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We’ve all seen how the
executive branch has been gutted of qualified people from the top-down,
with agency heads vowing to destroy their own agencies and senior-level
officials with decades of experie
In a dramatic new low for US
Congress, 30 Republicans raided the confidential Laura Cooper hearing,
bringing electronic devices into a secured area where none are
permitted. Here is a photo of Alex Mo
Something you can do right now:
Public comments are being solicited on a proposed federal rule that
would remove many existing restrictions on government contractors from
discriminating on the basis o
George Mason: “The President
ought not to have the power of pardoning, because he may frequently
pardon crimes which were advised by himself. … if he has the power of
granting pardons before indictm
“In your otherwise beautiful
poem, one verse reads, ‘Every minute dies a man, Every minute one is
born;’ I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend
to keep the sum total of the wo
Division of three for cardinals
without the axiom of choice. Formally, given 3x = 3y, the goal is to
prove that x = y. (With the axiom of choice, you can prove that x = 3x
for any infinite cardinal x,
Seen in the index of a book:
“Bears, combats with, 15, 26, 62, 75, 78, 90, 95, 106, 113, 118, 154,
169, 181, 188, 207, 213, 216; two men killed by a bear, 62; the crew
made ill by eating a bear’s live
“Knife money” was used for much
of 400 years in ancient China until round coins were finally invented.
(Before, and concurrent, with knife money was “spade money” which were
bronze shovelheads, usuall
Fun fact: The cornea receives
most of its oxygen directly from the air. The cornea’s endothelium
actively pumps water out of the cornea, but its metabolic activity is
reduced at night because it has l
NHC’s post-season analysis of
the 2018 hurricane season upgraded Hurricane Michael to category 5, but
their report on Michael incorrectly gave context for its strength. They
write: “In terms of wind
Best quote from the Mueller
report: ’[Trump] then asked, “What about these notes? Why do you take
notes? Lawyers don’t take notes. I never had a lawyer who took notes.”
McGahn responded that he keeps
Chess site “lichess” does not
properly validate chess games imported into the site in pgn notation.
This permits odd behavior such as moving into check (but only if the
king itself is moved) or promot
Quote from a recent Supreme
Court decision regarding a case in which a judge with the deciding vote
died before the court’s decision was announced: “Because Judge Reinhardt
was no longer a judge at th
A college admission cheating
ring involving 50 people was busted. From the indictment’s affidavit:
“Caplan: if somebody catches this, what happens? Cooperating Witness 1:
The only one who can catch it
In 1971 the proof below was
given that x3 + 117y3 = 5
has no integer solutions, using some difficult computations in the field
$\mathbb Q(\sqrt[3]{117})$. In 1973 it
was observed that the equati
In exciting news today, the
Supreme Court ruled that the states may not take “excessive” civil
forfeiture (it was already unconstitutional for the federal government
to do so). Every year the federal
This is old news, but I only
just found out: in 2017 a neutron star merger was observed by both
gravitational and electromagnetic waves! Aside from the usual
confirmations, in particular this confirme
(See previous post) After
Democrats won every state-wide election in Wisconsin, the Republican
controlled legislature rushed into law hundreds of pages of new
legislation to cripple the executive bra
Context and comments to follow:
“I would first invite the committee to perk up a little bit. If this is
a long day you’ve had an easy life, because there are Wisconsinites
who’ve been on their feet w
Evidence of systematic election
fraud has been found in the North Carolina 9th House district. Multiple
voters have given sworn affidavits that they witnessed improper election
behavior, including the
In 2010, the Catholic church
excommunicated a nun for authorizing an abortion at a Catholic hospital
where she worked as an administrator. (The woman who received the
abortion would have died without
Some researchers at Penn State
in the 90s decided that using nuclear bombs for spacecraft propulsion
(“Project Orion”) was not a crazy enough idea, and proposed igniting the
nuclear bombs with *antima
Just read Cohen’s plea
agreement. In addition to the well-publicized campaign finance
violations, he admitted to underpaying $1.5 million in taxes and lying
to a bank to illegally obtain loans. The ag
“A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in
total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball
cost?” According to the study below, around 5% to 40% of respondents
gave the answer “5 cents”, v
Prior to 2000, civilian GPS had
an intentional error of about 100 meters… except during the 1991 Kuwait
War, when the US military didn’t have enough military GPS receivers, so
they turned off the er
Of the 300000 documents seized
in the raid on Michael Cohen, only 7 were found to be subject to
attorney-client privilege related to Cohen being an attorney. So, while
Trump has characterized Cohen as
The early Earth produced
somewhat more geothermal heat, before most of the initial heat of
formation was dissipated and short-lived radioactive isotopes depleted.
