Tootfinder

Okay, that explains a LOT. Our poor Wolverine coaches were turning yellow 😭
https://www.trains.com/pro/passenger/intercity/amtraks-chicago-train-wash-open-for-business-other-locations-to-follow/

Do you have the ability to write code for Apple platforms? Do you know what MDM / device management is? Do you understand what Compliance is? Do you care about being able to use a Mac or iPad or iPhone for work or school?
Does the idea of dealing with the bugs that can crop up from things like "this needs to be reliably managed like a server, but a human randomly sleeps it mid-process and when it wakes up it's in a different country!" sound interesting to you?
If so - come be my direct co-worker!
Need to be able to be based in/work within the US, but the team itself is fully remote. Multiple positions open.
Feel free to DM me with questions
https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200628824-0836/software-engineer-test-infrastructure

“I sat beside a boy who tried to smile at me. I couldn’t return a real smile. Tears welled in my eyes as I realized words could never reach the horrors his soul had witnessed. All I could do was place my hand gently on his shoulder and whisper, ‘You are not alone.’”
– @…

I was walking down a street that had once been full of life—shops open,...
Then I saw them. Children. Some missing an arm, some missing a leg, some missing both, yet their small bodies moved through the debris with a courage that seemed almost impossible. Their eyes—wide, searching—asked questions no child should ever have to ask: Why me? Why here? Will anyone see me? A boy sat on the curb, rolling a broken toy car over the cracks. His laugh was fragile, sharp, yet it was still laughter. Nearby, a girl balanced on a fallen beam, her small feet gripping...

I wasn't previously aware, but apparently the government is looking, again, at updating the Computer Misuse Act 1990 with proposals to protect researchers. (Although I haven't seen an open consultation since 2023.)

Security — A data breach at analytics giant Mixpanel leaves a lot of open questions
A cybersecurity incident at analytics provider Mixpanel announced just hours before the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday weekend could set a new standard for how not to announce a data breach.
📍 https://

A data breach at analytics giant Mixpanel leaves a lot of open questions | TechCrunch
We sent over a dozen questions to Mixpanel's CEO about the company's data breach. Here's what we want to know.

Damn, it's a well-placed shot. Perfectly accurate, post-in. (I didn't know post caroms could then go in!)
Some complaint that Wirtz was fouled to start the play, but the referee has let them play and that was consistent.
LB continues to be a problem, as the commentary questions Robbo's distance from the shot.
I don't know, but certainly LFC remain so very vulnerable on counters because everyone is forward and the middle is wide open. Jones and Szoboszlai …

I think this seems like a good idea.
Should the Bureau of Justice Statistics Report UCR Stats?
https://open.substack.com/pub/jasher/p/should-the-bureau-of-justice-statistics?utm_campaign=post-expanded-sh…

Should the Bureau of Justice Statistics Report UCR Stats?
That and other questions raised by a policy brief.

'graphviz' is a suite of programs for drawing graphs (In the nodes/edges senses, rather than upwards and to the right sense) - and it uses a file format called 'dot'. Lots of things generate dot output (such as systemd-analyze I mentioned) and it's really easy to generate from scripts and things. 'dotty' is probably the most common program in the suite.
There are some newer formats and programs - but this one is probably the most universal.

AI model builder Eric Hartford unpacks the results of the September 25, 2025 NIST report on DeepSeek ("Evaluation of DeepSeek AI Models") and reports that the lack of evidence of malicious code, backdoors or data exfiltration, should lead to questions about the report's motives, framing and implications.
"The Demonization of DeepSeek -
How NIST Turned Open Science into a Security Scare"

I'm quite frustrated with my #HPC IT.
I have a ticket open for about a year now. They have finally found a fix.
I try to implement the fix, and notice that they must have installed their #Python packages in such an esoteric way, that I cannot even guess how.
It's not the first time I get an answer that raises more questions.
Sometimes they want a conda install, sometimes conda is the devil.
It would really help if they would give clear answers and instructions, that would also reduce their work because I wouldn't need to ask for clarification.

