Tootfinder

Just finished "Concrete Rose" by Angie Thomas (I haven't yet read "The Hate U Give" but that's now high on my list of things to find). It's excellent, and in particular, an excellent treatise on positive masculinity in fiction form. It's not a super easy book to read emotionally, but is excellently written and deeply immersive. I don't have the perspective to know how it might land among teens like those it portrays, but I have a feeling it's true enough to life, and it held a lot of great wisdom for me.
CW for the book include murder, hard drugs, and parental abandonment.
I caught myself in a racist/classist habit of thought while reading that others night appreciate hearing about: early on I was mentally comparing it to "All my Rage" by Sabaa Tahir and wondering if/when we'd see the human cost of the drug dealing to the junkies, thinking that it would weaken the book not to include that angle. Why is that racist/classist? Because I'm always expecting books with hard drug dealers in them to show the ugly side of their business since it's been drilled into me that they're evil for the harm they cause, yet I never expect the same of characters who are bankers, financial analysts, health insurance claims adjudicators, police officers, etc. (Okay, maybe I do now look for that in police narratives). The point is, our society includes many people who as part of their jobs directly immiserate others, so why and I only concerned about that misery being brought up when it's drug dealers?
#AmReading

@… with a profile name like that, I just have to follow you!
https://www.journeyman.cc/blog/posts-output/2025-07-02-flying-ou…

Flying out the hayloft
Ever since I built the cattle shed, and added the derrick to the front of it to allow bales to be hoisted up, I've thought that would make a very cool place to do a suspension. Now, at last, I've done it.

Mineral Detection of Neutrinos and Dark Matter 2025 Proceedings
Shigenobu Hirose, Patrick Stengel, Natsue Abe, Daniel Ang, Lorenzo Apollonio, Gabriela R. Araujo, Yoshihiro Asahara, Laura Baudis, Pranshu Bhaumik, Nathaniel Bowden, Joseph Bramante, Lorenzo Caccianiga, Mason Camp, Qing Chang, Jordan Chapman, Reza Ebadi, Alexey Elykov, Anna Erickson, Valentin Fondement, Katherine Freese, Shota Futamura, Claudio Galelli, Andrew Gilpin, Takeshi Hanyu, Noriko Hasebe, Adam A. Hecht, Samuel C. …

Mineral Detection of Neutrinos and Dark Matter 2025 Proceedings
The third ``Mineral Detection of Neutrinos and Dark Matter'' (MD$ν$DM'25) meeting was held May 20-23, 2025 in Yokohama, Japan, hosted by the Yokohama Institute for Earth Sciences, Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC). These proceedings compile contributions from the workshop and update the progress of mineral detector research. MD$ν$DM'25 was the third such meeting, following the first in October of 2022 held at the IFPU in Trieste, Italy and the second in January of…

MCIF: Multimodal Crosslingual Instruction-Following Benchmark from Scientific Talks
Sara Papi, Maike Z\"ufle, Marco Gaido, Beatrice Savoldi, Danni Liu, Ioannis Douros, Luisa Bentivogli, Jan Niehues
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19634

MCIF: Multimodal Crosslingual Instruction-Following Benchmark from Scientific Talks
Recent advances in large language models have catalyzed the development of multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) that integrate text, speech, and vision within unified frameworks. As MLLMs evolve from narrow, monolingual, task-specific systems to general-purpose instruction-following models, a key frontier lies in evaluating their multilingual and multimodal capabilities over both long and short contexts. However, existing benchmarks fall short in evaluating these dimensions jointly: they are often limited t…

Foggy fog 🌫️
雾雾的雾 🌫️
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️ Ilford HP5 Plus, expired 1993
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

The mass of the Milky Way from outer halo stars measured by DESI DR1
Gustavo E. Medina, Ting S. Li, Gwendolyn M. Eadie, Alexander H. Riley, Monica Valluri, Nabeel Rehemtulla, Jiaxin Han, Wenting Wang, Amanda Bystr\"om, Leandro Beraldo e Silva, S. E. Koposov, N. R. Sandford, R. G. Carlberg, M. Lambert, O. Y. Gnedin, A. P. Cooper, J. Garc\'ia-Bellido, N. Kizhuprakkat, B. A. Weaver, J. Aguilar, S. Ahlen, A. Anand, D. Bianchi, D. Brooks, T. Claybaugh, A. Cuceu, A. de la Macorra, P…

The mass of the Milky Way from outer halo stars measured by DESI DR1
As a benchmark for galaxy evolution and dark matter studies, the total mass of the Milky Way is a parameter of cosmological significance, and its value at large radii from the Galactic center remains highly uncertain. Following a hierarchical Bayesian inference approach, we measure the cumulative mass of the Milky Way using full 6D phase-space information of stars from the first data release of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). We employ 330 blue horizontal-branch stars (BHBs) an…

At some point, DOPs should stop going for even shallower depth of field or even weirder anamorphic lens distortion. I'm feeling like an old guy complaining about how "you can't see anything on the screen! It's too dark". Only I'm like "nothing is in focus anymore you doofuses!"
Yes, this is a subtoot about #Brick on

Day 3: Octavia Butler.
Incredibly dark, graphic, and disturbing near-future science fiction, which has proved absolutely prophetic. In the 1990's she was writing about a charismatic Conservative Christian and white nationalist president elected in 2024, and the horrors his paramilitary followers would unleash, including forced labor & indoctrination camps. Did I mention those books include ebikes & pseudo-cellphones too? Characters fleeing north from a disastrous social collapse in Loss Angeles? This is "The Parable of the Sower" and "The Parable of the Talents" and the later was tragically rushed to an end because of Butler's declining health.
Her work deals unflinchingly with racism and the darker parts of society, and to those who might say "her depiction of social collapse is overblown," I'd say that while it's not literally the world we live in, it's *effectively* the world that the poorest of us live in. If you're a homeless undocumented latinx person in LA right now, I'm not sure how meaningfully different your world is from the one she depicts.
Her work comes with a strong content warning for lots of things, including racial violence, sexual abuse and slavery, including of children, animal harm, etc., so it's not for everyone. Reading it in 2023 was certainly an incredible trip. Her politics are really cool though; with explicit pro-LGBTQ themes and tinges of what might today be considered #SolarPunk.
#20WomenAuthors

A sad passing of a pillar of my sense of humor. My father gave me a copy of That Was the Year That Was when I was about 10 years old and it tickled me in a way that little has since, save maybe Monty Python. May you rest in peace with no pigeons to be found. 🐦

Signatures of rigidity and second sound in dipolar supersolids
G. A. Bougas, T. Bland, H. R. Sadeghpour, S. I. Mistakidis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22290 …

Signatures of rigidity and second sound in dipolar supersolids
We propose a dynamical protocol to probe the rigidity and phase coherence of dipolar supersolids by merging initially separated fragments in quasi-one-dimensional (1D) double-well potentials. Simulations based on the extended Gross-Pitaevskii equation reveal distinct dynamical signatures across phases. Supersolids exhibit damped crystal oscillations following barrier removal, with the damping rate reflecting superfluid connectivity. A phase-imprinted jump additionally triggers metastable dark s…