Deriving the Boltzmann formula, defining temperature, and simulating liquid/vapor.

The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on whether to purchase a weapon now to protect against future potential threats.

The Adjoint School is an annual research school in applied category theory.

via: https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2025/08/burrito_monads_arrow_kitchens.html

I am an AI hater. This is considered rude, but I do not care, because I am a hater.

Me too, buddy.

The hamburger button, so named for its unintentional resemblance to a hamburger, is a button typically placed in a top corner of a graphical user interface. Its function is to toggle a menu (sometimes referred to as a hamburger menu) or navigation bar between being collapsed behind the button or displayed on the screen. The icon which is associated with this widget, consisting of three horizontal bars, is also known as the collapsed menu icon.

One of our central beliefs at the lab is that premature formality is the root of all evil.

Computers are great at doing things formally with explicit structure. Programs are formal descriptions of what the computer should do. But while using formalisms can be great, forcing people to be explicit about everything often gets in the way.

In 2014, researchers at the University of Washington and Microsoft Research proposed a radical idea: What if uncertainty were encoded directly into the type system? Their paper, Uncertain<T>: A First-Order Type for Uncertain Data introduced a probabilistic programming approach that’s both mathematically rigorous and surprisingly practical.

We trust our databases, queues, and other systems to store acknowledged writes, to serve them up later, and to isolate transactions from one another. But can we really trust them? Jepsen combines concurrent, generative tests with fault injection to measure distributed systems safety. We’ll learn about Datomic, Bufstream, and TigerBeetle, and show how three unconventional systems ensure–or violate–key safety properties.

More techniques from the math mines

This month we learned that the linguist Robin Lakoff had died at the age of 82. If you’ve heard of Lakoff you will probably know her as the author of Language and Woman’s Place (LWP), an early and very influential contribution to the field of language and gender studies.

By peddling the illusion that romance can be made queer, heteronormative capitalism forces queer people to try solve their problems of undesirability and unhappiness privately by finding the “right” partner, rather than directing their anger towards public action.

via: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zomXm7O3Os

This is a step-by-step guide into Heisenberg’s famous “Umdeutung paper” in which he created quantum mechanics in 1925. I include the experimental reason for the need of matrices, a deep dive into the four key ideas of Heisenberg’s paper, and a detailed worked-out example showing how zero-point energy naturally appears in Heisenberg’s theory thanks to an early draft of what years later would become Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

Radix sort is older than the computer yet quicker than quick sort. Why aren’t we all using it?