update: guy on the street just asked "is that true" and "isn't that the golden ratio" somehow it ended up with me saying "ah no that's a fibonacci number thing, pineapples are lucas numbers" and ended with "huh you really know your stuff about this" and me pointing "yeah, i got the t-shirt"

my thoughts on that fireside chat between Jay Bhattacharya and Emily Oster deevybee.blogspot.com/2026/04/that... #NASEM #NIH #CDC #replication #innovation #COVID

Next week, 5/2 at 6:00pm EDT, @politicsprose.bsky.social welcomes Roland Betancourt, author of Disneyland and the Rise of Automation! He'll discuss the engineering marvels behind one of America’s most innovative and beloved entertainment experiences. This is a free, in-person event: buff.ly/tpUew4d

Listening to National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics workshop on research integrity. Will try to create a thread, but will use hashtag #IntegrityNASEM in case the thread breaks. First: Uri Simonsohn from Wharton Credibility Lab on data provenance.

yiiiikes

#JMM2026 Invited Addresses are on YouTube. Today's video is the AAAS-AMS Invited Address by Ismar Volic, Wellesley College: "Math goes to Washington: The Mathematics of Democracy, from Theory to Practice." Watch: https://youtu.be/hm_nBJ_xpAQ

I’m on BBC Radio’s More or Less talking about my book, Beyond Belief. I explain how Dr Spock's unsubstantiated advice to put babies to sleep on their fronts fuelled a rise in infant deaths (SIDS) A powerful cautionary tale on importance of studies to find causes. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p...

Holy smokes! I remember 10 years ago, having a front row seat when volume I was nearing completion.

What an odd thing to say

This orange tabby approves

How to make learning math fun? Frame your arithmetical tables with ornamental borders! In this 16th c. handbook of commercial arithmetic, written in Lombardy, the charts include addition, subtraction, and four different methods of multiplication. (UPenn Ms. Codex 468) 🔗: https://bit.ly/3OcBSfA

hachiya persimmons, painted by amanda almira newton, 1917

Very relevant for voters in any jurisdiction where judges are elected, too.

NEW: Will Google's AI hype man kill the BBC? I've written about Matt Brittin because the coverage of his time at Google is shockingly naive. The BBC's next DG is a corporate yes man at a rapacious AI monopoly that preys on journalism in order to destroy it. 1/ www.thenerve.news/p/matt-britt...

A 164 triangles version of the Stanford Bunny folded from a 4ft x 4ft thin aluminum sheet, following a crease pattern created by the *Origamizer* algorithm of E.Demaine & T.Tachi. Folded by an MIT group in 2011. cs.smith.edu/~jorourke/Ma... #MathSky #MathArt #Origami #Mathematics #Engineering 🧪

(printing is manufacturing and still expensive and you really need to try and get it right the first time you make 10,000 of a book; the economics is why expertise still survives, I suppose, but we gotta keep banging the saucepans for the ancient trades or they get quickly forgotten)

Happy 21st anniversary to Donald Shoup's "High Cost of Free Parking"! For those who don't have time to read all 800 pages, revisit this brief explainer Shoup wrote on the book's three bold ideas for parking reform that have since inspired a global movement transfersmagazine.org/2018/07/19/d...

What in the absolute fuck is this.

The Los Angeles Charter Review Commission included ranked choice voting in its recommendations for improving municipal elections. #RankedChoiceVoting would increase representation and eliminate the need for costly, two-round elections. 👀 @calrcv.bsky.social

Handy. chatgptiseatingtheworld.com/2026/02/25/l...

Congress rejected massive cuts to US science budgets for 2026, but much of the money still isn’t flowing to researchers. The culprit? The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is quietly slow-walking the release of funds. 🧵👇

Wisdom from today's editorial board meeting: "Not everyone has to be wrong for you to be right."

Where is the future of mathematics going in the age of AI? Join @amermathsoc.bsky.social President Ravi Vakil on the latest episode of Breaking Math to learn more about the challenges we face with @profnoahgian.bsky.social and @1autumnleaf.bsky.social youtu.be/CiyMdgyV7oM?...

