Nick @internic@qoto.org

I think Germany abandoning the professorial dress in the late 60ies was the right thing to do, but I also cannot deny that it's fun to wear a proper university "toga en baret" when on a proper Dutch PhD committee.

#AcademicChatter #astrodon

I have my #Halloween costume ready, and you?

#AcademicChatter @academicchatter

We have opened formal proceedings to assess whether Temu may have breached the Digital Services Act in areas linked to:

▪️ Sale of illegal products
▪️ Potentially addictive design of the service
▪️ Purchase recommendations
▪️ Access to data for researchers

More: https://europa.eu/!4m8GPM

#DSA #EU

Interested in interpretable #AI foundation models for #DynamicalSystems reconstruction?

In a new paper we move into this direction, training common latent DSR models with system-specific features on data from multiple different dynamical regimes and DS: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.04814
(Fig. 7)

We show applications like transfer & few-shot learning, but most interestingly perhaps, subject/system-specific features were often linearly related to control parameters of the underlying dynamical system trained on …
(Fig. 4)

This gives rise to an interpretable latent feature space, in which datasets with similar dynamics cluster. Intriguingly, this clustering according to *dynamical systems features* led to much better separation of groups than could be achieved by more traditional time series features.
(Fig. 6)

Fantastic work by the incomparable Manuel Brenner and Elias Weber, together with Georgia Koppe!

So we are actually, somehow, just 43 paid subscribers away from unlocking a regular posting schedule for the long-form pieces over at Substack!

Also ha ha awkward I’ve been unable to work for most of the month due to surgery so if you were thinking about signing up there or at Patreon, now would be a super awesome time, & subscriptions at both sites count toward the goal.

Http://catvalente.substack.com

Http://patreon.com/catvalente

While I am running a campaign of positive solutions to save Alpha Quadrant, Captain Sisko calls me “truly evil.” Michael Burnham & her subspace surrogates are running a campaign of hate.

writing about the terminal is funny because it feels like a very intuitive and comfortable place to me, but the second I try to explain how anything actually works I realize there's SO MUCH I don't know and end up going down some extremely cursed rabbit holes

it’s extremely different from writing about git where git felt very comfortable for me, and when I tried to explain it I did know how it worked except for some small details

Three weeks ago, panic erupted when the South China Morning Post reported that scientists in that country had discovered a “breakthrough” in quantum computing attacks that posed a “real and substantial threat” to “military-grade encryption.”

Among the many problems with follow-on coverage, aside from a lack of skepticism, was its failure to link to the correct paper. For the first time, here's the right one.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/10/the-sad-bizarre-tale-of-hype-fueling-fears-that-modern-cryptography-is-dead/

The first message between two computers on the ARPANET was transmitted #onthisday in 1969 [1,2].

Interestingly, only the “LO” of “LOGIN” was successfully transmitted before one of the systems crashed (it's not clear which one). Charles Kline’s IMP Log recorded that “Talked to SRI host to host.”

[Image credit: UCLA Digital Library]

References
--------------
[1] "Charley Kline Sends the First Message Over the ARPANET from Leonard Kleinrock's Computer", https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=1108

[2] "ARPANET anniversary: The internet’s first transmission was sent 50 years ago today", https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/arpanet-anniversary-the-internets-first-transmission-was-sent-50-years-ago-today

#internet #arpanet #imp

Since Pythagorean stuff is appearing again in the popular press, let me once more recommend _The Pythagorean Proposition_ by Elisha S. Loomis (1852-1940). Depending on how they are counted, the book has about 360 proofs of the theorem. (I will not address the issue of how different they actually are.) It's not a book anyone would read front to back, but it's a lot of fun to flip through. A legal e-copy of the 1968 reprinting of the 1940 second edition can be found at the Education Resources Information Center of the US Department of Education:

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED037335.pdf

Seriously, if you have a PhD candidate or are a PhD candidate working in black hole or neutron star X-ray binaries, invite me to be part of the committee? I'd like to feel once like I know stuff 😅

I remember when this story of two high school students discovering one or more new proofs of the Pythagorean theorem came out some years ago, but (frustratingly) without any substantive details on what these proofs were and why they were new. Now there is a published paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00029890.2024.2370240

The question of defining precisely when two proofs are "the same" (or whether a proof is "new" compared to existing proofs) is actually a very subtle and interesting one (see some discussion at https://gowers.wordpress.com/2007/10/04/when-are-two-proofs-essentially-the-same/ or https://mathoverflow.net/questions/3776/when-are-two-proofs-of-the-same-theorem-really-different-proofs). Here the authors take a largely syntactic approach: they are considering a proof to be "trigonometric" if it avoids the use of circles (or coordinates), but uses angles in an essential way. With these restrictions, they do find at least five proofs that do not obviously resemble any of the standard known proofs, for instance one that involves summing a geometric series.

In ptinciple there may be "semantic" ways to distinguish these proofs from other proofs, in that there may be exotic variants of Euclidean geometry in which one of the proofs in this paper is valid but other proofs are not, or vice versa. But even without having such a semantic way to make this distinction, this was a fun read and a reminder that even the most ancient and well-established foundational results in mathematics can sometimes be revisited from a fresh perspective.

This is a good resource for undecided or unmotivated voters, or people talking with same: comprehensive analyses of what the 2024 election means for science, health care, technology, education, nuclear weapons and more (issues, not horse race nonsense) https://www.scientificamerican.com/report/how-the-2024-presidential-election-will-shape-science-health-and-the-environment/

Also, in case anyone is counting, Starlink is now 63% of all active satellites.

2 out of ever 3 satellites up there now are owned by that awful billionaire. He effectively controls Low Earth Orbit. That should terrify everyone.

A reminder that more American child pedestrians (age 0-17) are killed by cars on Halloween than on any other day of the year. #CarsRuinCities

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/10/31/23427256/halloween-children-car-deaths-pedestrian-safety

Saw a discussion on Bluesky about how web devs end up having no body of work as sites disappear, companies fold, and agencies shutter

This first happened to me in the 2000s. Almost every project, large and small, I've worked on since has disappeared. Even most of the ebooks I made for a publishers have been replaced. I've been doing this for almost thirty years and my body of work exists only as screenshots and vague memories

TIL: There is LaTeX coffee stains package and I think you should know this: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/examples/latex-coffee-stains/qsjjwwsrmwnc

Just canceled #Amazon & #amazonprime accounts after #JeffBezos canceled #wapo editors' presidential endorsement.

Removing the #amazonfiretv device next.

Are there recommendations for alternatives?

Devoted & patient #linux & #freesoftware user, but not a trained #software developer or #coder.

May choose #roku & curious about #opensource options.

#stopfascism #failingwashingtonpost #floss #foss #diy #gnu #raspberrypi #creativecommons #system76 #calyxos #community #democracy

If you, or someone you know, is into telescopes - this article has a nice breakdown of which ones to purchase.
https://www.space.com/should-you-buy-a-telescope-on-black-friday-cyber-monday