Tootfinder

Rockstar says physical copies of GTA 6 will contain a digital download code, not a disc; physical copies release on November 12, ahead of the November 19 launch (Tom Phillips/IGN)
https://www.ign.com/articles/grand-theft-auto-6…

Grand Theft Auto 6 Physical Copies Won't Include a Disc, Will Just Be a Code in a Box
Rockstar will sell physical copies of Grand Theft Auto 6 — though you'll only get a box containing a digital download code.

Chipmaker Onsemi agrees to buy Synaptics in a nearly $7B all-stock deal expected to close in the middle of 2027; ON drops 9% and SYNA jumps 11% after hours (Samantha Subin/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/25/on-semi-synaptics-deal-physical-ai.html
…

On Semiconductor strikes $7 billion deal for Synaptics in physical AI push
On Semiconductor said the deal bumps up its total addressable market by $30 billion to $243 billion by 2030.

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them."
—Bruce Lee
#acting #coaching

Last year, we covered how Anthropic was buying physical books,
scanning them,
and destroying them to feed their Claude chatbot.
Judge William Alsup ruled this fair use.
In particular, he said mulching the books was perfectly fine because making them digital was
“exceedingly transformative”: [Order on Fair Use, 2025, PDF]
The print original was destroyed.
One replaced the other.
And, there is no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, s…

AI vendors are destroying rare books to feed the chatbot
Every AI vendor trains their chatbots on the Common Crawl, a copy of the whole public internet. But that’s just the starting point. AI vendors are desperate for more data — in the hope of making th…

Yesterday we did our weekly errands again with our bicycle trolley. Works like a charm.
We select routes off major roads, have some chat along the way, see what's going on in town, physical exercise, fresh air, no fuel cost, no traffic jam.
And even car drivers are very friendly to us as well.

>Remote for TV box (from ISP, not TV itself) misses physical buttons.
>Need to go to AI trashbot for "assistance"
>AI trashbot: "Have you tried turning the receiver off and on?"
>"The physical buttons are gone..."
>AI trashbot: "That can be caused by an empty battery, please replace them and let me know!"

Three Books on a Table
When this novel began, there were three physical books on my table, and none of them had anything to do with the others....
https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/24/three-books-on-a-table/

"ESA is closely monitoring the wildfire situation in the vicinity of its deep-space ground station in #Cebreros, Spain," says https://www.esa.int/About_Us/Corporate_news/ESA_statement_on_the_wildfires_near_Cebreros: "Based on the information currently available, the station appears to have remained unharmed. [...] All ESA personnel are safe and accounted for. [...] At present, ESA does not have physical access to the station and is therefore unable to conduct an on-site inspection."

Wavefunction collapse is only one interpretation. Under some interpretations, graduate students also have souls.
#Comic

tree-of-life: Protein interactomes across the tree of life (2019)
Protein-protein iteraction networks ("interactome") for 1,840 species. An interactome captures all physical protein-protein interactions within one species, from direct biophysical protein-protein interactions to regulatory protein-DNA and metabolic interactions. .
This network has 186 nodes and 361 edges.
Tags: Biological, Protein interactions

The physics of AI weather models
George Craig, Tobias Selz, Matthias Beylich, Kirsten I. Tempest
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23778 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.23778 https://arxiv.org/html/2605.23778
arXiv:2605.23778v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Could it be that AI weather models are solving physical equations, although they may not be the equations used by conventional NWP models? We compute correlations of forecast skill and Centered Kernel Alignment, providing evidence that different AI weather models represent the atmosphere in similar ways, despite differences in architecture and capacity. We argue that the architecture and training of the AI models constrains the form of the physical laws that they might simulate. In particular, we propose that the models implement a particle description of the atmosphere, where the latent variables at each mesh point correspond to the position of a particle in the high dimensional latent space. We hypothesize that the movement of the particles follows a gradient flow in the latent space towards a minimum of a learned free energy functional. Analysis of the GraphCast and Aurora models show that they make changes on large spatial scales in the early processor layers and move to smaller scale with increasing layer depth, consistent with the gradient flow hypothesis.
toXiv_bot_toot

Poetry gives people a language to express collective grief.
In Gaza, poetry documents what cameras cannot always reach and what numbers can never explain.
When destruction erases physical spaces, poetry becomes a witness to history.
https://w…

Dallas Cowboys To Try More Physical Practice Approach For 2026 Training Camp https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/onsi/dallas-cowboys-to-try-more-physical-practice-approach-for-2026-training-camp

Why Your City Feels Built For Cars, Not People
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lauriewinkless/2026/07/24/why-your-city-feels-built-for-cars-not-people/

Why Your City Feels Built For Cars, Not People
A new book posits that physical space, rather than policy, is the primary constraint for urban transport. I speak to the authors to learn more.