This made possible higher temperature
On the subject of people
pardoning themselves, in 1856 the governor of Washington Territory
pardoned himself of a $50 fine he was levied by territorial judge Edward
Lander for the offense of having La
Until radar observations in
1965, Mercury was believed to be in 1:1 tidal locking with the Sun
instead of 3:2 because Mercury could be only be observed optically every
other Mercury year. Thanks to t
Cambridge friends: on June
1-14, Somerville Theater will be showing “2001: A Space Odyssey”. If you
are interested in joining me, let me know! Fun fact: Hal’s eye was a
working camera which was used
In 1770 it was proven that
every positive integer is a sum of at most four perfect squares (and no
fewer suffices). In 1912 it was proven that every positive integer is a
sum of at most 9 positive cub
Just listened to the latest
Opening Arguments podcast on the latest legal jeopardies of Trump: 1.
The Stormy Daniels case was moved to federal court, but in so doing
Trump effectively admitted in cou
I thought I was unique but
apparently I’m not even the only person named Eric from Indiana who
wrote a roguelike game in Haskell! https://haskellroguelike.com/
Something I learned today:
every meaning of the English word “check” (e.g. to verify against a
list, to limit, to block in sports, a money order, a restaurant bill)
ultimately comes from “checkmate” i
Current Stormy Daniels
status/updates: 1. The $130k settlement was ultimately paid by the Trump
campaign (and laundered through the Trump organization through a series
of 5 payments marked eg “Facili
Sexual abuse facilitator
Cardinal Bernard Law, of the Boston Archdiocese, died two days ago and
received honorable funeral rites in the Vatican. “We highly doubt there
is a single victim of abuse who
“The worst result in a
simultaneous [chess] exhibition given by a master occurred in 1951, when
International Master Robert Wade gave a simultaneous exhibition against
30 Russian schoolboys, aged 14 a
It is illegal in the UK to own
a document with information likely to be useful to a terrorist. In 2012,
Ruksana Begum was sentenced to one year in jail for having copies of two
issues of an al-Qaida m
Today I learned that some of
our most used punctuation dates back to ~200 BC, preceding the
popularization of lower-case letters or having spaces between words by
about 1000 years. The period, comma,
Today is the 500th anniversary
of Reformation Day, marking when Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses that
eventually led to the protestant reformation. It’s not often you get to
celebrate a 500th annive
Two interesting sequences:
Gijswijt’s sequence contains every positive integer, but grows so slowly
that the first 5 appears around term 101023. The Golomb
sequence grows asymptotically at a r
Near Xenon’s critical point at
58 atm and 17 C, Xenon gas has a density of 1100 kg / m3, greater than liquid water at
those conditions. So what happens if you try to float liquid water on
Xenon gas
In all the talk about Trump
Jr’s soliciting Russian help, there is another story I have not seen
discussed: Peter Smith, Republican operative close to Flynn and member
of shell company “KLS research”
Today I learned that there is a
layer of sodium at an altitude of ~100 km in the Earth’s atmosphere
caused by meteors.
<https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nasa-advances-worlds-first-spaceborne-sodi
In yesterday’s press briefing,
White House OMB director Mick Mulvaney uses the word “compassion” five
times to refer to the proposed cuts to food stamps and social security
disability. “We’re no long
“They lifted half a city block
[…] and an estimated all in weight including hanging sidewalks of thirty
five thousand tons. Businesses operating out of these premises were not
closed down for the li
Seen in a math textbook: “This
is all one needs to check that T(x) is metrically
transitive, and this is entirely trivial.1” Footnote:
“1Here I was carried away by a burst of inexplicable
optim
“we would estimate that
stripping insurance from 24 million people would produce an estimated
24,000 additional deaths annually. That is 40% more than the sum total
of all murders” [The Guardian](htt
In classical electromagnetism,
we usually think of the electric fields and magnetic fields as the
fundamental objects of study, in the sense that if you know the fields
at the location of interest, yo
Until today (or maybe late
yesterday), whitehouse.gov listed Obama as the current president at the
following link (it now lists Trump). I’ve been checking everyday since
this was brought to my attenti
“Republicans don’t look at
polls and think”we need to moderate our platform because Americans don’t
support starving the poor to death, and we’ll get negative media
coverage”; they work hard over the
“Lemma 0.3. Let S be a Scheme. Let X be a scheme and X is an affine open covering. Let
𝒰 ⊂ 𝒳 be a canonical and locally of
finite type. Let X be a
scheme. Let X be
“Extrapolating from present
information, …probably… it will be shown in the future that average
American adults experience a variety of significant physiological and
intellectual dysfunctions caus
With the worldwide banning of
leaded gasoline and the banning of leaded paint in the US and EU, I was
under the impression that chronic environmental exposure to lead was
largely a thing of the past.