“If a fascist is merely someone who opposes democracy, then let me be clear: I oppose democracy — and have always opposed democracy,” Jason Lee Van Dyke wrote.
That was a part of a lengthy response I received after I’d emailed the North Texas lawyer to ask a few questions
because on Nov. 11, he filed paperwork to become a Republican candidate for the open Justice of the Peace, Precinct 1 seat in Wise County. 
I wrote about Van Dyke for The Barbed Wireback in August, breaking …

He’s an Unapologetic Fascist Who ‘Despises’ Democracy. He Still Wants You to Vote for Him.
He was once leader of the Proud Boys, has posted racist threats online, and sports a white nationalist tattoo.

MATH-Beyond: A Benchmark for RL to Expand Beyond the Base Model
Prasanna Mayilvahanan, Ricardo Dominguez-Olmedo, Thadd\"aus Wiedemer, Wieland Brendel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11653

MATH-Beyond: A Benchmark for RL to Expand Beyond the Base Model
With the advent of DeepSeek-R1, a new wave of reinforcement learning (RL) methods has emerged that seem to unlock stronger mathematical reasoning. However, a closer look at the open-source ecosystem reveals a critical limitation: with sufficiently many draws (e.g., $\texttt{pass@1024}$), many existing base models already solve nearly all questions on widely used math benchmarks such as MATH-500 and AIME 2024. This suggests that the RL fine-tuning methods prevalent in the LLM reasoning literatur…

Generating CodeMeta using declarative mapping rules: An open-ended approach using ShExML
Herminio Garc\'ia-Gonz\'alez
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09172 https://

Generating CodeMeta using declarative mapping rules: An open-ended approach using ShExML
Nowadays, software is one of the cornerstones when conducting research in several scientific fields which employ computer-based methodologies to answer new research questions. However, for these experiments to be completely reproducible, research software should comply with the FAIR principles, yet its metadata can be represented following different data models and spread across different locations. In order to bring some cohesion to the field, CodeMeta was proposed as a vocabulary to represent…

Quantum Relative Entropy Decay Composition Yields Shallow, Unstructured k-Designs
Nicholas Laracuente
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08537 https://arxiv.org/pd…

Quantum Relative Entropy Decay Composition Yields Shallow, Unstructured k-Designs
A major line of questions in quantum information and computing asks how quickly locally random circuits converge to resemble global randomness. In particular, approximate k-designs are random unitary ensembles that resemble random circuits up to their first k moments. It was recently shown that on n qudits, random circuits with slightly structured architectures converge to k-designs in depth O(log n), even on one-dimensional connectivity. It has however remained open whether the same shallow de…

Foundations of LLM Knowledge Materialization: Termination, Reproducibility, Robustness
Luca Giordano, Simon Razniewski
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06780 https://

Foundations of LLM Knowledge Materialization: Termination, Reproducibility, Robustness
Large Language Models (LLMs) encode substantial factual knowledge, yet measuring and systematizing this knowledge remains challenging. Converting it into structured format, for example through recursive extraction approaches such as the GPTKB methodology (Hu et al., 2025b), is still underexplored. Key open questions include whether such extraction can terminate, whether its outputs are reproducible, and how robust they are to variations. We systematically study LLM knowledge materialization usi…

Dark matter Simplified models in the Resonance Region
Mattia Di Mauro, Bohan Xie
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08677 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.08677

Dark matter Simplified models in the Resonance Region
The particle-physics nature of dark matter (DM) remains one of the central open questions in modern physics. A widely used framework to investigate DM properties is provided by simplified models (DMSimps), which extend the Standard Model with a DM particle and a mediator that connects the visible and dark sectors. Much of the DMSimps parameter space is already constrained by direct and indirect detection, collider searches, and the measured DM relic abundance. We show, however, that the resonan…

I've just got this government safety ad in a podcast:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eX7G-aO0bg
and I have some questions.
Like, was it a good use of tax money to send this out in December? Or a good use full stop.
But mainly

Folks, @… from Gaza is doing an AMA (Ask Me Anything) about Gaza:
https://mastodon.social/@AhmedOuda/115305232117184704
“Life here in …

Vectorial Bernoulli Problems and Free Boundary Systems
Giorgio Tortone, Bozhidar Velichkov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09875 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.0987…

Vectorial Bernoulli Problems and Free Boundary Systems
In this survey we go through some of the recent results about the regularity of vectorial free boundary problems of Bernoulli type and free boundary systems. The aim is to illustrate the general methodologies as well as to outline a selection of notable open questions.