WaPo's opinion section has been promoting data centers, only sometimes mentioning owner Jeff Bezos' vested interest in them or the paper's OpenAI partnership (Paul Farhi/Washingtonian)
https://washingtonian.…

The Washington Post Loves Data Centers a Lot More Than Disclosing Jeff Bezos’ Financial Interest in Promoting Them - Washingtonian
The Washington Post’s opinion editors love data centers, the humongous and increasingly unpopular server warehouses that are the physical backbone of the internet and artificial intelligence. In unsigned editorials, podcasts, and guest op-ed columns, the Post’s take has been focused and forceful. America needs more data centers to boost the economy, compete with China, and

Velofahren hilft Körper und Geist. Ha!
#bicycle #velo #fahrrad
A scoping review of bicycling interventions’ impacts on psychological, social, affective, and cognitive well-being

James Pearce Jr. returns to Falcons for minicamp physical amid intervention program https://www.nfl.com/news/james-pearce-jr-falcons-physical-mandatory-minicamp-intervention-program

Germany's Black Forest Labs launches Flux 3 and Flux-mimic, its first models for robotics, as it expands from generative AI into physical AI (Yazhou Sun/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-0…

Is it just me or does #JonyIve share some physical similarities with #TheEdge from U2? 🤔

I know next to nothing of substance abt The Amazing Digital Circus. All I know is that every time a trans woman makes a virtual reality story she makes a zillion bucks and her characters get turned into fortnite skins cuz of our innate sauce with the feeling of physical disconnection, and im lowk tempted to try continuing the family nacho recipe even as itd be purely cynical cuz I actually really really only care abt the process of becoming a real physical person im tired of thinking within …

Where You Tap Matters: A Probe-and-Model Benchmark for Open-Set RF Fingerprinting
Gabriele Oligeri, Savio Sciancalepore, Ingrid Huso, Fatima Al-Mousawi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.21564 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.21564 https://arxiv.org/html/2607.21564
arXiv:2607.21564v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Radio Frequency Fingerprint Identification (RFFI) enables transmitter identification at the physical layer by learning device-specific impairments from received signals, yet the literature is inconsistent about where in the receiver chain those samples should be collected. Since distinct transformations are applied to the signal by the different receiver operations, i.e., carrier recovery, gain normalization, pulse shaping, and timing recovery, they can either tighten within-transmitter variability or suppress the features RFFI requires for classification. We present a systematic real-world evaluation of open-set, reconstruction-error RFFI using data collected at five probe points along a standard BPSK receiver chain. Our results show that RFFI is strongly probe-dependent: timing recovery and, to a lesser extent, carrier recovery enable low false-acceptance operation with limited in-distribution-out-of-distribution overlap, whereas other stages often require a false-acceptance ratio above 0.1 to achieve a true-acceptance ratio of 0.9. To test the validity of our findings across model selection, we benchmark several LLM-designed autoencoders using a controlled pipeline that holds preprocessing and MSE scoring fixed. These architectures confirm that RFFI is probe-dependent. Moreover, they do not outperform the baseline at the chosen operating point and typically increase training time. Overall, probe selection dominates reconstruction-based open-set RFFI performance, more than the autoencoder complexity.
toXiv_bot_toot

Podcast: The Physical Politics of the Internet with Britt Paris https://www.404media.co/podcast-the-physical-politics-of-the-internet-with-britt-paris/

“The project does not involve field research, laboratory experiments, or resource-intensive physical processes. The project-related activities are primarily computer-based and organizational in nature, and focus on the analysis and testing of data-driven infrastructures. Ecological sustainability aspects are therefore only marginally relevant.”
Well, the environmental impact of academic IT projects is indeed marginal compared to commercial operations, but…
⇢

“The project does not involve field research, laboratory experiments, or resource-intensive physical processes. The project-related activities are primarily computer-based and organizational in nature, and focus on the analysis and testing of data-driven infrastructures. Ecological sustainability aspects are therefore only marginally relevant.”
Well, the environmental impact of academic IT projects is indeed marginal compared to commercial operations, but…
⇢

“The project does not involve field research, laboratory experiments, or resource-intensive physical processes. The project-related activities are primarily computer-based and organizational in nature, and focus on the analysis and testing of data-driven infrastructures. Ecological sustainability aspects are therefore only marginally relevant.”
Well, the environmental impact of academic IT projects is indeed marginal compared to commercial operations, but…
⇢

