DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)

@screwlisp
This guy is working his way through basically *all* early adventure games (I helped him find one that used to be thought to be lost so I'm mentioned on his site somewhere); but today:

"A new country awaits for All the Adventures: New Zealand!"

("Robots on Terminus IV" for the ZX-81 […]

@ptesarik
Regarding your photograph, today Scalzi said:

https://mathstodon.xyz/@scalzi@mastodon.social/114993605457589715

Parenthetically: I'm seeing an ABNORMALLY large influx of new accounts (created today) following me from mastodon.social. Is this just me or is something crazy going on there, like a bot attack?

@darwinwoodka @cstross
> Mostly pretty ignorable

Yes, ".social" is infamous, however I follow a lot of very intelligent interesting worthwhile people there. You never know ahead of time.

That's the skeleton key to understanding this whole episode: there was no lib backlash to the Sweeney ad. There were a few random online comments. That's it. But they ginned that up into a full-fledged, media-dominating news cycle that has been running for *weeks* now.

White House Orders NASA to Destroy Important Satellite The White House has instructed NASA employees to destroy two major, climate change-focused satellite missions. As NPR reports, Trump officials reached out to the space agency to draw up plans for terminating the two missions, called the Orbiting Carbon Observatories. They've been collecting widely-used data, providing both oil and gas companies and farmers with detailed information about the distribution of carbon dioxide and how it can affect crop health. One is attached to the International Space Station, and the other is collecting data as a stand-alone satellite. The latter would meet its permanent demise after burning up in the atmosphere […]

Whenever I think we've hit rock bottom... https://futurism.com/white-house-orders-nasa-destroy-important-satellite

#arXiv Simulating high-temperature superconductivity in moiré WSe2 https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02662 low-energy electronic bands can be described by the Hubbard model and are highly tunable; a new platform for tackling the high-Tc problem. cc @mj-mjcp.bsky.social

"The way I see it, during any given period the market is driven by a narrative, positive or negative. The current narrative is strongly driven by optimism about AI. And it takes a major shock to change a market narrative.'

And Krugman goes on to note that investment in AI data centres accounts […]

When I am an evil billionaire I shall ensure that my mansion has a deep-buried supervillain lair in the bunker, and a hovercraft obstacle course in the back garden. (Or maybe a hovercraft polo arena?)

The helipad will be for the exclusive use of tiltrotors, autogyros, and dirigibles: no normal […]

@johncarlosbaez @ddrake
Yeah, and look what happened to *him*. 🙄

@johncarlosbaez this reminds me of Scott's "Seeing Like a State". And the useful advice on "don't be a dick" reminds me of an interview where Douglas Rushkoff mentioned speaking with billionaires on how they should try to handle their bunkers […]

Kemp's book "Goliath’s Curse" is about the collapse of civiliations.

“History is best told as a story of organised crime,” Kemp says. “It is one group creating a monopoly on resources through the use of violence over a certain territory and population.”

They rose for 3 main reasons:

1. The […]

screenshot: "A paper defining conditional expressions and proposing their use in Algol was sent to the Communications of the ACM but was arbitrarily demoted to a letter to the editor, because it was very short."

ahahaha mccarthy was also salty about reviews in the 50s http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/lisp/lisp.pdf

Paul Feyerabend said that if you don't take for granted the work of electricians or plumbers, why are you going to give your uncritical ok to "superior" professionals like doctors or scientists? He said that tribunals of laymen should examine what scientists claim. Feyerabend said that science […]

@davidsuculum
Feyerabend is incorrect in two ways.

First off, laypeople definitely cannot understand *some* science, medicine, mathematics, engineering etc. without the same years of study that the professionals had to put in -- and not all of the conclusions in question can be dumbed down for […]

#WritersCoffeeClub 05 August: How much misdirection is unreasonable?

