End-of-year linkage
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“Since 2012, five Wikipedia editors have been imprisoned – and one executed – for the crime of contributing to the world’s largest online encyclopedia” (\(\mathbb{M}\)).
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Concise functions and spanning trees (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Igor Pak describes a recent trend in combinatorial enumeration, of studying counting problems for which most or all natural numbers can be represented concisely as the number of solutions of some instance. Here, “concisely” means that the instance size is polylogarithmic in the given number, polynomial in the number of bits needed to write the number.
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Tristable cylinder collapse (\(\mathbb{M}\)). A spirally-crinkled flat paper annulus can flip to a (still-crinkled) cylinder, in two ways. See also bigger version and another way of thinking of it.
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I promised myself months ago, when we started to get warnings that Google’s plans to lobotomize ad-blockers were serious (\(\mathbb{M}\)), that the day an ad got through on Chrome (+ uBlock Origin) was the day I would give up on Chrome, give up on running with two browsers open, and switch to Firefox for everything. That day has arrived.
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Women’s biographies on the English Wikipedia have reached a milestone number, 20% of all biographies (\(\mathbb{M}\)).
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The 1968 Encyclopædia Britannica claimed that, by the time of the 1252 Alfonsine Tables, medieval astronomers used 40 to 60 epicycles per planet to represent its orbit. John Baez debunks this false claim.
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Nice new/updated 3blue1brown video on the square peg problem (\(\mathbb{M}\)), with some broader discussion on what topology is and what it might be good for.
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Buried in a story about yet another Elsevier journal editorial board resigning en masse (the Journal of Human Evolution; \(\mathbb{M}\)), there is an alarming new development in Elsevier’s publication practices: “In fall of 2023, for example, without consulting or informing the editors, Elsevier initiated the use of AI during production, creating article proofs devoid of capitalization of all proper nouns (e.g., formally recognized epochs, site names, countries, cities, genera, etc.) as well italics for genera and species. These AI changes reversed the accepted versions of papers that had already been properly formatted by the handling editors. This was highly embarrassing for the journal and resolution took six months and was achieved only through the persistent efforts of the editors. AI processing continues to be used and regularly reformats submitted manuscripts to change meaning and formatting and require extensive author and editor oversight during proof stage.”
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John Mark Ockerbloom writes: “More than funds, what Wikipedia really needs is more good editors.”
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The newly founded society for computational geometry is now open for registration (\(\mathbb{M}\)).
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A beautiful day on the northern California coast (\(\mathbb{M}\)), after a storm the previous day.
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After 2025, the year will not be a squared triangular number again for another thousand years (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Robin Houston encourages us to enjoy it while it lasts.