On the link between optoacoustic imaging and selective photothermolysis
Sergio Contador, Rodrigo Rojo, Alvaro Jimenez, Juan Aguirre
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.25913 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.25913 https://arxiv.org/html/2606.25913
arXiv:2606.25913v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Selective photothermolysis (SP) is widely used in clinical and cosmetic dermatology to remove unwanted skin structures. Careful laser parameter selection results in safe and effective target removal. Nevertheless, parameter selection relies on a trial-and-error process based on visual inspection of the immediate skin response. This process is highly dependent on the practitioner experience and can be time-consuming.
SP and optoacoustic imaging (OI) share many physical principles. However, the possibility of using OI to improve laser parameter selection in SP has not been studied before. Here, we explore the relationship between OI and SP theoretically and through clinical in-human trials with a focus on tattoo removal. Our results demonstrate a strong correlation between OI signals acquired before and after treatment with the immediate clinical endpoint, suggesting that OI could be used as a tool for optimal parameter selection and reduced treatment duration in tattoo removal and other SP treatments.
toXiv_bot_toot

tree-of-life: Protein interactomes across the tree of life (2019)
Protein-protein iteraction networks ("interactome") for 1,840 species. An interactome captures all physical protein-protein interactions within one species, from direct biophysical protein-protein interactions to regulatory protein-DNA and metabolic interactions. .
This network has 1369 nodes and 6629 edges.
Tags: Biological, Protein interactions

Arm EVP Mohamed Awad says its chip architecture now accounts for 50% of the hyperscale cloud computing market, as AI demand transforms the data center industry (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia)
https://asia.nikkei.com/editor-s-picks

SoftBank chipmaker Arm hits 50% share in top AI data centers: exec
AI boom drives demand for company's architecture as it also moves into physical chips

“Users want to feel that they are in charge of the computer's activities.”
“People expect their physical actions to have physical results, and they want their tools to provide feedback.”
“Use concrete metaphors and make them plain, so that users have a set of expectations to apply to computer environments.”
One gem after another.

#today I have done supervision and will potter on with some #research, and also prepare to release one moderately physical product idea developed into the public domain with the help of my supervisors. Now off to lunch. My son is on campus this week for work experience, so I may bump into him...

From The Conversation
Where else can you peer into the labs and lecture halls of Canadian researchers and academics, who draw on their life's work to explain what being sedentary does to your body, why male chimps repeatedly throw rocks at trees and how the international legal order has collapsed?
We share their vast expert knowledge to educate Canadians so they can make informed decisions about politics, their health, the environment, the education of their children and the…

Not getting enough physical activity may be harming your health: Here’s what being sedentary does to your body
From a biological perspective, being inactive is more than the opposite of being active. Being sedentary results in unique physiological changes that can lead to a variety of health risks.

Chargers mock Ravens failing Maxx Crosby physical in schedule release video https://raiderswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/raiders/2026/05/14/chargers-mock-ravens-failing-maxx-crosby-physi…

Doing errands with our #suv (shopping utility vehicle). For the cover we bought the rain cover of an outdoor backpack. Works pretty well.
Meanwhile I also have an adapter mounted on my axel, too. so I can use it as well. 🎉
Best combination of shopping and physical activity. But I feel a little weird as hardly ever see anybody else with a trailer around. But I simply shouldn't care …

Parameter mapping and physical reconstruction of Akhmediev breathers at the interface of two fluid half-spaces
Olga Avramenko, Volodymyr Naradovyi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.20193 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.20193 https://arxiv.org/html/2607.20193
arXiv:2607.20193v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: A methodology combining parameter mapping and physical reconstruction of Akhmediev breathers at the interface between two fluid half-spaces is developed on the basis of the Nayfeh model. Parameter maps are constructed to characterize the breather modulation period, the modulational instability growth rate, and the relative contribution of the bound second harmonic to the reconstructed interfacial profile. Their combined analysis provides a physically meaningful classification of breather regimes beyond the conventional focusing condition of the nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation. Reconstruction of the physical interfacial profile establishes a quantitative relation between nonlinear wave deformation and the contribution of the bound second harmonic, making it possible to identify the range of applicability of the weakly nonlinear approximation. Representative regimes from different modulational instability regions are analyzed to demonstrate the influence of resonance and focusing boundaries on breather characteristics and interfacial wave profiles. The proposed approach provides a direct link between the mathematical description of Akhmediev breathers and their physical interpretation and can be extended to other localized solutions of the nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation and to a broad class of stratified hydrodynamic systems.
toXiv_bot_toot

New blog post on the importance of owning physical (and digital) media, when possible: https://spacetimetech.wordpress.com/2026/06/28/the-importance-of-owning-physical-and-digital-media-when-possible

The importance of owning physical (and digital) media when possible
I wrote some about the continued popularity of physical media here in 2024, but I wanted to do one more post on it this year, to also feature some other formats, history, tips and tricks, and outri…

For the second time in my life, I’m supporting a friend while they separate from an emotionally abusive partner. Both times, I didn’t even know there was abuse until the relationship ended. Here’s your PSA: Emotional abuse is just as damaging as physical abuse. And when a friend is suffering from it, they probably aren’t being noisy about it. They will quietly, slowly disappear from your life as their abuser convinces/cajoles/threatens them into abandoning who they are and what they love.