Probing the Critical Point (CritPt) of AI Reasoning: a Frontier Physics Research Benchmark
Minhui Zhu, Minyang Tian, Xiaocheng Yang, Tianci Zhou, Penghao Zhu, Eli Chertkov, Shengyan Liu, Yufeng Du, Lifan Yuan, Ziming Ji, Indranil Das, Junyi Cao, Yufeng Du, Jinchen He, Yifan Su, Jiabin Yu, Yikun Jiang, Yujie Zhang, Chang Liu, Ze-Min Huang, Weizhen Jia, Xinan Chen, Peixue Wu, Yunkai Wang, Juntai Zhou, Yong Zhao, Farshid Jafarpour, Jessie Shelton, Aaron Young, John Bartolotta, Wenchao Xu,…

Probing the Critical Point (CritPt) of AI Reasoning: a Frontier Physics Research Benchmark
While large language models (LLMs) with reasoning capabilities are progressing rapidly on high-school math competitions and coding, can they reason effectively through complex, open-ended challenges found in frontier physics research? And crucially, what kinds of reasoning tasks do physicists want LLMs to assist with? To address these questions, we present the CritPt (Complex Research using Integrated Thinking - Physics Test, pronounced "critical point"), the first benchmark designed to test LL…

Realizing the Scientific Program with Polarized Ion Beams at EIC
Grigor Atoian, Nigel Buttimore, Giuseppe Ciullo, Ian Cloet, Marco Contalbrigo, Jaydeep Datta, Abhay Deshpande, Shubham Dutta, Oleg Eyser, Muhammad Farooq, Renee Fatemi, Ishara Fernando, Michael Finger, Wolfram Fischer, Dave Gaskell, Prakash Gautam, Ralf Gebel, Boxing Gou, Daoning Gu, Yoshitaka Hatta, Mohammad Hattawy, Volker Hejny, Kiel Hock, Georg Hoffstaetter, Haixin Huang, Christopher Ianzano, Jiangyong Jia, Andro Kach…

Realizing the Scientific Program with Polarized Ion Beams at EIC
Polarized ion beams at the Electron Ion Collider are essential to address some of the most important open questions at the twenty-first century frontiers of understanding of the fundamental structure of matter. Here, we summarize the science case and identify polarized $^2$H, $^3$He, $^6$Li and $^7$Li ion beams as critical technology that will enable experiments which address the most important science. Further, we discuss the required ion polarimetry and spin manipulation in EIC. The current E…

Rare Transients in Nearby Galaxies Explain Ultra-high-energy Cosmic Rays
Imre Bartos, Marek Kowalski
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06193 https://arxiv.org/pdf…

Rare Transients in Nearby Galaxies Explain Ultra-high-energy Cosmic Rays
The origin of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays remains one of the central open questions in astroparticle physics. Recent measurements reveal anisotropies in arrival directions, a rigidity-dependent composition dominated by intermediate-mass nuclei, and striking hemispheric differences in the energy spectra. Here we show that rare transients in nearby galaxies can naturally account for these features. In our fiducial neutron-star merger model, the cosmic ray flux above $25$ EeV is dominated by ten…

Ensemble seismic study of the properties of the core of Red Clump stars
Anthony Noll, Sarbani Basu, Saskia Hekker
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06494 https://…

Ensemble seismic study of the properties of the core of Red Clump stars
Red clump stars still pose open questions regarding several physical processes, such as the mixing around the core, or the nuclear reactions, which are ill-constrained by theory and experiments. The oscillations of red clump stars, which are of mixed gravito-acoustic nature, allow us to directly investigate the interior of these stars and thereby better understand their physics. In particular, the measurement of their period spacing is a good probe of the structure around the core. We aim to ex…

