You'll never guess what brand of coffee they _don't_ sell at the Folger Shakespeare Library café. Totally a missed opportunity.

Super-glad I got this op-ed about 12-dimensional spheres into Scientific American before it got sold out. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-heisenberg-uncertainty-principle-of-social-science-modeling/ It's an explainer about the curse of dimensionality and its relevance to social […]

OK, intellectual property fans, here's a draft law review essay I wrote for you about AI and copyright, entitled "The art critics won't save you from the robots". It's really about a trend in copyright jurisprudence which is distorting the AI debate. You shift the trend, you fix the debate—and […]

The golden age of piracy (mid-1600s) wasn't too far behind the popularization of the printing press and establishment of a printing industry (mid-to-late 1500s). Authors of the late 1600s would analogize printers who copied their works to pirates ("land pirates" or "word pirates"), and we still […]

TeX tip: \defs are pattern matched! E.g., \def\todo(<#1>){{\bf #1}} then usage: \todo(<Get yr act together.>) If your heavily-used macros have a different format, you're less likely to drown in curly braces. I'd be interested to hear if you all have other uses for going beyond curly braces in […]

Why are genies always granting wishes ironically? What's in it for them? What motivates them? They seem sidelined as characters. Next time you see something with a genie in it, you can check whether there are at least two genies, who talk to each other, about something other than granting wishes.

Oh, and as a follow-up to my last post, the demonym for a person who lives in Las Vegas is: Vegan. There used to be a free local paper called The Vegan Times, even. Have a lucky day, everybody.

[Unsolicited pronunciation tip] Throwaway particles aren't stressed, like "the PLAINS" and not "THE plains", or even "saint JOSEPH" and not "SAINT joseph". The same works in Spanish! Not "LAS vegas" but "las VEGAS", not "SAN josé" but "san JOSË".

Hey, orchestra nerds, what are your favorite works to perform? I've read more than enough audience favorites lists, but I expect the pieces that excite you as a performer are different.

Card games: they don't all have to be trick taking or set collection. Carbondale is a grid-building, friendly thievery card game playable with the standard decks of cards you have in your house right now: https://carbondale.network . #selfpromotionsunday

It finally happened: I sent a colleague 200 lines of code, and he 'improved' it by feeding it to an AI. Was so chipper when he sent me 2,000 lines in return, but then having to fix it and explain to them why the robot-generated version wasn't workable took most of my day. I'm never getting that […]

For you fans of science writer/comic musician Liz Landau, her latest is really her finest. Passed it on to an expectant coworker, who commented "I'm tearing up just a little". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ71REKRdWY

At work, have been sporadically passing around that essay I wrote on the history of modern math and how it advises better computing technique (see link below), and I think a few people have taken it to heart and are writing better code. Best reaction so far: "the big lesson is to stay on good […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@ethanschoonover/116426781763284152 This is how I do toothpaste. 💯 , would recommend.

My metaphorical hat is off to those of you in academia. 95% of my interactions with academics are stellar and the highlight of my day, and then 5% are with the most toxic, defensive, gatekeeping jerks I ever have to deal with. I don't know how those of you who encounter those people every day […]

In a feat of incredible brand consistency, you can't even log in to IRS's Free File Fillable Forms without doing mental arithmetic. This is why I wrote a tax calculator in python: https://github.com/b-k/py1040 . I do the math there, then copy to FFFF and everything goes fine.

(1/3) Concrete Blonde:still stuck in my head, still sounds great. Primarily guitarist James Mankey with the finest effects of 1990, and the superlative, superlative voice of Johnette Napolitano. They got a few singles on the radio, about an alcoholic ex ( […]

Imagine being a ghost, you finally have time to read anything you want, but if you can't move physical objects you have to wait for somebody to open the book you want to read. You have to haunt libraries and possibly wait years for somebody to come by, and then most of the time they stop reading […]

And I recently had the epiphany that you can just make hash browns. Shred a potato, add what you will, fry for a few minutes, you've got dinner.

“To opt out, GitHub users should visit /settings/copilot/features and disable "Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training" under the Privacy heading.” https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/26/github_ai_training_policy_changes/

Output passed via named registers, every function in its own file, arrays via name-munging macros: the dream of the 90s is alive in Stata

Talked to somebody who had worked at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve a few years ago and she said its cafeteria was cash only. Astonishing that there are still places that only accept company scrip.

duckduckgo implemented my dream feature: an option to 🚫 block sites from your search results which are spam, AI-generated noise, or otherwise not worth clicking through to. It's made search engines tolerable again.

