Tootfinder

Lovely 10 Year commemorative enamel pin from this year's IMIRT AGM.
I got to design this logo years ago, so I was thrilled when IMIRT reached out to me to update the logo. My favourite bit was switching out the D20 for a D10 for this commemoration (2015-2025).

My inherited crystal box has quite a variety of odd and old ones. I must have a play with that big module which I assume is an ovened module.
#retro #electronics

Zu den Mandelkeksen Eight-immortals-Tee

This seems about right. Taking smaller family farms out of the plan but retaining the tax above inheritance of 2.5M.
Government waters down farm inheritance tax plan - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8e9n3y28g1o

Government waters down farm inheritance tax plan
The government has now said it will lift the intended threshold from £1m to £2.5m.

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

Lightning AI merges with data center operator Voltage Park to create an "AI cloud" with a $2.5B valuation, managing 35,000 Nvidia GPUs across six data centers (Iain Martin/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/20

AI Startup Merges With A Billionaire-Backed Data Center Operator In $2.5 Billion Deal
The startup behind open source tool PyTorch Lightning has merged with compute provider Voltage Park to create a “full stack AI cloud” to serve corporates and startups like Cursor.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #BBC6Music's #SteveLamacq
Inwards:
🎵 Fishin
#Inwards
https://inwards.bandcamp.com/track/fishin
https://open.spotify.com/track/7eXSX587GbNtBDPJrkuTfi

Fast and length-independnt transport time supported by topological edge states in finite-size Su-Schieffer-Heeger chains
Yu-Han Chang, Nadia Daniela Rivera Torres, Santiago Figueroa Manrique, Raul A. Robles Robles, Vanna Chrismas Silalahi, Cen-Shawn Wu, Gang Wang, Giulia Marcucci, Laura Pilozzi, Claudio Conti, Ray-Kuang Lee, Watson Kuo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19237 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19237 https://arxiv.org/html/2511.19237
arXiv:2511.19237v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: In order to transport information with topological protection, we explore experimentally the fast transport time using edge states in one-dimensional Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) chains. The transport time is investigated in both one- and two-dimensional models with topological non-trivial band structures. The fast transport is inherited with the wavefunction localization, giving a stronger effective coupling strength between the mode and the measurement leads. Also the transport time in one-dimension is independent of the system size. To verify the asertion, we implement a chain of split-ring resonators and their complementary ones with controllable hopping strengths. By performing the measurements on the group delay of non-trivially topological edge states with pulse excitations, the transport time between two edge states is directly observed with the chain length up to $20$. Along the route to harness topology to protect optical information, our experimental demonstrations provide a crucial guideline for utilizing photonic topological devices.
toXiv_bot_toot

#AllBillionairesAreEvil #YesEvenThatOneYouBootlick #WealthTaxNow

Listen Labs, whose AI tools help Microsoft and others run customer research and interviews, raised a $69M Series B led by Ribbit Capital at a $500M valuation (Iain Martin/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/20

This $500 Million AI Startup Runs Customer Interviews For Microsoft And Sweetgreen
The San Francisco-based company, which has run more than 1 million customer interviews with its automated AI tools to help major companies figure out what their users want, has now raised $69 million.