Tootfinder

Good Morning #Canada
Sunday mornings should include some relaxation, a good cup of coffee, and a tale of one man forging a legacy of independence. Today we present to you the story of American businessman Russell Arundel who, in 1949, claimed sovereignty over approximately 4 acres of Outer Bald Tusket Island, off the southern tip of Nova Scotia. After purchasing the island for $750, Arundel announced the principality of Outer Baldonia with its own charter, a flag, currency, passports, and an organized military that consisted of 69 fishermen (all Admirals). Citizens of the principality who caught a Bluefin tuna and paid a $50 fee were accorded the rank of prince. Government officials included Prince of Princes Russell Arundel, Chancellor Elson Boudreau, and Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary Ron Wallace. The Canadian government mostly ignored the farce but an official Russian communication declared Outer Baldonia a fascist state.
#CanadaIsAwesome #History
https://backyardhistory.ca/f/the-nova-scotian-island-that-declared-independence

PhotonIDs: ML-Powered Photon Identification System for Dark Count Elimination
Karl C. Linne (Kai Li), Sho Uemura, Yue Ji, Andrew Karmen, Allen Zang, Alex Kolar, Ian Chin, Martin Di Federico, Gustavo Cancelo, Orlando Quaranta, Debashri Roy, Tian Zhong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26315

PhotonIDs: ML-Powered Photon Identification System for Dark Count Elimination
Reliable single photon detection is the foundation for practical quantum communication and networking. However, today's superconducting nanowire single photon detector(SNSPD) inherently fails to distinguish between genuine photon events and dark counts, leading to degraded fidelity in long-distance quantum communication. In this work, we introduce PhotonIDs, a machine learning-powered photon identification system that is the first end-to-end solution for real-time discrimination between photons…

The current AI investment boom will spark a "wildfire" that wipes out some companies, yet bolsters and enables others by unlocking GPUs, energy, and talent (Dion Lim/CEO Dinner Insights)
https://ceodinner.substack.com/p/the-ai-wildfire-is-coming-its-going

The AI Wildfire Is Coming. It's Going to be Very Painful and Incredibly Healthy.
AI won’t crash—it will burn. Like every tech cycle, the fire will clear the brush, redistribute talent, and leave infrastructure to power what comes next. The question is: what kind of plant are you?

Orchids are famous for specialized flowers that create species isolation by manipulating pollinators— but these ones don't have specialized pollinator relationships. Instead, they're isolated by pollen incompatibilities.
https://doi.org/10.1093/aob/mcaf271

I keep coming back to the mirror dualities of the oppressed and oppressor under authoritarianism.
The oppressed is portrayed as both weak and godlike. The stereotypes are always some variation on sloth and incompetence, but yet somehow also a menace capable of destroying the "pure" society. To use the most relevant current example, Antifa being both little femme soy boys who would always get beat up by "real men" while also being an international terrorist organization on the brink of overthrowing the US government, the unarmed presence of whom makes the heavily armed agents of ICE flee for their lives. Antifa is both having absolutely no impact on ICE, and also having such an impact on ICE that the military needs to come in to protect them. The contradiction is obvious but never seems to occur to those who hold both to be true at the same time.
But few talk about the duality of the oppressor. The sovereign throughout history has always been both a ruler above the law, sometimes even the representative or incarnation of a divine force. Yet, this same superhuman/god-man is also a baby who needs constant care. This is absolutely a through line from the very earliest records of sovereign cults to modern cult leaders, CEOs, and Trump today. Power, for these people, is expressed both as the ability to force others to enact their will and in the ability to compel others to care for them. Can any of these "men" cook? Can they fix anything themselves? They are driven everywhere, cooked for all the time, constantly protected from danger. Kings are still dressed, at least for rituals. I could dissect masculinity here, but that's a whole thing.
It is as though the drive to care for our children, who must be taught to behave within acceptable norms, is hijacked by "leaders" who demand our care and attention... even at the expense of our literal children. And recently we've seen some of those very CEOs, with LLMs and return to office demands, show that their judgment is also little better than children, making decisions while pretending to understand a subject.
The oppressed are portrayed as both god-like and impotent and are, in fact, neither. Meanwhile the rulers portray themselves only as invulnerable and are, in fact, childish in their ability to survive without constant support. Their greatest fear from the collapse of society is figuring out how to make sure people keep taking care of them.
It just keeps rattling around in my head.
#USPol

NFL Insider Pours Cold Water On Rumored Cowboys Coaching Hire https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/dallas-cowboys/brian-flores-cold-water-defensive-coordinator/

"The fundamental problem is this: that most of the means of communication are owned or influenced by the very rich. If democracy is the problem capital is always trying to solve, propaganda is part of the solution. Like the kings and empire-builders of the past, they use their platforms to project the claims that suit them and suppress the claims that don’t. This means boosting right and far-right movements, which defend wealth and power..." -- George Monbiot.

I've had a few of these thoughts stuck in my craw all day because I watched this liberal historian talk about the Galleanisti.
https://youtube.com/shorts/93yHEn8BYE4
Basically, she says that "of course the government had the right to target them." Then she goes on to talk about how it became an excuse to carry out a bunch of attacks on other marginalized people. Now, the Galleanisti had been bombing the houses of politicians and such. I get where she's coming from saying that one of their targets "was in the right" to try to catch them. But there's some context she's not talking about at all.
These were Italian anarchists, so they were not white and they were part of an already marginalized political group. Basically all of Europe and the US was trying to wipe out anarchists at the time. Meanwhile, the sitting president at the time showed the first movie in the White House. That movie was KKK propaganda, in which he was favorably quoted. The US was pretty solidly white supremacist in the 1920's.
Like... A major hidden whole premise of the game "Bioshock: Infinite" is that if you went back to the US in the 1920's, and you had magic powers, you would absolutely use them to kill as many cops as possible and try to destroy society. There's a lot of other stuff in there, I don't want to get distracted, but "fuck those racists," specifically referring to the US in the 1920's, was a major part of a major game.
Those Italian anarchists were also stone cutters. They carved grave stones. But the dust from that can kill you, much like black lung for coal miners. So they were dying from unsafe working conditions, regularly raising money to support dying coworkers and then carving gravestones for those same coworkers.
Now, I personally think insurrectionary anarchism is a dead end. I disagree with it as a strategy. We've seen it fail, and it failed there. But of course it makes sense that they wanted to blow up the government.
...And that's the correct way to structure that. When you say, "of course they were in the right" you're making a very clear political statement. You could easily say, "the cops in Vichy France had every right to hunt down the French Resistance." You would technically be correct, I guess. But it would really say something about your politics if you justified the actions of Nazi collaborators over those fighting against the Nazis.
And you may say, "oh, but the Nazis didn't have justification for anything. They invaded a sovereign nation, so their government wasn't legitimate anyway."
To which I would reply, "have you considered a history book about the US?"

The odd thing about being in solidarity with Americans who don't want a king seems odd coming from the citizen of a country that has a King as it's head of state.
He's relatively new in the job, but we kind of had a fondness for his Mum, who incidently served in WWII against you know who
So #NoKings except perhaps for

Science hasn't figured this one out. Male scientists don't want to know what's coming up for themselves. Women scientists know, but they're being suppressed. https://mastodonapp.uk/@tobestewart/115543906288237588