Robert McNees

[newborn voice]

Concerning. looking into it.

*fully restores your HP as you scroll past*

some wood grain with two unevev circular knots that resemble weary eyes with dark circles under them, and a third horizontal one that looks like a mouth under them. the overall effect is that of extreme fatigue and being worn down by the state of the world.

how your email finds me

[at the space therapist's office]

*sad voice* groot.

It is just really something, how the current government in the US is trying to destroy literally everything (immigrant, library, affordable education, college in general, world class basic research) that makes Kusch's story so great. 🧪 ⚛️

Polykarp Kusch was an immigrant* who worked at a library** to save enough money to go to college*** so he could do remarkable science****.

* Current admin hates immigrants, and
** is trying to defund libraries, and
*** is waging war on colleges, and
**** is trying to burn down American science.

Here is a thread about tiny discrepancies, the marvelous predictive power of Quantum Electrodynamics, and the sort of immigrant success story that the current administration is doing everything in their power to eliminate. 🧪 ⚛️

Every single one of these explainers is a work of art. The one about mechanical watches, especially, but they are all so good.

ciechanow.ski/archives/

Yes, though I’m open to the possibility that he talked to Ross and that turned him.

“person, woman, man, camera, TV”

Г ENOUGH..IT'S NOT ACCEPTABLE FOR AMERICAN CITIZENS TO BE KILLED BY FEDERAL AGENTS FOR EXERCISING THEIR GOD-GIVEN AND CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS TO PROTEST THEIR GOVERNMENT. AT BEST, THESE FEDERAL IMMIGRATION OPERATIONS ARE A COMPLETE FAILURE OF COORDINATION OF ACCEPTABLE PUBLIC SAFETY AND LAW ENFORCEMENT PRACTICES, TRAINING, AND LEADERSHIP. AT WORST, IT'S A DELIBERATE FEDERAL INTIMIDATION AND INCITEMENT OF AMERICAN CITIZENS THAT'S RESULTING IN THE MURDER OF AMERICANS. AGAIN, ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. THE PRESIDENT SHOULD PAUSE THESE OPERATIONS, DE-ESCALATE THE SITUATION, AND RESET THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT'S FOCUS ON TRULY CRIMINAL ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS. IN THE ABSENCE OF PRESIDENTIAL ACTION, CONGRESS AND THE COURTS MUST STEP UP TO RESTORE CONSTITUTIONALITY. Gov. Phil Scott

Missed this yesterday, but the Republican governor of Vermont called for an end to the murder of American citizens by federal agents.

“We’re going so unpredictable, so heterodox.”

Chris Madel ends GOP bid for governor, says he can’t support federal ‘retribution’ against Minnesota His exit comes as some other Republicans have started to distance themselves from the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in the state.

Good for him. More prominent Republicans should vocally leave their party, today.

Today is a great day to call your Representatives and Senators, and demand that they act now to defund and abolish ICE.

I wonder how many ICE agents understand what their bosses are doing, trying to trap them in situations they *hope* will become dangerous for the agents.

Her friends at school saw it and sent it to her. No terrible dad joke I make in front of them will ever top that.

(That post still makes the rounds, over five years later, and about once a month someone I haven’t talked to in a while will message and say “is this you?” One friend saw it printed out and posted on the wall in a bookstore.)

Extremely mom move

I once had a very viral post about my kid reading after bedtime with a flashlight, and one of my students saw a video about it on TikTok. They were excited to tell me, but felt like they first had to explain what TikTok is, because maybe I was too ancient to know. And so I vowed to ignore it forever

“Are you on TikTok?”

Lol, on what? Is that a word you made up? No, I’m not on TorkTomp.

More nba teams should incorporate small capes into their uniforms, imo

Guess my plan to not learn anything at all about TikTok wasn’t so dumb after all.

Swedish mathematician Niels Fabian Helge von Koch was born #OTD in 1870.

He did important work in number theory, including a result relating the Riemann hypothesis to the asymptotic distribution of prime numbers. But he's best known for the "Koch Curve" – an early example of a fractal. 🧪 🧮

Not only do they stink, but they are both twerps.

A fine reason to keep it!

Hah! I've had the dog for so long, but thought I better give it a rest in case I ever need to point to something on here in a professional context. (Which, why would I do that.)

One way mathematicians quantify this behavior is to assign a dimension greater than 1 (a curve) but less than 2 (a surface) to objects like the Koch curve.

Benoit Mandelbrot called this the "fractal dimension" of the curve. For the Koch curve the fractal dimension is log 4 / log 3 = 1.262.

(10/10)

So if it's more than a curve, does that make it a surface? That's not quite right, either. The points that make up the Koch curve don't cover an area like a surface would. (9/n)

What a curious thing! This curve has infinite length, yet it fits in a finite region.

Koch's object has more detail than would fit on something with finite length, so it seems like more than just a curve. (8/n)

Adding the areas of all the triangles at that stage gives

(√3/4)L²(1/3)² + 4(√3/4)L²(1/3)⁴ + ... + 4ⁿ⁻¹(√3/4)L²(1/3)²ⁿ

As n → ∞ the infinite sum converges, and we find that the area under the Koch curve is

A = L² (√3 / 20)

(7/n)