This is a scorching article on the absolute state of The New York Times, and much of the rest of the media. Not just the billionaire media, note, but also the billionaire-*compliant* media, which both-sides every issue with purchased junktank talking points. lithub.com/maybe-dont-t...

This week included handling issues from the 10⁻¹¹s to 10⁸s timescales. (Debugging custom electronics on one end, and prepping for the new EU Cyber Resilience Act on the other.) I'm tempted to rewrite my resume sorted by time frame now.

TFW you have a bit of free time so dust off a hobby project, only to remember it’s actually three hobby projects in a trench coat.

For the teachers: A friend who teaches a technology ethics class at the local university wrote an essay on why AI can be problematic for students. Patrick writes: "TEACHERS: If you're looking for a reading to assign, to help explain why you're banning AI from your classroom, here ya go. "There […]

A guilty pleasure, picking up textbooks on topics I’ve already studied. First time through is the hard one. Though, book 5 looks new…

Test renderings from an algorithm I wrote to generate mosaics. It came from being unhappy seeing image mosaics that are just pixelations - real roman mosaics used the Opus Vermiculatum style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_vermiculatum , tiling along edges […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

Tom Lehrer has passed. At least we can take comfort that, at age 97, he died in one of his primes.

This week in things I find myself saying often: We can always make it complicated later.

Could quantum mechanics have been invented earlier? Counterfactual questions like this aren't meant to be taken literally, but I think it's interesting anyway. Once upon a time it was noticed that light rays follow the shortest path - for some definition of shortest [1]. This generated interest […]

Big whirls have little whirls that feed on their velocity, And little whirls have lesser whirls and so on to viscosity —Lewis F. Richardson, 1922

Fermilab is announcing final results from the muon g-2 experiment today! I'm heading out the door, but the results will be at 10am CT. Quoting myself from April 7th, 2021: Fermilab shared first results from their "g-2" experiment showing the Standard Model of physics is even more incomplete […]

Ionosphere Declines Offer Of Horse www.nytimes.com/2025/05/27/s...

I really enjoyed the Ruth Asawa exhibition at SFMOMA. Sone of these structures remind me a lot of minimal surfaces.

"Use the most natural notation available to solve a problem." -- Peter Norvig Pictured is a dance in Beauchamp-Feuillet notation. It shows the connection between a dancer's motion and the music. "Like all forms of writing, choreography — literally the […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

Despite it being common in my industry, the first time I’ve ever put a sticker on a laptop was one of these lovelies. Thanks for adding a bit of art to my life @gwenbeads ! https://mathstodon.xyz/@gwenbeads/114349109165802626

Ed Smylie, Who Saved the Apollo 13 Crew With Duct Tape, Dies at 95 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/16/science/space/ed-smylie-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.H08.Acj9.QLRi089Gk0tP&smid=url-share

Using data from ALMA and advanced simulations, a research team led by Santiago Orcajo from the Instituto de Astrofísica de La Plata in Argentina (CONICET and Universidad Nacional de La Plata) has presented a new model that traces the evolution of […] [Original post on astrodon.social]

Solar panels cleaning solar panels

[uspol] God, the CPB responding to Trump's EO trying to end their funding with "I'm sorry, who are you again?" is really sending me. This is the energy I want in the room.

"My job is to carve off a sliver of the ineffable, and to eff it." This is quick, humorous, and gave me some things to think about in my own writing. (Apologies if this has made the rounds already. I'm still 2000+ posts behind on this social network, lolsob.) […]

Foreign Friends with Travel Plans to the U.S. for Conventions: A bit back I said you should maybe reconsider those plans. I would like to amend my prior statement. Cancel them. Cancel them now. We cannot keep you safe from our own government. Take your holiday in Spain or something.

Many of the world’s largest shipping nations decided today to impose a minimum fee of $100 for every ton of greenhouse gases emitted by ships above certain thresholds, in what is effectively the first global tax on greenhouse gas emissions. Which goes to show that maybe it's better when the USA […]

100 years ago, Cecilia Payne discovered what the stars are made of It might seem obvious today, but it was just 100 years ago that we discovered that the Sun, and all stars, are made of hydrogen and helium. We should thank Cecilia Payne for that. bigthink.com/starts-with-... #space #science #stars

Pre-bunking is where it’s at. https://bsky.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:kobfj6rmspbkpzydlklgy7yu/post/3ljnieqqcys2x

A team of archivists has recreated the pre-Trump CDC website as a live, easy-to-navigate website that should be indexed by Google. The team is hosting it in Europe. Cool project that is sadly necessary: https://www.404media.co/archivists-recreate-pre-trump-cdc-website-are-hosting-it-in-europe/

Wrote up something about Techdirt's recent coverage, and why (whether we like it or not) we need to be a "democracy blog" now, rather than just a "tech" blog (not that we've ever been just a tech blog). This story is *the* story and it impacts everything else. www.techdirt.com/2025/03/04/w...

