iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Fine but I'm not giving least squares to statistics when the romantic origin story about Gauss using it to predict where Ceres would pop up again is right there...

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Nalini Joshi @monsoon0.bsky.social · 7h

In case you’re wondering why I’ve been posting about inappropriate relationships between students and staff, the news about this case of a mathematician is now reaching across the media … vinnews.com/2026/10/01/h...

vinnews.com

Hebrew University Professor Convicted Of Harassing Doctoral Student Who Later Died An Untimely Death

JERUSALEM (VINnews) — A disciplinary appeals panel at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has rejected an appeal by mathematics professor Karim Alexander Adiprasito, upholding his conviction for sexual...

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M a r c u s 🏳️‍🌈🇧🇧 @marcusjdl.bsky.social · 20h

Will a government minister be making a statement and visiting? Of course not - not MANLY jobs in STEEL or CHEMICALS or CARS

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 19h

In the book he's apparently a professor; saw speculation change to postdoc was perhaps done make it more palatable to Stanford for the movie.

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Was going to quote repost this and just reposted by mistake, but I *just* learned about this the last few days talking with my Y10 daughter about her maths class and it took me several minutes of questioning her before I understood what the triple lines were meaning.

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Andrew Stacey @mathforge.org · 05/10/2026

This feels a bit like the school-level insistence on using the triple lines for identities instead of talking about equality of *functions*.

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Elizabeth Anne, PhD @lacksauthority.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

never the wrong time for this classic

Screenshot of a tweet by @RobbtKraft reading “scientist: "does everyone here know what Watson and Crick discovered?"
me from back of room: "Rosalind Franklin's notes"”

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Daniel Tunnard @danieltunnard.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

In about 1940 Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo moved in to an apartment on Santa Fe and Ecuador. Their friend Jorge Luis Borges came for dinner. He came for dinner every night for about 20 years. After dinner, Borges and Bioy retired to Bioy's study and talked and wrote until the early hours.

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Sheet music says quarter notes is 104. Think I got the timestamp in the link to take you straight there: youtu.be/ZUe_Yqoy4k8?...

youtu.be

Baedeker

YouTube video by Gabriel Kahane - Topic

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Hmmm. I'm happy with 3 against 4 and 3 against 5 polyrhythms, but I should probably master 4 against 5 before trying to play 3 against 4 against 5 all at once.

Two bars of the piano accompaniment to Gabriel Kahane's Baedeker -- 3/4 time, left hand playing quarter notes, right hand playing five notes against dotted quarter notes, making a 3/4/5 polyrhythm.

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

The two *other* papers I've seen on this in the last week or so did, though....

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

So Alpöge's complex structure on S^6 was a 100 page paper 40 days ago and then today there's a 100 page paper on the arXiv proving properties about it? I'm exhausted just contemplating it.

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Whereas, reading about Erasure in the Guardian just a few hours ago: "I’d get him to dress up onstage as a cactus and then expect us to be taken seriously by the music industry! But to me that’s more punk than punk, right?” www.theguardian.com/music/2026/o...

theguardian.com

‘It’s a deep soul connection’: Erasure on how 40 years of friendship got them through grief – and why Vince Clarke has quit touring

Returning for a 20th album of sumptuous synthpop, Andy Bell and Clarke open up about supporting one another through bereavement, being happily uncool and battling the resurgence of homophobia

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

"Ask yourself rather what is the mathematics that lives only inside you and nowhere else. The one that makes you dream, like the music that no-one has ever heard, that wakes you up in the middle of the night, playing itself inside your head, and demanding to be written."

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Ben Williamson @benpatrickwill.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

The turn against Turnitin in UK HE is gaining momentum, with Cambridge U the latest to cancel its contract over its proposal to use student essays to train AI. I imagine more unis will now follow. TII will surely be going into crisis management now. Good piece on it here wonkhe.com/blogs/a-supp...

wonkhe.com

A supplier shouldn’t be able to rewrite who owns students’ essays

Sam Dickinson looks at Turnitin’s paused plan to put student essays to work on AI – and finds that neither anonymisation nor university regulations answer the copyright question

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Now I want to reread Rorty talking about Nabokov.

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

It sure feels like that skimming the daily posts, but it's hard for me to eyeball on the graph. Looks like it's already starting to change before the pandemic flattens things for awhile....

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I've always gone with I Am Sitting in a Room, but something more direct and well known might be the way. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Si...

en.wikipedia.org

I Am Sitting in a Room - Wikipedia

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Lucy Gaynor @lucyjgaynor.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Today, staff @ University of #Edinburgh are striking to protest recently announced cuts - incl. the forced closure of >90 courses. Principal Prof Sir Peter Mathieson accused the union of "weaponising" students. I find this enraging, so: a short (quite personal) thread. www.bbc.com/news/article...

bbc.com

Edinburgh University lecturers begin five-week strike over cuts

Members of the University and Colleges Union are walking out in part of a long-running dispute over job and course cuts.

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Nina Markl 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 @ninamarkl.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

cries in 400 jobs threatened at my one (1) small (tiny!) university as part of sector-wide crisis

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

As a US expat in UK I'm amused by the pedantic correction of "brackets" to "parentheses", not realiz/sing you were just being British.

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Not serious oldest child golden boy me playing a paladin in an otherwise completely chaotic party, no sir.

