this could be the subject of a dissertation

Qui a encore joué avec le générateur de titres aléatoires ?

And for the rest of his life, Ernie told his friends that he had talked with God.

Bonjourrrr

Ils ne sont pas tendres avec les historiens, les historiens. 😅

One significant step toward equality between men and women will be when husbands no longer to call their wife (who is an ASTRONAUT IN SPACE) in order to find something in their house. 😆

Having decided to cross the Rubicon, “famed military genius Julius Caesar got lost trying to find a 50 mile long river only about 150 miles away from Rome when he tried to cut cross-country instead of over the roads.” acoup.blog/2022/08/12/c... 🤣

Par ailleurs, il n'y a que dans les expériences de pensée philosophiques qu'il y a exactement 2 solutions entre lesquelles choisir. Généralement, la bonne réponse entre 2 choix merdiques, c'est «le troisième, qu'on faisait semblant de ne pas voir».

Absolutely heartbreaking. So many mathematicians I know studied there, men AND women. Maryam Mirzakhani studied there. If this isn't enough to cancel/relocate from the US the International Congress of Mathematicians #ICM2026, nothing will be.

Just 60h ago, the second author (from Sharif U.) of this very nice paper ⬇️ — about which he and I had had an interesting discussion on MO mathoverflow.net/a/479501/17064 — wrote to tell me it had been published. I hope he's well! I can't imagine what it is to do math in those circumstances. 😰

The rabbit-duck illusion explained at last.

Goose on the moose!

Dans mon expérience à Paris, pompiers et SAMU font un usage raisonné du deux-ton, tandis que la police en profite visiblement à tout propos. Impossible de juger un cas précis, mais dans l'ensemble c'est évident qu'il y a énormément d'abus.

Faites un test ludique pour mettre les gens dans des cases, les gauchistes se précipiteront.

Maybe after zero-knowledge proofs we need to invent zero-laugh jokes, where someone does not tell the punchline but merely proves that they know a funny one, thereby avoiding the side effect of the audience laughing.

Chaque fois que je visite un endroit qui se proclame fièrement « le berceau de la civilisation », je repense à cette case d'Astérix et les goths : « Passmoilcric, habile politicien, se proclame aussitôt chef suprême des Goths. Les autres chefs suprêmes rient... »

the way this ends in a cartoon is Iran setting up a Hormuz tollbooth and getting the US to withdraw by offering Trump personally a cut

Right. Or as I often like to people who speak of terraforming other planets: if we get to a technological stage where terraforming Mars is even remotely feasible, maybe we'll start with the considerably easier task of reterraforming Earth so we don't need to go to Mars.

Judas Iscariot was paid 30 pieces of silver for turning Jesus Christ in to the Roman authorities. But he made nearly 10 times that amount by placing a Polymarket bet accurately predicting the day of Christ’s death.

Happy Easter.

@tah-sci.com Just a sanity check since, unlike me who's faking it, you actually know the subject: do you agree with my idea that epidemic models can be a reasonable way to model the dynamics of “signing a petition”?

(J'ai signé.) Je me dis que le nombre de signataires d'une pétition dans le temps doit être une assez bonne application du modèle épidémiologique SIR, y compris dans ses variantes avec susceptibilité hétérogène, que j'ai appris il y a qqs années. www.madore.org/~david/weblo...

The problem with the public's use of scientific studies is that people (laypeople, journalists, politicians, sometimes even other scientists) don't turn to studies to try to decide what's true or not: they turn to papers to reënforce their prior beliefs and have sth they can throw in an argument.

Young man

For an April fool's joke, this “Higher multipoles of the cow” paper is actually remarkably well written and interesting! It took some dedication to do the computations.

Going beyond the spherical cow approximation. The paper we all needed. 🎢 ⚛️ 🧪 ♾️ 🐄

Fun fact: in the first instances of spaces used to separate words in written text, because the concept was so new, so as to not disturb readers who might think a letter was missing, they wrote “THIS SPACE BETWEEN WORDS IS DELIBERATELY LEFT BLANK”. 🙃

It never ceases to baffle me how long a time it took, after the invention of writing, for people to invent punctuation (separating sentences) and even the concept of separating units of meaning (“words”) in written text for ease of reading. …

This is a definite case of something funny but also an important example of how probabilistic reasoning works: do the maths and often the effect of known exposures on the pre-test probability for anything hard to distinguish like skin marks can dwarf other diagnostic refinements.

