Nick @internic@social.cleverlibre.org

Happy 2024!

Yesterday was a remarkably sunny day for winter in Edinburgh, and so is today.

(1/2)

West Coast of USA show alerts!
I'm hosting "Mathematics: A Quick Revue" at the JMM in San Francisco, Friday January 5. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/mathematics-a-quick-revue-tickets-744572525467?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
Plus a full-on An Evening of Unnecessary Detail in LA on Sunday January 7. https://www.flapperscomedy.com/shows/an-evening-of-unnecessary-detail/72865/
I'll be around after both to say hi etc. See some of you there!

Indian mathematician & physicist Satyendra Nath Bose was born #OTD in 1894.

He is best known for his work on quantum mechanics in the early 1920s, in developing the foundation for Bose–Einstein statistics & the theory of the Bose–Einstein condensate. A Fellow of the Royal Society, he was awarded India's second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan, in 1954 by the Government of India. Bose Bose was nominated 4 times for the Nobel Prize in Physics, he was never awarded the honor.

#physics

"It's of no use whatsoever. This is just an experiment that proves Maestro Maxwell was right—we just have these mysterious electromagnetic waves that we cannot see with the naked eye. But they are there."

As quoted by Andrew Norton

~Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (February 22, 1857 – January 1, 1894)

#books #science #physics

Hey #mastodon, I need some #help. I've noticed that the official web client shows fewer boosts than 3rd party ones, Elk & Tusky in my case.

Even after waiting for a while those boosts never show up. Normal posts do keep appearing in a timely manner. The instance of the poster/booster doesn't seem to matter.

Just in case I tried disabling the "Group boosts" setting (even though that's just supposed to group recent boosts, which is not the case here), but nothing changed. Am I missing something?

I was looking for some more stories about the 12 percent decrease in the US murder rate and just look at the suggestions from search.

Naturally if you take these suggestions you'll find material that gives you the impression the rate is rising.

Some kinds of misinformation feel huge and intractable. No one wants to hear this, no one wants to looks for this, no one reports it and when they do it's literally headlines like "After Rise in Murders During Pandemic a Sharp Decline"

Let´s celebrate, today is Public Doman Day!

Plenty of new titles are available now and volunteers at @DProofreaders will have plenty of work ahead.

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers
The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie
The Giant Horse of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson
Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Money for Nothing by P.G. Wodehouse
The House at Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne
Hunting for Hidden Gold by Franklin W. Dixon

#books #literature
1/

Happy Public Domain Day! Disney's Steamboat Willie, the first appearance of Mickey Mouse, is now officially in the public domain - a day many thought might never come. Because I can, I've shared the entirety of the short film on YouTube, with a voiceover of me explaining public domain in the context of our favorite corporate Mouse. :) #publicdomain #publicdomainday #steamboatwillie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnGL55VOj_4

We wish everyone a pseudoperfect 2024!

(for anyone curious, a pseudoperfect number is a number for which two or more of it's divisors add up to the number its self)

Some people start the new year with a kiss. Others refresh English Wikipedia at midnight ET to see Mickey. Happy Public Domain Day!

going on Fox News to launch the War on New Year’s, arguing that I am part of a marginalized group that follows the Julian calendar and it’s insulting to say Happy New Year when it’s not even Christmas yet

Inspired by @johncarlosbaez's post on complex frequencies, thinking about complex numbers:

If you are learning complex analysis, and want to really understand branch cuts, and live in the US, I recommend moving to east Asia.

No, really: I lived in South Korea for a few years, working at KAIST, and having to deal with the international date line -- the branch cut for the Earth -- forced me to understand that little bit of complex analysis.

The extreme of this are two islands, only a couple kilometers apart, called "Yesterday" and "Tomorrow" islands: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=tomorrow+island

This is especially relevant today, December 31st, because as I write this in the morning, it's already tomorrow -- January 1st, 2024 (or, apropos of my recent post, January 1st, 45² - 1) in parts of Australia. Happy #newyear2024.

Happy New Year, everybody!

Full of mathematics, and logic and computation in particular, for all here on mathstodon and beyond.

🎆

No Right to Medical Care, Compensation for #Injuries or Time Off: How Immigrant #Dairy Workers Go From Vital to Disposable
==

Wisconsin’s dairy industry would almost certainly collapse without the #immigrants who do the dirty, dangerous work that #farmers across the state say citizens won’t.

But when #workers get hurt — and they get hurt with such frequency it’s considered a routine part of the job — the laws are stacked against them.

#News #Labor #Safety

https://www.propublica.org/article/wisconsin-dairy-farm-immigrant-workers-injury-safety?utm_medium=social&utm_source=mastodon&utm_campaign=mastodon-post

Firefly Bookstore is going to try out being on Mastodon. We hope to connect with you here! #Mastodon #kutztown #books #bookstore #pennsylvania

1/2 If you lived on one of the 5 outer planets orbiting the star TOI-178, you could call your friends on another planet and celebrate #NewYear together, as their orbits are in resonance.

They follow a 18:9:6:4:3 resonance chain: for every 18 orbital revolutions of the first planet (the 2nd from the star), the next one does 9, the next one 6 and so on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WevvRG9ysY

📽️ ESO/L. Calçada

#astrodon #astronomy #space #science

People are pushing back on the overly-centralized social media platforms, and this year it led to an explosion of exciting projects in decentralization. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/12/taking-back-web-decentralization-2023-review

Three women who served in the Trump White House, speaking on an ABC News program, warn against a possible second Trump term, with one of them saying it could mean "the end of American democracy as we know it." https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/former-trump-white-house-insiders-call-2nd-term/story?id=105998679

the two way to mom

This December, if there’s one tech New Year’s resolution I’d encourage you to have, it’s switching to the only remaining ethical web browser, Firefox. According to recent posts on social media, Firefox’s market share is slipping. We should not let that happen. There are two main reasons why switching is important.

1. Privacy

Firefox is the only major browser not built by a company that makes money from advertising and/or selling your personal data. There’s been a lot of talk about websites tracking users using cookies, fingerprinting and other nefarious technologies that hurt your privacy. But owning the browser puts Google, Apple and Microsoft in a position where they don’t even need those tricks. We need to use browsers that are independent, and right now that means Firefox.

2. Browser engine monopoly

Wikipedia lists four browser engines as being “active”. Browser engines are the bits that take a web page’s code and display it on your screen. Ideally, they conform to the official W3C standards, and display all elements as it describes. If that’s the case, web developers can easily write sites that work on all browsers. No proprietary vendor lock-in nonsense, just glorious open standards at work.

It’s happened before

In the early 2000’s, Internet Explorer had a massive 95% market share. This meant that many sites were only developed for use with IE. They’d use experimental features that IE supported, in favor of things from the official HTML standard. This was a very bad situation, which hindered the development of the World Wide Web.

Currenty, Chrome, Safari and Edge all use variations of the closely related Webkit and Blink engines. If we want to avoid another browser engine monopoly, we need to support Firefox, and its “Gecko” engine.

Firefox is actually really good

If Firefox would be a bad browser, I would not recommend you to switch. It’s fast, has a nice user interface, and feels every bit as modern and elegant as its competition. I’ve been using it as my main browser for a couple of years now, on Linux, Windows, MacOS and Android. As a web developer, I usually have at least three browsers open, but when I go look something up on the web, I pick Firefox.

So please, help save the web by using the best browser out there. It’s an easy thing to do, and it makes a big difference.

https://roytanck.com/2023/12/23/in-2024-please-switch-to-firefox/

#Firefox #privacy