Linkage for a trick-or-treat-less Halloween

3d flythrough of a near-optimal TSP tour through a dataset of nearly 221 stars (\(\mathbb{M}\), via). I found the “full view of tour” a lot easier to navigate than the mini-view on the main page.
The light herder (\(\mathbb{M}\), via). Dave Blair makes dynamic fractals from old-school video feedback.
Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA 2021) accepted papers (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Lots of interesting looking titles there, but you’ll have to search online for links to the corresponding papers.
Tom Lehrer has made his song lyrics public domain, or as close to it as one can legally get (\(\mathbb{M}\), via, via2). But you have to download them within four years because his domain may go away after that. In honor of which, here’s a link to an (audio-only) version of a little ditty about plagiarism (only be sure always to call it please research).
Chaos ink (\(\mathbb{M}\), via). It’s rendered to look like waves in liquid metal, but I think it’s actually some kind of reaction-diffusion equation, in which you can move your mouse around to try to control where the reactions are centered.
2020 Mathematics A to Z: Statistics (\(\mathbb{M}\)). On the differences between statistics and mathematics, historical connections between statistics and eugenics, and new connections to algorithmic fairness.
Bay Area Discrete Math Day, November 21 (\(\mathbb{M}\)). This year, it’s a day of online discrete math talks, so you don’t actually need to be in the SF Bay Area to participate.
Lior Pachter reports on confirmed sexual harassment within the computational geometry community, at SoCG 2016 in Boston, by Adrian Dumitrescu (\(\mathbb{M}\)). According to the victim, SoCG organizers told her they would try to bar Dumitrescu from future events, but told Dumitrescu he could not be barred (see also this update). She says there was also a second victim, whose academic career was “ruined” as a result.
Fourth International Workshop on Enumeration Problems and Applications (\(\mathbb{M}\)). I haven’t participated in previous instances but this year I’m on the program committee. Submission deadline November 8; online workshop December 7–10.
Igor Pak hates journal special issues (\(\mathbb{M}\)). The underlying problem appears to be loss of quality control compared to regular papers. He suggests handling festschrifts as books instead, and publishing surveys and reminiscences instead of research papers in them.
The 84-vertex cubic symmetric graph (\(\mathbb{M}\)) is drawn nicely on mathpuzzle.com (update of June 27) using its structure as a 36-heptagon symmetric tiling of a non-orientable surface of Euler characteristic \(-6\). The Petrie dual of this tiling is another symmetric tiling of the same graph with 28 nonagons on a higher-genus surface. Does anyone know of other sources on these tilings? Or nice 3d embeddings of their surfaces?
Plus magazine on Cambridge’s Whitehead Prize winners (\(\mathbb{M}\)): A nice general-audience explainer of
- Maria Bruna’s derivation of macro-level models from micro-level behavior, applied to vacuum cleaner design
- Holly Krieger’s connections between prime factors in integer sequences and special points on the Mandelbrot set
- Henry Wilton on the impossibility of determining whether infinite symmetry groups have finite quotients
Silly computer news of the day: automatically aimed soccer game video camera follows bald referee’s head instead of the ball, causing fans to miss key plays (\(\mathbb{M}\), via).