David Bindel

Week 29 Within, amongst, against

Each Friday, I summarize what happened this week in science 🧪& higher ed. This was Week 29:

- new executive order makes a mockery of peer review
- UCLA facing demand for $1 Billion, patents are latest attack on Harvard
- mRNA, climate assessments & so much more at buttondown.com/liminalcreat...

A painting of a bird next to the words "at least let me get some coffee before you start in with your horseshit"

Me in 2023: Just chill. All the AI doom scenarios involve giving models direct access to and control over real world systems, and no one would be that dumb

In 2025: oh fuck

Step 3: Profit!

Yes, I am favoring food-based representative words. Maybe I should eat something.

Anyhow, despite <gesticulates wildly at the world>, I am finding joy in little things where I can.

The "Words with Friends" dictionary has an anagram group of size 12 (!), represented by "pears".

I'm teaching a part of a summer program afternoons this week, and the project involves doing various things with anagrams.

From a dictionary of popular words, there are six anagram groups of size 5, represented by "eat", "meat", "triangle", "tales", "tacos", and "stop".

A cow with its head stuck in some trees

Despite my unease,
I'm still just a cow in some trees

Today is a good day to remember: "taco cat" spelled backwards is still "taco cat."

Congratulations! And now that you're a little closer, we hope you'll come up to Ithaca to visit us again sometime.

How Bees, Beer Cans and Data Solve the Same Packing Problem (Gift Article) Trying to fit it all in? There’s a trick to it, even in 24 dimensions.

Dear #mathsky, if you repost this, it will let people see the article for free. Thanks!

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Monk seals on a beach.

Sadly, replacing the clause "the Danish government is switching to Linux" with "the US government is bombing Iran" would have made the sentence less surprising.

I am trying to imagine how I would have reacted 20 years ago, say, to the sentence "In response to the foreign policies of President Donald Trump, the Danish government is switching to Linux.". Just... Every word would have been unexpected.

Because I am enjoying watching Murderbot, I decided to reread the Murderbot novels. And I really want to know will voice ART in season 2.

Dear everyone I owe a response to something: I am catching up with myself, and expect to get all responses out soon.

Say in about two weeks...

Elbert Frank Cox - Wikipedia

One hundred years ago, Dr. Elbert Frank Cox earned his Ph.D. in mathematics at Cornell University. He was the first African American to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbert_...

people more pro-AI than me? gullible nerds. people more anti-AI than me? fear-addled clowns. and me? perfect, as per usual

C³ Group @ Cornell We are a team of interdisciplinary researchers at Cornell University. We study how nonlinear dynamics and distributed control shape collective intelligence in natural and engineered systems, drawing o...

My research group at Cornell finally has a dedicated website ☺️ Still very minimal, but we will populate it soon with the cool projects we are getting off the ground! Stay tuned! sites.google.com/cornell.edu/...

We need an infinite number of Alt^n FDA accounts, each posting at some fixed fraction of the rate of the Alt^(n-1) account, and I will have my new geometric series example for the year.

Ended father's day with Scrabble, where I managed to play "qi" on the corner triple word score (building "ti" the other way).

Hey, I take my victories where I can.

how the fuck is it possible to be this bad at drinking coffee

Green and red sock with a picture of a man on a recliner. Surrounding area the words "ain't no bad joke like a Dad joke."

Happy father's day!

If anyone happens to know optimal rates (in m) of convergence for approximating a compact convex set in the plane by the convex hull of boundary points, I would love a pointer.

It was a fantastic technical program, and we got to show off Ithaca in the summer. And I got to mostly ignore the news, because I was busy talking math and running logistics.

Also, the cowbell I got a few years ago continues to be a sound investment.

This was number 22 in the series, which has run every three years since well before I was born (except COVID delay of the last meeting).

I first attended as a senior graduate student in 2005, and have been on the technical program committee for the past three.

Today was the end of the Householder Symposium on Numerical Linear Algebra, which this year was held at Cornell. Anil Damle, Alex Townsend, and I were the local organizers.

householder-symposium.github.io

Grateful to Householder committee for the opportunity to explain the ResQPASS algorithm at Householder symposium XXII at Cornell University --- Ithaca, NY USA. The paper, co-auther with Bas Symoens ( arxiv.org/abs/2302.13616 ), has been accepted for publication in SISC.

A painting of a bird next to the words "what the fuck am i looking at"