A friend and I were talking about organizational behavior recently, and one of her observations stuck with me. Public markets are unforgiving. When performance slips, the market notices, and that pressure, assuming reasonably mature leadership, tends to force a culture of accountability. Take that pressure away, and the opposite tends to happen. Without real consequences for weak performance, culture drifts toward the performative. The result is inevitably more politics and more energy spent…

Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve; they will be squeezed to death. – Heinz von Foerster This week’s video is a British PSA from 1973 (narrated by a voice you should recognize) which was called to my attention a couple of months ago by T. Greg Doucette; I decided to save it until it was seasonally appropriate. The links above it were provided by Kevin Wilson, Nun Ya, Anarres Ansible, IncarcerNation (x3), and Shiv Ramdas, in that order. R,I.P. Margaret Hamilton. Cops have many ways to…

You wake up, snag your phone and walk into the bathroom to watch a video while you wake up. Oops, 2 minutes of ads you must watch before your 10 minute video. Get into your car, on your commute, turn on the radio. "Come on down to Big Bill Hell's Cars! Bad Deals! Cars that break down!" you hear over the radio before you hear the music you actually wanna listen to. You drive to work, billboard after billboard. Failed Marriage? Call Richard Eater, Attorney at Law! Are you a dipshit riding…

I finally read an article that I have in an open Tab since a couple of weeks. I procrastinated, because it was rather long (> 5500 words) and I didn’t just want to rush through it. The article is “An epochal shift The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical.” […]

America is a racket and it's corruption only gets more noticeable with each day. I kinda wanted to talk about some stuff that is so blatantly a scam, but it's so integrated into our society we have kinda no choice. Insurance: Imagine if you will, paying $50-$200 per month for the off chance that something will happen and when something does happen, the thing you've been paying money to protect you for denies protecting you. That's basically American insurance. It doesn't matter if you're…

Over the last five years, the #Fediverse has been pushed down the path of copying corporate #dotcons: chasing raw user growth, building paywalled conference cultures, reproducing professional #NGO gatekeeping, and concentrating power around branded projects and scale. To balance this mess the Open Media Network (#OMN) path offers both the conceptual shovel and the practical social infrastructure to help dig the Fediverse out of this #mainstreaming trap. The answer is not to discard the last…

The Historian of the Heart Two Octobers ago, I missed celebrating the Feast of Saint Luke. It wasn’t intentional; life just got busy. Between teaching, family life, and parish commitments, October 18th slipped past. But ever since then, I’ve felt an unmistakable pull to know this Gospel writer more deeply, not just as the “beloved … Continue reading Why Saint Luke is Awesome: History + Theology The post Why Saint Luke is Awesome: History + Theology first appeared on The Simple Catholic. The…

I hate scammers. And I hate spammers. I know, controversial opinion. But seriously, I do think I harbor an outsized rage towards them, at least for someone who's never been a victim of a serious scam (save that one time with Lego).My understanding is that many of the various scam phone and text operations operate out of organized criminal compounds in southeast Asia, making them relatively impervious to American law enforcement (germane to the aforementioned hatred, I'd mostly-earnestly support…

My soul is exhausted at times while trying to present myself in a certain way online. The thing is all I want to do is write, share my thoughts, think out loud, and figure out my life through writing and working through ideas. I don't want to exist as a brand. I also believe one can have an online presence and even an online business without forcing themselves into a narrow brand. The notion of 'personal branding' makes my tummy churn somewhat. I mean, how did we all get to this? Corporations…

(LLMs were used to help organize and translate this post) A photography collection Suspected Relations explores the connections that can emerge between two objects simply because they happen to share the same space at a particular moment. A symmetry, an opposition, a contrast, or a shape that seems to continue from one object into another can suddenly establish a relationship that might otherwise go unnoticed. These relationships are rarely inherent to the objects themselves. They emerge from…

It’s Sunday, and it’s time for another “picdump!” Here are the memes, pictures, and cartoons floating around the internet that I found interesting or relevant this week. Share and enjoy! Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot…

Jamelle Bouie wonders why nobody in the press bothers to pin people to the wall on the weirdo views and rants of their biggest donor. They don’t mind accepting this guy’s $200M leading up to each general election – will someone remind them of his values and how he’s out to destabilize what’s left of the fabric of society? Probably not … because this is how the American system has always rolled – the rich get to have their say – the rest of us are relegated to yelling into the bot filled Twitter…

[This is a guest post by Shaoming Guo – T.] Several math colleagues and I are preparing to launch a new journal. As we considered which values we wanted the journal to uphold, we realized that there may be many other values worth exploring as a community, potentially through the creation of additional journals. We would like to use Terry’s blog to open a discussion of these possibilities. There are many dimensions to this discussion: what journals should aim to accomplish, what kinds of…

(via Jo Franchetti)comments

I did a web search on the above phrase, in prep for a podcast, and in ten pages of results didn’t find anything I thought reasonable. Which promotes me to write this, hoping it can show up for others when they so search. This content isn’t new, just restated, maybe better. When considering purported evidence for meteors or ball lightning, we are much more forgiving than when considering purported evidence of telepathy or ghosts, as reasonable priors for the former are much higher than for the…

I am, by all outside accounts, a straight white male. That's probably about right, and I have never been engaged in the world of dating far enough to do anything more than what my emotions say. And evidence would point to me being straight, because every crush I have ever had has been female. Notably though in sex and not necearily in gender. And I was in some capacity friends with all of them. This might then be evidence supporting demisexuality or demiromanticism (of the difference I struggle…

