Tootfinder

Obesity & diet
I wouldn't normally share a positive story about the new diet drugs, because I've seen someone get obsessed with them who was at a perfectly acceptable weight *by majority standards* (surprise: every weight is in fact perfectly acceptable by *objective* standards, because every "weight-associated" health risk is its own danger that should be assessed *in individuals*). I think two almost-contradictory things:
1. In a society shuddering under the burden of metastasized fatmisia, there's a very real danger in promoting the new diet drugs because lots of people who really don't need them will be psychologically bullied into using them and suffer from the cost and/or side effects.
2. For many individuals under the assault of our society's fatmisia, "just ignore it" is not a sufficient response, and also for specific people for whom decreasing their weight can address *specific* health risks/conditions that they *want* to address that way, these drugs can be a useful tool.
I know @… to be a trustworthy & considerate person, so I think it's responsible to share this:
#Fat #Diet #Obesity

Estrogen? Hot drinks will suffice!
"""
Naturally, cold water cooled. For that reason it was used in mania and frenzy, sicknesses of heat where the spirits were in ebullition, solids tightened and liquids were heated to the point of evaporation, leaving the brain of the patient ‘dry and brittle’, as anatomists regularly demonstrated. Reasonably enough Boissieu includes cold water among his list of refreshing cures: baths were the foremost ‘antiphlogistic’, purifying the body of any excessive igneous particles to be found there. Taken as a drink, it was a ‘dilutive procastinant’ that diminished the resistance of fluids to the action of solids, thereby indirectly lowering the general heat of the body.
But it was also said that cold water brought heat and that hot water cooled. Such at least was the thesis defended by Darut. Cold baths chased the blood from the periphery of the body and pushed it ‘with increased vigour towards the heart’. As the heart was the seat of natural heat, the blood was warmed there, all the more so as “the heart, which struggles alone against all the other parts, makes renewed efforts to expel the blood and overcome capillary resistance. What results is a greater intensity of circulation, the division of the blood, the fluidity of the humours, the destruction of congestions, an increase in the strength of the natural heat, of the appetite of the digestive forces, and the activity of the body and the mind.” A symmetrical paradox operated regarding hot baths: blood was attracted to the extremities of the body, as were the humours, sweat, and all forms of liquid, both beneficial and harmful. The vital centres were therefore deserted, the heart slowed and the organism thus began to cool down. This fact was confirmed by the ‘fainting, lipothymia… weakness, nonchalance, lassitude, and lack of vigour’ that generally accompanied excessive bathing with hot water.
But there was more. So great was the polyvalence of water, so great was its aptitude to submit itself to the qualities that it carried, that it sometimes lost its efficacy as a liquid and acted as a desiccant instead. Water could Prevent dampness. In part, this was the old principle of similia similibus, but in another sense, and by the intermediary of a visible mechanism. For some, it was cold water that brought dryness, as heat kept water humid. Heat dilated the pores of the organism, distended its membranes, and allowed humidity to impregnate them as a secondary effect. Liquids made their way through heat. For that reason, the hot drinks so widely used in the seventeenth century risked becoming a danger, and those who took too many risked relaxation, general dampness and a weakness of the whole organism. As these were traits commonly associated with the feminine body, as opposed to the dry, virile solidity of the male, the abuse of hot drinks could lead to a general feminisation of the human race: “Not without reason, the reproach is made to the majority of men that they have softened and degenerated, taking on the habits and inclinations of women – the only thing lacking is a physical resemblance. The abuse of humectants could accelerate the metamorphosis, and render the two sexes almost identical both physically and morally. Woe betide the human race if this prejudice ever spreads to the masses: there will be no more labourers, artisans or soldiers, as they will have lost the strength and vigour necessary for their profession.” [Pressavin]
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