The relationship between surface features and sub-surface turbulence: simulations and experiments
Omer M. Babiker, J{\o}rgen R. Aarnes, Ali Semati, Am\'elie Ferran, Yi Hui Tee, R. Jason Hearst, Simen {\AA}. Ellingsen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03732

The relationship between surface features and sub-surface turbulence: simulations and experiments
Turbulent flows close beneath a free water surface are of central importance in the Earth system, yet remain relatively little studied with many open questions. We study the degree of correlation between surface motion and sub-surface velocities, comparing data from direct numerical simulation to a new experimental setup where the free-surface motion and sub-surface velocity field are measured simultaneously in a jet-stirred tank. A previous study showed a close correlation between the time ser…

Integrable Billiards and Related Topics
Misha Bialy, Andrey E. Mironov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03790 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03790

Integrable Billiards and Related Topics
This paper surveys our results on integrable billiards. We consider various models of billiards, including Birkhoff, outer, magnetic, and Minkowski billiards. Also, we discuss wire billiards and billiards in cones. For four models of convex plane billiards, we also discuss an isoperimetric-type inequality for the Mather $β$-function. We conclude with a section of open questions on this subject.

Resonance varieties and Lie algebras of matroids and hyperplane arrangements
Alexandru Suciu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24060 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.24…

Resonance varieties and Lie algebras of matroids and hyperplane arrangements
The resonance varieties, the holonomy Lie algebra, and the holonomy Chen Lie algebra associated with the Orlik-Solomon algebra of a matroid provide an algebraic lens through which to examine the rich combinatorial structure of matroids and their geometric realizations as complex hyperplane arrangements. In this survey paper, we emphasize the commonalities between these objects but also the possible ways in which realizable and non-realizable matroids differ, leading to some open questions.

The role of environment in triggering AGN -- evidence for a change at $z\sim$1
Jason Reeves (Tufts University), Anna Sajina (Tufts University), Henry Adair (Drexel University), Duncan Farrah (University of Hawaii, Manoa), Mark Lacy (NRAO)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02193

The role of environment in triggering AGN -- evidence for a change at $z\sim$1
What triggers AGN in some galaxies and what role does this brief period of activity play in the overall evolution of galaxies are still open questions. This paper explores whether or not the local, on scales of $\approx$1\,Mpc, galaxy density plays a role in triggering AGN when controlling for stellar mass. We consider this question as a function of redshift and AGN selection in the X-ray vs. in the IR. We use available density maps within the 4.8\,sq.deg. XMM-LSS field in the redshift range $0…

Knowledge Extraction on Semi-Structured Content: Does It Remain Relevant for Question Answering in the Era of LLMs?
Kai Sun, Yin Huang, Srishti Mehra, Mohammad Kachuee, Xilun Chen, Renjie Tao, Zhaojiang Lin, Andrea Jessee, Nirav Shah, Alex Betty, Yue Liu, Anuj Kumar, Wen-tau Yih, Xin Luna Dong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25107

Knowledge Extraction on Semi-Structured Content: Does It Remain Relevant for Question Answering in the Era of LLMs?
The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly advanced web-based Question Answering (QA) systems over semi-structured content, raising questions about the continued utility of knowledge extraction for question answering. This paper investigates the value of triple extraction in this new paradigm by extending an existing benchmark with knowledge extraction annotations and evaluating commercial and open-source LLMs of varying sizes. Our results show that web-scale knowledge extract…

Collective dynamics on higher-order networks
Federico Battiston, Christian Bick, Maxime Lucas, Ana P. Mill\'an, Per Sebastian Skardal, Yuanzhao Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05253

Collective dynamics on higher-order networks
Higher-order interactions that nonlinearly couple more than two nodes are ubiquitous in networked systems. Here we provide an overview of the rapidly growing field of dynamical systems with higher-order interactions, and of the techniques which can be used to describe and analyze them. We focus in particular on new phenomena that emerge when nonpairwise interactions are considered. We conclude by discussing open questions and promising future directions on the collective dynamics of higher-orde…