Tootfinder

An older adult with underlying health conditions is believed to be the first person to die from a rare strain of bird flu,
but Washington state health officials said on Friday the risk to the public is low.
The person – from Grays Harbor county, about 78 miles (125km) south-west of Seattle – had a backyard flock of domestic poultry that had been exposed to wild birds.
The person was treated for the H5N5 bird flu strain after becoming seemingly the first known human infected…

Leerzaam experiment met polderrijst - Universiteit Leiden
https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/nieuws/2023/10/leerzaam-experiment-met-polderrijst
De rijstoogst van dit jaar mag dan vrijwel volledig mislukt zijn ... De onderzoekers houden de moed er in. 🙂

Day 28: Samira Ahmed
As foreshadowed, we're back to YA land, which represents a lot of what I've been enjoying from the library lately.
I've read "Hollow Fires", "This Book Won't Burn", and "Love, Hate, and other Filters" by Ahmed, along with "Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know" which is quite different. All four are teen ~romances with interesting things to say about racism & growing up as a South Asian Muslim, but whereas the first three are set in small-town Indiana, the third is set in France and includes a historical fiction angle involving Dumas and a hypothetical Muslim woman who was (in this telling) the inspiration for several Lord Byron poems.
Ahmed's novels all include a strong and overt theme of social justice, and it's refreshing to see an author not try to wade around the topic or ignore it. Her romances are complex, with imperfect protagonists and endings that aren't always "happily ever after" although they're satisfying and believable.
My library has a plethora of similar authors I've been enjoying, including Adiba Jaigirdar (who appeared earlier in this list), Sabaa Tahir ("All my Rage" is fantastic but I'm less of a fan of her fantasy stuff), Sabina Khan ("The Love and Lies of Rukhsana Ali"), and Randa Abdel-Fattah ("Does My Head Look Big In This?"; from an earlier era). Ahmed gets the spot here because I really like her politics and the way she works them into her writing. Her characters are unapologetic advocates against things like book bans, and Ahmed doesn't second-guess them or try to make things more palatable for those who want to ban books (or whatever). Her historical fiction in "Mad..." is also really cool in terms of "huh that could actually totally be true" and grappling with literary sexism from ages past.
#30AuthorsNoMen

Daniels was looking at just 10 easily quantifiable body measurements. How many important dimensions of variations are there in a human mind? How hard are they to measure? How likely is it that even one single “average” mind exists on Earth?? The odds are vanishingly small.
[Napkin sketch: assume there are a paltry 20 dimensions of brain variation. (Surely that’s low.) Assume there’s a 1 in 5 change of being completely “normal” in each. (Surely that’s high.) Even that absurd hypothetical gives a 1 in 11,490 chance that a •single• completely average mind exists in a population of 8.3 billion.]
5/

I finished my Vienna canework pattern (Wiener Geflecht), its just a first PoC, maybe it needs some more refactoring before I might think about some round variation.
#openscad #3dmodelling #3dprinting

MagiClaw: A Dual-Use, Vision-Based Soft Gripper for Bridging the Human Demonstration to Robotic Deployment Gap
Tianyu Wu, Xudong Han, Haoran Sun, Zishang Zhang, Bangchao Huang, Chaoyang Song, Fang Wan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19169

MagiClaw: A Dual-Use, Vision-Based Soft Gripper for Bridging the Human Demonstration to Robotic Deployment Gap
The transfer of manipulation skills from human demonstration to robotic execution is often hindered by a "domain gap" in sensing and morphology. This paper introduces MagiClaw, a versatile two-finger end-effector designed to bridge this gap. MagiClaw functions interchangeably as both a handheld tool for intuitive data collection and a robotic end-effector for policy deployment, ensuring hardware consistency and reliability. Each finger incorporates a Soft Polyhedral Network (SPN) with an embedd…

B-facets in dimension 4
Fedor Selyanin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19118 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19118

"How a Big Oil PR Firm Helped Top UK Cultural Institutions Defend Their Fossil Fuel Sponsorships"
#UK #UnitedKingdom #Climate

How a Big Oil PR Firm Helped Top UK Cultural Institutions Defend Their Fossil Fuel Sponsorships
Brunswick Group’s strategies aimed to neutralise growing calls for theatres, museums, and galleries to distance themselves from climate polluters.

And if you do not partake, and do not wish to be Monster'd tonight, remember you can temporarily mute hashtags!
https://jorts.horse/@plaidtron3000/115403394576105506

Mobile #Plauderbänkli gegen Vereinsamung
https://www.derbund.ch/plauderbaenkli-in-belp-nachbarschaftshilfe-gegen-vereinzelung-27952709557…

Plauderbänkli in Belp: Nachbarschaftshilfe gegen Vereinzelung
Immer mehr Gemeinden fördern nachbarschaftliche Beziehungen. Denn immer mehr alte Menschen haben keine Familie, die für sie sorgt.