Speculative politics
As an anarchist (okay, maybe not in practice), I'm tired of hearing why we have to suffer X and Y indignity to "preserve the rule of law" or "maintain Democratic norms." So here's an example of what representative democracy (a form of government that I believe is inherently flawed) could look like if its proponents had even an ounce of imagination, and/or weren't actively trying to rig it to favor a rich donor class:
1. Unicameral legislature, where representatives pass laws directly. Each state elects 3 statewide representatives: the three most-popular candidates in a statewide race where each person votes for one candidate (ranked preference voting would be even better but might not be necessary, and is not a solution by itself). Instead of each representative getting one vote in the chamber, they get N votes, where N is the number of people who voted for them. This means that in a close race, instead of the winner getting all the power, the power is split. Having 3 representatives trades off between leisure size and ensuring that two parties can't dominate together.
2. Any individual citizen can contact their local election office to switch or withdraw their vote at any time (maybe with a 3-day delay or something). Voting power of representatives can thus shift even without an election. They are limited to choosing one of the three elected representatives, or "none of the above." If the "none of the above" fraction exceeds 20% of eligible voters, a new election is triggered for that state. If turnout is less than 80%, a second election happens immediately, with results being final even at lower turnout until 6 months later (some better mechanism for turnout management might be needed).
3. All elections allow mail-in ballots, and in-person voting happens Sunday-Tuesday with the Monday being a mandatory holiday. (Yes, election integrity is not better in this system and that's a big weakness.)
4. Separate nationwide elections elect three positions for head-of-state: one with diplomatic/administrative powers, another with military powers, and a third with veto power. For each position, the top three candidates serve together, with only the first-place winner having actual power until vote switches or withdrawals change who that is. Once one of these heads loses their first-place status, they cannot get it again until another election, even if voters switch preferences back (to avoid dithering). An election for one of these positions is triggered when 20% have withdrawn their votes, or if all three people initially elected have been disqualified by losing their lead in the vote count.
5. Laws that involve spending money are packaged with specific taxes to pay for them, and may only be paid for by those specific revenues. Each tax may be opted into or out of by each taxpayer; where possible opting out of the tax also opts you out of the service. (I'm well aware of a lot of the drawbacks of this, but also feel like they'd not necessarily be worse than the drawbacks of our current system.) A small mandatory tax would cover election expenses.
6. I'm running out of attention, but similar multi-winner elections could elect panels of judges from which a subset is chosen randomly to preside in each case.
Now I'll point out once again that this system, in not directly confronting capitalism, racism, patriarchy, etc., is probably doomed to the same failures as our current system. But if you profess to want a "representative democracy" as opposed to something more libratory, I hope you'll at least advocate for something like this that actually includes meaningful representation as opposed to the current US system that's engineered to quash it.
Key questions: "Why should we have winner-take-all elections when winners-take-proportionately-to-votes is right there?" and "Why should elected officials get to ignore their constituents' approval except during elections, when vote-withdrawal or -switching is possible?"
2/2
#Democracy

The Effects of Sunspots on Spectral Line Shapes in the Visible
Claire Komori, John M. Brewer, Lily L. Zhao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09030 https://arxiv.o…

The Effects of Sunspots on Spectral Line Shapes in the Visible
We present a comparative spectral analysis to explore the ability of a cooler Sun model to accurately capture the spectral line shape changes caused by Sunspots. In the search for small Earth-like planets, the effects of stellar surface activity can overwhelm the $\sim$10 cm/s planetary RV signal. This necessitates the development of new stellar modeling methods and a greater understanding of the impact of surface activity on stellar spectra. Some attempts to model out noise from Sunspot activi…

EcphoryRAG: Re-Imagining Knowledge-Graph RAG via Human Associative Memory
Zirui Liao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08958 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.08958

EcphoryRAG: Re-Imagining Knowledge-Graph RAG via Human Associative Memory
Cognitive neuroscience research indicates that humans leverage cues to activate entity-centered memory traces (engrams) for complex, multi-hop recollection. Inspired by this mechanism, we introduce EcphoryRAG, an entity-centric knowledge graph RAG framework. During indexing, EcphoryRAG extracts and stores only core entities with corresponding metadata, a lightweight approach that reduces token consumption by up to 94\% compared to other structured RAG systems. For retrieval, the system first ex…

Anderson Accelerated Primal-Dual Hybrid Gradient for solving LP
Yingxin Zhou, Stefano Cipolla, Phan Tu Vuong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08062 https://arxiv…

Anderson Accelerated Primal-Dual Hybrid Gradient for solving LP
We present the Anderson Accelerated Primal-Dual Hybrid Gradient (AA-PDHG), a fixed-point-based framework designed to overcome the slow convergence of the standard PDHG method for the solution of linear programming (LP) problems. We establish the global convergence of AA-PDHG under a safeguard condition. In addition, we propose a filtered variant (FAA-PDHG) that applies angle and length filtering to preserve the uniform boundedness of the coefficient matrix, a property crucial for guaranteeing c…

The French energy regulator has now decided on the demand and solar injection zones on the grid, for which optional countercyclical grid fees apply to battery storage systems (as of August next year).
These negative/countercyclical grid fees can serve as inspiration for Europe on how to deal with energy storage.

