Linkage

Firefox testing reveals as many as 5% of crashes are caused by hardware memory faults.

Useless advice about making technical online content accessible, from my university’s head bureaucrat for online content accessibility bureaucracy (\(\mathbb{M}\)): “I would recommend avoiding PDFs altogether. They are extremely difficult to make accessible. If PDF format is absolutely necessary, create a document in Microsoft Office and then save it as a PDF.”

Meanwhile, TeX Live 2026 + ltx-talk has been working for me in making pdf-format slide decks that pass all Acrobat accessibility checks, and I have moved on from experiments in using it to using it in production for all my course lecture slides. There is no real alternative to some form of TeX for content involving mathematics. This works. And if you’re already using LaTeX + beamer, it’s not difficult.

Knuth’s packing puzzle (\(\mathbb{M}\)), a variant of Hoffman’s packing puzzle with 28 rectangular cuboids of carefully chosen shapes that should fit into a cube. Like Hoffman’s, this is difficult.

White faceted aluminum flows through branching curved surfaces to form the pillars and dome of an architectural folly by Marc Fornes (\(\mathbb{M}\)).

Wikipedia prohibits the use of LLMs to generate or rewrite article content (\(\mathbb{M}\)).

Folded cyanotype art by Fritz Horstman (\(\mathbb{M}\)). More description.

Sumerian clock (\(\mathbb{M}\)).

Goran Konjevod’s curved and pleated origami vases (\(\mathbb{M}\)).

Two years ago in connection with SAT-solver optimization of cascading stylesheet files I briefly mentioned the possibility that CSS might be Turing-complete, with a link to some attempts at demonstrating this via simulation of the Rule 110 cellular automaton (\(\mathbb{M}\)). These attempts were unsatisfactory for a couple of reasons: Rule 110’s completeness requires an infinite array of cells and a mostly-repeating pattern of initial cell values, the demonstrations had only finite arrays of cells of fixed size implemented as html objects, and each step of the simulation required some user interaction. Since then Clement Cherlin has found a better solution: a CSS Turing machine simulator whose only interaction requirement is that you move the mouse to a starting position within 5 seconds of opening the page. It still appears to use html elements as tape cells, so the tape has a predetermined size, but having a fixed and finite tape is less of a problem for Turing machines than for Rule 110. You can still do arbitrary computations for which you already know how much tape you’re going to need (which I guess can be described as Turing completeness). But determining whether the computation terminates is not an undecidable problem, because with a fixed tape size the total number of machine–tape states is finite.

Women talking about their experience in mathematics (\(\mathbb{M}\)).

Unexpected cutbacks in international student visa approvals by the Canadian government (far beyond their projected cutbacks) lead to program cuts and faculty layoffs at Canadian universities (\(\mathbb{M}\), via). According to an auditor report, the Canadian immigration department “did not know why approval rates were lower than projected”. The story focuses on BC but it appears that the effects are nationwide.

A report on the huge amount of bot traffic putting strain on Wikipedia’s infrastructure, and the steps taken to counter it (\(\mathbb{M}\)).

ICML’26 had two groups of reviewers one for which LLM use was forbidden and another for which it was not. Reviewers could state their preference and only those who claimed to be ok with forbidding LLM use were assigned to that group. But then, ~500 of the reviewers in the LLM-forbidden group were caught using LLMs through hidden watermarks in the papers they reviewed (\(\mathbb{M}\), via). As a consequence, ~400 of those reviewers had their submissions desk-rejected (~500 rejections).

On the perspective of Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère (\(\mathbb{M}\)). The face-on view of a waitress blankly staring across an empty bar while her reflection interacts with a customer seems like an impossible piece of artistic license, but Malcolm Park made a photographic reconstruction without even an in-shot camera reflection.

Maybe everyone else already knew this geometric food trick (\(\mathbb{M}\)), but it took me years to discover it: subdivide your artichoke hearts into quarters or sixths before removing the choke, not after. That way, the nearly convex shape of the pieces, compared to the bowl shape of a whole heart, makes it much easier to remove the choke with a straight cut of a sharp knife.

An improved algorithmic 4-color theorem (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Previous proofs could only produce a single reducible subconfiguration at a time; with linear time to find and handle each subconfiguration, they led to algorithms for 4-coloring planar graphs with \(O(n^2)\) total time. This new preprint claims to find a linear number of disjoint reducible subconfigurations, leading to an \(O(n\log n)\) algorithm.