Tootfinder

Day 21: Aya Yoshinaga
I'm actually generally much less aware of the creators involved in the anime I watch, for a number of reasons, and the few anime directors I could name without looking them up were all men before I started this list. I've now got a short list of anime directors/writers who are women, and the first I'll include here is Yoshinaga, in part because she was pivotal to one of my favorite lesser-known anime, "Kurau Phantom Memory". It was actually one of the first anime I watched ever, but I didn't like it just because of that, since I've rewatched it at least twice and still regard it highly. It's got a pretty cool science fiction setting, an extremely cool barely-comprehensible alien race, a female protagonist who is not sexualized and not subjected to romance, and it centers a platonic relationship torn apart by technological hubris. Very "cool seinen stuff that wouldn't make it past the focus groups today" stuff.
Besides Kurau, Yoshinaga has worked on other great stuff like Golden Kamuy, Azumanga Daioh, Durarara, and Fullmetal Alchemist, and when you see a correlation like that between well-written shows and the same writer showing up again and again, it's clear there's talent there, even if most of these are manga-based.
Probably going to circle back to at least one more anime writer, but for tomorrow I'll move on to manga probably, since I want to space out all my YA enthusiasm a bit.
#30AuthorsNoMen

Ever wondered what it would be like to live in a neighborhood that wasn’t designed around cars?
Well - in most of the country that’s actually illegal.
But in Tempe, AZ there’s a new development called Culdesac
that has managed to make it happen.
This community is designed around alternative transit first,
which means more land is freed up for housing, retail and open space
- and it seems to be working
As more modes of transportation become avail…

Series C, Episode 06 - City at the Edge of the World
VILA: The air's as fresh as ever. Do you know what that means?
KERRIL: We're going to die of exhaustion.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/306/452 B7B2

Archival Inference for Eccentric Stellar-Mass Binary Black Holes in Space-Based Gravitational Wave Observations
Han Wang, Michael J. Williams, Ian Harry, Yi-Ming Hu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07174

Archival Inference for Eccentric Stellar-Mass Binary Black Holes in Space-Based Gravitational Wave Observations
Space-based gravitational-wave observatories will detect the early inspiral of stellar-mass binary black holes and can track their eccentricity evolution. However, untargeted searches in the space band are computationally demanding and require relatively high detection thresholds (signal-to-noise ratio $\sim 15$). Information from ground-based detections can significantly shrink the parameter space for space-band analyses and thereby substantially reduce the detection threshold. We present a Ba…

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

Tuning pair interactions in colloidal systems using random light fields
Augustin Muster, Diego Romero Abujetas, Frank Scheffold, Luis S. Froufe-P\'erez
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06793

Tuning pair interactions in colloidal systems using random light fields
We propose a method to tune interactions between absorptionless colloidal particle pairs. This is achieved via optimization of the spectral energy density of a homogeneous random optical field. Several standard and more exotic interaction potentials, as well as their negative counterparts, are shown to be successfully tuned. We show that the effective dimensionality of the space of potential functions that can be created by this means can reach up to several tens.

It's shpooky season! 🎃🦇🕷️
You know what that means, dontcha? 🧐
Yep, evil spirits 👻 are haunting you in the evening.
Let me to lure you into spending your precious life on #firmware hackery instead. 👩‍💻✨💾
That will keep you from turning into zombies. 🧟
Now be a good fella and join the @…

I think this may be the thing that truly kills the last embers of any passion I had for tech. I knew it was coming when I coined WYSIAYG (what you see is ALL you get) and here it is, only 40 some years later, and while services halting inexplicably is is a fact of computing, WYSIAYG means the software won't even try to explain, intelligent logging and troubleshooting wasn't in the Business Requirements because we all know software only ever works perfectly. If you really must know, use gdb.
It's like the old joke, spouse buys a parrot, leaves it as a surprise, arrives home to find it cooked for dinner; how could you, it spoke 12 languages! then it should have said something.

There have to be consequences. Would-be quislings need to start having vivid pictures of what’s going to happen to them •personally• if they collaborate with fascists. I’d much prefer those consequences not be violent; in fact, harsh consequences now are the very thing that •avoid• violence. Professional and personal ruin will suffice. That means •we• have to make it stick.