Ben Klemens

Intrigued by the question, am reskeeting this in the hopes that one of you have insights.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
is a strong statement. It's not about allowing limited uses but disallowing less-discriminate uses, it's a clear "No bots."

I agree that targeted queries are probably reasonable, but we want robots.txt to be respected, because we don't have a good plan B if it isn't.

Screenshot of the Stardrift project showing 30 bodies' gravitational interactions evolving in real time, with the spatial octree grid visible as well. It looks pretty sciency.

I mentioned stardrift.live in the stream and just wanted to share it so you could see! it's a work in progress. it just creates randomized simulations right now that you can kinda watch unfold.

In other words: nobody has "A Mastercard", they have a bank card, where your bank made a choice to go with one payment processor over competitors. If your bank chose one that doesn't do its job of letting you buy things, you can let it know it can serve you better by switching to a new processor.

Thinking I should write my credit union and ask them to switch away from using Mastercard for cc services.

Every Bandcamp Friday, Mastercard shuts me down, with a flurry of "suspicious activity" alerts. I do this every month! You get ~3% to do one job! Why is buying from musicians suspicious?

White cardboard representation of a cuboctahedron on a green cutting board.

My surprising fact for today. Needed the centroid to vertex distance for this cuboctahedron. Thought I'd got the sum wrong; it is the same as the edge length!
Apparently the only polyhedron where this is true!🧪

TIL the Architect of the Capitol has a glossy magazine, if you want real behind-the-scenes operations. In this month's issue (vol 30): how they managed to move 192 members to new offices for the new session.
www.aoc.gov/what-we-do/p...

(via firstbranchforecast.substack.com from @americalabs.org)

I'm not the litigious type, but today I learned that I, along with maybe a million other authors, am suing Anthropic?

Eventually you’ve made enough things that you don’t have to hold on to everything you’ve made, it’s a very nice feeling to be able to curate yourself.

A screenshot of a publisher’s website of a book titled “The Invention of Scarcity” by Deborah Valenze, showing pricing, availability, etc.. Circled in yellow are three things: the title of the book (“The Invention of Scarcity”), the word “ebook”, and (in the same row as the ebook) text saying that the ebook is “out of stock”.

🤔

Love it, best in the series. It gets heavy rotation on my playlists. The singer, Grady Tate, is all in, like the nine times table is the most hard-luck blues he's ever lived.

What's the opposite of phoning it in

Not really intuitive, but it's easy to prove by induction. Let Σ_nª indicate Σiª for i=1...n.

(Σ_(n+1))²
= ((Σ_n) + (n+1))²
= (Σ_n)² + 2(Σ_n)(n+1) + (n+1)²
Useful trivia: Σ_n = n(n+1)/2
= (Σ_n)² + n(n+1)² + (n+1)²
= (Σ_n)² + (n+1)³
Induction: assume (Σ_n)²=Σ_(n³)
= Σ_(n³) + (n+1)³ = Σ_((n+1)³)

🤯!
It checks out:

1 = 1
(1+8)² = 9 = (1+2)²
(1+8+27)² = 36 = (1+2+3)²
(1+8+27+64)² = 100 = (1+2+3+4)²
(1+8+27+64+ 125)² = 225 = (1+2+3+4+5)²

How did I get this far in life and _just_ find out that every cube is a multiple of 9, ±1?
1³ = 1 = 0⸱9 +1
2³ = 8 = 1⸱9 -1
3³ = 27 = 3⸱9 +0
4³ = 64 = 7⸱9 +1
5³ = 125 = 14⸱9 -1
6³ = 216 = 24⸱9 +0
7³ = 343 = 38⸱9 +1

Proof is easy: any can be written as (3k-1)³, (3k)³, or (3k+1)³; then just expand.

I've heard the narrative that the Bike Lobby is finally getting its way and bike lanes are everywhere. But those lanes didn't become prevalent in the U.S. until they were bike/scooter/ebike/golf cart/vespa lanes.

When I was at Census, they taught me about Census's data sharing to facilitate the WWII Japanese internments on week one--employee orientation-level stuff. The cost of their acquiescence has been deep institutional regret, for decades.

I did the thing you are never supposed to do. I wrote a (rough draft of a) textbook: Theories of Rational Decision

It's technical, but from a philosophical perspective. It focuses on the normative theory but touches on some behavioral issues as well.

raw.githubusercontent.com/kzollman/Rat...

And are intolerant american jews [sic] more common than intolerant americans? It seems mathematically impossible, but there has to be a reason for focusing only on this subset.

I'm still searching for the american jews [sic] to whom this person is referring. They have to be out there in force if we're talking about them so much, not just fringe characters like Stephen Miller. 663 people gave this a heart; I guess they all know many? Are they a common thread in yr life?

Trump’s NASA budget could cede solar system to China, scientists warn As the administration slashes spending on science, NASA is running low on new missions.

Was this written by an AI? Blaming paperwork as the reason for falling behind in science is so disingenuous I can't even

www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025...

The cover of the US Department of Commerce's 1971 report "A Metric America: A decision whose time has come".

It's the day to declare independence from the Imperial--switch to Metric today!

Topology: The interesting parts, by Ben Klemens 18 track album

I fact-checked my claim that _Topology: The interesting parts_ makes good beach reading by reading it on the beach last week; it worked ☑.

I found a typo or two (notably an x where there should've been an ϵ on p 37) and have posted an updated edition. Get it at b--k.bandcamp.com/album/topolo... .

If it's not tested on animals, it's a selling point they put on the front of the bottle. If it is, it's "dermatologist tested", a selling point they put on the front of the bottle.

Looking for other examples where the advertisers have it both ways.

They filmed _The Fugitive_ outside my place when I was living in Chicago, and I joined the crowd to watch the filming. Harrison Ford made eye contact and nodded at me.

NASA to silence Voyager's social media accounts : All about consolidation as mission mouthpieces archived in pursuit of 'improving the experience'

There's not much to recommend about that other site, but there is still some good science communication there.

Or, there was.

It seems that US federal cuts to science are affecting that as well. All the more reason to ditch it, if you haven't already.

🚀 🧪

www.theregister.com/2025/06/11/n...

Tomorrow's official announcement will be a traffic advisory about pedestrians blocking P, 19th, New Hampshire and Mass Aves.

something that stands out about this is just how cheap it is for us to have world-leading scientific capacity

we spent ~6.75 trillion last year, and the combined budgets for NIH, NSF and NASA are barely more than 1% of that

what an incredible waste to lose it all for a drop in the bucket

COS Statement on “Restoring Gold Standard Science” Executive Order The Executive Order issued on May 23, 2025, Restoring Gold Standard Science, references several open science practices championed by COS and the open science and metascience communities more generally...

Complementing other communications about the "Restoring Gold Standard Science" Executive Order, here is a statement from COS. Also, see the links to stories from previous attempts to co-opt open science for policies that undermine science and evidence-based policymaking.

www.cos.io/about/news/c...

Here’s a picture of the FEC launch cake from “back in the day” - this came up at our #CfASummit session today. Launching the new FEC.gov on my birthday was one of my favorite 18F memories!

🧵
This is a nice movie of the Venus' night side produced by IR2, the infrared 2 μm camera aboard the Venus Climate Orbiter "Akatsuki", which was launched on 21 May 2010 by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to solve the atmosphere's mysteries on Venus.

➡️ isas.jaxa.jp/en/topics/00...

🔭 🧪