A beautiful and fun animated short movie by Alan Becker, ‘Animation vs. Geometry’: www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEJW...

Also, where do we need to apply to create a whole new category of gatherings? Say I want to organize a “convivium”, a “symposiac”, a “salon” or an “ivory tower” on a subject: is a special authorization needed to define a type? Is there a Grand Academic Council on authorizing gathering types? 🤔

I will admit that I have no idea of the difference between a seminar, workshop, working group, meeting, conference, congress, symposium, colloquium, convention, round table, forum, and other forms of academic gatherings. I treat them all as synonyms. 🙈

In the case of my last preprint, the artwork to be added is without any doubt ‘The Beguiling of Merlin’ by Edward Burne-Jones. As the title says, this is pretty much exactly what the paper is about!

This is one of the most bizarre math facts that I like to tell. (And I admit that telling this story does give me some sympathy for the ultrafinitists who are rolling their eyes and thinking “this is not mathematics! this is theology!”.)

One way I like to present things is this: suppose you want to write a “fairly short” computer program whose goal is to run for as long as possible and then stop. (Equivalently, compute and return some ginormous number.) How would you do it? (Think about it!) 🧵⤵️ •1/8

Ça me semble aussi absurde de douter que les personnes trans existent depuis des millénaires et dans toutes les cultures que de douter que les gauchers existent depuis des millénaires et dans toutes les cultures. Si on ne les voyait pas, c'est juste qu'on les cachait ou les contrariait — ou pire.

Il est vrai que de 1610 à 1792 la France a eu quatre chefs d'État successifs avec le même prénom et la même, euh, absence de nom de famille, ce qu'on peut aussi considérer comme une coïncidence dingue. 🙃

Pour ma part, je suis juste terriblement déçu que le successeur de Khomeini et Khamenei n'ait pas été quelqu'un appelé Khumeni.

This talk by Andrej Bauer was generally interesting, but I particularly enjoyed the questions at the end when (somewhat unrelatedly to the topic if the talk) people started asking him “what's your favorite topos for computability?”: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lwwf...

🧵🔽 An illustration of how to use ffmpeg, pretty much alone, to set up a simple video chat. The result itself isn't very interesting, but the process is, because it shows the power and flexibility of ffmpeg. Instructive! (The thread author is an ffmpeg dev.)

An excellent exercise in linear algebra: if M is a finitely presented module over a ring R (i.e., there is a linear surjection R^m → M whose kernel is finitely generated) and R^n → M is an unrelated linear surjection, its its kernel always finitely generated? mathoverflow.net/q/1788/17064

On attire mon attention sur le fait que selon les articles L211-1, L211-4 et L212-1 du Code du patrimoine français, les mails pro échangés par les fonctionnaires et agents publics sont des archives publiques, et à ce titre, inaliénables et imprescriptibles. … www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/sectio...

Il n’a pas été le seul, du reste. Un peu plus tard, Mathieu Pigasse a lui aussi réagi. D’abord en liminaire en dénonçant des questions à charge :

Interesting thread about how the Epstein files gave us some (precious but not at all unexpected) insight into how the world of antique art sales functions: 🧵🔽

L’objectif est maintenant de 500 000 signatures pour obtenir un débat à l’Assemblée nationale et mettre la pression avant le vote le 16 avril prochain. petitions.assemblee-nationale.fr/initiatives/...

While his parents beamed, little Tommy Lundquist, future developer, surveyed the view from his newly constructed treehouse.

I admit it's only with the Artemis mission that I realized how odd it was that the program that did successfully land humans on the moon was called “Apollo”. Shouldn't have Artemis headed for the sun, then?

This articulates incredibly clearly some of the reasons I'm scared of widespread LLM usage in my corner of academia.