After Careful Thought, I Have Decided That Our Ship Actually Is Being Attacked by the Kraken For a long time I resisted the idea that the multiple tentacles tearing at the thin wooden planks of our vessel represented some kind of 'sea monster' threat. But when the facts change, I change my mind.

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.”

On this, National Sandwich Day, keep up with voir dire for DC sandwich guy with @ryanjreilly.com

And now we breathe

Two books I've been waiting for!

Amazon is helping fund a $300 million build of a ballroom for the White House. Independent bookstores are donating to food banks and organizations that help with food insecurity. They are not the same.

Eagerly awaiting my Prop 50 flyer from the Christmas Adventurers.

"Big Tent" Algebraic Geometry. Your ring isn't Noetherian? This book still cares about you.

In the early days of quantum chemistry, before we had computers to calculate the shapes of electron orbitals, one man invented a mechanical machine that simulated their shapes. My latest column for @chemistryworld.com www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/the-...

Since it resonated with the audience, I’ll recap my main argument against AGI here. ‘General intelligence’ is like phlogiston, or the aether. It’s an outmoded scientific concept that does not refer to anything real. Any explanatory work it did can be done better by a richer scientific frame. 1/3

Except that. That's a bad lifeboat.

The Rising Sea around the world, part 3: here in Los Angeles -- with a normal-sized cat for scale.

The Rising Sea around the world, part 2: here on display -- with other excellent titles -- at the @mathmoves.bsky.social library.

The Rising Sea around the world: here on display at the Clay Math(s) Institute annual meeting in Oxford UK (official publication date is 21 October).

“When you get a suspicious book, “you look it up to see what else the [author] has written. And you see there's 30 things, and none of them have any reviews, and they were all written in the last two years,” DeMeester-Lane says.”

I haven't read the whole list(!), but saw some excellent math books for unbelievably friendly prices...

This is what happens when Wittgenstein edits your math textbook. #science #philosophysky #math #mathematics #academia #philsky

Walking the Carcassonne ramparts as Every Day Is Like Sunday floats up from the town. Love that, musically, it's always the 80s in Europe.

Brilliant piece

Celebrate the communication medium that's inherently local!

Found around the house

A personal highlight from the Electric Dreams show at the @tatemodern was Mary Martin's Permutation of Six, 1966 This work repeats and arranges six shapes using generative number patterns.

Inspired by Fred Rogers, @nature.com asked readers to help us 'find the helpers' amid the crisis in American science. What emerged were inspiring stories of researchers, legal experts, data hounds and government scientists who are fighting the dismantling of the US research enterprise. 🧪🧵1/6

Been going through the $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement. First, the settlement is for $3,000 per work for 500,000 works. Despite what this NYTimes article states, it is not for 500,000 authors. @nmamatas.bsky.social pointed this out and I confirmed it. 1/ www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/t...

Billionaire Larry Ellison helped land top QB Bryce Underwood for Michigan, his wife’s alma mater. Now he’s investing hundreds of millions at Oxford University — and tapped former UM president Santa Ono to lead an institute there. www.wsj.com/business/lar...

"A recurring flaw in AI alarmism is that it treats intelligence as a property of individual minds, rather than recognizing that this capacity is distributed across our civilization and culture" (Maciej Cegłowski, quoted by Becker p112). He calls out the lone genius myth prevalent in US, too.

My calculus teacher would write out a proof on the board, look at us, and ask "Do you believe it?" When we gaped at him in uncomprehending horror, he would sit right down and maybe cry a little. He was very, very old, and Italian. He would say "You are horrible people," and prove it another way.

Terry Tao on Trump/Republicans' irrational disinvestment in science: "in our current environment, when even the most benign activities are subject to capricious disruption and political interference, the luxury of disengagement is no longer a viable option." newsletter.ofthebrave.org/p/im-an-awar...

Such a fun book to work on

I urge everyone outraged at this letter to demand that their congressional representatives vote for a ban on gerrymandering at the national level.

Celebrating the 2025 Euler Book Prize winner: @ismarvolic.bsky.social's Making Democracy Count. So much talk at #MAAthFest re gerrymandering, ranked choice voting & where we go from here. Thanks to @joinmaa.bsky.social. @princetonupress.bsky.social is honored to be a part of it. #ItAllStartsWithMath