I think 2016 will be (and
should be) remembered for two things: the putative discovery of the 9th
planet in the solar system, and the announcement of the first
observation of gravitational waves. [Yo
Floridian friends- In 2000, at
least 991 Nader supporters in Florida pledged to vote for Al Gore in
exchange for Gore supporters in other states voting for Nader. These
vote swaps very nearly decided
I’ve seen many people state
that they find the flaws in both major party candidates so troubling
that they cannot in good conscience vote for either one. They have a
point. That’s why I, as a single i
Leaked video of former US
Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon talking with Mormon leaders (the Mormon
“apostles”) reveals details I find disturbing: - he repeatedly,
explicitly states that his loyalty* to
My favorite fact in elementary
number theory is that odd primes can be written as a sum of two squares
if and only if they are congruent to 1 modulo 4. This has been known
since 1634 and proven (by Eu
I ran into a very interesting
(and fairly readable) paper that demonstrates remarkable algorithms for
(1) finding the maximum of a continuous function on the real interval
[0, 1] and (2) integrating a
Here’s a cool (and very simple)
data structure I just learned about that takes advantage of
uninitialized memory to use less time than space! https://research.swtch.com/sparse
Some adjectives used to
describe certain types of cardinal numbers, according to Wikipedia:
small; large; worldly; inaccessible; hyper inaccessible; reflecting;
totally indescribable; unfoldable; shr
For every prime p > 1075, there exists
an infinite group whose nontrivial subgroups each have p elements. There is no such group
for p = 2 or p = 3.
[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wi
A quick exercise in L’Hopital’s
rule: compute the derivative of W((x2+x−1)e(x−1))
at x = 0, where W is the Lambert W function. The
derivative of W is given by:
$$ =
Today I fixed a bug in my lua
code by adding the lines: if x == 0 then x = 0 end if y == 0 then y = 0
end Turns out lua has a “negative zero”, which is equal to zero
I have on occasion recommended
the excellent book Governing the Commons by Elinor Ostrom (Nobel prize
winner in economics, and the only woman to have done so), most
especially to those interested in t
A handful of you may remember a
lecture I taught on the J programming language way back at Caltech. Here
is an interesting 1975 tutorial on APL, “A Programming Language”, which
was the predecessor of
I made a computer in a computer
game. Wanted to do this with Dwarf Fortress a while ago but never got
far (and that’s been done several times already), maybe I’ll return to
that someday. <https://www
A new Mersenne prime and a new
planet? What a week! “it was sent to the four most renowned Australian
number theorists. They were asked to work on it for six hours. None of
them could solve it in thi
“Turns out this is not Brady’s
first water glass heist. He also took the glass used by President Obama
at his first inauguration.” [Washington
Post](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2
Fun fact: the sum of 1/(ab)2 over all
relatively prime pairs of positive integers a, b is rational. This is not true if
you remove the “relatively prime” restriction. Short proof… that sum
e
For the second time this year,
Lenovo is found to ship computers with malware preinstalled. This time
it is a rootkit in the bios that replaces a Windows system executable
with one which (on boot) ins
I learned recently that
pre-main sequence stars (those fueled by their own gravitational
collapse) are typically much brighter, by up to an order of magnitude,
than their successor main sequence stars
“Father Gary Thomas, pastor at
Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Saratoga, Calif., and the exorcist for
the Diocese of San Jose, said he has seen notable improvements after
exorcising homes and when he
“The Hague District Court has
ruled today that the State [of the Netherlands] must take more action to
reduce the greenhouse gas emissions in the Netherlands. The State also
has to ensure that the Dut
Since September, Lenovo has
been shipping laptops with pre-installed malware that spies on all
network activity – including encrypted – and sends it to a remote server
under the guise of injecting t
After careful examination of
the discography of Korean pop group 4Minute I have determined that they
should be renamed 3Minute19Second (with a standard deviation of 40
seconds).