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Alexander Kasprzyk @amkasprzyk.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Sorry to double-post – I find this plot clearer. Start of February is apparently when Claude Opus 4.6 was released by Anthropic, and ChatGPT-5.3-Codex was released by OpenAI. The next big release after that was GPT-5.4 by OpenAI at beginning of March.

arXiv submissions in maths since 2022. It shows a steady increase until around Feb 2026, after which the numbers take off dramatically.

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Oooh, yes, this one is great. Or maybe terrible...but it shows what I'm feeling great.

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

It *feels* like the daily arXiv submission numbers are getting oppressively huge and I just checked arxiv.org/stats/monthl... and yuuuuuuuuup. Also note the pandemic.

Graph showing the number of submissions to the arXiv over time since it started in the mid 90s. Starts with what looks like linear growth, but the right half of the graph starts to climb rapidly (with, interestingly, a slowdown during the pandemic)

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Amused this morning that Gabriel Kahane's Villains (4616 Dundee Dr.) and Courtney Barnett's Avant Gardner both mention Uma Thurman ODing in Pulp Fiction.

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And-Boo 👻 Jacobs (he/him) @drewjakeprof.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

lol at this chart and the disclaimer

A Connect Four style chart labeled "Illustration of the Proportion of the Courses or Talks Offered by the University" with blue circles as "left-leaning" white circles as "most centered" and red circles as "right-leaning." There are many more blue circles. The disclaimer on the side reads "Note: the proportions shown here are purely illustrative and may not correspond to the actual proportions of course of talk offerings."

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Three albums feels excessive but I did listen to Thrift Shop.

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Matt Clegg @eyesfront.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

My poems. My partner's illustrations. They helped us through Covid. @longbarrowpress.bsky.social turned them into 3 beautiful pamphlets. We're small. No marketing. If they sell, Longbarrow can publish more poets. Share this post & you'll be helping more than us. longbarrowpress.com/featured-poem/

longbarrowpress.com

Featured Poem

Tzu-Jan as Performance Outcome | Matthew Clegg Into every account mail is pinging: ‘we will secure our long-term future by competing on more fronts.’ Let’s find a glade where a thought might grow. …

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Huh -- anywhere I can read about this as a practicing mathematician? If you'd said "ahistorical" instead of "acausal" I'd be nodding along, but as it is I can kind of agree if I squint just right but would more likely have sided with the blg author.

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

I'm a simple man; seeing these enharmonic notes back to back amuses me. (@gabrielkahane.bsky.social's Baltimore, for those keeping score at home. Piano party is easy to get through but harder to make sound good. And singing in tune to the harmonies? 😬)

A bar of sheet music. Lyrics "Luke, I guess, got himself into a fight". Piano part has two notes highlighted, played consecutively by right pinky: and F-sharp, and a G-flat.

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Green beans and tomatoes were what I most remember from our garden as a kid. Gotta get organized and get stuff in next spring here.

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

@ncecire.bsky.social took me along a few times ages ago. I am not a singer and I enjoyed myself; community there/then seemed very welcoming and I'd be surprised if that wasn't the norm. Go for it!

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

His book Mathematics Without Apologies is pretty good! I was just thinking about it again because I was reading about Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces (think it's being republished?), and Harris talked about it a lot. Hadn't expected academic-ish book about maths to being in pink music.

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Robert Saunders @robertsaunders.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I'm probably a dinosaur, but I wish students were allowed more time just to be students: to study, to read, to think, to talk to each other, to have big ideas - maybe even to have fun now & then. I'm not convinced turning unis into training centres is going to fix bigger problems in the jobs market

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Alexander Kasprzyk @amkasprzyk.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

If government believes "math is solved"; if research funders believe "math is solved"; if university administrators believe "math is solved"; if future would-be students believe "math is solved": then it really doesn't matter what the #LLM is capable or not capable of doing. Communicate our value.

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Kieran Healy @kjhealy.co · 10/09/2026

Missed opportunity here to use properly evocative Irish vernacular: “with ideas” should be “with notions”, including lingering just ever so slightly too long on the first syllable.

It isn't clear why the company's board made this decision now. One person speculated that the timing may have something to do with Mullenweg's annual trip to the Burning Man festival, after which he tends to return
"with ideas." This year's festival ended on
September 7.

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I know how to write an equation for that square using max(a, b), and I can write max(a,b) using absolute value and linear combinations.

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Ugh, painful. Particularly loved that they managed to shove "work related" in there. And asking for various bits to be "authentic" when the prompt itself is anything but.

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Grant @syncingsinking.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this proposition that this profit margin is too narrow to contain sufficient tokens to complete a lean formalization

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Smiled to see @eyesfront.bsky.social repost Hopkins shortly after I read this in his latest: The river is pied With the glory of foam -- rain drums scent from hiding. I can't read the word "pied" and not think of skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow, and he's stuck "glory" in there, too.

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

A good practice document about using the discussion board feature in Blackboard suggests posting questions anonymously as if you were a student could encourage other students to do the same. I had a visceral negative reaction to this and it feels unethical to me. Am I off base?

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Paul Johnson @ptwiddle.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I took a lot of driving lessons switching from US-->UK as an experienced driver. Some of that was learning to drive manual (stick), but a lot was narrower roads, and cars parked on both sides making road very narrow. "Do we both fit?" was a new question. Japanese figures sound even more extreme.

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🇵🇸Tim Henke (tɪm 'ɦɛŋ.kə) @timhenke.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

We should talk more about what a travesty the bibliography of OpenAI is 16 measly citations for a 165-page paper, of which 5 are just the problem statement. Only 7 are from this century. They failed to cite the method they used. And the guy whom they offered single-authorship & the Millennium Prize

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