August 2015 linkdump

• There’s a new biography of Grothendieck, this one in French.  Any chance it’ll be translated?
• Let felons vote and let them carry guns — the ultimate left-right compromise reform?  Why not?  Everybody believes there’s some core of constitutional rights an American doesn’t give up, no matter what they do.  Felon or no felon, you have the right to free speech and the right to a trial by jury.  I think voting belongs in that inner circle.  I don’t really feel that way about gun ownership, but I get that a lot of people do.  And — purely as a practical matter — the typical felon who’s served his time is surely more correct in feeling he needs a firearm to protect himself than, say, I do.
• “Pinch my cheeks and call me gorgeous — it’s Raven!”  This panel has been floating in my memory for about thirty years.  CJ really likes the Teen Titans show that’s on Cartoon Network now, and watching him watching it inspired me to see if I could actually find an image.  Thanks, tumblr.
• Indietracks Compilation 2015.  As always, a great collection of songs.
• At some point I will try to find time to think more seriously about the claim by Josh Miller and Adam Sarjurjo that the famous Gilovich-Vallone-Tversky study finding no evidence for the hot hand in basketball actually found strong evidence for the hot hand in basketball.  The whole thing comes down to screwy endpoint problems when you average results of a bunch of short trials.  It has some relation to the perils of averaging ratios.
• Pretty sure this cartoon calculus book is the very one that was sitting on the shelf in Mrs. Levin’s 6th grade classroom, which I became absolutely obsessed with.
•  Do you think the most Shazammed songs are the most popular songs, or songs that best combine popularity with being a song no one knows the name of?  I like that you can see the country-by-country charts:  here’s Thailand, where they love Meghan Trainor, or don’t know her name.
• Good-looking conference at the Newton Institute about large graphs.

September linkdump

•  According to Nielsen, nobody watched the Astros play the Indians.
• The Golden Goose award, a project of Rep. Jim Cooper of Tennessee, honors federally funded research which was apparently without application at the time of funding but which has turned out to be massively useful.  Seems like great public relations for basic science.
• Did you know The Number Theory Web is still there?  Young folks, let me tell you about the days of Web 1.0, when we used to scan the new listings here all the time to find out about interesting upcoming conferences.  Actually, even now, what’s the right way for young number theorists to find out about interesting conferences?
• A UW-Madison undergraduate is paying his way through school with his success as a competitive eater.  “[H]e eats no more than 3,100 calories a day, mostly vegetables to avoid increasing his waistline, and stretches his stomach by eating 10 pounds of cabbage or broccoli in a single sitting followed by a lot of water.”
• “When pitching a science story to a news editor, a science correspondent soon learns that the answer that gets airtime is either “yes”, or “no””  Very true!  Though there is also much to disagree with in this Guardian piece on scientists as cranky priests.
• “Vegetable Soup” was a weird psychedelic cartoon I used to watch as a kid, and here is the theme song, which I often sing to AB as a lullaby.
• M. Ganesalingam and Tim Gowers have built a computer program that produces proofs hard to distinguish from human-written ones (the sort we will someday call “artisanal proofs,” I suppose.)
• There’s a new Fatty Acids record out!
• Ever wonder what happens if you accept one of those spammy conference invitations you get in your e-mail?  It isn’t pretty.
• Three minutes of footage of a window washer on State Street, Madison, WI, 1977.
• Some good responses to latest science/humanities poo-flinging, from John Hawks and Gary Gutting.
• Can mastery of the concepts of calculus be tested?
• From the Washington City Paper, possibly an even more depressing Maryland story than the Orioles’ late-season fade:  most Maryland crab isn’t from Maryland.
• All DC-area people will wish to know that Captain 20 will DJ your wedding!

Math linkdump Nov 11

• Tim Gowers destroys and rebuilds mathematical publishing.
• Mosteller and Youtz randomize Mozart.
• The Open Graph Archive is trying to generate a community-built, openly accessible library of graphs.
• Eugenia Cheng on what mathematicians are talking about when they use the word “morally.”
• Philipp Habegger just proved that the field F obtained by adjoining to Q all torsion points of an elliptic curve E/Q  has the Bogomolov property; the logarithmic height of a non-torsion element of F^* is bounded away from 0.  About a year ago I was going around asking a lot of people whether this was true, and no one knew; at some point I’ll write a longer blog entry explaining why I wanted to know.

Back to school linkdump

• Fellow O’s fan Tom Scocca explains why the Red Sox are the new Grateful Dead in the Boston Globe. (Previously on Quomodocumque:  why the Red Sox are John McCain.)
• David Carlton is moving to Playdom to work for Steve Meretsky.  Steve Meretsky!  The guy who wrote Planetfall!
• From Baseball Reference:  on August 18. 1998, the Braves got nine hits against the Giants, all doubles.  Will this feat ever be repeated?  About 20% of hits are doubles.  let’s say that for some ballparks, or some batting lineups, the chance a hit will be a double goes up to 1/4.  Then you might figure the chance of nine hits all being doubles would be (1/4)^9, about one in a quarter-million.  (If the chance of a double is 1 in 5, this goes down to one in two million.)  From that point of view, it’s not so shocking; there have been about three hundred thousand MLB games played this century, so why not?  Two problems.  1.  Doubles used to be a lot less common then they are now.  2.  If you hit nine doubles off a team’s pitching staff, it probably means they’re having a terrible day, and it probably means at some point you’re going to hit a home run.  I think a much better way to assess whether another team’s likely to match the Braves is to check how many times a team has managed eight doubles without a hit.  And nobody has.  Not seven, either, or six. And just five teams have had 5 doubles in a game with no other hits.  I think the Braves are safe here.   And I think this is a good example of a question where just looking at the data gives you a much more robust answer than a half-assed probability calculation.
• Not a link:  based on the response to my question, tons of people follow the new postings on the arXiv. But hardly anyone follows it, as I do, in Google Reader — according to their stats, the RSS feed for math.AG has only 98 subscribers and math.NT just 83.