Tootfinder

Day 30: Elizabeth Moon
This last spot (somehow 32 days after my last post, but oh well) was a tough decision, but Moon brings us full circle back to fantasy/sci-fi, and also back to books I enjoyed as a teenager. Her politics don't really match up to Le Guin or Jemisin, but her military experience make for books that are much more interesting than standard fantasy fare in terms of their battles & outcomes (something "A Song of Ice and Fire" achieved by cribbing from history but couldn't extrapolate nearly as well). I liked (and still mostly like) her (unironically) strong female protagonists, even if her (especially more recent) forays into "good king" territory leave something to be desired. Still, in Paksenarion the way we get to see the world from a foot-soldier's perspective before transitioning into something more is pretty special and very rare in fantasy (I love the elven ruins scene as Paks travels over the mountains as an inflection point). Battles are won or lost on tactics, shifting politics, and logistics moreso than some epic magical gimmick, which is a wonderful departure from the fantasy norm.
Her work does come with a content warning for rape, although she addresses it with more nuance and respect than any male SF/F author of her generation. Ex-evangelicals might also find her stuff hard to read, as while she's against conservative Christianity, she's very much still a Christian and that makes its way into her writing. Even if her (not bad but not radical enough) politics lead her writing into less-satisfying places at times, part of my respect for her comes from following her on Twitter for a while, where she was a pretty decent human being...
Overall, Paksenarrion is my favorite of her works, although I've enjoyed some of her sci-fi too and read the follow-up series. While it inherits some of Tolkien's baggage, Moon's ability to deeply humanize her hero and depict a believable balance between magic being real but not the answer to all problems is great.
I've reached 30 at this point, and while I've got more authors on my shortlist, I think I'll end things out tomorrow with a dump of also-rans rather than continuing to write up one per day. I may even include a man or two in that group (probably with at least non-{white cishet} perspective). Honestly, doing this challenge I first thought that sexism might have made it difficult, but here at the end I'm realizing that ironically, the misogyny that holds non-man authors to a higher standard means that (given plenty have still made it through) it's hard to think of male authors who compare with this group.
Looking back on the mostly-male authors of SF/F in my teenage years, for example, I'm now struggling to think of a single one whose work I'd recommend to my kids (having cheated and checked one of my old lists, Pratchett, Jaques, and Asimov qualify but they're outnumbered by those I'm now actively ashamed to admit I enjoyed). If I were given a choice between reading only non-men or non-woman authors for the rest of my life (yes I'm giving myself enby authors as a freebie; they're generally great) I'd very easily choose non-men. I think the only place where (to my knowledge) not enough non-men authors have been allowed through to outshine the fields of male mediocrity yet is in videogames sadly. I have a very long list of beloved games and did include some game designers here, but I'm hard-pressed to think of many other non-man game designers I'd include in the genuinely respect column (I'll include at least two tomorrow but might cheat a bit).
TL;DR: this was fun and you should do it too.
#30AuthorsNoMen

Cowboys RB Calls for Major Rule Change After Tie With Packers https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/dallas-cowboys/miles-sanders-rule-change-tie/?adt_ei=[email]

Series A, Episode 08 - Duel
MUTOID: Time Distort Six.
TRAVIS: Minimum scan, their sensors mustn't register the beam.
MUTOID: Scan complete, identification confirmed.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/108/12 B7B5

YOLO26: Key Architectural Enhancements and Performance Benchmarking for Real-Time Object Detection
Ranjan Sapkota, Rahul Harsha Cheppally, Ajay Sharda, Manoj Karkee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25164

YOLO26: Key Architectural Enhancements and Performance Benchmarking for Real-Time Object Detection
This study presents Key Architectural Enhancements and Performance Benchmarking of Ultralytics YOLO26 for real-time edge object detection, providing a comprehensive overview of the design principles of YOLO26, technological advances, and deployment readiness. YOLO26, released in September 2025 by Ultralytics, represents the newest and most cutting-edge member of the You Only Look Once (YOLO) family, engineered to push the boundaries of efficiency and accuracy on edge and low-power devices. This…

The case for my 28g QRP dual-ported (9:1 and 49:1) unun cracked from tightening one of the terminal screws too tight, and from having printed the box with too few perimeters, so it wasn't really strong enough. I had designed it so that the coax was integrated into the case, so I had to cut the case apart to remove the still-functional electrical components for re-use.
At least this gave me a chance to confirm that I hadn't blown up the ferrite from overheating it!

Sustaining Life on Planet Earth: Metalloenzymes Mastering Dioxygen and Other Chewy Gases https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-12415-5

Sustaining Life on Planet Earth: Metalloenzymes Mastering Dioxygen and Other Chewy Gases
MILS-15 provides an up-to-date review of the metalloenzymes involved in the activation, production, and conversion of molecular oxygen as well as the functionalization of the chemically inert gases methane and ammonia. Found either in aerobes (humans, animals, plants, microorganisms) or in anaerobes (so-called “impossible bacteria”) these enzymes employ preferentially iron and copper at their active sites, in order to conserve energy by redox-driven proton pumps, to convert methane to metha…

This morning, the #MetaphorsOfReligion conference starts with the panel on “Digital and Computational Approaches to Metaphor Analysis,” including our own presentation “Religious Metaphors at Scale.” I am looking forward to the discussion!

Singleton-Optimized Conformal Prediction
Tao Wang, Yan Sun, Edgar Dobriban
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24095 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.24095

Singleton-Optimized Conformal Prediction
Conformal prediction can be used to construct prediction sets that cover the true outcome with a desired probability, but can sometimes lead to large prediction sets that are costly in practice. The most useful outcome is a singleton prediction-an unambiguous decision-yet existing efficiency-oriented methods primarily optimize average set size. Motivated by this, we propose a new nonconformity score that aims to minimize the probability of producing non-singleton sets. Starting from a non-conve…

Series C, Episode 12 - Death-Watch
AVON: We are short of time, Orac.
VILA: I'll say we are. It's not hanging about this time. [Screen display: 2. WAIT blinks out and is replaced by:]
[Computer display: 2. ARBITERS TAKE POSITION AND INDICATE READINESS]
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/312/544

Series C, Episode 13 - Terminal
ZEN: Confirmed.
[Teleport room. All but Avon are present. Avon enters.]
AVON: You can take the watch now, Vila.
VILA: Wonderful. I've been looking forward to that.
TARRANT: Where are we going, Avon?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/313/86