Nick @internic@qoto.org

Converting abandoned, post-pandemic office buildings into residential apartments is making our cities better (for example, making them more walkable).

Buildings with fewer amenities, less-desirable locations and smaller floors are hardest to rent as offices these days – and the most attractive as prospects to be turned into apartments.
An architect looks at the obstacles to transform these buildings and how architects are starting to find answers:
https://theconversation.com/cities-with-empty-commercial-space-and-housing-shortages-are-converting-office-buildings-into-apartments-heres-what-theyre-learning-226459

Carpe diem 🐝

Even as the sun slips below the hills to the south, a honeybee's work is not done 🍯

Perhaps not the sharpest of shots, given the rapidly dimming light, but the lovely evening colour mix of the lavender & the defocussed houses & trees on the other side of the valley seems worth sharing 🙇‍♂️

#Photography 📷
#MacroPhotography 🔬
#BackGardenEntomology 🪲

@rcorless @fredrikj :
https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.03336

/Efficient and Precise Calculation of the Confluent Hypergeometric Function/

Alan Herschtal

abstract:

Kummer's function, also known as the confluent hypergeometric function (CHF), is an important mathematical function, in particular due to its many special cases, which include the Bessel function, the incomplete Gamma function and the error function (erf). The CHF has no closed form expression, but instead is most commonly expressed as an infinite sum of ratios of rising factorials, which makes its precise and efficient calculation challenging. It is a function of three parameters, the first two being the rising factorial base of the numerator and denominator, and the third being a scale parameter. Accurate and efficient calculation for large values of the scale parameter is particularly challenging due to numeric underflow and overflow which easily occur when summing the underlying component terms. This work presents an elegant and precise mathematical algorithm for the calculation of the CHF, which is of particular advantage for large values of the scale parameter. This method massively reduces the number and range of component terms which need to be summed to achieve any required precision, thus obviating the need for the computationally intensive transformations needed by current algorithms.

As long as we're doing man behind the curtain for how hard modern science and publishing is (and not for reasons of rigor but for gatekeeping reasons that are keeping us from accessing the work we've all paid into), I think peer review should be a thing journals don't get to just hide away and never reveal. If you're promising it's a key way you uphold journal quality we should know more about it.

How much hard drive storage did your first home computer have? 🤔💾

A thread about the value of the fine structure constant in Quantum Electrodynamics. (1/137)

Gen AI: Too much spend, too little benefit [pdf]
https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/pages/gs-research/gen-ai-too-much-spend-too-little-benefit/report.pdf

Let's get real about something. The last four scientific journal pages I looked at, when I looked at their open access fees I sighed and closed the page. The last one I saw was nearly $10,000. Everybody on the fediverse will bitch about you, the authors, and scientists if you source a scholarly article that doesn't have an open PDF somewhere but you have to understand what an effing bind we're in here. If I could fix this I would've

Today was a nice day for a walk.

“French voters turned out in numbers not seen in decades to stop the far-right National Rally from taking power in the French National Assembly. Polls predicted a first-place finish for National Rally, which instead came in third …” 🇫🇷 🎉

https://www.npr.org/2024/07/07/nx-s1-5032011/france-elections-emmanuel-macron-marine-le-pen

French people to the far right:

Dear all,

I have an exciting, and unexpected, professional news to share: I’m going back to academia!

This fall, I will join the CEREFIGE, a research center in economics and management at the University of Lorraine in Nancy, as a research associate.

Read more in my newsletter article: https://o.simardcasanova.net/p/da7384fc-334d-42a2-b68e-272878aed37d/

Padua to Friedrichshafen (changes in Verona & Innsbruck) is an absolutely stunning train journey. You start with views over the Po valley, followed by amazing Alpine views as you pass East of Lake Garda and through South Tyrol, crossing to Austria over the Brenner and the through Tyrol and Vorarlberg, one beautiful Alpine panorama before the next until you finally reach Lake Constance, travelling right along the shore in Bregenz.

#trainbubble #trains

I just checked a halberd on United if you were wondering if that’s possible

Phasing out 32-bit-only app support for older devices too:

We're planning on phasing out support for 32-bit apps on 5th/6th generation Pixels where they're still supported. They were already phased out by Android for 7th generation Pixels and later, and by ARM for 2nd generation ARMv9 Cortex cores onwards.

Meanwhile, over on LinkedIn: "Welcome to the future of college education" ... "this app just listens to my prof and takes all the notes for me"

How is this not a parody?

#AI

The proponents of this kind of shit want to throw away the whole concept of having and using scientific knowledge obtained by experiment, with documentation of how it was obtained, evidence supporting the resulting models, falsifiability, etc., and replace it with a worse version of the way humans tens of thousands of years ago came to believe things about the world: simplistic pattern recognition.

Guess who brought home covid from #EAD2024... And I'm going say it: yes, I needed to be there to represent, but it was totally not worth the misery of today and the next days. (Second round and it again hits me with REALLY high fever.)

Here’s a video I’ve been meaning to put together for a while explaining how to use CO2 monitors to gauge COVID risk.

If you’d like to own this great public health tool, Aranet have kindly offered to collaborate on a GIVEAWAY!

To win an Aranet4 HOME indoor air quality monitor, check the YouTube video description.

https://youtu.be/t2G_jVclPWs

I would like to cover "the state of mathematics on the internet in 2025". Articles about Wikipedia and maybe Youtube are in the works. Is anyone interested in writing about Mastodon and/or other social media sites?