A brief glimpse into the
insightful mind of Darwin, and of some of the very beginnings of
statistics. “Fisher’s analysis was only possible because Darwin had
designed his experiment so well. In fact,
“If Obama had
written”moveForward(“three steps”);“, the program would have failed,
offering only a cryptic error message and exposing the president to the
near-perpetual state of frustration most sof
It seems clear in retrospect,
but apparently the limiting factor that determines the size of the outer
solar system is tidal effects due to the Milky Way. It turns out we can
calculate the upper limit
“Mr. Obama announced that the
United States would emit 26 percent to 28 percent less carbon in 2025
than it did in 2005. […] China’s pledge to reach peak carbon emissions
by 2030, if not sooner, is
The Nobel Prize in medicine was
awarded yesterday to those who discovered, in 2005, the existence of
“grid cells” in the brain. These cells help animals keep track of their
position in space… using
So I’ve learned that rogue
planets have actually been discovered (2 to 7 of them, the first
confirmed in 2013). All of them are very large (sub-brown dwarfs) and
young, and so warm enough to be seen d
The Minamata Convention, if it
takes effect (which it looks like it will), would (among other
provisions) ban all mining of mercury almost world-wide around 2020. So
I guess mercury recycling is going
Japan’s anti-nuclear hysteria
seems a lot less hysterical now that I’ve read a bit about Japan’s
rather spotty nuclear safety record and history of government cover-ups.
Global accidents in the last t
Apparently there is no road
link between North and South America. The first time anyone drove
between the two continents was in 1987, taking more than two years at
the rate of 1 mile per week. It had
In comparison to other sources
of energy, nuclear power may as well be magic, and it baffles me that
many environmentalists continue to oppose it. Here is an open letter
from four leading climate scie
“NextGen Climate will spend
about $100 million this year to influence several Senate and governor’s
races in which climate change could play a major role.”
[NYT](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/22/us/
Apparently North Korea has its
own OS. Wikipedia
Also, for only $68 you can purchase an SD card with 32 GB of storage, a
wireless connection, and runs a w
I wasn’t expecting Flight of
the Bumblebee performed on the organ to mean the feet… (see inset).
Also, the oldest documented permanent organ installation was in 1361,
with three manuals and a pedalb
After having heard the news
that some hundreds of migrant construction workers are believed to have
died in Qatar in preparations for the 2022 world cup, I learned that the
consultants hired by FIFA t
“A space in the indiscrete
topology is like an enormous room. Everyone is lumped together, and
nobody is housed off. In fact, the indiscrete topology is the most
un-housed-off topology there is.” -Mat
“parent Jennifer Reynolds said
she sees the computers as […] part of a move to have students
‘indoctrinated of the concepts of global warming, evolution, defaming
the Founders.’” <https://tucson.co
Mathematics made difficult: A
handbook for the perplexed http://i7-dungeon.sourceforge.net/math_hard.pdf “Are any
two numbers comparable? Objection. The kinds of comparison - the
absolute, compara
“In 1952, the logician Leon
Henkin flipped Gödel’s idea around and asked about a sentence in the
language of arithmetic that says: ‘This sentence is provable.’ He asked:
is this provable or not? The a
Here’s a generalization of a
puzzle about logic gates I posted in July, which (if you are one of the
roughly two people who solved it) neatly explains how the puzzle works.
(The original source I saw
“The redistricting decisions of
which DOJ complains were motivated by partisan rather than racial
considerations, and the plaintiffs and DOJ have zero evidence to prove
the contrary.” <https://www.bl
Today I learned the Netherlands
has the world’s first suspended bicycle roundabout. (Unfortunately the
last time I was in Eindhoven it had not been built yet….) {
https://vimeo.com/73588938 Someone took a 1993
government report, extracted various diagram and quotes, and put them
them together with creepy music in a video. The result is… interesting.
