why call it bird site when ‘the fowl place’ is right there and a much better pun

Bohemian Rhapsody but Freddy Mercury is a postdoc #ChatGPT

The integer sequence $$\hat{a}$$ that will never enter OEIS: Say the OEIS sequences are $$a^k, k\le n$$ and the $$i$$-th element is $$a^k_i$$ then $\hat{a}_j:=(\max_{k\le n}a^k_j)+1$

We should start a campaign to get "normal" Markdown in toots, cf.
github.com/mastodon/mastodon/i

Astonishingly, there is still a doubt in the minds of Mastodon devs that it's a useful feature, expressed in GitHub issues like this one, using Markdown :P @Gargron

So, a horse walks into a bar and orders a pint. The barkeep says, "You're in here pretty often lately. Do you think you might be an alcoholic?" The horse replies, "I don't think I am," and then vanishes from existence. You see, the joke is really about Descartes' famous quote, "I think; therefore, I am." but if I had explained this before the joke, I would've been putting Descartes before the horse.
...
I'll show myself out now.

#Storytime: One character who crops up a lot in Northumbrian and Border #folktales is Michael Scot the wizard.

What's interesting is that Michael Scot was a real person. Born in the #ScottishBorders in the late 12th Century, Scot was a mathematician and astrologer, educated in Oxford and Paris, worked at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, spoke Latin, Greek, Arabic and Hebrew, made a number of important translations of mathematical texts from Arabic to English, and had a book dedicated to him by Fibonacci.

But in his native lands, he's remembered as Auld Michael the wizard.

It's said that Michael Scot tricked the devil and was thus responsible for the splitting of the Eildon Hill into three. Some believe that he taught his arts to the wicked Lord Soulis of Hermitage Castle, and he was involved in a failed attempt to coax the tide to rise up the Wansbeck River as far as Morpeth.

At least two different stories bring Auld Michael up against witches. He's said to have turned a coven to stone in Cumbria, resulting in the Long Meg Stone Circle, and he once had a feud with a miserly old witch who turned him into a hare - which Michael finally won by cursing the woman to dance to exhaustion until she begged for forgiveness. Good illustrations of the different popular views of educated, scholarly, (usually male) 'wizards' and the common folk accused of 'witchcraft'.

I gave an invited talk at Wollic'2007 about the computational content of topological notions and theorems, in particular Tychonoff's Theorem.

Paulo Oliva, a proof theorist, who also gave an invited talk at that meeting, pointed out that my main construction seemed to amount to some form of "bar recursion", which was introduced and used in proof theory by Spector in the late 1950's to prove the consistency of analysis.
1/

And that gives us a very useful notion of "program fission" (hat-tip @jer_gib). Your potatoes won't catch fire, but you can turn them into vodka which will catch fire. By first-order structural induction, you compute an ordinal on which you can do transfinite induction. It's one of the original miracles.

It seems no matter where I go, I find myself wishing that companies would employ (engineering) historians.

Someone who would interview employees and read docs and then write chapters about each major component of a company and how it got to be the way it did.

"furlongs per pint" sounds like total nonsense but it's exactly the same as miles per gallon

so you can literally just substitute it in

I am worried about the future of mathematics. The present is working just fine, mostly. It is the future that worries me.

Papers, in most subjects, are written in such a way that only people with PhDs can understand them.

But having a PhD is not enough. You have to have a PhD in that particular subject to be able to follow the papers.

Not necessarily because the papers are deep, but mainly because there is a culture of taking for granted what the community knows.
1/

Perhaps at some point I'll write a thread on my deep concerns about our reliance on Google Scholar.

For now, though, why on earth does Google Scholar not let you sort your search results?

You have basically one choice: to see them in "relevance" order—and we're not even told the secret formula used to determine relevance.

You can also sort by date—for papers from the past year only.

It's really crazy that a mature tool supposedly designed to serve the community would be severely limited.

Economics: Humans only value things monetarily.
Sociology: Uh, I don't ...
Economics: Humans are always rational and value is calculated by a complex inner calculus.
Sociology: Uh, Psy, can you help?
Psychology: That's not how humans ...
Economics: ALSO MY SYSTEM WILL GROW EXPONENTIALLY FOREVER!!
Physics: *drops teacup*

TheoretiCS, a new diamond-open-access journal in all areas of theoretical computer science: theoretics.episciences.org/

It is being run as an overlay of arXiv, through the Episciences platform for such overlays, with Javier Esparza and Uri Zwick as editors-in-chief and a large and distinguished editorial board.

Graphs often don't tell the whole story

operator precedence parsing was solved 100 years ago, y'all just cowards

@tao every person who historically confused correlation with causation has since ended up dead. I think we all know what that means.

biblically accurate cat

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A Mastodon instance for programming language theorists and mathematicians. Or just anyone who wants to hang out.