Physical attacks on cryptocurrency holders rose 75% in 2025, reaching 72 confirmed incidents and $41 million in known losses, according to data compiled by the blockchain security firm CertiK.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

www.maptap.gg June 22
100🎯 91👑 98🎯 91👑 82🌟
Final score: 906
1. x: 4,686 pts, 97 km, 29 sec, 0 steps
2. x: 4,483 pts, 163 km, 25 sec, 0 steps
3. x: 498 pts, 3,441 km, 58 sec, 0 steps
4. x: 0 pts, 15,022 km, 53 sec, 0 steps
5. x: 0 pts, 13,783 km, 22 sec, 0 steps
Total: 9,667 pts, 32,506 km, 3 min, 8 sec, 0 steps
(out of physical time for the last two...)
TimeGuessr #1118 — 36,821/50,000
1️⃣ 🏆8666 - 📅4y - 🌍134.0 km
2️⃣ 🏆9908 - 📅0y…

San Diego-based Aether AI, which is building "causal world models" to teach robots cause and effect instead of pattern-matching, raised a $20M seed led by MPCi (Cristian Dina/The Next Web)
https://thenextweb.com/news/aether-ai-causal-world-models-20m-…

I grew up with 2 sisters. I never heard either of them discuss guys in physical/visual terms.
My first girlfriend, later my first wife, said she was first attracted to me because I looked “like a man” whatever that meant. It only took her 5 years of intermittent dating & 10 of marriage to decide that maybe that was a poor basis.
My last girlfriend, later & still my second/last wife, hadn’t see a photo of me when she deemed me suitable from afar in `98

A U.S. appeals court has ruled in a case involving Exxon Mobil that the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration
cannot require businesses to document work-related mental illnesses reported by employees.
A unanimous three-judge panel of the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said on Tuesday
that a requirement in federal law that ‌employers periodically report work-related deaths, injuries and illnesses only applies to physical -- and not mental c…

"Spotify's effective payout averages roughly $0.003 to $0.005 per stream... By contrast, Bandcamp pays artists roughly 82% of each sale. A direct $10 album sale can exceed revenue from thousands of streams. Buying music or books directly from artists, whether physical or DRM-free digital, is one of the most direct ways to support them."
Artists are likely better off when you #buy o…

Adapting a 3D scanning water phantom for use in brachytherapy dosimetry
Rachael Wilks (Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital, Herston Qld 4029, Australia, Herston Biofabrication Institute, Herston Qld 4029, Australia, University of Queensland, St. Lucia Qld 4072, Australia), Samuel C. Peet (Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital, Herston Qld 4029, Australia, Herston Biofabrication Institute, Herston Qld 4029, Australia, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane Qld 4001, Australia), Tanya Kairn (Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital, Herston Qld 4029, Australia, Herston Biofabrication Institute, Herston Qld 4029, Australia, University of Queensland, St. Lucia Qld 4072, Australia, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane Qld 4001, Australia), Scott B. Crowe (Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital, Herston Qld 4029, Australia, Herston Biofabrication Institute, Herston Qld 4029, Australia, University of Queensland, St. Lucia Qld 4072, Australia, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane Qld 4001, Australia)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.21320 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.21320 https://arxiv.org/html/2606.21320
arXiv:2606.21320v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: In external beam radiotherapy, 3D scanning water phantoms are the gold standard for obtaining relative dosimetry data. These phantoms, consisting of a water tank and mechanical arm, along with accompanying software, are de-signed to acquire dose profiles along and orthogonal to the beam axis. In brachy-therapy, the acquisition of analogous dose profiles is more difficult, and is generally achieved with complex custom-built phantoms or chemical dosimeters such as film or gel. In this study, a low-cost 3D-printed jig was designed and fabricated within a clinical department, to allow precise brachytherapy dose measurements using a PTW BeamScan water phantom. Specifically, this jig al-lowed applicators to be suspended securely and reproducibly within the water phantom. Protocols were developed to relate the scanning system coordinates to the physical source position, and to obtain isodose planes both parallel and radial to the source axis. The developed solution has the potential to be used for physical verification of TG43 dose calculation parameters (e.g. anisotropy functions), the characterization of dose for a single dwell position in a complex applicator containing non-water equivalent materials, or the collection of point dose measure-ments for treatments incorporating multiple dwell positions or catheters.
toXiv_bot_toot

#TuneTuesday (May 19)
Lewis Capaldi uses his great voice to put out a bunch of hits and I like that he doesn’t let stardom get into his head and takes his mental and physical health seriously. Among his songs I’ve heard, “Forget Me” is easily my most favorite with his raspy vocals adding angst into the chorus.