I am c
“Earlier in his presidency,
Mr. Obama made the catastrophic mistake – in the face of just this sort
of extortion – to believe in Mr. Boehner’s willingness to be
reasonable.” The Republicans have bee
Random things I ran into on
wikipedia… “Nearly any fluid can be used to create an acoustic event
horizon, but the viscosity of most fluids creates random motion that
makes features like Hawking radi
I am prepared to believe
(though I have not heard an adequate explanation of the fact) that in
general relativity, an infinite universe homogeneously filled with mass
will tend to contract. In A Brief
This article just gets more
ridiculous the further you read… “The station gathered a panel of clergy
specialising in exorcisms who scrutinised the footage and concluded that
the pope had performed a
“Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) said
in 2010 that he opposed action on climate change because ‘the Earth will
end only when God declares it to be over.’ He is the chairman of the
Subcommittee on Environment
Let’s play… identify the city
from its satellite picture! (To get the highest zoom, click on the icon
in the upper right of each picture.) Total population between all the
pictures is roughly 333 mi
“Stonewall took place in 1969,
and as of last week the Supreme Court was still trying to decide if gay
people should be allowed to marry each other. If the climate movement
takes that long, we’ll be r
“Which is to say: To form
accurate beliefs about something, you really do have to observe it. It’s
a very physical, very real process: any rational mind does ‘work’ in the
thermodynamic sense, not jus
A detailed report on why cap
and trade legislation failed in congress (specifically the Senate), in
particular compared to health care reform which succeeded. Key points: *
Need for strong, broad pop
“perhaps even the single best
thing written about climate change for a general audience” This book,
What We Know About Climate Change, is entirely non-technical, while
remaining lucid, informative, a
“Our limit applies to a person
out of the sun, in gale-force winds, doused with water, wearing no
clothing, and not working.” Using purely thermodynamic considerations of
the absolute limit of the hu
“what appears to the public as
the United States Constitution is not the complete document”
<https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/03/new-hampshire-lawmakers-allege-secret-hidden-thirteenth-amend
“Smullyan has argued forcefully
that Tarski’s undefinability theorem deserves much of the attention
garnered by Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.”
[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski’s_un
Long story short, republicans
have no interest in any compromise with Obama. Not that this surprises
anyone who remembers Senate Minority Leader’s “the single most important
thing we want to achieve i
“Richard Hamming suggests that
you ask yourself three questions: 1. What are the most important
problems in your field? 2. Are you working on one of them? 3. Why not?
[…] Hamming used to go around
“On Feb. 8, 2011, just as the
Arab Spring was reaching a crescendo, the government in Damascus
suddenly reversed a long-standing ban on websites such as Facebook,
Twitter, YouTube, and the Arabic vers
A unique perspective.. “I
supported George W. Bush in 2000, and many close friends served in
high-level administration positions. I was especially close to the
Council of Economic Advisers and often w
“Beijing even funded the
non-existent party’s newspaper, De Kommunist, which was written entirely
by Dutch secret service agents.” [The
Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/dec/04/jonhenl
“Robert Grubbs, an American who
shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2005, says he eats chocolate
whenever possible. […] Grubbs’ countryman, Eric Cornell, who won the
Nobel Prize in Physics in 20
“‘I think all political
philosophies can be rated on (1) How stupid they are and (2) How evil
they are,’ said celebrated economist C.B. Francois, who headed the panel
of experts responsible for the ch
“There is even an early
disagreement over the question of what type of warning - if any - the
guards would give before firing their weapons. The guards, who follow
the inspectors everywhere, are real
Just arrived in Nottingham! Pop
quiz, which one of the following can /not/ be found on my tourist map of
Nottinghamshire: Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Attenborough, Gallstone, Gotham,
Melbourne, North Leverton
Penn. House Majority Leader
admits that increased regulations on abortion facilities are intended to
decrease availability of abortion services and that voter ID laws in PA
are intended to disenfranch
“In your otherwise beautiful
poem, one verse reads, ‘Every minute dies a man, Every minute one is
born;’ I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend
to keep the sum total of the wo
There is at least one true
sentence in this puzzle, and the last such is sentence 2. The number of
true sentences in this puzzle is even if and only if you index from 0.
There is more than one consist
This is still under
investigation, so the full story is as yet unclear and not all the
pieces have been verified.
<https://www.thedailybeast.com/dutch-castration-scandal-how-journalists-broke-the-sto
I was stuck on my work and it
was getting late so I took a break to write a Markov chain text
generator and trained it in four languages. Voilà: help you remember i
went the weeks when it was when my
Two of the most useful
resources for functional programming are this vaguely titled website and
“Purely Functional Data Structures” by Chris Okasaki, which may be the
best computer science book I’ve r
<https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/guam-northern-mariana-i
{