From the section on Teichmuller space: It does not of necessity follow that, if the work delights you with its grace, the one who wrought it is worthy of your esteem. -- Plutarch, The Parallel Lives https://sites.math.washington.edu/~jarod/moduli.pdf

I really enjoyed this explainer on why making a calculator app do the right thing is way harder than you might expect. Recommended for both the software engineers and mathematicians. https://chadnauseam.com/coding/random/calculator-app The paper is "Towards an API for the Real Numbers" by […]

Too bad it has to be super cold for it to be this pretty

[USpol] This isn't the social network where I normally post this sort of thing, but given we're in the middle of a coup at the moment, I'll make an exception. Our elected officials pay little attention to social media posts. They pay more attention to phone calls. https://5calls.org/ […]

It's almost silly how nice command line tools have gotten. Today I'm glad for the `uv` Python project manager. If you're not already using Conda, uv is worth a look managing Python and packages. 'cuz life is always nicer when code works repeatably. Of […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

And here's an important thing to remember in the coming weeks and months: Every cent of taxpayer money spent by county, state, and federal governments on #LAFires is a fossil fuel industry subsidy. Every disaster and recovery dollar is paying an externalised cost of toxic fossil fuel production.

Perhaps you are searching for a gift for someone who is a connoisseur of the finest dongles and adapters, and you’re unsure of what to get them? Look no further than the HDMI <> Garden Hose adapter. Video sourced from :youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmYefLAw51E #humor

"Each task consumed approximately 1,785 kWh of energy—about the same amount of electricity an average U.S. household uses in two months" This is one per-task estimate from Salesforce's head of sustainability -->> www.linkedin.com/posts/bgamaz...

[ComSci] It's not often I get to use an actual, y'know, 𝘢𝘭𝘨𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘮 at work. I recently got to update my ComSci education on compression of sequences of small integers. Entropy coding, via Asymmetric Numeral Systems appears to be a current winner, generalizing arithmetic coding. I've […]

At my latitude, tomorrow will have one extra second of daylight. A small promise of larger things to come. Happy Solstice y’all

Oh hey, the new Genuary prompts are up! Maybe I’ll do a few of these. https://genuary.art/prompts

... would a humungous space telescope on the far side of the moon have a clear enough view and be far enough out that we could better resolve the atmospheres of exoplanets? I know astronomers must get bored with laypersons being so focused on "earth like" exoplanets ... there is a lot of […]

I’m embarrassed to admit how long I stared at this to piece it together. In my defense, Euclidean geometry is a comforting lie we tell schoolchildren, to avoid discussing other, more Lovecraftian horrors. Anyway, a cute visual set of constraints leading to […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

"it's easy to propose a solution if you only understand 10% of the problem" describes 80% of the innovation of the last decade https://mastodon.social/@tef/113641002565056663

Nadine’s Evening of Adventure <3 David Zinn’s Magical Chalk Art: https://streetartutopia.com/2024/12/03/chalk-street-art-david-zinn/

More evidence space is jiggly! Pulsars are incredibly precise time keepers. They’re as heavy as stars and spinning, so changing their rotation rate isn’t something that happens quickly, unless something cosmic intervenes. If they do change their periods […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

Decided now was the right time to get an iPad Air M2. The 11” size is perfect for reading PDFs and zooms are instantaneous. I didn’t expect to want to write on it, but I’m finding taking notes and doing mathematics on it to be surprisingly pleasant. Mostly because of the instant response. Now […]

Dominion Power claims that Virginians’ power usage keeps climbing, so they need to build new power plants that we’ll all pay for with rate hikes. Forced to release internal records, it turns out that the only increase is coming from building data centers. Why should Virginians subsidize Amazon […]

Misread "composable" as "compostable" in a programming context, and now I want to throw all my functions in a pile and turn them over with a pitchfork once in a while.