Spending my day at the #IETF126 Hackathon, talking to people about the Open Fibre Data Standard, #OFDS, https//ofds.info/ a specification for describing the *physical* infrastructure of the #Internet. It&…

The quality of images from digital cameras is inversely proportional to the physical size of the memory card used.
This Kodak DC50 uses PCMCIA (type I or II) cards

What you lose when you stop reading physical books - Big Think https://bigthink.com/books/reading-physical-books/

Physical Properties of 6.7 Million Galaxies from the DESI Bright Galaxy Survey: Spectral Fitting and Systematic Tests with Mock Spectra
Niu Li, Hu Zou, Jinfu Gou, Weijian Guo, Wenxiong L, Haoming Song, Jipeng Sui, Xi Tan, Yunao Xiao, Jingyi Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19162 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.19162 https://arxiv.org/html/2607.19162
arXiv:2607.19162v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We present a comprehensive analysis of the physical properties of galaxies in the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Data Release 1 (DR1) Bright Galaxy Survey (BGS), based on full spectral fitting of $\sim 6.7$ million galaxy spectra. Using a customized spectral fitting pipeline, we derive key physical parameters including stellar mass, stellar velocity dispersion, stellar population age, dust attenuation, and emission-line properties. To quantify the reliability and systematic uncertainties of our measurements, we construct a large set of mock spectra that closely reproduce the observed properties of DESI data, including realistic noise and spectral features. By comparing the recovered parameters with the known inputs, we assess the performance of the spectral fitting as a function of stellar continuum signal-to-noise ratio (S/N, defined as the ratio of the median continuum flux to its associated error) and redshift. We find that stellar masses can be robustly recovered with negligible bias for spectra with $\mathrm{S/N} \gtrsim 5$, while low-S/N spectra ($\mathrm{S/N} \lesssim 5$) show a mild systematic overestimation of $\sim 0.1$ dex and increased scatter. Similar trends are observed for stellar population parameters, while emission-line fluxes are recovered with high accuracy and minimal bias. We further validate our stellar mass estimates by comparison with independent measurements from photometric spectral energy distribution fitting, finding good overall consistency within the expected systematic uncertainties. The value-added catalog presented in this work enables a wide range of statistical studies of galaxy evolution with DESI, and provides a foundation for future analyses.
toXiv_bot_toot

Unlike π, which relates to a physical shape, e naturally describes dynamic systems that grow or decay continuously. In calculus,
the exponential function \(y = e^x\)
has the unique property that its rate of change (its derivative) is exactly equal to the function itself.

The Guardian's tech team share their shoe-leather experiences covering AI data centers, as field investigation becomes increasingly important in tech coverage (Gautam Malkani/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/membership/202

‘These are some of the most complex structures ever created’: how tech reporting moved into the physical world
The Guardian’s global tech reporting team are investigating the impact of the vast datacentres being built to power the AI revolution. We spoke to them about how their beat has become increasingly offline

Nvidia unveils Cosmos 3 Edge, a world model designed for robots and vision AI agents to perceive and navigate physical environments in real time (Jenny Lee/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/16/nvidia-reveals-new-ai-model-and-expands-…

Nvidia unveils new AI model and expands Japan’s physical AI ecosystem
Nvidia announces new AI model, Cosmos 3 Edge, and expansion of its physical AI ecosystems in Japan.

This will go on my list of three things to be grateful for today:
#3goodthings

Shoulder mended - JazMat
The Missus’s shoulder has mended and the doc removed her sling, so she is free to stretch her arm out. Next week, she’ll start physical therapy. We are...

Text2Villa: Hierarchical Generation of 3D Indoor Environments with Physics-Aware Analysis-by-Synthesis
Xiang Tang, Ruotong Li, Xiaopeng Fan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.17145 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.17145 https://arxiv.org/html/2607.17145
arXiv:2607.17145v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Generating 3D indoor scenes from natural language holds tremendous potential, yet existing methods predominantly fail to generate multi-room structures with vertical connectivity and arbitrary polygonal boundaries. Furthermore, they lack a deep grounding in continuous 3D physical laws, leading to severe geometric penetrations and floating artifacts. In this work, we propose Text2Villa, a novel hierarchical generative framework. At the macro level, we construct a multi-story dataset to fine-tune an autoregressive layout generator, ensuring the direct parsing of text into 3D building foundations featuring polygonal boundaries and multi-story connectivity. To enforce physical laws during micro-level asset arrangement, we introduce the Affordance-driven Physical-Semantic Scene Graph (A-PSSG) to explicitly abstract physical affordances (such as support surfaces and containment cavities) into node attributes, establishing strict geometric and semantic edge constraints. Guided by the A-PSSG, we formulate scene instantiation as a constrained closed-loop optimization problem following the analysis-by-synthesis paradigm. By integrating an underlying geometric collision detection engine with the high-level semantic reasoning of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), our heuristic solver dynamically executes physics-aware actions under the observation-evaluation-modification mechanism to effectively resolve mesh collisions, floating artifacts, and fine-grained cavity containment failures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Text2Villa outperforms previous methods across various metrics, robustly generating high-fidelity and physically plausible villa-level 3D environments from text, thereby providing a reliable and interactive 3D content foundation for downstream applications.
toXiv_bot_toot

White House Releases Results of Trump's Latest Physical Exam (Chris Cameron/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/30/us/politics/trump-health-medical-physical-exam.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/260530/p43#a260530p43

