Yesterday I gave a presentation at a nearby senior center called "AI for the confused" -- I've been inspired to do some outreach to educate less-technical people on just what AI is these days, how to use it, what to know about it. An interesting thing: one of the attendees was deaf. She had an […]

RE: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csHC_bot/115575733396796885 This looks really interesting -- how can you present code in a way that reduces cognitive load for blind and low-vision users? Of course, in the spirit of universal design, my first suspicion is that if you can reduce cognitive load […]

🧵 1/N Imagine a graphics/paint program that worked with 24-bit RGB values, and which had a color selection where you could type in the numerical values for the three channels. Now imagine that program would let you type in numbers bigger than 255, or negative values. And it wouldn't tell you […]

Just went down a rabbit hole to fix a weird bug and feel like (1) I should post about it so that others can find it (or, these days: so it can get sucked into LLM training data), and (2) so I can vent about how irritating it is. Problem: using Ptyxis, the default terminal in GNOME 49 / Ubuntu […]

Texas A&M makes it a thought crime, basically, to "advocate" race or gender ideology: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/13/us/texas-am-gender-race-ideology-rules-classroom.html?unlocked_article_code=1.1E8.DhKk.wCdC1ptnYqDO&smid=url-share There's quotes from leadership claiming that the policy […]

Infinitely More is a substack by Joel Hamkins. Lots of interesting essays on math and the philosophy of the infinite: https://www.infinitelymore.xyz/ I subscribed, and have several gift subscriptions I can give away. If you're interested, DM me and I'll give you one.

Like many college teachers, I am struggling to deal with students using AI for their writing. For me, though, it's not essays -- it's *emails*. I get lots of emails from students that are florid and effusively polite, in which the actual content and message are insulated inside a thick layer […]

I used to teach at KAIST and this is a great development from their CS folks -- provably correct translation from C to Rust. https://news.kaist.ac.kr/newsen/html/news/?mode=V&mng_no=54270 #kaist #c #rust

Back in the late 90's when I was getting into Linux, there was this big collection of seamless wallpaper tiles -- square images whose sides match up so that you can tile them on your desktop background and it looks like one seamless repeating image. The collection was "Propganda for Linux", and […]

This piece is as good as people say it is. Read it to appreciate that writing isn't just about content, but style. AI can't do this. https://lithub.com/maybe-dont-talk-to-the-new-york-times-about-zohran-mamdani/

🧵 4 / 4 ...but there's an obvious alternative explanation: humans evolved in environments with these natural curves and shapes, so perhaps it's just familiarity? In other words, we like them just because it's the sort of things we always saw when we evolved. It would be interesting to see what […]

🧵 3 / N ...information theory. It seems that these natural shapes and curves have, in some sense, very low information: you don't need much to describe them. One could also think about this in terms of Kolmogorov complexity: the code / program / abstract definition of these natural things is […]

🧵 2 / N ...L-systems. Those are known for being able to generate images that closely resemble branches, trees, and so on, even with what appear to be trivially simple rewrite rules. For example, a fractal plant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-system#Example_7:_fractal_plant with rules (X → […]

🧵 1 / N A little brain dump on a constellation of ideas that've been swirling for a few days: The Hidden Brain podcast recently had an episode on the beneficial psychological effects of being around nature. (https://www.hiddenbrain.org/podcast/how-nature-heals-us/) Even just seeing natural […]

@ddrake some details are in https://www.ramseycountymn.gov/residents/elections-voting/voters/prepare-vote/ranked-voting they need to explain what they mean by "mathematically impossible" I'll pass it on to the in-house voting theory expert 🙂 https://elkind.ee/edith/

I was excited to use ranked-choice voting / instant runoff to vote for Saint Paul mayor yesterday. I was also excited to see it go to a second round of counting -- with traditional voting, we would have a third term with Carter, but RCV yielded the city's first female, and first Hmong-American […]

Quite chuffed that I now have contributed code to zsh: https://sourceforge.net/p/zsh/code/ci/5f07437f9f814653bcb9d2abe306c7fe51443af5/

🧵 1/2 Earlier this semester, trying to look all super ambitious and so on, I volunteered to speak at the department seminar. My talk is next week, and they sent out a flyer advertising it...and suddenly it's on nearly EVERY office door near me. So now I'm all […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

I recently posted on how I discovered Sonic Pi and wanted to play with it, in part to learn Ruby and play with some variations on Steve Reich's "Clapping". I got it working! https://gist.github.com/dandrake/4d5e1f99f3c08ead419b99b3742acdbf Now I can go from there and goof around with […]

It seems weird that the big AI-related companies have billions of dollars available and that they can't give at least some of that to Wikipedia: https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-says-ai-is-causing-a-dangerous-decline-in-human-visitors/ But instead, they just seem to slosh the money around […]

@dpiponi Indeed. Wilf was great in Generatingfunctionology, though.

