iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 27/09/2026

I had one in a hotel suite in Boston in 2011. It helped to have multiple interviewers of more than one gender and the suite had a layout where the bedroom area was closed off behind a door. So it felt like sitting in a living room for a chat, which I *think* would have felt OK for all candidates.

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 27/09/2026

walk me back or if I should venture across campus in FARGO in JANUARY on my own. (They decided that since I knew campus, I should walk myself over to the Math Department. I hope they didn’t do that to anyone else!)

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 27/09/2026

For a campus interview, the most awkward moment was at NDSU, where I’d gone for undergrad. They took me from lunch to a meeting with the dean. When that was over, I had to ask his assistant (who’d been there since I was a student) to call the Math Department and learn if someone was coming to

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 27/09/2026

Overall the worst interviewing situation I ever had was after W&L decided not to reappointment me at fourth year review. I’m sitting in the waiting area at the JMM employment center waiting for interviews while my soon-to-be former colleagues are coming out to call back candidates for next victim.

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 25/09/2026

My first instinct was NDSU-Hawaii, but yeah, NIU tops that. Gotta love all these teams far from the mountains in the MW.

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 22/09/2026

Ah, but that was the TRO, and CA8 went to the merits and ordered a permanent injunction.

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 22/09/2026

But it’s more like 40 since he went from +6 to –34.

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 22/09/2026

It feels like that makes what they did today even more absurd.

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 22/09/2026

And wasn’t CA8’s original stance on the TRO appeal “Nuh uh. Can’t appeal a TRO”?

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 21/09/2026

And while awaiting takeoff of my flight from DCA to MSN, I got an email from Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada informing me that part 1 of my adoptee citizenship application has been approved. (My paternal grandfather was born in Winnipeg, and dad got his certificate last month.)

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 21/09/2026

There’s also some not even veiled racism thrown at him in some of the ads, but yeah, you’re not wrong.

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Reposted by Mitch Keller

Dan Shafer @danshafer.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Republicans' entire campaign against David Crowley is just this, over and over.

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 21/09/2026

Wrapped up a short trip to DC with a visit to the Embassy of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg to the United States so I could apply for my Luxembourg passport and ID card.

A middle-aged bald white man with a goatee wearing a gray shirt. He stands in front of a European-style building flying the flags of the EU, Luxembourg, and Ukraine.

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Reposted by Mitch Keller

Bolts @boltsmag.org · 19/09/2026

Missouri and Montana would have some of the nation’s most robust constitutional protections for direct democracy if voters approve two citizen-initiated ballot measures this fall.

boltsmag.org

To Protect Direct Democracy, Two States Mull a New Approach: Name It As a Right - Bolts

Ballot measures in Missouri and Montana would strengthen citizen-led initiatives. Democracy advocates in each state are going on the offense after facing years of attack.

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Reposted by Mitch Keller

Slate @slate.com · 17/09/2026

Judge Saylor’s opinion consists mostly of expressions of bafflement at the idea that anyone would ever take this policy proposal seriously. slate.trib.al/JFNRTd1

slate.trib.al

Trump’s New Effort to Mess With Student Visas Was Shot Down in Humiliating Fashion

The change was set to take effect on Tuesday.

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 15/09/2026

Surprised not to see anything about this in my feed this morning from the LawSky folks I follow. I’m sure CA1 won’t stay the PI, but this feels like wildcard territory at SCOTUS. Hopefully @chrisgeidner.bsky.social gives this some attention at @lawdorknews.bsky.social today.

insidehighered.com

Judge Blocks Controversial International Student Restrictions

A Massachusetts judge issued the injunction hours before the regulation was set to take effect. Institutions worried it would harm international students.

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Reposted by Mitch Keller

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

1.2 million foreign students represents just 6% of the 19.4 million students studying as of 2025. But even that is too high, as the 1.2 million number includes ~300,000 people on post-graduate Optional Practical Training (OPT), meaning foreign students are sub-5%.

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 13/09/2026

Say what you want about Wisconsin electing Supreme Court justices in April elections, but one thing this state unequivocally got right: it is constitutionally impossible for more than one of the seven seats on the Supreme Court to be up in any given year.

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 10/09/2026

The only way this fast tracks to SCOTUS is if CA8 overturns the district judge and then the plaintiffs in that case appeal to SCOTUS. If SCOTUS *wanted* this before the election, they could have granted cert. before judgment and just taken the case. Stop with the doomerism.

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 10/09/2026

If CA8 upholds the district court TRO, the opponents to that map have 90 days to petition for cert. The SCOTUS stay is in place until SCOTUS rules. The intervenor opponents to the 2025 map have no reason to file for cert. before the election since SCOTUS’s stay is in place.