News story on a significant earthquake in Uzbekistan, 50 years ago, May 17, 1976 (Fargo-Moorhead Forum archives). Mentions the Medvedev scale, apparently now the the MSK or MSK-64 scale. That scale is not mentioned in North American, physical geology textbooks I have seen, although it's apparently similar to the Mercalli scale.
Also, the first page of a scientific paper on it, from 1980. ⚒️🧪
#OTD

genetic_multiplex: Multiplex genetic interactions (2014)
Multiplex networks representing different types of genetic interactions, for different organisms. Layers represent (i) physical, (ii) association, (iii) co-localization, (iv) direct, and (v) suppressive, (vi) additive or synthetic genetic interaction. Edge direction (i,j) indicates gene i interacting with gene j.
This network has 6570 nodes and 282755 edges.
Tags: Biological, Gene regulation, Protein interactions, Unw…

Cowboys' Brian Schottenheimer hints at more physical training camp ahead https://www.sportingnews.com/ca/nfl/dallas-cowboys/news/cowboys-brian-schottenheimer-padded-practices-oxnard/e00c3a30ef702b47e58df24b…

A message from Dutch Rabobank meant as reassuring that doesn't really work that way. "For Europe and the Netherlands immediate physical fuel shortages due to disruption in the Strait of Hormuz are improbable until the end of May."
Published on 13 May.
https:…

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them."
—Bruce Lee
#acting #coaching

Prometheus,
the physical AI startup co-founded by Jeff Bezos and Vik Bajaj, the former co-founder of Verily, Google’s life sciences unit,
announced it raised $12 billion at a $41 billion valuation.
The new funds came from Bezos,
as well as from JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and BlackRock, among others.
This is the second fundraise round for Prometheus, which launched late last year with an initial raise of $6.2 billion, according to CNBC.
Prometheus is bu…

Jeff Bezos's Prometheus raises $12B to build an 'artificial general engineer' for the physical world | TechCrunch
The new round values the physical AI startup that aims to automate heavy engineering and drug design at $41 billion.

It's a shame that PlayStation is abandoning physical discs - and essentially physical retail - for games. But any advantages of physical media for games evaporated a decade ago. Developers released literally unplayable games in the expectation of a Day One Patch.

An LLM generated “book” of “crochet” “patterns” (it contained ONE pattern)
JFC
https://dialup.space/@TechTangents/116567890237371075

Lovely, thoughtful piece. I also struggle with my book collection. @… https://social.ewenbell.com/objects/0671eb0d-4b1c-4519-80c3-a094e001e…

Ewen Bell 📸 (@ewen@social.ewenbell.com)
New post on the blog today. Books or not to Books? https://ewenbell.com/blog/What_Comes_After_Books "In a world where wisdom and knowledge is changing faster than ever, the idea of physical pages...

Does anyone here have a https://wise.com account?
This is a bit embarassing, but how would I even pay using their "digital cards"?
Their website says "just like with your physical card!" but, well, cleary not. It's not in my pocket, to begin with.
How do you usually "take out&q…

I was hoping for a draw, knowing that this was always going to be a rough away fixture. Villa are disciplined and the right kind of physical.
The injury-depleted attack effectively put too much on Ngumoha to do something individually. He tried, but doubling him was all they needed to do. Gakpo, out of position, is a hole in the offense.
Otherwise, it's set pieces, of which you'd be delighted to score twice in a match.
But for the tragicomic defense in broken play..…

NFL news roundup: Cowboys WR George Pickens reports for physical ahead of mandatory minicamp https://www.nfl.com/news/nfl-news-roundup-latest-league-updates-from-monday-june-15

Alibaba's AI unit Tongyi Lab launches the Qwen Robot Suite, its first family of AI models for robots, in pilot testing with some enterprise clients (Wency Chen/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article

Alibaba eyes physical world with its first suite of AI models for robots
Alibaba unveils Qwen robot models to push AI beyond chatbots, as embodied intelligence becomes the next frontier in global AI.

UK astronaut #JohnMcFall could become the first person with a physical disability to live in orbit, thanks to an agreement signed between the UK government and US commercial space company #Vast: #Haven1 (not launched yet!) as early as next year.

Mid year, trying to knock out a few blog posts. Finished the one on the Gemini protocol, since I wanted to do that one before I finish the small web one. Next up is a brief one on physical media, then the one on the small web after that. And maybe get a few more in after all those before the end of the year.
#blogs #blogging

Seattle-based Augmodo, whose AI-powered "Smartbadges" worn by employees track shelf inventory, raised $21M led by TQ Ventures at a $350M valuation (Kurt Schlosser/GeekWire)
https://www.geekwire.com/2026/augmodo-rais

Augmodo raises $21M to push its spatial AI beyond just retail toward the broader physical workforce
Customer demand is pulling the Seattle startup's technology into warehouses, facility maintenance, delivery, and other parts of the physical workforce.

Working with an #acting #coaching client on an emotionally pitched scene, and by making one physical change (for rehearsal's sake), we shifted the way they were speaking, and that revealed an emotional turn the character can make later in the scene because of it. Very cool discovery.

