Nick @internic@qoto.org

Amazing how a high school experiment on ballistics, for a student who has issues engaging with science, changes when you start with:
"Call of Duty?"
"Hell yeah."
"So you know about bullet-drop?"
"Yeah...?"
"That's what we're looking at."

Politico- Washington DC startup pitched as a service to integrate AI into lobbying is covertly run by a pair of well-known, far-right conspiracy theorists and convicted felons who are using pseudonyms in their new business. https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/02/jacob-wohl-jack-burkman-ai-lobbying-pseudonyms-00176917

Please subscribe to my newsletter! Mondays are free! Tuesdays and Thursdays will cost you, but just a little bit, though, so I can, y'know, eat.

https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/subscribe

#Hannover steht auf gegen #Faschismus!
#AFDVerbotJetzt #OmasGegenRechts

Homotopy Type Theory by the Univalent Foundations (2014). The book itself is more an explainer as to what UF participants do. Much of the activity around automated proof assistants revolves around this project.

Deep Learning by Goodfellow, Benigo, and Courville (2016). Some might say it’s a computer science book, and not a mathematics book, but I’d argue the combination of linear algebra, calculus, and statistics just happens to be implementable in silicon. Not the first or even the best book on its topic, yet certainly the standard reference

Poincairé Conjecture website by the Clay Mathematics Institute (2010). They provide links to Perelman’s three papers solving the problem as well as the papers and lectures by experts explaining the proofs and importance. Another great example of how intensely collaborative mathematics can be, even if just one person succeeds in solving a difficult problem.

Four Colors Suffice by Robin Wilson (2002). An expository book, beautifully produced with high quality paper, binding, and print, on the controversial and long solution to the four color problem. While automated provers and a plethora of deep learning techniques have quickly become standard, the world had to get used to having machines “solve” problems. Wilson tells the story of how this problem was solved and then improved upon, and effort among many that allowed mathematicians to accept the usage of machines in their work.

@TeaKayB

**
What are the most important/influential #Maths #books of the 21st century
**

This is a very loose question, I know. That's intentional: I'd like to see how people interpret things like "important", "influential", and even "maths" and "book".

Given that, an explanation with your chosen book(s) would be most appreciated.

Also: I know that confining it to the last 24 years makes it more difficult as there hasn't been a lot of time for anything published in that period to have much influence at all. Humour me!

If you don't have an answer I'd appreciate a #boost all the same.

Thanks!

@collectifission @cstross So, I agree with you about the missed opportunity, but I feel the "where's Eugen" dig is very unfair. Mastodon gGmbH is like 4 people and they're all coders, not marketing. The fediverse is an intentionally decentralized collective, not organized like a startup running user-acquisition campaigns.

Nobody executed the highly skilled labor you (and I) wish would have happened because there is literally no one being paid to do that, because Mastodon is not a company,.

You don't have to be racist to participate in systemic racism. US policing produces racist outcomes even from "not-racist" people. I'm going to explain (again):

* why I've probably been pulled over way more times than most people you know, even though most of the times I'm pulled over, I get no ticket (because I did nothing wrong)
* how I stopped getting pulled over so much (because I understand the system)
* And why lots of cops say that the average voter is more racist than the average cop

The first solar flare observations were made #OTD in 1859 by Carrington and Hodgson, preceding one of the largest geomagnetic storms on record.

Both amateur astronomers made their observations independently, and published them simultaneously in MNRAS.
https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?db_key=AST&bibcode=1859MNRAS..20...13C&letter=0&classic=YES&defaultprint=YES&whole_paper=YES&page=13&epage=13&send=Send+PDF&filetype=.pdf

Plastic recycling is a myth created and propped up by the petroleum industry. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/texas-resident-used-apple-airtags-to-discover-plastics-taken-to-houston-recycling-centers-arent-being-recycled

This graph guessing game is pretty interesting! You're shown a graph, and you have to guess (from five options) what is being displayed. A good tool for statistical literacy in math and statistics classrooms!

https://www.graphs.world/

#Math #MathEd #Statistics

Your SSH honeypot fakes a Linux system and logs the threat actor's commands.

My SSH honeypot hijacks the threat actor's terminal to play the music video of Rick Astley's 1987 pop hit "Never Gonna Give You Up" while ignoring Ctrl-C.

We are not the same.

Check out this link to follow nearly 100 journalists working on climate, energy, and the environment.

https://go.bsky.app/2TNd1Ya

Yesterday I listened to the first episode of the "Change, Technically" #podcast by @grimalkina and @analog_ashley and (unsurprisingly) really liked it. I think it had a lot of interesting things to say about how we think about who can code or do science as illustrated in part by their own paths into these fields. If you're interested in #STEM, #coding, #softwareEngineering, etc. I think it's well worth a listen.

https://www.changetechnically.fyi/

The Moon Dressed Like Saturn https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap240901.html #APOD

Hey folks, if you want to know how to improve your product, ask open ended questions.

This tweet brought to you by Marriott*, whose "Are you happy with the product" asked to select between 8 categories of problems they think represent user behavior. At their scale, why not ask for freeform text and categorize it as "fits an existing category well" or "doesn't"?

*Not actually sponsored by Marriott.

The physics laws that the standard model is built on do not explicitly require that leptons behave exactly the same, but they seem to do so. This is a good enough reason to check, particularly because some other experiments maybe see differences. This #CMSPaper 1336 tests this for the very difficult B_c meson, and the results agree with the standardmodel (within large, 28%, uncertainties) https://buff.ly/3AIqJfw

“It was a simple but brilliant design stroke: rather than a window where people paste text and allow the LLM to extend it, ChatGPT framed it as a chat window.”

"The practical risks of AI are not that they become super capable thinking machines. It is building complex systems around machines we falsely assume are capable of greater discernment and logic than they possess."

Just two of the excellent insights in this piece.

https://www.techpolicy.press/challenging-the-myths-of-generative-ai/

Meanwhile, BlueSky is a Brazilian site now.

It’s Brazil’s site now, everyone else just lives in it.