The author gets some stuff wrong, but they are principled and have a few good ideas (most especially highlighted comments).

why is there such a strange and ritualistic male quest for meaning? look to the beats to find out.

I’m not sure exactly when I started putting jokes in my scientific presentations, but I know why I started. I also know when and why I stopped.

via: https://www.reinvent.science/p/use-humor see: https://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf

Mankiw’s 10 principles of economics, translated for the uninitiated

via: https://www.reinvent.science/p/use-humor

Slime Molt Time Mold would be very interested in procedural rhetoric in order to help people learn cybernetics.

I designed the 12-bit rainbow palette for use on National Grid: Live. It consists of twelve colours chosen with consideration for how we perceive luminance, chroma, and hue

Nina Cosford is a freelance illustrator based in Hastings, UK.

She has illustrated over twenty published books and has worked with numerous brands including Apple, HBO, WaterAid, TATE, Google, UN Refugee Agency, Radio Times, H&M, Lonely Planet and Netflix. Her work became particularly well-known after she collaborated with Lena Dunham and HBO on the award-winning TV show GIRLS, which sparked a huge interest in the girl-centric zeitgeist of today. She has over 325,000 followers on Instagram and was recently named one of the Top 20 Female Illustrators by Stylist Magazine

Public shaming plays an important role in upholding valuable social norms. But, under what conditions, if any, is it morally justifiable?

This piece does a great job of explaining when use of (public) shame is justified. We ought to get much better at deploying social shame, especially as the Western world rapidly becomes more fascist.

today, we’re parsing XML through some… unconventional means. for fun and profit

Wise words regarding web scraping.

This page presents a video-based tutorial on using the Church programming language.

Also a great hub of resources for probabilistic programming.

A “quine” is a deterministic program that prints itself. In this essay, I will show you a “gauguine”: a probabilistic program that infers itself. A gauguine is repeatedly asked to guess its own source code. Initially, its chances of guessing correctly are of course minuscule. But as the gauguine observes more and more of its own previous guesses, it detects patterns of behavior and gains information about its inner workings. This information allows it to bootstrap self-knowledge, and ultimately discover its own source code. We will discuss how—and why—we might write a gauguine, and what we stand to learn by constructing one.

Beautiful paper. Church also looks to be tremendously powerful; I ought to give it a try.

Forecast hacking is sick.

I’m currently a Principal Scientist at Galois, Inc.. My research addresses problems in software reliability through advances in program analysis, computer-checkable proofs, and their combination. Recently I have been working on new programming languages for data privacy and secure computation, and new verification techniques for software defined networking. I used to help run and still actively collaborate with the UVM PLAID Lab.

Open-source CQL and its integrated development environment (IDE) performs data-related tasks — such as querying, combining, migrating, and evolving databases — using category theory, a branch of mathematics that has revolutionized several areas of computer science.

This blog post provides an overview of the work I had done with José Siqueira this summer. Inspired by the free Boolean/Heyting algebra of a given set, we develop a free-forgetful adjunction between posets and PLTL temporal algebras, where PLTL denotes propositional linear temporal logic. We provide a description of their induced Eilenberg-Moore categories. We describe how this could be used to temporalise systems and logics through hyperdoctrines and connect this to the stream comonad. We end with future research directions, connecting this topic with the cofree comonad of polynomial functors and temporalising doxastic logic.

The logic algebra stuff was neat. Got lost in the cat sauce as per usual LOL.

Mathematics and science Braille textbooks are expensive and require an enormous effort to produce — until now. A team of researchers has developed a method for easily creating textbooks in Braille, with an initial focus on math textbooks. The new process is made possible by a new authoring system which serves as a “universal translator” for textbook formats, combined with enhancements to the standard method for putting mathematics in a Web page. Basing the new work on established systems will ensure that the production of Braille textbooks will become easy, inexpensive, and widespread.

Good advice in general.

Let m and n be positive integers. For the quantum integer [n]_q = 1 + q + ... + q^{n-1} there is a natural polynomial addition such that [m]_q \oplus_q [n]_q = [m+n]_q and a natural polynomial multiplication such that [m]_q \otimes_q [n]_q = [mn]_q. These constructions lead to the construction of the ring of quantum integers and the field of quantum rational numbers. It is also shown that addition and multiplication of quantum integers are equivalent to elementary decompositions of intervals of integers in additive number theory.

Very beautiful exposition. I hope all of my mathematical communications can be as clear as this.

via: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fkc0pti6I3E