Tootfinder

In a remarkable turn from prominent American conservatives,
-- who until Trump’s return to power in January had long complained of a censorious leftwing “cancel culture”
-- now seem happy to reframe that, too, as “consequence culture”.
Nancy Mace, a House representative, sounded a lot like the progressives she has often decried for their political correctness when she declaredlast week, during an effort to censure one of her opponents in Congress, that “free speech isn’t f…

Holy crap. I still haven't deployed my upgraded personal blog. I have a bunch of posts that I've withheld for months now because I was going to push it to production 'any day now'... but Drupal 11's got a remarkably convoluted tool chain, especially with regard to theming. So I've still got one or two pesky things to sort... then I will make it live. This has gone on long enough. I need to put a fork in it. It's (so close to) done. Stop procrastinating Dave!

«But the cancellation of an entire issue of an academic journal, which has not been previously reported, is a remarkable new development in a mounting list of examples of censorship of pro-Palestinian speech.»
This is just one more example of how the world is turning a blind eye to the genocide the Israeli state is perpetrating against the Palestinian people. It is, in every way, inconceivable (and yes, that word does mean what I think it means) that world leaders are able to defend th…

Debian in 2025 is really relaxing. When I think back with horror to how I struggled with Debian in 1999 after switching from the well-functioning Red Hat Linux to Debian to get all my hardware to work halfway, and how easily everything works out of the box today without much fiddling, even with Debian Stable - a remarkable advance. 😎
If I had known this earlier, I would have long since returned to the quasi “mother” of all major distributions. But as we all know, man is a creature of…

Let's Grow an Unbiased Community: Guiding the Fairness of Graphs via New Links
Jiahua Lu, Huaxiao Liu, Shuotong Bai, Junjie Xu, Renqiang Luo, Enyan Dai
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15499

Let's Grow an Unbiased Community: Guiding the Fairness of Graphs via New Links
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse applications. However, due to the biases in the graph structures, graph neural networks face significant challenges in fairness. Although the original user graph structure is generally biased, it is promising to guide these existing structures toward unbiased ones by introducing new links. The fairness guidance via new links could foster unbiased communities, thereby enhancing fairness in downstream applications. To ad…

AcT2I: Evaluating and Improving Action Depiction in Text-to-Image Models
Vatsal Malaviya, Agneet Chatterjee, Maitreya Patel, Yezhou Yang, Chitta Baral
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16141

AcT2I: Evaluating and Improving Action Depiction in Text-to-Image Models
Text-to-Image (T2I) models have recently achieved remarkable success in generating images from textual descriptions. However, challenges still persist in accurately rendering complex scenes where actions and interactions form the primary semantic focus. Our key observation in this work is that T2I models frequently struggle to capture nuanced and often implicit attributes inherent in action depiction, leading to generating images that lack key contextual details. To enable systematic evaluation…

I don't think I posted any running photos from the Thom B Trail Runs this May 17th in Hammond Hill State Forest; here's one of the faster runners -- this time I didn't get hypothermia or sunburn or anything
#photo #photography

Sanders to play Sat., downplays Gabriel remark https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/46039126/shedeur-sanders-play-saturday-downplays-dillon-gabriel-remark

Meson mass spectrum in Ising Field Theory
Alexey Litvinov, Pavel Meshcheriakov, Egor Shestopalov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15766 https://

Meson mass spectrum in Ising Field Theory
We study the two-particle approximation of the Ising Field Theory (IFT), formulated in terms of the Bethe-Salpeter (BS) equation. Derived by Fonseca and Zamolodchikov as a systematic realization of the McCoy-Wu approach, this equation captures confinement by modeling ``mesons'' as bound states of two Majorana fermions (``quarks''), in a way analogous to the integral equation in the 't Hooft model. Despite its approximate nature, the BS equation provides remarkably accurate predictions for the m…

Eagles pull off remarkable 19-point comeback vs. Rams, cover the spread on final play with ultimate bad beat

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/eagles-