Linkage
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Retraction Watch reports on the mass resignation of the editorial board of Elsevier’s Journal of Approximation Theory (\(\mathbb{M}\)). This follows in close succession from the mass resignation from Taylor & Francis’s Communications in Algebra.
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On Max Bill’s gelbes feld (\(\mathbb{M}\)), Barry Cipra, Notices of the AMS. Analysis of this artwork reveals that it depicts a magic square, with dice-like dot patterns encoding its digits, and with equal numbers of dots in each row or column of dots. You can do this with every magic square, but the diagonals are more problematic.
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One week ahead of its announced deadline for major institutions to make all online content meet WCAG 2.1 A/AA accessibility standards, the US government kicked the can down the road instead, extending the deadline to April 26, 2027 (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Although I was more or less on top of getting my 1600 pages of old university-hosted html content accessible, I also have a couple hundred old pdf files (for instance of papers and talk slides) that are difficult to convert, and are fortunately grandfathered by the requirements. Nevertheless I would like to make them as accessible as possible, eventually. I have found that it is often possible, if tedious, to convert old pdf files to tagged and alt-textified pdf within Acrobat.
However, I hit a roadblock with some old pdf files, consisting purely of vector graphic artworks with no text. The accessibility checkers all suspect that these are secretly “image-only pdfs”, scans of text that need OCR to make them accessible to non-sighted readers. They are not scans. They are not written in any language. They are purely vector graphics. It does not work to add tags labeling them as figures, to add alt text to the figure tags, nor to set the document language to “None”: the accessibility checkers are still convinced that there must be secret hidden text somewhere in all that line art and complain that I haven’t told them what that supposed text says. Does anyone know how to tag or otherwise annote these files with the information that they contain no text in a way that will make the accessibility checkers shut up about them?
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The Centrality Fallacy and ACM (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Moshe Vardi in CACM protests ACM’s claims that they are making their Digital Library open-access while at the same time paywalling all of its metadata features. His post links to a petition to reopen the metadata.
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Peter Brass, Former NSF Theory Director, on the NSF budget (\(\mathbb{M}\)).
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Does anyone know what was the significance of the stella octangula to André Breton (\(\mathbb{M}\))? In case anyone near Paris wants a mathematically-themed excursion, one of these shapes ornaments Breton’s tomb in Batignolles.
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A knot invariant that can be computed in polynomial time, separates more knots than many other invariants, likely gives a genus bound, and produces fun “QR code” images representing each knot (\(\mathbb{M}\), via Quanta). A recent arXiv preprint by Dror Bar-Natan and Roland van der Veen.
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On coloring Penrose rhomb tilings. A recursive substitution system can simultaneously generate a Penrose tiling and color its tiles with four colors. But a graph degeneracy argument and the De Bruijn–Erdős theorem on coloring infinite graphs together imply that every rhombus tiling, and in particular the Penrose tiling, has a 3-coloring. Can it be generated by a substitution system?
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Trump fires entire 24-member National Science Board (\(\mathbb{M}\), via). This board oversees the National Science Foundation’s funding of US science and advises the government on science policy, and the move is “widely seen as [Trump’s] latest move to erase NSF’s independence”. The National Science Foundation has also been lacking a director for the past year. Trump has proposed to cut the budget of the NSF by another 55% for the coming year (at the same time as saddling it with expensive white elephant projects).
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Book of New Patterns by Hokusai, 1824 (\(\mathbb{M}\), alt. link, via). The via-linked discussion led me to the story of the 1986 rediscovery of the wood blocks for printing this book in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The blocks were then brought back to Japan and new prints made from them.
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The number of ISO A(n) sheets that fit orthogonally into an A(0) sheet (\(\mathbb{M}\)) might be the least satisfying sequence in the whole OEIS. It should just be powers of two, but no: rounding sets in.
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Arizona State University professors disturbed to find their lectures chopped up and turned into AI slop (\(\mathbb{M}\)), by a new platform introduced by Arizona State using content scraped from its courses’ Canvas sites, without warning the faculty or offering any opt-out.
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The product of two zero-dimensional schemes can be infinite-dimensional. The example involves \(\mathbb{R}\otimes_{\mathbb{Q}}\mathbb{R}\), the same space in which Dehn invariants of polyhedra live.