Today's @nytimes.com has a moving obituary of a giant in Operations Research, Prof. Al Blumstein, who died at age 95. I wrote a post noting him coming to my talk when I spoke at CMU 10 yrs. ago annanagurney.blogspot.com/2016/04/grea... The obit quotes MIT Prof. Dick Larson. @informs.bsky.social

Fun little analysis by @jzhao.xyz estimating the short-term, direct cost of the El Paso TFR as ~$600K. log.jasongodfrey.info/questions/Th...

Packed with gems! I've adopted the psychedelic Voderberg tiling from the cover as my zoom thumbnail.

Start your week with some mathematical brainteasers from #ReachingForTheExtreme author Ian Stewart for @theguardian.com this weekend 🧩🧮

Congratulations to @ismarvolic.bsky.social, author of Making Democracy Count, who is delivering a sold-out lecture tomorrow, Feb 2 at 6:30 pm EST, as a part of Lectures on Tap! He will discuss how statistics are exploited in political contexts. Learn more about his timely work here: buff.ly/KfAjEri

This came out two weeks ago ago but I missed it: The French Mathematical Society has announced that they will not attend the ICM in Philadelphia. Other national societies should follow suit until the ICM is relocated. (Translation in alt text.) 🧮 smf.emath.fr/actualites-s...

Metro board unanimously approves Sepulveda Rail alignment for heavy rail subway from Westwood-Van-Nuys. Attendees applaud.

A right wing proposal would force public universities to gather/publish standardized test scores (SAT, GRE, etc.) for every faculty applicant across stages of a faculty search, to “restore meritocracy.” 👀 My op-ed today explains one of the many reasons this is nonsense: bad statistics. #AcademicSky

Fascinating thread!

Thanks to Mura Yakerson for helping us share the news that Ravi Vakil's The Rising Sea has been published! Her short video is a lovely introduction to Ravi and a great appetizer for her wonderful Math-Life Balance channel on youtube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUWW...

The Rising Sea by Ravi Vakil is now available worldwide! Explore a free preview of this accessible, motivated introduction to one of the most dynamic areas of mathematics (and save 30% with code PUP30): press.princeton.edu/books/paperb... #Mathematics #Algebra #ReadUP

Sit, Stay, Sleigh This week’s feature is Olive, the Other Reindeer by Vivian Walsh and J. Otto Seibold, illustrated by J. Otto Seibold, in this delightful deluxe edition published by Chronicle Books in San Francisco in 2007. —Melissa, DCLA tinyurl.com/yc7ey3st

Bladstanden A.A.Van Voorn (date c. late 1800's) From the collection of botanical wall charts at Stichting Academisch Erfgoed (no longer online)

Funny you should mention that arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/w...

If you see this, repost with your model of positive masculinity

THE FOOTBALL is in the @sciam.bsky.social best-of books list! @dodecalemma.bsky.social calls it "a fascinating mathematical and physical microhistory of soccer balls... World Cup match balls in particular." Thanks, Emma R Hasson (love your bsky handle) and SciAm! press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

An article I cowrote with Andy Schultz and David McCune providing some highlights from a research project that analyzed various voting systems. theconversation.com/ranked-choic...

Journalist challenge: Use “Machine Learning” when you mean machine learning and “LLM” when you mean LLM. Ditch “AI” as a catch-all term, it’s not useful for readers and it helps companies trying to confuse the public by obscuring the roles played by different technologies. 🧪

!!!!! variety.com/2025/film/ne...

Good morning! Day 4 of the Sandwich Guy’s trial. He is finally wearing a suit (the rest of the week’s evidence suggests he seems to prefer pullovers in cooler weather). The jury has a note for the judge.

Great to see people looking ahead to building back better @princetonupress.bsky.social

NEW: Common Crawl, the massive archiver of the web, has gotten cozy with AI companies and is providing paywalled articles for training data. They’re also lying to publishers who have asked for material to be removed. “The robots are people too,” CC’s exec director told us when we asked about this.

Day 3 of the “no more than 2” day trial of Sandwich Guy. The prosecution intends to rest; the defense hasn’t decided yet. Dispute over jury instructions continues, a few morsels (sorry) to follow.

Back for Day 2 of Sandwich Guy’s trial. In government opening statement: “This case is about the fact that you can’t go around throwing stuff at people when you’re mad.”