Linkage for the end of summer

Fewer links than usual this time because of all my Japan posts.

• The number of convex layers in a square grid (G+). A new entry in the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences.

• The program from the Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry, now with video links for most of the talks.

• Awards from ALGO 2017, including the Nerode Prize to Fomin, Grandoni, and Kratsch for “measure and conquer”.

• Perimeter-halving centers, a possibly-new triangle center defined by Joe O’Rourke based on distance to the nearest chord that bisects the perimeter.

• The forgotten history of the Harvard Observatory computers. “In the late 1800s, they were famous, only to be virtually forgotten during the next century. A recent discovery of thousands of pages of their calculations by a modern group of women has spurred new interest in their legacy.”

• The readability of scientific texts is decreasing over time according to a new research report (G+). Many scientists could do much more to make their work readable. But in the G+ comments, Mark Wilson points out that they might not have much incentive to do so.

• Kawasaki’s theorem characterizing flat-foldable single-vertex origami patterns, now a Good Article on Wikipedia.

• The complete Graph Drawing proceedings, now on arXiv (G+). See G+ for discussion of why we still might need conventional publishers.

• Divination by program committee (G+, more G+ comments). As Moshe Vardi points out, after picking off the easy accepts and easy rejects, the remaining selections of conference submission acceptances are essentially random. So why don’t we save a lot of effort and produce a more scalable system of fewer bigger conferences by just taking them all?

• Minima Maxima by Marc Fornes (G+), a tall self-supporting structure resembling a minimal surface built out of thin layers of aluminum composite.