Linkage
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Marcel Duchamp, early hero of the taking-credit-for-others’-work movement (G+, via).
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Several European-language Wikipedias go dark in protest of EU copyright proposal (G+). Fortunately it was eventually rejected.
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An open letter from the Wikimedia Foundation to the government of Turkey (G+), in protest of Turkey’s year-long block of Wikipedia access for their citizens and residents.
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Computational origami on stage at Capitol Hill briefing. Erik Demaine tells congress why fundamental research on topics such as folding is important.
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Two-distance sets (G+). See also the closely related new Wikipedia article on isosceles sets, sets of points where every triple has at most two distinct distances.
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Discrimination and the conference publication system (G+, more G+ comments. Cora Borradaile argues that the pressure on computer scientists to travel to conferences discriminates against those for whom travel is difficult as well as those who face greater likelihood of harassment in face-to-face situations.
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Alexander Bogomolny, creator of Cut the Knot, has died (via). Very sad news. I hope he made some arrangements to keep his website going after him, because there’s a lot of great content there.
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Antoine’s necklace. Despite the Cantor set being totally disconnected, it can be embedded into 3d in a way that gives its complement a complicated topology. The corresponding Wikipedia article uses the same image, by an editor named Blacklemon67 who also has an interesting post on how to use folded A4 paper to compute rational approximations to \(\sqrt{2}\).
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Michael Fogleman constructs “a database of all interesting Rush Hour configurations” (via), and speculates on how visualization of the state space of each connected component of states might be used to more accurately estimate the difficulty of a puzzle.
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What can SFF fandom do about the inherent bias of Wikipedia? (G+). Fantasy author Juliet McKenna writes about the experience of having a Wikipedia biography put up for deletion, and about the broader context of systematic bias on Wikipedia and the forces arrayed on both sides of the issue. Much of what she writes applies well beyond SFF fandom.
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Nancy Amato hired as new CS department chair at UIUC (via). I just saw Nancy last month at SWAT, where she gave a great talk on motion planning problems as one of the invited speakers. I’m sure she’ll be an excellent new chair. Congratulations, Nancy! And congratulations, too, to UIUC, for getting her.
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Forbidden Configurations in Discrete Geometry. Darren Glass and MAA Reviews publish the first review (at least the first I’ve seen) of my new book.
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Grandma Got STEM (G+), Harvey Mudd mathematician Rachel Levy’s blog filled with stories of earlier generations of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. See also new Wikipedia articles on the blog, Levy, and flukeprints (the tracks left by whales on the surface of the ocean, one of the topics in Levy’s fluid dynamics research).