Enjoying this rational conversation about current US affairs between Ezra Klein and Yuval Levin. White House is creating many stories, but not achieving much, bite sized governance by deal making that dominates the news cycle but is overall very ineffective […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A few potentially useful tips for teachers who want to allow reasonable use of LLM chatbots in exams: https://ploum.net/2026-01-19-exam-with-chatbots.html #academia #academicchatter #university #exam #llm #ai

For some reason the Nobel committee felt it necessary to issue a statement that their prize is not transferable: https://www.nobelpeaceprize.org/press/press-releases/the-nobel-prize-and-the-laureate-are-inseparable Interesting: "In 1943, the Norwegian author […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Nicolas Lopez, b&w watercolor art. https://danielsmith.com/nicolas-lopez/ #art #watercolor #painting #blackandwhite

Tarski's semantic theory of truth is often summarised concisely as 'The sentence "Snow is white" is true if snow is white.' Due to the quotation mark removal it is called the Disquotational Principle. It is hated by teachers because it gives rise to the […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

"With 4 parameters I can fit an elephant, and with 5 I can make him all fluffy." - John von Neumann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%27s_elephant fluffy = 100 x(t) = -60*cos(t) + 30*sin(t) - 8*sin(2*t) + 10*sin(3*t) + sin(fluffy*t) y(t) = 50*sin(t) […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

I created a small package for ggplot2 called gghotelling - hotelling ellipses, robust and otherwise, bag plots and more. I would be interested in any comments. github.com/january3/ggh... #rstats

Genuary 2026 - 13: "Self portrait" Voronoi image reconstruction based on grayscale values sampled from a photo, comparing uniform random sampling and (maximin) Latin Hypercube Sampling. Illustrates how the space-filling property of LHS leads to a better […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Genuary 2026 - 12: "Boxes only" This was a tough challenge, but I think I solved it. #GENUARY #genuary2026 #genuary12

Also made a tiny tryptic on 1x2 inch chipboard panels. Getting the alignment right was annoying and I came close to breaking the nib on a pen. #penplotter

As a connoisseur of minimalistic black and white generative art I'm really enjoying the #penplotter hashtag. Can someone in that bubble recommend a good Getting-Started guide for someone looking to explore pen plotting a bit more?

Genuary 2026 - 11: "A Quine" A quine is a program that outputs its own source code. Below is an attempt to write a quine as an R plot. Here is how it works: Write whatever it says in the image into a single-quoted string variable x (that is, x <- 'y=1:nchar […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Genuary 2026 10 - "Polar coordinates" You have probably always wondered what would happen if you kept transforming 2d points to polar coordinates forever. Well, you get an iterated map (x,y) -> (sqrt(x^2+y^2), atan2(y,x)). Shown below are the (smoothly […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Many people have seen the equality 1+2+3+... = -1/12 and wonder how this can possibly make sense. It makes sense in the same way as saying "there are square root of pi many ways to shuffle minus half a card" makes sense. Both rely on taking a well defined […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

I'm not a fan of trance music, but this lyrics-annotated DJ live coding session had to be one of the coolest things I've seen in a while. "In the beginning there were 5 notes..." "Increase the duck attack to 160ms..." "We need more chaos - random detuning […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Finnish military dude discusses why US army have little chance fighting the rest of NATO in Greenland due to lack of winter gear. They're outmatched by at least a factor 10. Hardly a relief, but interesting analysis nonetheless. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8hdthsG8tks #us #nato #greenland #trump

Genuary 2026 - 9: "Crazy automaton." Modified Game of Life on a random Voronoi tesselation. A cell survives if it has exactly one neighbor, a new one gets spawned from exactly two neighbors. R code in alt text. #GENUARY #genuary2026 #genuary9 #rstats #gameoflife

Fascinating article about historical use of hard drugs as medicine https://drugabuse.com/featured/if-old-drug-ads-told-the-truth/ "Although heroin had already been invented in 1874, [...] Bayer decided to sell it as a morphine substitute between 1898 and […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

An amusing way to filter out the AI cheaters josezarazua.com/im-a-former-...

