ceoln @ceoln@social.cleverlibre.org

Here's an 'Apollonian gasket'. To get one of these, start with 3 circles snugly packed in a bigger circle. Then keep putting in more circles, each tangent to 3 that are already there.

Each number here is the curvature of a circle - that is, the reciprocal of its radius. Frederick Soddy, a Nobel prize winner in chemistry, showed something wonderful in 1936. If the 3 circles and the big circle you start with have integer curvatures, all the rest will too!

What integers can show up in this game? This turns out to be an amazingly interesting question!

For example, say you pick integer curvatures for the 3 circles and the big circle you start with. Then the other integers that show up can only take certain specific values mod 24.

Yikes! The appearance of the number 24 shows we're getting into deep waters. This number shows up all over math, linking different subjects in amazing ways. I've been trying to write a paper about this, but there aren't enough hours in the day.

Are there any other restrictions on the curvatures? For a long time people thought basically NO.
That is: after you pick integer curvatures for the 3 circles and the big circle you start with, all
sufficiently large integers that have allowed values mod 24 actually do show up as curvatures of circles in your Apollonian gasket!

(Well, at least if the curvatures for the 3 circles and the big circle you start with are relatively prime. If they're not, you can divide them all by the same number N, and then all the other circles will have curvatures divisible by N.)

But now it's been shown this is WRONG! Check out the new Quanta article:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/two-students-unravel-a-widely-believed-math-conjecture-20230810/

This was on Fb
I hope the tax reduction fans take note

For the record, I'm incredibly proud of @pixelfed and the Wired article, but it won't change the promise I made to myself when I started this project

I will remain humble, and I want y'all to keep me humble, because @pixelfed is a community build by many people

I just wrote some code

Y'all made this relevant ❤️

"I will not forbear to say, captain, that the morals of dragons are very sadly flexible."

- A great quote from League of Dragons, by Naomi Novik

#Introductions

I'm Chris, a POC from a US ghetto, worked as a social worker and STEM teacher for poor, homeless, immigrant and largely non-white kids in America's inner-city slum. I'm a one-person indie game dev, and my games are personal reflections of my experiences.

I've been doing gamedev for 25+ years, my largest project to date is Neofeud, a cyberpunk adventure game. I made it while teaching full time, and homeless, w/ my wife and kids living in the back of a Mazda Tribute. Cuz America.

AOC leads call for federal ethics investigation into Clarence Thomas - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/12/aoc-democrats-federal-investigation-clarence-thomas do it

How fun.
https://patreon.com/lowqualityfacts

We submitted a letter to the court today in the ongoing lawsuit against our library. We’re fighting for the rights of libraries to use their print collections in the digital age: https://blog.archive.org/2023/08/11/our-fight-is-far-from-over/ #DigitalRightsForLibraries #EmpoweringResearch

This is an unexpected and definitely interesting development. #GiftLink https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/10/us/trump-jan-6-insurrection-conservatives.html?unlocked_article_code=m5dvlTCbcqyfDWxI_zyBWS9QAmoFj4oNuQqk-WRV7iaydNgnHS5GwAwzueyC-GvnsFatpmOi2AK7VhemlAY1EfGMICz1OMn8dFhmj23O0-7Z7Qo511hZDWUvKrOl0LZH4t9R3e9wPI0poIk6-o5DoRLM4Jn3crjsG0-muHiiox8kQRUa-21dK3ctIDT1J2Nj1s-uEb7CHBtlBUYklIGEnQDoPb6pcakbUyouUIX8ntocnR4a42myi1VZqIpY5csFokYezU35LqVMemQ71slTmdRYg5LckEf2_x3p5u9pI97ZtPO1CRaxuhsI87_mEHV54kT5Xe8dQHL7fuTAitowZIaQCeDdsytkYJb8&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

How to Play Blackjack

reading wikipedia talk pages about proposed deletions and remembering how fucking hard it is for certain topics to get full coverage of the different views a subject can have
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Witchcraft_(traditional)

"It's okay to do something bad for your body if it is good for your mind."

#EvanPoll #poll

Physicist Lise Meitner’s brilliance led to the discovery of nuclear fission. But her long time collaborator Otto Hahn, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry without her in 1944, even though she had given the first theoretical explanation.

Albert Einstein called Meitner “our Marie Curie." She also adamantly refused to work on the atomic bomb during WWII. https://whyy.org/articles/lise-meitner-the-forgotten-woman-of-nuclear-physics-who-deserved-a-nobel-prize/ #science #history

“Bill Browder has led a global campaign for justice since tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was abused and left to die in a Russian jail cell after uncovering the massive fraud. “Switzerland has had a long and shady history of providing secret accounts, looking after dictators’ money and hiding Nazi gold. It seems that since Putin’s murderous invasion of Ukraine, they are adding to its negative reputation by returning dirty money to sanctioned Russian gangsters amid a worldwide effort to starve Putin of his financial resources,” he told The Daily Beast.

Switzerland Freaks Out After Veselnitskaya Plot Is Exposed https://www.thedailybeast.com/switzerland-freaks-out-after-veselnitskaya-plot-is-exposed

It's pretty wild that corporations are making record profits with people working from home but claim that people aren't productive unless their under the corp's watchful eyes. They're basically claiming employees are stealing from the company while they're paying their C class hundreds of times more than an employee. You know, wage theft, wage gap, wealth gap stuff

It's wild but in this oligarchy, not even a little surprising

I have lots of feels about Justice Thomas and his acceptance of lavish vacations and stuff from friends.

But here's the thing, if it's not illegal my feels don't matter. Elect more Dems to congress so we can pass ethical regs for SCOTUS so we can make it illegal.

Hi!!! I’m a strategist/entrepreneur/software engineer/activist, focusing on the intersection of justice, equity, and software engineering. I also run the Nexus of Privacy newsletter -- https://thenexusofprivacy.net and @nexusofprivacy@mastodon.social. Some of my other interests include intersectionality, psytrance and darkwave music, and tarot. More about me at https://thenexusofprivacy.net/about-me

I've written about Mastodon since 2017 (and been on the Fediverse even longer). May 2017's ["Lessons from Mastodon”]() post from May 2017, is still very relevant, including “Policies against racism, sexism, discrimination against gender and sexual minorities, and Nazis are extremely appealing positioning these days“ and "Even with an explicit anti-harassment, anti-fascism, and anti-racism focus, people of color are likely to be marginalized if the most influential people are white."

For some more recent thoughts, see November 2022's Mastodon, a partial history (DRAFT) and December 2022's [#BlackTwitter, quoting, and white views of toxicity on Mastodon](https://
privacy.thenexus.today/black-t
witter-quoting-and-white-toxicity-on-mastodon/)

#introduction

On tv news they say “there are obvious problems with putting trump in jail,” but they never say what the obvious problems are, and I honestly don’t believe there are any.