First linkage for my new site

…and the first one I’m doing in markdown instead of html. Moving gives me a chance to rethink any blogging habits I might have gotten into, and change the ones that aren’t working, but I think I’ll keep doing these — regardless of whether others like them, I find them useful for myself for finding my old G+ posts. On the other hand, I’m changing up the format a little, to put longer description after the links instead of trying to limit each to a single line.

• Attacks on independent Universities in Europe. The Central European University in Hungary is under attack from the Hungarian government, but it’s not the only one.

• The Collatz conjecture in color (G+). This visualization of the branching process inverse to the Collatz-conjecture process draws an infinite binary tree by turning a small amount left or right at each branch. It makes pretty organic-looking curved tangles of lines but I don’t think it is very helpful in distinguishing it from any other branching process with similar parameters.

• Quanta on gerrymandering. 30 years after “a ruling that rejected nearly every available test for partisan gerrymandering”, will the Supreme Court accept the “efficiency gap” standard used in a Wisconsin ruling from a lower court?

• Livejournal announces new terms of service (G+). I moved my journal here and have now deleted my account from LJ (forgoing five months of already-paid service) because I cannot accept their newly-ubiquitous ads, restrictions on speech, rejection of pseudonymity, and promises to spam my email. See also a related Metafilter discussion which clarifies the mysterious “Federal act 149-ФЗ” parts of the ToS.

• If professional women and men cannot be alone together, women are the ones who will pay a price. Although ostensibly about Vice President Mike Pence and the US political right, this is also relevant for academia and the ongoing push from the left to shut down inappropriate relations between faculty and students.

• You need to update the MathJax library address in your web pages (G+). Here’s how.

• Building a blog with Jekyll and GitHub Pages (G+). What I did to move my blog. The comments discuss some related alternatives.

• New Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch is a plagiarist (G+). Not that that’s anywhere close to the worst thing about him or about the Trump administration that stole his seat for him.

• Elsevier changed the terms of their “Open Access” user license (original post now deleted; G+). In particular it no longer seems to be permissible to display, adapt, or redistribute their papers. (If we can’t display them, how are we supposed to read them?) The secret blogging seminar has more analysis.

• How Google Book Search got lost. The project doesn’t seem to be dead, exactly, but it’s stagnating. Via bit_player.

• After hyping itself as antidote to fake news, New York Times hires extreme climate denier (G+). Bret Stephens‎ may be an anti-Trump Republican but that doesn’t prevent him from being a shill on other matters.

• Soap bubble photography by William Horton. Via Metafilter.

• Drawing trees on small number of lines in 2D and 3D (G+). By re-using the same line for many edges, it is possible to draw some trees on many fewer lines than the number of edges in the tree. Does it help use fewer lines to use lines in 3d instead of in the plane?