Genuary 2026 - 8: "A City. Create a generative metropolis." Based on code adapted from https://github.com/paulvanderlaken/generative-art. R code in alt text. #GENUARY #genuary2026 #genuary8 #rstats

[not funny] When I was a meteorology student I used to have fun with mislabeling the climate conditions of geographic regions. I would randomly shout out "Humid Sahara! Hot Antarctica! Hahaha!" All day long. But over time it became obsessive and quite an annoying habit for the people around me […]

Genuary 2026: 06 - "Lights on/off" In base R. I treated this as an exercise in projective geometry. Given light source and window corner coordinates, first calculate the intersections of the ray from source through the window corners with the z=0 plane to […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

This is a solid attempt at demystifying quantum physics: https://nchagnet.pages.dev/blog/physics-concepts-explained/quantum-mechanics-is-not-that-hard/ "Instead of describing the state of a system as a point in phase space defined by positions and momenta […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Genuary 2026: 5 - "Write Genuary. Avoid using a font." R + ggplot2. First time using grid.locator with ggplot2 and peek for screen recording as gif. Smoothing splines and mapping of diff(y) to linewidth for calligraphy effect. R code in alt text. Enjoy! #GENUARY #genuary2026 #genuary5 #rstats

#Rstats slides back into the top 10 programming languages. R is far from dead. www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

RE: https://mastodon.social/@safest_integer/115709568497175895 Genuary 2026 - 4: Lowres. #GENUARY #genuary2026 #genuary4

Happy Perihelion everyone! Like in recent years I celebrated this orbital holiday with a sea swim in Exmouth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apsis#Perihelion_and_aphelion #perihelion #physics #holiday

Genuary 2026 - 3: "Fibonacci Forever". Using the Fibonacci angle, (aka Golden Angle pi * (3 - sqrt(5)) rad), seen in plant growth eg in sunflowers and pinecones. Each seed grows a Fibonacci angle away from the previous one, leading to efficient packing. R […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Genuary 2026 - 2: "Twelve principles of animation". (R code in alt text) #GENUARY #genuary2026 #genuary2 #rstats

Some people believe in 2026 Doomsday is Saturday. But actually this is a special year where every day is a Doomsday. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_rule #doomsday #calendar #mathematics

"One color, one shape" (R code in alt text) #GENUARY #genuary1

This seems like a pretty good representation of the entire history of mankind. I know everything seems fucked up all of the time but let's keep going anyway, ok? via https://anticapitalist.party/@Looping/115816663793201966 @Looping #happynewyear #YesFuture #streetart #2026

I didn't know snow skateboarding was a thing. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kJjL010FWJc #snow #skateboarding #youtube #video

Barefoot runners: The transition from windows/macos to linux is like going from heavily padded running shoes to minimal footwear. A bit painful at first, it even slows you down, but ultimately liberating and more natural, making you stronger and more resilient. As a bonus you become part of a […]

Never heard of the lem editor before. I like the "can be extended in lisp while it runs" bit. https://lem-project.github.io/ #lem #vim #editor #linux

I'm blown away by how effortlessly visual artists can create complex high res animations in real time with tools like TiXL. https://www.tixl.app At the same time I struggle to produce "science based" animations of physical systems even at a fraction of their […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

In the age of enshittification Robert Pirsig becomes mandatory reading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_Maintenance #enshittification #Pirsig #zen #books #bookstodon

Extraordinary close-up of spider thread wins Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition 2025 | Discover Wildlife #photography https://www.discoverwildlife.com/photography/royal-society-publishing-photography-competition-2025-winners

RE: https://thecanadian.social/@MostlyHarmless/115793995162647692 The kids will groan their asses off when they hear that one.

I'm spending the holidays catching up on some music listening. I've been re/discovering Linkin Park over the last few months. Knowing about Benningtons death I thought pre-2017 that was all there is. I was vaguely aware of their 2024 reboot but never […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Maybe the default settings are too high. https://www.raptitude.com/2025/12/maybe-the-default-settings-are-too-high/

Lava-Lava! What's up Teddy Bear? https://youtube.com/watch?v=1-3lwhFezDE&si=UITnDxQbdRzx2Tf_ #christmas #youtube #video

#christmas #physics #newton

This is problem with #academia and organisations and institutions more generally. Everything is performative, appearance above everything else. "Looking good" is the main target, if a bit of value is created along the way that's great, too.

Korean Michelin chef with a heavy Italian accent shows how he cooks his instant Ramen. Love it. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WW62RWXMlTc #ramen #cooking #youtube #video

Free e-book "Foundations of machine learning" https://cs.nyu.edu/~mohri/mlbook/ #machinelearning #mathematics #computerscience #books

Linus Torvalds deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for maintaining an open global project that benefits all of humanity like no other, and building critical free infrastructure for large scale peaceful collaboration. This point has already been argued in 2009 and remains true in 2025 […]

More awesome insect portraits https://www.wired.com/2014/09/these-close-up-shots-of-tropical-bugs-are-beautifully-frightening/ #nature #insects #photography #photo #portrait

Jimmy Carr is the new Jordan Peterson, with christianity replaced by comedy and "metaphorical substructure clean your room" replaced by "fuck off, mate". #comedy #jimmycarr #jordanpeterson

My arxiv submission has been "on hold" for over 2 weeks now. I can live with abuse from journal reviewers. But rejection by a preprint server feels like a clear message to reconsider my career choice... #academicchatter #arxiv