Tootfinder

Investigation: Amazon is buying huge quantities of rare books, scanning them for AI, and destroying them; a tracked Biblio order went to its Las Vegas facility (Emanuel Maiberg/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of…

We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.

Investigation: Amazon is buying huge quantities of rare books, scanning them for AI, and destroying them; a tracked Biblio order went to Amazon's Vegas facility (Emanuel Maiberg/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipme…

We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.

Improved detection and spatiotemporal spectral analysis of neural traveling waves https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.11.750831v1 "alpha/beta activity is associated with both feedforward- and feedback-directed large-scale dynamics";

Improved detection and spatiotemporal spectral analysis of neural traveling waves
Traveling waves (TWs) are a fundamental mode of neural dynamics, yet existing detection methods are limited by sensor geometry, spatial-frequency resolution, signal amplitude, and ambiguity between propagating and standing-wave patterns. Here we introduce the Traveling Wave Index (TWINDEX), a framework for three-dimensional spatiotemporal spectral analysis of TWs across temporal frequency, spatial frequency, and propagation direction. TWINDEX generalizes to irregular sensor layouts, and quantif…

from my link log —
Accurate int/float colour conversions.
http://lomont.org/posts/2023/accuratecolorconversions/
saved 2026-08-18 https://

Dis Bilbo, c'était quoi ton moment préféré ?
Y en a un paquet, évidemment, mais il y a ce moment après le troisième contact quand la pression retombe, que les gens autour sont béats et joyeux. Et ce petit rituel du selfie solaire instauré il y a 20 ans dans le désert égyptien. Un moment de partage avec tous les voisins qui sont repartis avec un croissant de soleil en projection sur leur t-shirt ou dans la main. C'était chouette, vraiment...

Data centers powering the AI boom have been spewing out a staggering amount of pollution by relying on fossil fuel-powered generators.
And given the industry’s unrelenting appetite for more infrastructure supporting ever-more-resource-intensive AI models,
the trend is only going to get worse from here.
It’s reached the point that AI is giving the fossil fuel industry a substantial leg up,
as a new paper published in the journal NPJ Climate Action details.
The au…

AI-driven productivity gains enable more CO₂ emissions than they avoid in a global energy–economy model - npj Climate Action
The net climate impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) depend largely on how its applications propagate through competing energy pathways. Predominant analyses examine the relationship between datacenter energy demand, renewables optimization, and demand-side efficiencies, but insufficiently address how AI also reshapes fossil fuel supply economics. We instead model AI as a bidirectional productivity amplifier in a global computable general equilibrium model, quantifying both enabled emissions…

Long read. For a technology that's apparently poised for a commercial breakthrough, quantum computing research is still pursuing a surprising number of approaches to creating a scalable, fault-tolerant quantum computer.

Meet the quantum tribes: Six competing visions of fault-tolerant computing
For a technology that's apparently poised for a commercial breakthrough, quantum computing research is still pursuing a surprising number of approaches to creating a scalable, ...

A lovely article by the excellent (and left-handed) Natalie Wolchover on left-handedness. I too was forced to write w/ my right; writing suffered for YEARS until I figured it out (and now I can't write with my left, though I'm leftie in all other respects!).
https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-am-i-le

Why Am I Left-Handed? | Quanta Magazine
An invisible difference in 10% of humans poses deep mysteries in several fields at once.

BCG: enterprise users spent a total of $300M on quantum computing in 2025, outranking the combined spending of research labs and governments for the first time (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/businesses-are-sp

When I was first learning to write,
my letters and words ran from right to left, reversed as if in a mirror.
Being left-handed, I was imitating the hand strokes of my right-handed teachers instead of reversing their strokes to replicate the letters.
I gradually got the hang of writing in the correct direction, but it still feels natural for me to mirror-write.
I have a mirror-written childhood diary. Leonardo da Vinci, another lefty, did that too

Why Am I Left-Handed? | Quanta Magazine
An invisible difference in 10% of humans poses deep mysteries in several fields at once.