sojournTime @sojournTime@social.cleverlibre.org

Just watched a piece on a Dutch newssite about a guy who started to learn to read and write at a later age because his little daughter was starting to read too and he wanted to be able to help her out.

And I found it pretty striking what he said at the end when he was asked what that felt like:

Freedom. It felt like a lot of freedom.

Education is important, folks!

The #SalemPrize is a prize in analysis (particularly relating to Fourier analysis, analytic number theory, and probability, which were Raphael Salem's main research interests) which was founded in 1968, but suspended since 2018 due to the death of Jean Bourgain (who was almost singlehandedly administering the prize) and the COVID-19 pandemic. It has now been revived and we are now accepting nominations until September 1st. https://terrytao.wordpress.com/

Not often that a mathematician's work (in this case, Moon Dulchin's work on gerrymandering) makes a significant impact at the US Supreme Court. https://twitter.com/madprofessah/status/1666831394717433856

Mind. Blown.

New paper on the Polsby-Popper score, with applications to majority-minority districts, with
@pietrobelotti and Soraya Ezazipour https://optimization-online.org/2023/05/political-districting-to-optimize-the-polsby-popper-compactness-score/ #orms #mip #misocp

@da_667 are you aware, sir, of the greatest website ever made?
https://pointerpointer.com/

This is real-world XKCD

See full thread: https://twitter.com/rachel_l_woods/status/1649790435533922307?s=61&t=Ugdi4XBKf_2ovJ1y9hKs4w

@DeliaChristina

In 1999 to 2000 I was going through a very rough patch in my life. What with the state of things, I didn't get to see #GalaxyQuest when it was first released. Finally, on a day I was feeling particularly low, and shortly before the movie left the theaters, I canceled work and took myself out to a midday matinée.

I was the *only* person in a vast theater, of a size that no one builds anymore, sitting and waiting for the lights to go down. At one point, I turned and peered up at the projectionist's booth. I saw a shadowy figure moving back and forth behind the window, bending and straightening. This was in the days before automated, digital films. The Phantom Menace had been released digitally in 1999, but the equipment to show such films was extremely expensive and most theaters hadn't converted yet; "projectionist" was still real job.

While I was looking, the figure paused, strode to the window and peered back at me, then disappeared quickly.

I turned back around and continued to fidget and ponder the misfit pieces of my life.

At the top of the aisle behind me, the theater door swung open and banged loudly on the wall. The projectionist strode down the aisle toward me, a tall barrel-shaped man with a thick beard and glasses. My first thought was that the matinee was canceled due to low turnout, and I'd be getting a refund. Just as I'd resigned myself to that, the marching projectionist shouted out in a booming voice,

"WELCOME to your PRIVATE viewing oooooooof GALAXY QUEST!!!"

He stopped in front of my row, and I saw that he had an *armload* of STUFF. One by one, he began presenting each thing to me, and as the pile in his arms dwindled, the one in my lap grew.

"As our SPECIAL VIP Galaxy Quest GUEST today, YOU are entitled to..."

"- A commemorative t-shirt!"
"- A poster suitable for framing!"
"- A limited edition refrigerator magnet!"
"- A button to pin to your lapel!"

The list and the shwag went on. With every ridiculous item, I laughed harder and harder, until there were tears leaking out of the corners of my eyes.

Then he bowed and shouted, "WE HOPE YOU ENJOY THE SHOW!" and turned on his heel to march back up the aisle and out the exit door.

Alas, of all the shwag only the magnet has stood the test of time. But the humor and kindness of the unknown projectionist lives on.

@andrewb @christianp I can say hello as well if that reduces your degrees of separation!

My pal @standupmaths commissioned me to do some animations for their video about landlocked bits of the world: https://youtu.be/5cJK9VJ24hQ

It includes arguably the best, and potentially only, pun involving Liechtenstein

Reproducing Kernel Hilbert spaces define norms on functions so that solutions of regularized fitting problems are linear sum of kernel functions. Defines non-parametric learning methods (complexity scales with input). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducing_kernel_Hilbert_space

I have verified that you can leave secret messages to Bing Chat on the web.

There are a lot of reasons to read this article. What was most interesting to me that the EA and rationalist communities might be turning its back on OpenAI

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-03-07/effective-altruism-s-problems-go-beyond-sam-bankman-fried

Meet the woman behind early @NASA_Landsat images: Dr. Valerie L. Thomas.

A self-taught programmer, she managed the development of Landsat image processing. Her work in the '70s helped show that satellite imagery could be used to support agriculture. https://go.nasa.gov/3EJMPgT #BHM
#NASA

HISTORY OF PHYSICS & MATHEMATICS

The problem of the Brachistochrone.

One of the topics considered by Galileo Galilei in his 1638 masterpiece, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, is rates of descent along certain curves.

In Proposition V of “Naturally Accelerated Motion”, he proved that descent time of a body on an inclined plane is proportional to the length of the plane, and inversely proportional to the square root of its height.

1/

Adding an independent Gaussian variable is the same as doing a heat diffusion on the density. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolution_of_probability_distributions

@icecolbeveridge I made a bar chart with Pyplot.