Tootfinder

Not too late to build a pin hole camera with whatever you have lying around. The greater the distance from the pin to the projecting surface, the larger the image…
#eclipse #eclipse2026

The One-Way Drop: Why a Drop of White Blood Never Made Anyone White
American race law rests on a piece of arithmetic no mathematician would sign: one drop of Black blood makes a person Black,...
https://bolesblogs.com/2026/08/11/the-

#ScribesAndMakers 11. Is there a word whose meaning is benign that still grates on you for some reason?
That depends entirely on context, I have my pet peeves when it comes to my own writing (not so much when it comes to others'). I avoid 'suddenly' after a prolonged period of overusing the poor word. Now, it rests in the unused drawer. Preferably forever.
'Very…

Justice probe into TV networks rests on thin legal grounds, legal experts say (Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/10/11/justice-probe-into-tv-networks-rests-thin-legal-grounds-lawyers-say/
http://www.memeorandum.com/261011/p73#a261011p73

I never tire of seeing these two brothers sleeping in the cat tree.
#Caturday

Georgia Republicans are snubbing Donald Trump’s pick for U.S. Senate.
A cadre of conservative mayors in the Peach State have opted to publicly back Democratic incumbent Jon Ossoff -- rather than get behind Trump-endorsed Representative Mike Collins.
Those mayors include Gail Fry of Toccoa,
James Matheson of Valdosta,
and Julie Smith of Tifton.
The key to their successful bipartisan relationship with Ossoff rests in the senator’s attentiveness to Georgia’s myriad…

Key Senate Race Is Already Backfiring on Trump
Multiple Republican governors have endorsed a candidate in the race—and it’s not who Donald Trump backs.

How it started/how it's going

First batch of käsespätzle - it's officially fall.
#cooking

I don't take photos of animals often, but every now and then we are visiting the #TiergartenNürnberg and I bring the camera to see if I can capture a scene that's worth taking a photo.
#nürnberg

These attacks on elections are absurd, incoherent, cravenly partisan, nakedly totalitarian. This is obvious. It’s obvious, yet the attacks still work.
Why? Because this is asymmetric warfare. Every attack on democracy needs a carefully reasoned, principled response — democracy rests on principles, or it isn't democracy — but the attackers need be neither reasoned nor principled. They need only be shameless and relentless.
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'[W]ords that stand for equality are demonized by those who benefit from inequality. Opposition will always come from people whose power rests on the group they were born into rather than on what they do as individuals. This persists because they fear what might happen if they have no built-in advantage. And this is sad because they may never find out who they really are, and what they would really want to do in life.'
Gloria Steinem’s Final Essay | The New Yorker
https://archive.ph/r7OD2#selection-469.223-469.737

Classical Acceptance Is Not Hybrid Authentication: Measuring X.509 Verifier Semantics in Post-Quantum Migration
Taesung Kim, Boheung Chung, Keonwoo Kim, Yousung Kang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.20800 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.20800 https://arxiv.org/html/2607.20800
arXiv:2607.20800v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: A relying party validating a hybrid X.509 certificate --- carrying both a classical and a post-quantum credential --- must distinguish whether its accepting judgment rests on the post-quantum evidence or only on the classical path. To preserve compatibility, the separable designs place that evidence where classical path validation may ignore it. A verifier can then validate the classical path and accept while the post-quantum evidence never bears on the decision --- a valid classical result silently promoted to a hybrid conclusion it did not establish. We measure this across eight path-validation stacks (seven independent codebases), in nine validation modes, over six certificate schemes. Under a hybrid-required policy, nearly every stack parsing a separable hybrid certificate accepts on the classical path without making the post-quantum evidence outcome-bearing; one enforcing mode instead fractures interoperability over a signature-input encoding not yet interoperably profiled; and stacks that verify post-quantum signatures still do not enforce the binding by default: the gap is structural, not explained by missing primitive capability alone. Under lifecycle desynchronization the downgrade is realized: when a bound post-quantum credential is revoked while the classical certificate stays valid, the default path still accepts, because the bound credential lies outside the decision's scope. Binding success is not authentication success. We contribute a specification-derived verifier model and an executable, policy-parametric reference contract --- what a verifier must recognize, verify, make outcome-bearing, and check before reporting a validation as hybrid --- with a diagnosis of why standards do not require it.
toXiv_bot_toot

A distressing amount of political theory rests on assumptions of the form “Oh, sure, but in practice only a state actor would have the capacity to do that.”
Those fundamental assumptions don't hold. They haven't held for a while.

"When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free"

Trump administration's crackdown on illegal voting rests on a shaky foundation (Kyle Cheney/Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/10/06/DOJ-noncitizen-voting-cases
http://www.memeorandum.com/261006/p36#a261006p36

#butterfly #lepidoptera #bugs #memphis

Many (including me) have noted that the •efficacy• of a whole lot of our systems rests on trust, and people breaching trust by Doing Dumb Shit With LLMs They Clearly Should Not Be Doing are undermining those systems.
I'll add that the •efficiency• of a lot of our systems depends on trust, too. If someone wrote an academic paper or wrote some code, well, it used to be pretty obvious if they didn't think about it at all: knowing how to write something that •sounds• like a paper is at least a partial smoke test for actually knowing how to •think• about the paper. No longer so. Now it takes real time.
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