Raiders HC Klint Kubiak Provides Major Maxx Crosby Injury Update https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/klint-kubiak-maxx-crosby-injury-update/

We don’t make space for flat-Earthers. We also do not make space for people who argue (explicitly or implicitly) that some of our students deserve to be murdered.
The reasons for those two things are not identical — the latter also has to do, for example, with the fact that education requires physical safety — but they rest on a shared principle: free speech means freedom to ignore speech, and freedom to choose which speech we amplify and how. Making such choices is, in fact, the •duty• of upholding free speech.
/end

Trump Undergoes a Physical Exam at Walter Reed (Karoun Demirjian/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/26/us/politics/trump-physical-walter-reed.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/260526/p63#a260526p63

This is the second major loss of a drive containing valuable information in Japan in the last week.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/japanese-energy-firm-loses-drive-with-data-of-109-million-clients/…

Japanese energy firm loses drive with data of 10.9 million clients
Kyushu Electric Power Co., Inc. has disclosed a physical security incident that affects private data of more than 10 million customers.

Cowboys Have 53-Man Roster Upset Brewing With Physical Freak UDFA Michael Trigg https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/onsi/dallas-cowboys-have-53-man-roster-upset-brewing-physical-freak-udfa-michael-trigg

Federal agents across the United States were told in recent days that the FBI will no longer investigate physical confrontations involving Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.
The guidance was shared with FBI managers on Thursday, with some ICE agents notified by their FBI counterparts the same day.
The Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security issued a joint statement denying that any change had taken place.
They insisted the relationship between …

FBI Told to Stop Investigating ICE After Patel Halted Renee Good Probe, Now ICE Investigates Itself
The FBI will no longer investigate ICE confrontations, shifting responsibility to Homeland Security Investigations. This change raises concerns about accountability and scrutiny of ICE's use of force.

Google plans to open its first physical Google Store outside of the US, in Tokyo's Omotesando district "this summer", marking Google's 11th physical store (Damien Wilde/9to5Google)
https://9to5google.com/2026/06/01/goog

Google Store Tokyo to be first physical store outside US, opens this summer
After being exclusive to the United States, the first physical Google Store outside of the region is coming to Tokyo, Japan, this summer.

Just worked with an #acting #coaching client who is new to acting. For a take on the first scene they've done, I asked them to change one physical thing they were doing. That take, from the first sentence suddenly had a different life behind it. So good to see.

Intel taps Alex Katouzian, an ex-Qualcomm EVP, to lead Client Computing & Physical AI group, and names Pushkar Ranade as CTO, after serving on an interim basis (Dylan Martin/CRN)
https://www.crn.com/news/components-periph

Intel Taps Top Qualcomm Exec To Lead Client Computing, Physical AI Group
Intel said Monday that it has hired a top Qualcomm executive for a new position that will have him oversee the alignment of its long-running and critical PC business with the emerging field of physical AI, which its CEO has made a priority.

Most Americans say Trump is mentally, physically unfit to serve effectively: Poll (Ashleigh Fields/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5862406-trump-mental-fitness-physical-health-poll/
http://www.memeorandum.com/260504/p72#a260504p72

Brazilian technology helps NASA assess health risks for astronauts on mission to the Moon: #ArtemisII mission.

genetic_multiplex: Multiplex genetic interactions (2014)
Multiplex networks representing different types of genetic interactions, for different organisms. Layers represent (i) physical, (ii) association, (iii) co-localization, (iv) direct, and (v) suppressive, (vi) additive or synthetic genetic interaction. Edge direction (i,j) indicates gene i interacting with gene j.
This network has 105 nodes and 137 edges.
Tags: Biological, Gene regulation, Protein interactions, Unweigh…

On the Anticipation of #Lunar Travel in the Early 20th Century - A Pedagogical Exercise: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12582 -> "This article examines, from historical and pedagogical perspectives, Alphonse Berget's anticipation of Earth-Moon travel in Le Ciel (Larousse, 1923), decades before the beginning of the space age. [...] Unlike earlier fictional treatments such as Jules Verne's De la Terre a la Lune, Berget approached space travel using physical reasoning grounded in Newtonian gravitation. [...] His estimated Earth-Moon travel time of approximately 49 hours is of the same order of magnitude as Apollo mission transit times (approx. 72 h)."

