Tootfinder

This seems a good petition to sign for YP https://www.ourparty.org.uk/#openletter

Sign the open letter: it's time for the people to take the reins.
Your Party is too important to fall at the first hurdle. If you agree that the founding conference should be organised by a democratically elected body, sign your name.

AugerPrime Surface Detector Electronics: requirements, verification and performance
Martina Boh\'a\v{c}ov\'a (for the Pierre Auger Collaboration)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14955

AugerPrime Surface Detector Electronics: requirements, verification and performance
The Pierre Auger Observatory has recently undergone a major upgrade, called AugerPrime, tailored to answer the current most pressing questions in the ultra-high-energy cosmic ray (UHECR) detection. The AugerPrime upgrade consists of the addition, on top of each station, of a scintillator detector, to separate the muonic and electromagnetic component of the shower for better primary identification, and of a radio detector to measure the emission of air showers in 30-80 MHz range. An additional s…

It is now less than than 12 months to the midterm elections.
And the D-party is about as ready and organized as a bag of live worms.
The R-party is ready with massive tools to exclude voters; block, disrupt and manipulate the vote counts; and otherwise assure that the election comes out their way.
But the D's still hang onto leaders and issues (I'm lookin' at you "identity politics") that are like boat anchors on a parachute.
I am old, but I firm…

The fracturing of the Dutch far-right, after Wilder's reminded everyone that bigots are bad at compromise, is definitely a relief. Dutch folks I've talked to definitely see D66 as progressive, <strike>so there's no question this is a hard turn to the left (even if it's not a total flip to the far-left)</strike> a lot of folks don't agree. I'm going to let the comments speak rather than editorialize myself..
While this is a useful example of how a democracy can be far more resilient to fascism than the US, that is, perhaps, not the most interesting thing about Dutch politics. The most interesting thing is something Dutch folks take for granted and never think of as such: there are two "governments."
The election was for the Tweede Kamer. This is a house of representatives. The Dutch use proportional representation, so people can (more or less) vote for the parties they actually want. Parties <strike>rarely</strike> never actually get a ruling majority, so they have to form coalition governments. This forces compromise, which is something Wilders was extremely bad at. He was actually responsible for collapsing the coalition his party put together, which triggered this election... and a massive loss of seats for his party.
Dutch folks do still vote strategically, since a larger party has an easier time building the governing coalition and the PM tends to come from the largest party. This will likely be D66, which is really good for the EU. D66 has a pretty radical plan to solve the housing crisis, and it will be really interesting to see if they can pull it off. But that's not the government I want to talk about right now.
In the Netherlands, failure to control water can destroy entire towns. A good chunk of the country is below sea level. Both floods and land reclamation have been critical parts of Dutch history. So in the 1200's or so, the Dutch realized that some things are too important to mix with normal politics.
You see, if there's an incompetent government that isn't able to actually *do* anything (see Dick Schoof and the PVV/VVD/NSC/BBB coalition) you don't want your dikes to collapse and poulders to flood. So the Dutch created a parallel "government" that exists only to manage water: waterschap or heemraadschap (roughly "Water Board" in English). These are regional bureaucracies that exist only to manage water. They exist completely outside the thing we usually talk about as a "government" but they have some of the same properties as a government. They can, for example, levy taxes. The central government contributes funds to them, but lacks authority over them. Water boards are democratically elected and can operate more-or-less independent of the central government.
Controlling water is a common problem, so water boards were created to fulfill the role of commons management. Meanwhile, so many other things in politics run into the very same "Tragedy of the Commons" problems. The right wing solution to commons management is to let corporations ruin everything. The left-state solution is to move everything into the government so it can be undermined and destroyed by the right. The Dutch solution to this specific problem has been to move commons management out of the domain of the central government into something else.
And when I say "government" here, I'm speaking more to the liberal definition of the term than to an anarchist definition. A democratically controlled authority that facilitates resource management lacks the capacity for coercive violence that anarchists define as "government." (Though I assume they might leverage police or something if folks refuse to pay their taxes, but I can't imagine anyone choosing not to.)
As the US federal government destroys the social fabric of the US, as Trump guts programs critical to people's survival, it might be worth thinking about this model. These authorities weren't created by any central authority, they evolved from the people. Nothing stops Americans from building similar institutions that are both democratic and outside of the authority of a government that could choose to defund and abolish them... nothing but the realization that yes, you actually can.
#USPol #NLPol