The French energy regulator, CRE - Commission de régulation de l'énergie, has now decided on the demand and solar injection zones on the high-voltage (HV) and medium-voltage (MV) grids, for which… | Jaap Burger
The French energy regulator, CRE - Commission de régulation de l'énergie, has now decided on the demand and solar injection zones on the high-voltage (HV) and medium-voltage (MV) grids, for which optional countercyclical grid fees apply to battery storage systems. A negative price in the network tariff rewards 'grid-friendly' behaviour, meaning discharging during the winter morning and evening demand peak in zones defined as demand zones. Conversely, battery systems installed in solar inject…

ChoirRec: Semantic User Grouping via LLMs for Conversion Rate Prediction of Low-Activity Users
Dakai Zhai, Jiong Gao, Boya Du, Junwei Xu, Qijie Shen, Jialin Zhu, Yuning Jiang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09393

ChoirRec: Semantic User Grouping via LLMs for Conversion Rate Prediction of Low-Activity Users
Accurately predicting conversion rates (CVR) for low-activity users remains a fundamental challenge in large-scale e-commerce recommender systems.Existing approaches face three critical limitations: (i) reliance on noisy and unreliable behavioral signals; (ii) insufficient user-level information due to the lack of diverse interaction data; and (iii) a systemic training bias toward high-activity users that overshadows the needs of low-activity users.To address these challenges, we propose ChoirR…

Differential rotation of solar {\alpha}-sunspots and implications for stellar light curves
Emily Joe L\"o{\ss}nitz, Alexander G. M. Pietrow, Hritam Chakraborty, Meetu Verma, Ioannis Kontogiannis, Horst Balthasar, Carsten Denker, Monika Lendl
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08196

Differential rotation of solar α-sunspots and implications for stellar light curves
Differential rotation is a key driver of magnetic activity and dynamo processes in the Sun and other stars, especially as the rate differs across the solar layers, but also in active regions. We aim to accurately quantify the velocity at which round α-spots traverse the solar disk as a function of their latitude, and compare these rates to those of the quiet-Sun and other sunspot types. We then extend this work to other stars and investigate how differential rotation affects the modulation of …

Day 16: Mayra Cuevas & Marie Marquardt
Okay so this is cheating, but they're co-authors of multiple books together, and there's no way for me to separate their contributions... I've already got too many authors I'd like to list, so why not?
I read their book "Does My Body Offend You?" and absolutely loved it; it's a celebration of teen activism while also being a deep exploration of feminist issues through practical situations that bring out the complicated side of things, which the authors refuse to reduce back to a simple formulaic answer. It has a supporting cast of appropriately-complex male characters that help in exploring the nuances of issues like the line between female empowerment & male gratification, and it brings race and macho culture into the conversion as well.
CW for sexual harassment & deep discussion of the resultant trauma.
I'll cheat again here to sneak in mention of two male authors whose work resonates with theirs: Mark Oshiro's "Anger is a Gift" has a more pessimistic/complex take on teen activism along with a gay romance (CW for racist cop murder), while Jeremy Whitley's graphic novel "Navigating With You" deals with queer romance & disability, while having a main character pairing that echoes those from "Does My Body Offend You?" in a lot of ways. Another connection (to non-men authors this time) is with "Go With the Flow" by Lily Williams and Karen Schneemann. Their graphic novel about teen activism and periods is a bit more didactic and has a much lighter tone, but it does necessarily have some overlapping themes.
To bring it back to Cuevas & Marquhardt, their writing is great and their ability to discuss such complex topics with such nuance, all wrapped up in a story that feels completely natural, is amazing to me, and makes their book feel like one of the most valuable to recommend to others.
In writing this I've realized a grave oversight in the list so far that I'll have to correct tomorrow, but I'm quickly running out of days. The didn't-quite-make-it list is going to be full of more excellent authors, and I'm honestly starting to wonder whether it might actually be harder to name 20 male authors I respect now that I've found the sense to be mostly somewhere between disgusted and disappointed with so many of the male authors I enjoyed as a teen.
#20AuthorsNoMen (cheating a bit)