My rule of thumb has always been that if you want to be an expert in something you have to be very familiar with one level down. If you wanna be a Python expert you have to know some C. If you wanna be a good data scientist you have to know matrix algebra. Even if vibe coding really is the […]

I like the stuff on direct-from-China sites because somebody had the idea, convinced a committee to commit funds, hired engineers and/or designers to think hard about the details, set up a factory and warehouse. It's the ultimate in committing to the bit.

The world population might seem large, but it's still only 1.38e-14 moles.

You might feel bad that you can't talk about your favorite kink or your opinion about Middle Eastern politics in most social settings, but you'll never have it as bad as a mathematician. Saying things like "I learned the most amazing thing about prime ideal domains of abelian rings" in polite […]

Donut mug: not toplogically equivalent to a donut nor a coffee mug.

Every year, I check for changes on IRS tax forms, and I get to see all the little improvements most will never notice: better kerning, boldface where appropriate, removing excess italics. It's subtle, but they're living documents under constant revision.

I don't get why job application sites time out after ten or fifteen minutes. Are there bands of marauders waiting to pounce on computers with unattended job applications? There are essay questions, often several, which I am not going to speedrun in that time.

Tens of thousands of parking spots disappeared under snow in our fair city this week. Without having councilmembers to blame or editors they can write letters to, people are just...dealing with it.

I wrote you a short history of mathematics in the last century and its implications for how we can write better data analysis code. If you're not a data hacker, there's still a lot of interesting stuff there for you, like a deep dive into causality, like whether Bertrand Russell caused my birth. […]

A few years ago I requested a feature on the #firefox fora: the ability to remotely close tabs. E.g., you use sync to open a tab from your desktop on your telephone, read it, then close it in both locations. It's fully implemented and working now, and it feels great. Thx to the maintainers for […]

Remedios Varo made ends meet for a while by working for Bayer Pharma, and even her work toned down for public consumption is incredible and makes me want to buy drugs https://www.vagabunda.mx/publicidad-surrealista-remedios-varo-y-las-piezas-que-hizo-para-bayer/

been pretty interested in graph layout for a while now. there are a lot of really cool algorithms created in the last decade or so that look a lot better (imho) than the force-directed default layout for a bunch of datasets. so i read through some papers and wrote a little bit about them! […]

To answer the question on everybody's lips as we enter 2026: yes, 1,013 is prime.

Am submitting a paper to a journal, and I have to pick "anonymous" reviewers as part of the process. Any suggestions, anything I can read, on the customs for picking reviewers? Is there a minimum social distance expected; can I use people in my department?

[Kvetching about the peer review system] After 17 months, an editor rejected my article on the U.S. corporate network. He indicated that he liked it, got one positive review, but just couldn't find anybody who wanted to write a second review. Peer review is characterized as checking […]

I've had the privilege of having a versatile job where I can do something different with every project, but now that I'm looking for new work it feels like a trap, because every job posting is like "Must have done EXACTLY ONE SPECIFIC THING for the last 4-10 years."

Just found out about the tonnetz (tone network) diagram, wherein every type of chord is a different molecule, and my mind is entirely blown. It's from 1739, but new to me. https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50195805986_cfde866eca_b.jpg

I'd love to meet the marketing person who came up with the phrase "device hoarding" and got articles about it placed in major media. Their methods could do so much good if applied to actual problems.

Thinking about getting a pricey split keyboard but don't have the $$$? Just plug two $10 keyboards in at the same time. Feels great.

Error message/writing prompt I'm dealing with right now: "daemonic processes are not allowed to have children"

People are telling me that they're bummed about the daylight-savings shift making it dark at 5PM around here now, but that's backwards: if we didn't have daylight savings, all of October would've been like this.

#FediBookFair I know a lot of you escape the horrible of our world by reading about fictional interpersonal conflicts, but me, I read math books. Things make sense, there are no bad guys, there's always a new challenge on the horizon. With all that in mind, I […] [Original post on xoxo.zone]

Way down at the end, the Python manual's page on functional programming—y'know, the paradigm where you write lots of little lambdas which compose together to something big—advises against using lambdas. https://docs.python.org/3/howto/functional.html I use them anyway: Python lacks a "const" […]

My office's zero trust framework and frequent time-outs have trained me that if a pop-up appears asking me for a password or PIN, I should just type in the info without thinking.

The editors at Wikipedia have the comprehensive run-down of ways to spot AI-written slop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

I wrote this little explainer about how Git is a blockchain in April but I never told you all about it. https://b-k.medium.com/git-its-a-blockchain-7acc02379fcc It may elucidate some weirdness about how git works for you; it may just be a math/software amusement.

Are there vi influencers? Does vi/vim/neovim maintain popularity just by existing, or are there people out there building a community around it?