Topological Phononic Crystal on the Scale of Quasi-Ballistic Phonon Transport
Keita Funayama, Yuki Akura, Hiroya Tanaka, Jun Hirotani
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12528 https://…

Topological Phononic Crystal on the Scale of Quasi-Ballistic Phonon Transport
Phonon engineering technology has opened up the functional thermal management of semiconductor-based classical and quantum electronics at the micro- and nanoscales. However, challenges have remained in designing accurate thermal characteristics based on quasi-ballistic phonon transport. The quasi-ballistic thermal transport arises from the combination of wave-like and diffusive phonon behaviors unlike pure diffusion. The topological nature has been known to be compatible with both wave and diff…

https://cyberscoop.com/nozomi-networks-mitsubishi-electric-acquisition-ot-ics-cybersecurity/
Mitsubishi Electric to acquire Nozomi Networks in $1 billion deal

Mitsubishi Electric to acquire Nozomi Networks in $1 billion deal
Industrial conglomerate Mitsubishi Electric has agreed to acquire OT and IoT cybersecurity specialist Nozomi Networks in a transaction that values the firm near the $1 billion mark.

How Surface Make-Up and Receding Electrokinetics Determine the Sign and Magnitude of Electrification at Water-Hydrophobe Interfaces?
Yinfeng Xu, Himanshu Mishra
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09930

How Surface Make-Up and Receding Electrokinetics Determine the Sign and Magnitude of Electrification at Water-Hydrophobe Interfaces?
It has been widely reported that as water contacts hydrophobic materials such as air or hydrocarbons (liquid or solid), the interfaces acquire a negative charge. It is not entirely clear whether this occurs due to the nature of water, or the hydrophobe, or purely the interface. Here, we probe the effects of surface chemistry and the speed of liquid-solid contact formation and separation on electrification. Glass capillaries grafted with mixed self-assembled monolayers of octadecyltrichlorosilan…

Data distribution impacts the performance and generalisability of contrastive learning-based foundation models of electrocardiograms
Gul Rukh Khattak, Konstantinos Patlatzoglou, Joseph Barker, Libor Pastika, Boroumand Zeidaabadi, Ahmed El-Medany, Hesham Aggour, Yixiu Liang, Antonio H. Ribeiro, Jeffrey Annis, Antonio Luiz Pinho Ribeiro, Junbo Ge, Daniel B. Kramer, Jonathan W. Waks, Evan Brittain, Nicholas Peters, Fu Siong Ng, Arunashis Sau

Data distribution impacts the performance and generalisability of contrastive learning-based foundation models of electrocardiograms
Contrastive learning is a widely adopted self-supervised pretraining strategy, yet its dependence on cohort composition remains underexplored. We present Contrasting by Patient Augmented Electrocardiograms (CAPE) foundation model and pretrain on four cohorts (n = 5,203,352), from diverse populations across three continents (North America, South America, Asia). We systematically assess how cohort demographics, health status, and population diversity influence the downstream performance for predi…

Bitter divisions in Reform UK’s flagship county council have been laid bare in a leaked video of a chaotic internal meeting where members were told to “fucking suck it up” if they did not agree with decisions.
Councillors can be seen complaining about “backbiting” and being ignored by their leader, Linden Kemkaran, who tells them they will be “screwed” and that Reform can forget about winning the general election if they don’t balance Kent’s budget.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/oct/18/suck-it-up-leaked-video-exposes-bitter-infighting-at-reform-uks-flagship-kent-council?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Labour politician charged over 'honey trap' WhatsApp messages sent to MPs https://therecord.media/oliver-steadman-charged-alleged-honeypot-blackmail-britain-politicians