(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

My nerds: I'm BEYOND thrilled that my org, @qside.bsky.social, is cosponsoring this active learning event. "The Public Scholar Workshop - How to Get Started, How to Get Better." Sign up, spread the news, amplify your work. (Also... share!)

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.”

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.