I've been wanting to play around with some variations on Steve Reich's "Clapping": https://youtu.be/lzkOFJMI5i8?si=35fN5rmBjx6cEmCK I discovered Sonic Pi, which basically lets you write Ruby code to generate music: https://sonic-pi.net/ Turns out I *also* have been meaning to learn some Ruby […]

Ah, the joy of being a grizzled, decades-long Linux user: I was trying to upgrade my computer to Ubuntu 25.10. The upgrader got stuck, so I killed it, tried to reboot. Got a message that I *can't* reboot because apt/dpkg is in the middle of installing packages. Try again with the suggested […]

I'm excited to live in a place with ranked-choice / instant runoff voting! City elections in Saint Paul use that system: https://www.ramseycountymn.gov/residents/elections-voting/voters/prepare-vote/ranked-voting Next month is a mayoral election. This'll be the first time I've voted this way […]

Holy cow, I’ve met one of this year's MacArthur genius grant recipients — Lauren Williams! I gave a talk at the FPSAC conference in Tianjin many years ago and after it she praised it, saying my talk was very clear and easy to follow! Also, I see that two awardees are from Madison. Proud to see […]

A while back I heard Steve Yegge talking about agentic coding and he's super, super excited about it. But I'm not convinced that agentic coding or vibe coding truly is something new. In fact, I think something else got there first. Forty years ago, in fact: spreadsheets. My little post about […]

Math hivemind: I'm looking for something on the mathematics of kumihimo braiding. The version I know of has a disk with 8 slots, and you start with 7 strings in slots. You take one of the strings, pull it out of its slot, and put it into the empty one, and repeat. It's a super simple way to […]

Achievement unlocked: I have ridden a bicycle with square wheels. This is from earlier this week at our department's "block party" for our majors and interested students. I'm proud (and a bit intimidated TBH) to work in the same department as Stan Wagon, the […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

A great post from The Absent-Minded Professor: https://joshbrake.substack.com/p/keep-thinking?publication_id=634571&post_id=174291502 I really like the ideas of instruments versus devices and productive versus parasitic friction, and so on.

A colleague of mine is in a band called Math Emergency. They're playing this Sunday! https://www.amsterdambarandhall.com/events/amsterdam-presents-math-emergency-w/ Sadly, it's their last concert ever -- one of the members is moving out of town, so they're disbanding. But maybe they'll reband […]

added a cheat sheet to the official Git website https://git-scm.com/cheat-sheet

where this came from is that I made a Git cheat sheet a while back at https://wizardzines.com/git-cheat-sheet.pdf and then I found out that the folks who make the official Git website are super open to contributions and thought "... wait, the website doesn't have a cheat sheet, I could just […]

Oooh, it's triple square day! 9/16/25 (or some permutation thereof) https://www.npr.org/2025/09/16/nx-s1-5535545/pythagorean-triple-square-day-9-16-25

@kickingvegas : did you see my posts about my casual-eww prototype? https://github.com/dandrake/casual-eww Thoughts? Should I make a PR?

“Human Resources is neither human nor a resource.” (said by a very frustrated former supervisor of mine 😂) #WorkOrSchoolWittyRemarks #HashTagGames @hashtaggames

#macalester College has a Kofi Annan Ping Pong Table.

Yikes, weird coincidence: a week ago I saved an article on AI voice clones and the risk for scams, disinformation, and so on. This morning I get to reading it. The lede is a description of someone narrating a PSA...except, of course, it's actually a voice clone of that person. The person? […]

@kickingvegas I vibe-coded a casual eww menu: https://github.com/dandrake/casual-eww It seems like the menu options could be curated a bit better, but for the moment, this works and is useful. @kickingvegas, take a look. If you'd like to incorporate it into your casual-suite, you are free to […]

Trump has called his political opponents "vermin" and "lunatics." Trump declined to call the MN governor after the assassination of Rep. Melissa Hortman in May 2025. Trump elected not to fly the flag at half staff following the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville in 2017. Trump […]

A great editorial from Eugenia Cheng. The line that really struck me is "It shouldn’t be called sexist to help people overcome sexism, and it shouldn’t be called racist to help people overcome racism" […]

Today at Macalester's convocation, one of the speakers mentioned the Andrea Gibson poem "What Sucks About the Afterlife" and oh my, it is a lovely, lovely poem: https://breathoffreedompoetry.substack.com/p/what-sucks-about-the-afterlife-andrea "On Earth, everyone loved butterflies, but I […]

I love the little frisson of cognitive dissonance when I find myself editing my .vimrc with emacs, or my init.el with vim. #vim #emacs

@kickingvegas I'd love to see a casual-eww transient menu. I find myself browsing a bit now and then with eww and never remember the basic keys. Back, forward, copying a link to the current page, copying the link at point...just those would be great. Maybe also some page navigation? Just […]

The Minnesota State Fair is going on, and it's a tradition there to find the craziest food that is either (1) fried, or (2) served on a stick. (Or both.) Some great math folks -- in particular, Chris Danielson of https://talkingmathwithkids.com/ -- started […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

My first OEIS entry: https://oeis.org/A387361

Hilbert/Russell Inn

Via the SeqFan mailing list: David Radcliffe wants to resurrect the Encyclopedia of Combinatoric Structures and is looking for collaborators. https://codeberg.org/Radcliffe/encyclopedia-of-combinatorial-structures

I just moved (back) to #stpaulmn and the #twincities#stpaulmn and thought I'd read some books on the history of the area. Asked Claude for suggestions. It hallucinated some results and I asked it be more careful....and it showed a sort of self-awareness: "Rather than risk providing more inaccurate […]

After you've learned Discrete Mathematics with Ducks.... https://www.amazon.com/Discrete-Mathematics-Ducks-Sarah-Marie-Belcastro/dp/1466504994 ...you can, it seems, learn Bayesian analysis with dogs. #math #dogs #ducks

I'm looking to actually start paying for an AI service, and want to know which one to sign up for. As a college educator, as a software developer, computer scientist (kinda), I think it's my professional responsibility to keep up with the capabilities of AI. So I'm contemplating signing up for […]