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 10/09/2026

There’s a baseball pitcher with the same name as me. I would occasionally get tagged by someone ranting about him having a bad game. I also once was tagged by a company he had an endorsement deal with. But now I can’t get my name as my WhatsApp handle, and I assume it’s because he’s prominent.

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 10/09/2026

Apparently they are time traveling now, citing the district court’s October 8 ruling 🤦‍♂️

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 09/09/2026

May you return to an organizational system more conducive to finding books faster than I did after my most recent move.

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 09/09/2026

Even ignoring the apostrophe catastrophe, this is completely incoherent.

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 07/09/2026

Yeah…so close to the general that the county couldn’t run this election like they normally do and the city had to figure out how to run it for itself.

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 07/09/2026

Fargo is voting to change its municipal form of government in a special election in October: fargond.gov/pageid/6a874...

fargond.gov

The City of Fargo - 2026 City of Fargo Special Election More Information

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 04/09/2026

The one that didn’t need a fifth down to beat Mizzou remains the only legitimate national champion from 1990. But man, that display from the Jackets tonight was an embarrassment.

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 03/09/2026

Except here in the US we don’t use A4 paper, and half of a US letter sheet of paper has a different aspect ratio than the full sheet. I’m generally ambivalent about metric vs customary units, but my goodness is the A paper system superior and I wish we’d adopt it.

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 01/09/2026

(Roberts wants the elected Republican King to do exactly what Roberts wants, but he doesn’t want to be the King himself.)

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 28/08/2026

orders permitting a representation in which every interval has unit length (often called semiorders) had been enumerated long before, and they are one of the myriad collections counted by the Catalan numbers!

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 28/08/2026

sequence description and connections to pattern-avoiding permutations to find a generating function. *bam* that generating function had appeared in the literature before, but without anyone connecting the structures there to interval orders. Oh, I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that the interval

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 28/08/2026

oeis.org/A022493 The Fishburn numbers count the number of unlabeled interval orders on n points. Fishburn raised the enumeration in his 1985 monograph, but the problem remained open until 2009, when Bousquét-Melou et al defined a class of sequences and found a bijection. They then used the

oeis.org

A022493 - OEIS

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 27/08/2026

Probably going to rename it the St America River soon.

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 26/08/2026

But when campus-level turns back to actively discussing procurement of solutions for math-heavy content, I’m definitely pitching PreTeXt.plus as something they should seriously look at. I’m still at the stage of getting key campus people to not say nonsense about math in PDFs.

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 26/08/2026

These are institutionally-owned projects (discussion/recitation worksheets, math learning center resources, exam archives, etc.). We need them living somewhere where the source belongs unequivocally to the department, and Gitlab pages gets us nifty Wisc URLs (even though we most use the LMS embeds).

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 26/08/2026

Especially now that I’m getting batches and batches of people using PreTeXt in my department, I can’t be arsed to help fix installs. And we have opted for Gitlab over GitHub, so Codespaces are not an option for anything other than having someone create a sample document to test things out.

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 26/08/2026

I’ve gone all in on Docker and have zero regrets.

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 26/08/2026

I had finally figured out the correct order, and then y’all changed the second part of the incantation!

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 26/08/2026

pretext update-project now 😉

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 22/08/2026

Academics, to "celebrate" the start of a new semester, post a WayBack Machine snapshot of your workplace from when you were applying to college (or a later milestone if you missed the dawn of dot edu) #WayBackCollegeChallenge

Screenshot of wisc.edu from February 2000. Link in upper left for text only version. Images are small and low res, but links go to the same things you’d find on the homepage today.

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 21/08/2026

I have taken some bizarre routings to score award seats in business or first class. This is much more bizarre than anything I’ve ever tried! Someone at AA has a sick sense of humor.

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 18/08/2026

without needing a shadow copy of the book structure.

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 18/08/2026

It’s now possible (again) to use the solutions manual generator to produce a workbook. When we set up the side workbook structure in that repo, it wasn’t possible for esoteric technical reasons. The active-calculus-vector repo can (or maybe after I push up some code and merge it) build a workbook

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 16/08/2026

UNIX has epoch seconds: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time

en.wikipedia.org

Unix time - Wikipedia

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 14/08/2026

For whatever reason, I on the other hand, voted in my home county in North Dakota until I was 30. First time I had to register to vote (ND doesn’t have voter registration) was when I moved to Nebraska in 2012.

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 13/08/2026

I feel subskeeted 😂 But at least for a first pass on the Active texts we copied the caption in as the description and put ADD ALT TEXT TO THIS IMAGE when there was no caption. More importantly, for ACS and ACM, we now have written descriptions for everything, including the interactives in ACM!

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Mitch Keller @mitchkeller.phd · 13/08/2026

Digital accessibility should be about actually providing useful features, not just meeting requirements. Most of these things (such as image descriptions) require authorial intent. Offloading this to an AI is irresponsible.

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