Linkage

Closing the gap between male and female biographies on the French Wikipedia (In French; G+). The corresponding project on the English Wikipedia is Women in Red.

China is cracking down on non-party-line political expression by academics both in their publications and in social media (G+).

Video of paper artist Peter Dahmen’s best pop-up creations (G+).

“But apart from that, what have the Romans done for us?”. A leading sociologist responds to Chief Justice Roberts’ dismissal of all sociological research as “gobbledygook”. See also 538 on the Supreme Court’s distaste for quantitative reasoning, via +JeffE and @jhertzli.

Napkin folding. Like origami but with really floppy paper.

Numberphile video on the very big number TREE(3) (G+) derived from Kruskal’s tree theorem. This is a key precursor to the graph minor theorem, and in the G+ comments David Roberts points to Friedman’s SSCG function, an even more ridiculously-quickly-growing function derived in the same way from graph minors.

“Blatant censorship” (G+). The EPA has cancelled three scheduled conference talks by its scientists about climate change.

Portugal takes some positive steps on digital rights management. The use of DRM on public domain works is forbidden, and cracking DRM to achieve fair use purposes is allowed.

Gerard Westendorp’s paper flexible inside-out quartic (G+), based on an earlier description by Greg Egan. Westendorp subsequently posted another version with assembly instructions. The accordion folds he uses for these models cannot actually be folded as rigid origami, and it’s not clear whether there is a rigid origami version of the same shape that can be turned inside out in the same way.

Google scholar’s “sort by date” option does not sort by publication date (G+). Instead it shows you the citations that have been added to the database in the last year, sorted by when they were added, just as Google intended it to do.

The angry dude theorem (G+): if two disjoint circles are circumscribed by a third circle, the outer bitangents of the two circles are parallel to the chords of the outer circle formed by its crossings with the inner bitangents. Name given by a MathOverflow user named July based on the appearance of the resulting diagram.

The IMU’s recommendation on the evaluation of individual researchers in the mathematical sciences. “Tools such as impact factors are clearly not helpful or relevant in the context of mathematical research.” Now, if only we had similar statements about conference acceptance rates…

Anja Markiewicz’s micro origami (via, see also). Like normal origami, but a lot smaller.

The Journal of Computational Geometry is now indexed by MathSciNet (G+). Actually this has been true since at least last January but the announcement on the JoCG web site is dated from September.

The Atomic theory of origami (G+). Quanta describes work by Michael Assis using statistical mechanics to understand defects in Miura folds.