Tootfinder

“Why yes, good sir, men are meant to court women for the sole purpose of producing offspring! Anything else is simply un-American!”
-- #MAGA
#USPol #US

Harvard’s business model is raking in ungodly amounts of money selling that name to the offspring of the ultra-wealthy, however deserving or undeserving, and then investing it.
(Harvard does to its credit use a portion of that money to subsidize access for the highly deserving and underprivileged. I’ve seen the “tuition paid” graph for Harvard, and it’s very roughly ~20% pay nothing and ~40% pay full freight and their family has more money than everyone you’ve every known combined.)
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Inhomogeneous branching trees with symmetric and asymmetric offspring and their genealogies
Frederik M. Andersen, Marc A. Suchard, Carsten Wiuf, Samir Bhatt
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07921

Inhomogeneous branching trees with symmetric and asymmetric offspring and their genealogies
We define symmetric and asymmetric branching trees, a class of processes particularly suited for modeling genealogies of inhomogeneous populations where individuals may reproduce throughout life. In this framework, a broad class of Crump-Mode-Jagers processes can be constructed as (a)symmetric Sevast'yanov processes, which count the branches of the tree. Analogous definitions yield reduced (a)symmetric Sevast'yanov processes, which restrict attention to branches that lead to extant progeny. We …

holy cow, painful debugging session
offspring managed to break networkmanager by editing a config file
NM died with an unhelpful error message complaining about the syntax of a [connection] line
it looked ok in vim
it looked ok from cat -v
it looked the same as the file from the source package
but diff said the [connection] lines were invisibly different!
hexdump -C revealed that the broken file started with a UTF-8 BOM
i have encouraged him to…

Musk will never get over one of his offspring turning out ok.

Multitype contact process with sterile states
Nicolas Lanchier, Max Mercer, Hyunsik Yun
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05397 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.05397…

Multitype contact process with sterile states
This paper considers a natural variant of the $d$-dimensional multitype contact process in which individuals can be fertile or sterile. Fertile individuals of type $i$ give birth to an offspring of their own type at rate $λ_i$, the offspring being fertile with probability $p_i$ and sterile with probability $1 - p_i$, whereas sterile individuals can't give birth. Offspring are sent to one of the neighbors of their parent's location and take place in the system if and only if the target site is …

🇺🇦 Auf radioeins läuft...
The Offspring:
🎵 Come out and play (Keep 'm separated)
#NowPlaying #TheOffspring
https://4thetraxx.bandcamp.com/track/the-offspring-come-out-and-play
https://open.spotify.com/track/5JJDu0Z5DKe7mR31MGksSg

The arch-enemy managed to trap the garou pack for a time, and one of his minions analyses their DNA. Turns out, all are children of former accomplices who he has killed.
Arch nemesis: ›You are their offspring, but how can that be?‹
Rebekah (Galliard): ›Let's start with the birds & the bees …‹
#rollenspiel

Random thought: humans view trees as vulnerable because they can't move out of the way of danger. But consider:
1. A single tree can produce tens of thousands of offspring.
2. Many of those seeds can remain dormant and viable for millennia.
3. Some living trees survive fit millennia themselves.
4. Trees vastly outnumber humans, maybe up to 100:1.
5. Many seeds die, but those that don't have found a niche that supplies them everything they need without having to move.
In contrast, humans:
1. Only produce a few dozen offspring at most. Barely replace their own population.
2. Cannot remain dormant once birthed.
3. Only survive for a century tops. Can only reproduce for maybe half that time.
4. So few of us. Individual humans live hundreds of feet apart, or at least dozens even in the densest cities.
5. Need to constantly burn energy moving around for their next meal. Could starve and die at any time in just a few days if they can't find water.
At a species level, the survival of humans begins to look much more perilous than the survival of many tree species.
Also I forgot to add:
6. Humans kill *each other* all the time. What the fuck humans?!? We have made ourselves our own biggest threat.
Trees do compete locally for water and sunlight and thus do kill each other, but only via circumstance, not intentionally.

Friday evening nature drama, on the ride home, a mom deer got separated from her two adolescent offspring, who were trapped between Concord Ave and the fence along Fresh Pond reservation (they ran out near the entrance to Black's Pond I think). Once I figured out what was going on I crossed Concord to quit scaring them away from the opening, and with two other people got to the other side of the young deer to scare them back towards the opening (they on sidewalk, me on Concord).