aoki

Wait, Matthew Salomone is the lead of Klein Four!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=BipvGD-LCjU

Back at the SFMTA, Armando told me the Breda vehicles are being replaced, and with them their destination displays will be swapped for newer LED dot-matrix units that are more efficient and easier to maintain. By the end of 2025 the signs that inspired Fran Sans will disappear from the city, taking with them a small but distinctive part of the city’s voice.

:-(

That’s viXra

Once upon a time, editors requested submissions in single-column, double-spaced form because they (or the in-house writers) would actually mark on the printed-out paper. Mysterious glyphs, squiggly arrows, and indecipherable handwritten text would be inscribed between the lines in red ink. Many journal preprints from that era are double-spaced.

Even more mysterious are the arcane notations such as “TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE” with the actual table/figure contents placed at the end of the paper. Understandable when authors provided hardcopy figures for photoreproduction, baffling when the entire submission was generated with LaTeX or Word.

The deepest compartments (below the waterline) are often like this. It is not always possible for taller equipment spaces (engineering, magazines) in small ships. Crew berthing is often below the waterline and accessed via deck hatches as you say, but you do end up with hard choices when the space is flooding and people are still unaccounted for. Hope you can stabilize the ship or run it aground before it sinks, or 100% guarantee that some crew will drown?

Above the waterline, it is common to have “loops” of passageways for movement of equipment and people (including casualties). Firemain stations will be spaced along such a loop because they are used to both fight nearby fires and dewater the compartments below.

Can’t speak for the Norwegians but that is not how at-sea watchstanding works in, e.g., the US Navy. The OOD is the captain’s delegate in operating the ship. In peacetime steaming, there may not be another khaki (officer or chief petty officer) on watch who is qualified to stand OOD - the JOOD/JOOW is typically a trainee, and the CIC watch officer is often a non-OOD-qualified junior officer or chief petty officer. They can and should all provide support to the OOD but usually nobody is available to babysit or step in. All of the babysitting should have happened before the OOD ever got their OOD qual.

Which btw tells you what has gone wrong in many of these situations: the OOD was given a qualification they were not ready for, because not having enough OODs means the actually-qualified OODs will be standing port/starboard watch and be exhausted all the time. COs and XOs give the weak OODs quiet steaming watches they think will be easy, but a shipping channel can get busy earlier than expected and everything can go to shit really quickly.

In the modern US military, it’s a truism that if anything seriously goes wrong on a ship, the captain has ultimate responsibility and will be fired. (Whereas before WW2, future admirals like Nimitz ran their ships aground and were not fired.) This leads to a zero-defects mentality on the part of the leadership of a ship, which in turn explains why junior officers fail to call the CO to the bridge (or call too late) when they get into a bad situation.

Pure math has a far greater vulnerability to this than applied math. Top journals have impact factors of around 5.0. Respectable but tiny specialist journals can have impact factors less than 1.0 (like, 0.4). Meanwhile, MDPI Mathematics is a Q1 journal with an impact factor over 2.0.

The now-standard bibliometrics were not designed by statisticians :-)

The issue in all fields became significantly worse as developing countries decided their universities needed to become world class and demanded more international publications for promotion. Look at the universities in the table in the paper and you can see which countries are clearly gaming the system. If your local bureaucrats can’t tell which journals are good and which are fake, the fake journals become the most efficient strategy. Even worse, publishers figured out that if you can attract a few high-citation papers, your impact factor will go way up (it’s an arithmetic mean) and your fake journal becomes “high quality” according to the published citation metrics!

Math is particularly susceptible to this because there are few legitimate publications and citation counts are low. If you are a medical researcher you can publish fake medical papers but more easily become “high impact” on leaderboards (scaled by subject) by adding math topics to your subjects/keywords.

Fortunately, medical researchers discovered Tai’s Formula for the area under a piecewise linear function. No calculus required! :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai%27s_model

Well, at least “smearing” isn’t a default choice anymore

Ah, the “financial exigency” escape hatch

I think they mean predatory journals and conferences. Setting up a predatory journal costs nothing, whereas actually holding an in-person conference of any kind costs money.

A good time to repost about the famous VIDEA conference:

https://users.cg.tuwien.ac.at/wp/videa.html

https://users.cg.tuwien.ac.at/wp/videa-paper.html

Have nerdy kids and you can make references to “Romanes eunt domus” and shrubbery again

The pricing is not about the cost of storing and serving the articles. It is partly direct revenue replacement and partly “stick” to get institutions to subscribe to APC allowance buckets.

ACM went hybrid access (optional APC for Gold open access) in 2013. Before that, there were no APCs. As of 2026 authors will pay APC unless their institution pays (by subscribing, or directly). If you are in a developed country and not affiliated with a subscriber institution, there is no longer a free-to-publish option.

Everything related to HAMURABI, such as:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40953536

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Paravia_en_Fiumaccio

The early 90s were the era of (1) Pentium (2) PCI (3) multiplatform Windows NT. Most vendors switched to desktop/deskside designs based on PC bus and PC components, it would be more cost competitive (volume economics) and could run NT/Alpha, NT/MIPS, NT/PowerPC if the market went that way.

The Sumida Hokusai Museum is almost entirely a display of replicas. They are very upfront about being a “learning” museum - they do hold the original prints but display them in rotation. We were there last year and there was exactly one original print on display (in a back corner of the special exhibit room); it was one of the “36 views” but not one of the uber-famous ones.

20 years ago (in 2005), did anyone voluntarily, happily label themselves autistic, without any disgnosis, outside of such psych classes (outliers for obvious reasons)?

The “Aspie programmer” meme has been around since the turn of the century (at least)

https://www.wired.com/2001/12/aspergers/

I’m pretty sure people made reference to it when I was at Cal in the 90s but I can’t prove it. (The prevalence of social awkwardness, eye contact avoidance, hyper-interests, etc.). I don’t think it was as much about people wanting to feel special as trying to find explanations for the overall environment.

From Wikipedia: “The complete, unexpurgated, and definitive edition, edited and transcribed by Robert Latham and William Matthews, was published by Bell & Hyman, London, and the University of California Press, Berkeley, in nine volumes, along with separate Companion and Index volumes, over the years 1970–1983.”

reads article at 11pm

And so to bed!

For those downvoting: As measured from the planetary surface(=sea floor in this case), as opposed to sea level

Does Asymptote get much use these days?

Kids who get most of the way through AoPS (typically) end up learning some Asymptote as that is the supported way to draw figures on the AoPS website

I believe they are saying that there are multiple rounds, each with different games - some with honest optimal strategies and some with dishonest optimal strategies. A dishonest person can always choose the optimal strategy for each game, but the honest person can only choose the best honest strategy. So in aggregate the dishonest person comes out ahead.

Although numerous papers continue to be submitted to USENIX ATC with significant research being reviewed, accepted, and presented, the community has evolved, and now attends conferences other than USENIX ATC. From 1,698 attendees in San Diego in 2000, ATC attendance dwindled to 165 attendees in Santa Clara in 2024

It became a write-only conference :-(

I remember reading the NFS and Kerberos papers in school.

His educational background includes a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Villanova University

Huh. Career counselors take note, new path opened up.

She says she’s 50. I think the “young” vibe comes from the way she talks about experiences and what is important, because it doesn’t read like she had kids.

Pell grants