Sources: Microsoft has been working on a disc-to-digital feature for Xbox One and Xbox Series X that will let users digitize their physical game collections (Tom Warren/The Verge)

Xbox testing disc-to-digital feature that digitizes a physical game collection
Microsoft’s disc-to-digital feature could be essential for next-gen Xbox consoles.

tree-of-life: Protein interactomes across the tree of life (2019)
Protein-protein iteraction networks ("interactome") for 1,840 species. An interactome captures all physical protein-protein interactions within one species, from direct biophysical protein-protein interactions to regulatory protein-DNA and metabolic interactions. .
This network has 200 nodes and 206 edges.
Tags: Biological, Protein interactions

Emma Raducanu returned to Andy Murray Arena for her second match in five hours with lingering doubts about her physical condition after slipping on the slick grass earlier in the day and hurting her left thigh.
By the time she had launched herself into consecutive backhand and forehand down-the-line winners to snatch an early break, that concern had dissipated.
What followed was one of her very best matches as she dismantled the talented 18-year-old Iva Jovic 6-2, 6-2 in front of…

"I think when you're just counting on your voice, you actually need double the energy. I find myself acting out the scenes and being very physical while I'm recording because I think you can tell when someone is just sitting on a stool."
—Judy Greer
#acting #coaching …

Nvidia researchers unveil ENPIRE, an agent harness framework that develops robotic self-improvement strategies for physical tasks with minimal human supervision (Jeremy Hsu/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/06/ai-coding-agents-can-auton…

AI coding agents taught robots how to install GPUs and cut zip-ties
NVIDIA’s self-improvement program for robots enlists teams of AI coding agents.

This glimpse of modern drone-enabled police surveillance,
including the highly sensitive video of the man’s physical takedown,
wasn’t voluntarily released by the SFPD
—which, like most US police departments, rarely releases drone videos even in response to public records requests.
Instead, it was accidentally livestreamed onto the open internet via Skydio’s website.
That’s where two security researchers, Sam Curry and Maik Robert, discovered that the SFPD was le…

A Leak of San Francisco Police Drone Footage Exposes the New Reality of Urban Surveillance
The SFPD’s exposure of hours of videos from drone platform Skydio reveals how broadly it’s watching the city from above—and how the results can spill online.

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them."
—Bruce Lee
#acting #coaching

Behind the public’s mounting worries is a growing sense that Trump isn’t mentally all there.
Physical and mental health aren’t easily separated, especially as one reaches 80. I often can’t remember where I put my wallet and keys or why I’ve entered a room. I also have less patience than I used to have. (I’m less tolerant of long lines, automated phone menus and Republicans.)
But if Trump can’t remember where he put, say, a top-secret memo or why he entered the Situation Room, or …

XDOF, which is building data pipelines, collection tools, and annotation systems for robot training data, emerges from stealth with $70M (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/17/colle…

Collecting robot training data is dirty, unglamorous work. Some AI labs are already paying XDOF to do it. | TechCrunch
If physical AI is going to match the accomplishments of LLMs, there's a data problem that needs to be solved.

Surveillance pricing is bad for privacy, equity, and price transparency.
So EFF supports a California bill,
S.B. 2564,
which would ban this creepy practice.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/californias-bill-ban-surveillance-pricing

Yes to California's Bill to Ban Surveillance Pricing
Corporations harvest and monetize ever-growing amounts of our personal data, such as our browsing history and physical location. One bitter fruit of this poisonous tree is known as “surveillance pricing”: corporations offer the same product to two different people at two different prices, based on...

Human Archive, which trains robots using first-person video from 1,000 camera-equipped caps worn by Indian home services workers, raised $8.2M from YC and more (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/26/human…

This startup is betting India's gig economy can train the world's robots | TechCrunch
Human Archive, a startup founded by UC Berkeley and Stanford researchers, is paying gig workers in India to wear camera-equipped caps and sensor devices to collect the real-world physical training data that AI and robotics labs are racing to acquire.

Nvidia unveils Cosmos 3, an open physical AI foundation model, to help robots and autonomous cars better understand the real world with limited training data (Ina Fried/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/06/01/nvidia-ai-push-cosmos-3-world-model

Nvidia expands AI push with Cosmos 3 world model
The chip giants aims to become a platform for physical AI.

A look back at the 2007 heist of a Verizon data center in London, highlighting the role of physical data security as cyber defenses grow more sophisticated (Nathaniel Rich/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/12/magazin

How a Gang of Thieves Pulled Off a Multimillion-Dollar Data Center Heist
The world’s most valuable assets are stored on rows of servers in giant, anonymous buildings. And they can be stolen.

Sony says all new PlayStation games from both first- and third-party developers will be sold in digital formats from January 2028, ending physical game discs (Stephen Totilo/Game File)
https://www.gamefile.news/p/sony-drops-playstation-discs-2028-ps3-vit…

Sony will cease production of discs for new PlayStation games in 2028
The end of an era, a potential fatal blow to video games as physical media, and a hint of what’s in store for the PS6? Also: PS3/Vita online stores scheduled for shutdown.

LG shares jumped 300% this year, after largely sitting out South Korea's chip-rally in 2025, as LG seeks to expand into physical AI businesses such as robots (Sangmi Cha/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Jeff Bezos' Prometheus, which is building AI models for physical tasks, raised a $12B Series B at a $41B valuation, following a $6.2B Series A (Dan Primack/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/06/11/prometheus-bezos-industrial-ai

Prometheus, Jeff Bezos' AI startup, is now worth $41 billion
"Make that dream-build loop 10 times faster."