Time for a 20th anniversary viewing of The Christmas Invasion.

The whole pastry:

Made salmon coulibiac for Christmas dinner! (Merry Christmas!)

Gravlax as part of Christmas dinner.

Happy first day of Christmas! Eleven more days to go, and THEN you can sing “We Three Kings”.

Shout-out to @desmos.com: I’ve been working for several days on approximating a complicated integral, and the main reason I’ve made any progress is through insights gained from experimenting with graphs. Desmos is handling improper integrals and finicky derivatives with remarkable precision.

Van Gogh’s lines swirl, twist, and double back—movement made visible, as if time itself refused to stand still.

Both my physical and mental health are rough right now. Most days, the pain is overwhelming. If you'd like to do something for me? I have a request. Do something kind for someone else. Invite an extra person to holiday dinner. Donate to mutual aid. Help your sister pack. Anything for anybody.

Most underrated video game villain.

(Yes, I live in Los Angeles where it has been sunny and 80 for weeks and I’m STILL feeling this)

I am attributing our existential exhaustion today to the solstice. Tomorrow the light starts coming back.

This is the most Sunday afternoon of Sunday afternoons I have experienced in a while.

A minimalist world map

Life isn’t simple like math where every problem has an answer; it’s more like math, where problems have many answers or no possible answer at all!

D'oh! I'm 20 minutes late to wish you a happy solstice! At 10:03 Eastern US time the Sun reached its most southern point on the sky, and will slowly begin to crawl farther north every day. This means today has the least amount of daytime of the year, and nights get shorter from here on out!

I’d vote for that platform.

Ok but I frequently—and unintentionally—refer to the dishwasher as a washing machine, with the unfortunate side effect that I sometimes call the washing machine a dishwasher.

The whole point of being an academic is that you need to be willing to spend three days creating a 700-word footnote that you will later delete. And you need to LIKE IT.

Teachers are being forced to teach kids how to write with LLMs in schools. Ya'll... IT IS IN THE SCHOOLS. We are 5 years out from having an entire new crop of writers in the field who have never written WITHOUT LLMs. No one hates this more than me. But these are the cold fucking equations.

HEY AUTHORS: It's the last weekend before Christmas and/or the end of Hanukkah, so people are going to be looking for last minute holiday gifts, which books are perfect for, so use this thread to tell everyone here at Bluesky about your book so they can go find it at their local bookseller. GO!

Ok, I’ve learned a lot about Hermite interpolation since last night, and as I expected the error bound here typically depends on the 4th derivative of f(x). However, it turns out that my function f(x) is *not* smooth, and f''(x) has a logarithmic asymptote at one endpoint. So what else can I try?

The issue isn't "are we capable of talking to each other." It's "are we capable of respecting each other."

Suppose f(x) is a smooth function, and g(x) is the unique cubic function such that g(a)=f(a), g(b)=f(b), g'(a)=f'(a), and g'(b)=f'(b). What does the difference between the integrals of f(x) and g(x) on [a,b] depend on? (This seems like a variant of Simpson’s rule, but a nontrivial one.)

And… nope. Not quite there. The approximation overestimates too much. I’ve got a good picture to work with, though.

If you like the Numberblocks, or if you’ve never seen them before, their rendition of the 12 Days of Christmas is delightful. And it shows the tetrahedral numbers! youtu.be/mvPfSl5hG3s

Soooo why is a president allowed to do these kinds of things? What will it take to protect agencies from being dismantled by a whim?

Have convinced myself before going to bed that this method of approximation for the integral I’ve been working on will give the result we need. Hopefully can get the details done tomorrow.

Ok but the derivative of x*dilog(1/(1+x)) turns out to be quite nice actually. (I have abandoned evaluating the integral and am now attempting to approximate it.)

Apples xkcd.com/3180/

Didn’t think I was going to be defeated by this integral, but I might be.

There was a trend going around recently to share lines of poetry that live rent-free in your head. It’s these. I think about these lines all the time.

This is my favorite post I’ve seen on Tumblr recently.

Here is the solution to putting AI in everything: realize that the initialism AI can stand for myriad phrases.

I got an insight recently from a conversation with a friend who works in animation. He said that AI makes stuff that looks good in boardrooms, but it can’t do the things that actually create a quality product (details!). I’ll be evaluating all future announcements about AI with this in mind.

Me: Ok, time to read a little escapist sci-fi now that my hold has come in from the library. The first page of Asimov’s “The Gods Themselves:

Brown’s student newspaper is posting updates about the shooting at its campus. www.browndailyherald.com/article/2025...

In response to recent posts about fabricated citations, someone was telling me how awesome Gemini is, and implied that because it's Google there's some kind of secondary checking of sources happening. Anyway I asked for recent books about AI published by academic presses. This was quite a ride. 🧵

Kiddo is learning the Pythagorean theorem so I finally have the pleasure of introducing him to the hippopotenuse

Oh no. No, no, no, no. I’ll read your paper, Richard, because I don’t know much about Mostow rigidity. But we’re not doing this. Use ChatGPT if you feel you must. But don’t anthropomorphize the damn thing.

To review: Sincerely : formal Best : neutral All the best : positive All the very best : can we be friends??? Regards : from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee

One of the many reasons AI can't produce good writing is it can't hate its own writing. It can't think to itself "Maybe I'm illiterate" during the writing process. And that's essential

“Don’t miss our seminar on AI and … !” I am definitely going to miss that.

*kicks down the door like Big Bird in that one gif* VISIT YOUR LIBRARY WE'VE GOT DVDS WE'VE GOT CDS WE'VE GOT BOOKS ON CD WE'VE GOT THAT TONIES THING FOR YOUR KID YOUR TAXPAYER DOLLARS AT WORK

it's actually surprising to me that exponentiation is continuous as a function of the exponent on the rationals at all, let alone that it extends to the reals continuously. although i suppose if you start talking about such things with power series instead of dedekind cuts it wouldn't be so odd

5 dimensions being high-dimensional, with intuitions from 1 and 2 dimensional spaces utterly failing, is a pretty good rule of thumb.

Well that escalated quickly. (Figure from “A survey of the theory of hypercube graphs” by Harary, Hayes, and Wu)

#ObjectivityTheater #NotEveryNumberRepresentsQuantitativeMeasurement #GradingForGrowth

"To receive results as ten-second videos that present a sponsored product as the only possible answer to your question."

I had not read this review. This is good theology.