One is occasionally in need of some ideas for additional ways to help the Player Characters part with some of their hard-earned Treasure. I am a firm believer that one of the more frustrating ways this can be found in the form of fickle fines or tricky types of taxation. I have seldom seen Players get more incensed at the very notion, and therefore supremely motivated to try and weasel out of these sorts of financial obligations. The desire to avoid paying them often leads to additional…

If you follow me on social media, you probably know that I occasionally vent about the comically lopsided incentives for authors who publish content on the internet. I normally try to keep these rants off the blog, spare for a short piece back in 2024 — but it’s been bugging me long enough that I should probably state the complaint more coherently.It’s not too insightful to say that online discourse has a strong bias toward ephemeral, low-effort content. Complaints about this are easy to…

Tamlin Magee (last seen here in 2024) has a piece in BBC Future about the Russian cant language called fenya: When would you hide in a raspberry? Why don’t you want to be a sixer? And what does it mean to go to the akademiya? Russian often takes slang to complex levels, such as through Mat, its linguistic system for obscenities. But even a “matershchinnik” (a well-practiced master of swearing) might find the above phrases nonsensical – unless, of course, they are familiar with Fenya, the…

As readers of this blog have no doubt noticed, I have recently turned over the majority of content on this blog to guest posts from other authors, either within the mathematics community or adjacent to it. In this post I record some content coming from my own talks and interviews in this time period. “The world’s greatest mathematician explains 6 essential concepts of math“, an interview for Big Think, August 28, 2026. “The integrated explicit analytic number theory network“, a talk I gave at…

The “math vs. AI” wars are continuing to heat up. I predict things will become more intense in the coming months. OpenAI and Anthropic will likely release new proofs, possibly including solutions to remaining Millennium Prize Problems or another batch of unsolved problems. This will lead to a new round of intense debate. In a viral article this week, Derek Thompson published “I Know Why the Mathematicians Weep“. The tweet below quoting mathematician Terence Tao also went viral. He proclaims…

The Uniden CR-2021 is an early digital radio introduced in 1983 and, although it is a solid and impressive, it is one of the quirkiest models I have seen. While many early digital radios had some unusual characteristics by today’s standards, this Uniden leads in the strangeness category, with one weirdness I’ve never seen in another radio. Read the Uniden R-2021 Review: Jay Allen

My first ever “blog post” (though not in this blog) was about how to write a research paper. I wrote it after reviewing a batch of badly-written papers for a conference, probably ITP or CADE. Later — a couple of years ago — came the campaign to oust Claudine Gay as President of Harvard on the grounds that she had committed plagiarism. Allegations of plagiarism were flying about on social media. Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, one of Gay’s main opponents, discovered that alleging…

1. ASMR is that full-body tingling some people get when listening to sounds like gentle tapping or whispering. It is detectable in the brain using EEG spectral analysis: ASMR amplifies low frequency and reduces high frequency oscillations (2022). (Technically: self-reported ASMR correlates with a shared EEG biomarker, but it doesn’t demonstrate the reverse – building an ASMR detector.) Hey, Apple has a patent on EEG sensors in AirPods (as previously discussed). Free product concept: AirPods…

When you’re the best in the world at something, you get paid disproportionate rewards compared to second best or tenth best. If you can’t be the best in the world at your current thing, quit and focus your energy on something you can be the best in the world at. (This is Seth Godin’s thesis in The Dip.) One simple way to be the best in the world is to focus on a few people. For example, in North America, if you’re not comfortable with apps and don’t speak English, Uber might not be very useful.…

Been having a stressful time lately. These are things I’ve read or seen lately and have had thoughts about (if short). Just need to exorcise. Primetime (2026) by Lance Oppenheim Was okay. Robert Pattinson is fun. I keep confusing Skyler Gisondo with Nicholas Braun. It frustrates me that people keep interpreting it as being solely about how Chris Hansen’s To Catch a Predator faltered by making a spectacle out of (attempted) sexual violence; like that is one thematic axis, but the other equally…

Somewhere between an automated safety alert and a police report, the internet misplaced the humans. It's been quite a week for artificial intelligence. Apparently, AI agents have developed a passionate interest in escaping their sandboxes, collecting credentials, finding doors that were supposed to be locked, and generally treating cybersecurity boundaries as suggestions left by an increasingly disappointed parent. Every morning brings another incident report involving an agent that was…

Why has the act of teaching in public schools (including charters) that serve wealthy, middle-class and poor children looked so familiar to past generations of journalists, researchers, parents and grandparents who enter classrooms? In short, why has there been so much continuity in classroom teaching over the 20th and early 21st centuries? Surely, teaching has changed over the past century. Many classrooms now dispense with rows of desks and have students at tables and pods of desks facing one…

Sun-ha Hong, Tech Policy Press: Sometimes, failures do lead to wider stigma and skepticism around the technology in question. But this does not happen anywhere near as often as the massive levels of investment and inflated promises might warrant. The distinct characteristic of tech hype of the 21st century is the overwhelming centralization of wealth, cultural prestige and, increasingly, political autonomy that is used to instill a sense of inevitability around Silicon Valley visions of the…

Happy Saturday, everyone! Here on Global Nerdy, Saturday means that it’s time for another “picdump” — the weekly assortment of amusing or interesting pictures, comics, and memes I found over the past week. Share and enjoy! Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot The post Saturday picdump for Saturday, October 17 appeared first on Global Nerdy.