Nick @internic@qoto.org

I just cast my #vote and I was told my registration had been suspended because of undeliverable mail.

1. My address hasn’t changed in close to a decade
2. I certainly did not receive a notice that I would be suspended
3. There is no reason why a voter registration card sent to my address would be returned as undeliverable
4. I still have a current voter registration card

I was able to vote after signing a confirmation of address.

So yeah, check your registration. That’s some fishy shit.

Was reading the Wikipedia entry of Galois on his birthday. Perhaps a little reminder of what life was like when the village priest had significant political power over you, and perhaps also a reminder that we should not go back:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89variste_Galois

"On 28 July 1829, Galois's father died by suicide after a bitter political dispute with the village priest. A couple of days later, Galois made his second and last attempt to enter the Polytechnique and failed yet again. It is undisputed that Galois was more than qualified; accounts differ on why he failed. More plausible accounts state that Galois made too many logical leaps and baffled the incompetent examiner, which enraged Galois. The recent death of his father may have also influenced his behavior."

Sam Altman side by side with Aaron Swartz.

I can't stop thinking about it. One was prosecuted by the US for downloading copyrighted data from 1 source for noble purposes, and committed suicide to avoid prison. The other is widely celebrated for doing this on a much larger scale*.

Edited: *(and not for noble purposes)

The Washington Post’s choice not to endorse a candidate is only the most recent example of a bad decision by legacy media outlets prompting people to urge their staff to quit and go independent. I love being independent, but it’s also not without its challenges.

#newsletter #CitationNeeded #journalism #IndependentMedia

"Political polarization and health"

This is gonna become a paper people cite a lot, I bet

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03307-w

Hey y’all, the Washington Post Guild is inviting readers to share concerns about the paper’s editorial independence with their Bezos-installed CEO, Will Lewis, and their editorial page editor, David Shipley. There’s a handy form and everything!

Their default language is pretty mild but you can add your own heat if you like; I certainly did.

https://actionnetwork.org/letters/send-a-letter-to-post-ceo-and-editorial-page-editor-voicing-your-concern/

🌟Hello #AcademicMastodon🌟

I'm Hannah and currently working on the research project to understand the role of #Mastodon in #academia during my internship here.

If you haven’t done so already, please consider participating in the project. I would love to hear from you:

🔗https://rug.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9M1VEyMQ8k4xv94

A huge THANK YOU to everyone who has already participated in the survey! It is really insightful to read your opinions and experiences.

#AcademicChatter #OpenScience #Plushtodon #SocialMedia

Pretty cool being cited in a letter from my home state Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) to the CEO of Cloudflare regarding domains tied to Doppelganger, a sprawling Russian covert influence network.

https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/4/e/4e9969ec-3780-464a-ab2d-691db067837d/FB1EF8A7559A823A51351A5A2FA96E2077226711B7534E7720C7157D73496C8F.10.24.24-doppelganger-letters.pdf

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/09/why-is-us-being-used-to-phish-so-many-of-us/

"A triangulation of the sphere where 5 or 6 triangles meet at each vertex" is really just a topological, or combinatorial, concept. But Thurston noticed that when you have such a thing, you can make all the triangles be flat equilateral triangles. Then you've given the sphere a geometry! To precise, it has a flat Riemannian metric except at the points where 5 triangles meet at a vertex. There need to be 12 of those points, by Euler's formula V - E + F = 2.

So, you get a sphere with a flat Riemannian metric except at 12 points. The total angle around these points is not 360°, only 300°, because only 5 equilateral triangles meet there. These points are called 'conical singularities', and we say they have an 'angle deficit' of 60°.

Thurston showed you can get any such sphere by drawing an 11-sided convex polygon in a lattice of equilateral triangles and following the procedure in my first post. (You have to make sure the green triangles don't overlap.)

He even studied the so-called 'moduli space' of all ways of giving a sphere a flat Riemannian metric with 12 conical singularities with nonnegative angle deficits. He showed this is the quotient of 9-dimensional complex manifold by a discrete group action! And he studied how this moduli space contains the specially nice cases I've been discussing, where all the angle deficits are 60°.

Thurston's paper is here:

W. P. Thurston, Shapes of polyhedra and triangulations of the sphere, https://arxiv.org/abs/math/9801088

These are good too:

P. Engel and P. Smillie, The number of convex tilings of the sphere by triangles, squares, or hexagons, https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.02614

R. E. Schwartz, Notes on shapes of polyhedra, https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.07252

(2/2)

it often feels like I'm not doing enough, that in the face of a resurgent nazi[1] party in the US *nothing* would be enough, and it's a perpetual drain on my mental health that requires constant management.

so thank you Jeff Bezos[2] for the brave example showing how someone with so much more power could do so much less. now, for the next week and change, if I'm feeling down, I can just think "at least tens of thousands of my own subscribers aren't calling me a disgusting coward"

#USPol

LA Times owner has apparently barred his journalists from covering the scandal and uproar he caused by suppressing a Harris editorial page endorsement.

Big Journalism's bosses are killing what's left of the craft's integrity. https://www.status.news/p/los-angeles-times-2024-endorsement

Mastodon is financed by crowdfunding instead of venture capital not because we don't know that venture capital exists, not because we don't have bills to pay, and not because venture capital isn't willing to give money to new social media platforms. VCs don't want a sustainable business, they want a big exit. Every VC-backed business is on a timer to deliver or die.

BREAKING: UnitedHealth Group has confirmed that more than 100 million people had private health information stolen in a ransomware attack earlier this year on its health tech subsidiary Change Healthcare.

The cyberattack led to months of outages and disruption. This is the first time UHG has put forward a number of individuals affected by the breach, after previously saying that a "substantial proportion of people in America."

More: https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/24/unitedhealth-change-healthcare-hacked-millions-health-records-ransomware/

Gun manufacturers handed over personal data from buyers to political operatives, a stunning breach of privacy from an industry that constantly warns of tracking gun owners: https://www.propublica.org/article/gunmakers-owners-sensitive-personal-information-glock-remington-nssf

I have done it. I’ve deleted twitter from my phone.

It was time.

When I was putting together my "Forgotten Greek and Roman Myths" manuscript, I was constantly told that it is not a sellable concept for a book - because "people want to read their favorite myths", and not unkown ones.

Now the reviews are trickling in, and every reviewer highlights how exciting it is to find unknown myths about the well-known gods and heroes.

🤷‍♀️

(Still looking for an English language publisher, btw.)

#mythology #books #bookstodon #storytelling #writing #publishing

A Brief History of Nobody Reads Anymore

🧵

“Mariel Garza, editorials editor at The Los Angeles Times, has resigned, The Standard has learned.

The news comes a day after it was revealed that the paper’s owner, biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, intervened to prevent the paper from publishing an expected endorsement of Kamala Harris for president.”

https://sfstandard.com/2024/10/23/la-times-opinion-editor-quits-after-billionaire-kills-endorsement/

🌳 The #nasa #giss #nyc #MoonTree arrived today

The first moon trees were from Apollo 14 when Stuart Roosa packed seeds in his bags as part of the US bicentennial:
https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/moon_tree.html

The idea of a tree grown of a seedling that had made its way around the moon piqued the interest of so many #STEM lovers that the modern #Artemis team decided we needed a new cohort of inspirational, well traveled trees:
https://www.nasa.gov/learning-resources/nasa-stem-artemis-moon-trees/

Our sapling sweet gum is hanging out w plants on our living wall