Misdirection is fine, but it's a tool for adding surprise to a story: you shouldn't lie to your readers. That is, all the clues to decode what's *really* happening should be there, so that on re-reading the misdirect can be […]

A sphere with ∞ as the point on top, 0 as the point on bottom, and four points on the equator labeled 1, i, -1, and -i. This is called the Riemann sphere: it's the complex plane curled up into a sphere, with the point ∞ tacked on.

You'll notice I said bound states of the hydrogen atom correspond to analytic functions from ℍ - {0} to ℍ. That's because these functions may 'blow up' - approach infinity - as we approach the quaternion 0.

These functions may also approach infinity for very […]

[Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

In 1843 Hamilton invented the quaternions: a 4-dimensional number system ℍ where you can divide. Quaternions have a 3d 'vector' part and a 1d 'scalar' part, but they were invented before vectors. So, throughout the 1800s, scientists used them a lot. Maxwell wrote a version of his equations using […]

@ChuckMcManis
I know you know this, but my instant reaction was "ham radio used to be really famous with the public for this kind of thing":

"When all else fails, there’s amateur radio — and handwritten notes. Both ham radio and clear thinking helped rescue a mother and her son from a recent […]

This Mastodon post has four a’s, one b, one c, three d’s, thirty-one e’s, four f’s, one g, nine h’s, nine i’s, one j, one k, one l, two m’s, twenty-three n’s, seventeen o’s, two p’s, one q, nine r’s, twenty-six s’s, twenty t’s, three u’s, three v’s, six w’s, three x’s, five y’s and one z.

A copper plaque engraved with rather cryptic symbols indicating a Turing machine. This is the tropy to be awarded to the first person or group who is first acknowledged by the bbchallenge.org community to have resolved the Antihydra problem: https://wiki.bbchallenge.org/wiki/File:Antihydra_award.jpg

Here's a simple-sounding math problem that's unsolved:

Starting with the number 8, and repeatedly adding half of the number to itself, rounding down to get a whole number, will there eventually be a point where you have seen more than twice as many odd […]

[Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

@robinhouston @standupmaths
That makes sense. I'll have to think about why the pixel case is guaranteed to have a fixed point rather than having the possibility of oscillating.

@robinhouston
Your job will be so much harder when we get to full Unicode coverage...

After Einstein invented general relativity, he used it to study the universe. He discovered the universe would expand or collapse unless the attractive gravity of matter was delicately balanced by some repulsive force. So he introduced an extra term into his […]

[Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

Trevor Flowers just posted about their Memex demo: https://mathstodon.xyz/@trevorflowers@machines.social/114951213216066456

Vannevar Bush's proposal for "Memex" helped kick off the computing revolution, inspiring things like the invention of the computer mouse and hypertext […]

Almost all of the most important Discworld characters drawn by the artist Paul Kidby

If there are any Discworld art fans out there: Modiphius just uploaded a 5,000px × 3,620px almost uncompressed version of Paul Kidby's Massive Massiv to their CDN to show it on the product page of Discworld RPG: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork

Full scale […]

[Original post on chaos.social]

Survey image for the 2016 paper. It shows the different options, with Copenhagen ahead.

Survey from the recent Nature paper. Copenhagen is clearly the first one, but other options have increased.

Interpretation of quantum mechanics: If we compare the recent survey
from Nature (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02342-y) with a
paper from 2016 with a slighlty minor sample size (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1612.00676) we can point out some things […]

[Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

We are modernizing the user interface

Pray we do not modernize it further

Library of Babel A project towards a universal library. By this art you may contemplate the variation of the 23 letters.

@smashedratonpress
Jorge Luis Borges' "Library of Babel" implemented as website:
https://libraryofbabel.info/

Clearly a labor of love, since there isn't any functional reason for it to exist. :)

I'm among those that have heard that a tsunami can be modelled as a soliton, but the authors of this article think that some important tsunamis of the past were not solitons and that you can just use the shallow water theory.

Solitons and Tsunamis […]