Linkage

An amusing if minor repeated typo in the literature: “appiled superconductivity (\(\mathbb{M}\)). I think its 177 Google Scholar hits are the fault of IEEE, which spells Trans. on Applied Superconductivity correctly on its site but misspells it repeatedly in the doi database. So if you get your citations from doi metadata, you will get this error. You can see the metadata for an example by curl -LH "Accept: application/x-bibtex" https://doi.org/10.1109/TASC.2005.849553.

A map of the percentages of female researchers in Europe. The numbers are highest in the Baltics and Balkans; the discussion thread suggests that there’s a negative correlation with pay.

YouTube no longer an acceptable platform for course lecture or academic talk content (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Unless, of course, you and your university are comfortable with your students or other audience members being subject to advertisements that interrupt the lectures and are beyond your control both in their placement and content.

Scientists uncover the universal geometry of geology (\(\mathbb{M}\)). This is all a bit mystic and breathless and woo, but what Quanta really seems to mean to is that if you subdivide space by randomly recursively splitting by planes (sort of like a 3d Gilbert tessellation) then the average number of sides per bottom-level polyhedron is six.

A paradox, and where it led (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Peter Cameron looks at the inclusion graphs of countable models of not-well-founded set theories. The well-founded ones are all the Rado graph, but without foundation the results are more varied.

Curved origami robot grippers with tunable stiffness (\(\mathbb{M}\)).

Archive.org improves accuracy of OCR and compression of PDF on its huge collection of old scanned printed documents by switching to open-source software (\(\mathbb{M}\)).

Four common mathematical means of two quantities in a single compass-and-straightedge construction.

More different kinds of graph paper than you might have even thought possible (\(\mathbb{M}\)).

Comparison of six ways to get your old Java applets running again on the modern web (\(\mathbb{M}\), via). I have a couple of old defunct ones that I’m tempted to try this on…

New names for special types of hexagon: “squashogon”, “boltogon”, “extremely irregular hexagon”, and “treeah star”. Boltogons are the zigzag 180-degree symmetric ones.

Some tips for avoiding sexist language when writing about women (\(\mathbb{M}\)). This is from 2015, when singular “they” was more controversial, and mostly aimed at Wikipedia editing, but it was recently reprinted in the Wikipedia Signpost, and I think it is still topical more generally.)

The place of blogs in the modern math world, Katherine Thompson, Notices of the AMS (\(\mathbb{M}\)). “Clearly, mathematicians are using blogs. … And yet despite all of the work that goes into blogs, the mathematical community has no idea what to make of them—even at the most basic level like citation.”