Linkage

Exchange rates between CS conferences (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Assuming that the people who publish in top conferences are equally productive, how many machine learning papers are the equivalent effort to one paper in other areas?

Video of my NY computational geometry seminar talk on integer distances in non-Euclidean metric spaces (\(\mathbb{M}\)). See also my preprint, and two previous blog posts.

The formula behind Trump’s tariffs explained (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Apparently the intention is deliberately inflational: to increase prices to US consumers to a high enough level so that their decreased purchases close the US trade deficit with each other country. However, setting aside the significant philosophical concerns about imposing a big new regressive tax within a country not known for spending its tax receipts on societal benefits, the explanation also reveals two major mathematical modeling errors in this calculation. First, the idea that trade can be rebalanced in this way appears to be based on the unlikely assumption that the rest of the world’s purchases of US goods will be undamaged by the ensuing trade war. And second, its calculation of the effect of these tariffs on US pricing does not match past experience: it is based on an assumption that only 25% of the tariffs will be passed on to consumers whereas in past the numbers were much closer to 100%.

Giant riveted white minimal surfaces fill a sphere (\(\mathbb{M}\)) in a new public outdoor art installation in Palo Alto, at Google’s Charleston East campus.

26 Polyhedra that Fit Through Themselves, and 5 that Might Not (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Nice video of analogues to Prince Rupert’s cube, by David Renshaw.

Mathematical Logic Quarterly editorial board resigns (\(\mathbb{M}\)). MLQ was published by Wiley but sponsored by the Deutsche Vereinigung für Mathematische Logik und für Grundlagenforschung der exakten Wissenschaften, which cancelled their publication agreement and started a new diamond-access journal Zeitschrift für Mathematische Logik und Grundlagen der Mathematik because “commercial and profit-oriented interests are now influencing the editorial process negatively.” Despite the heavily German names the new journal will continue to publish in English.

Wikipedia is struggling with voracious AI bot crawlers (\(\mathbb{M}\), via, see also). It’s a problem that threatens the open web, open source development, and open access publication more generally.

How to fold a cardioid (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Dave Richeson in Math Horizons. Paywalled but based on a previous blog post that may be more accessible and that I linked a year ago.

Martin Escardo asks authors of submitted papers to please say in the first sentence what the paper is doing, rather than burying it in the middle of a later paragraph. A more controversial suggestion: use a different abstract for the metadata on conference submission servers than in the paper itself, because these two abstracts have different purposes.

On the responsibilities of intellectuals and the rise of bullshit jobs in universities (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Or, why do we have so many administrators?

Exponentile (\(\mathbb{M}\), via), a solitaire game with play mixing Bejeweled and 2048. If that sounds addictive to you, it probably is.

Peter Cameron on the Shrikhande graph (\(\mathbb{M}\)). He and Ambat Vijayakumar have drafted an entire book on this 16-vertex graph, modeled after the 1993 book on the Petersen graph. This blog post is a teaser with six constructions of it.

Formula relating the radii of a ring of circles packed around another circle (\(\mathbb{M}\)).

Mojibake in journal-supplied BibTeX. It’s difficult enough when they use TeX special characters but this one throws in html entities.