors I'd like to list, so why not?
I read their book "Does My Body Offend You?" and absolutely loved it; it's a celebration of teen activism while also being a deep exploration of feminist issues through practical situations that bring out the complicated side of things, which the authors refuse to reduce back to a simple formulaic answer. It has a supporting cast of appropriately-complex male characters that help in exploring the nuances of issues like the line between female empowerment & male gratification, and it brings race and macho culture into the conversion as well.
CW for sexual harassment & deep discussion of the resultant trauma.
I'll cheat again here to sneak in mention of two male authors whose work resonates with theirs: Mark Oshiro's "Anger is a Gift" has a more pessimistic/complex take on teen activism along with a gay romance (CW for racist cop murder), while Jeremy Whitley's graphic novel "Navigating With You" deals with queer romance & disability, while having a main character pairing that echoes those from "Does My Body Offend You?" in a lot of ways. Another connection (to non-men authors this time) is with "Go With the Flow" by Lily Williams and Karen Schneemann. Their graphic novel about teen activism and periods is a bit more didactic and has a much lighter tone, but it does necessarily have some overlapping themes.
To bring it back to Cuevas & Marquhardt, their writing is great and their ability to discuss such complex topics with such nuance, all wrapped up in a story that feels completely natural, is amazing to me, and makes their book feel like one of the most valuable to recommend to others.
In writing this I've realized a grave oversight in the list so far that I'll have to correct tomorrow, but I'm quickly running out of days. The didn't-quite-make-it list is going to be full of more excellent authors, and I'm honestly starting to wonder whether it might actually be harder to name 20 male authors I respect now that I've found the sense to be mostly somewhere between disgusted and disappointed with so many of the male authors I enjoyed as a teen.
#20AuthorsNoMen (cheating a bit)