My personal favorite work was my migration study, the only study of the causes/correlates of migration using the full US pop. The short answer: the hyperrational economists are wrong and it's not about income gain. For the methodologists, I got there by proving that a statistic from the 1950s […]

#followFriday for @johncarlosbaez , a mathematician who is always finding interesting things—when he isn't writing them himself. Even when his explainers are over my head, they feel like an inspiration to keep learning until I can get the details.

Here's National Geographic explaining how the Endangered Species Act is being cut to pieces. It published earlier this week, but #2 and #3 have already been put into regulation. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/endangered-species-act-changes-explainer

What proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act mean for wildlife

Four major updates could alter the way the act is administered—and how animals are protected.

nationalgeographic.com

RE: https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/116875308492426800 RTing this because not only do you help the author with posts positively referencing their work, but you help the timeline. Wouldn't you rather have a feed of exciting long reads than endless USPOL snark?

Sunday night bump for Monday's post: https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/striking-evidence-for-forced-experimentation "A natural experiment shows how we always have something to learn, even about the things we are most familiar with."

Striking evidence for forced experimentation

A natural experiment shows how we always have something to learn, even about the things we are most familiar with.

tomstafford.substack.com

All you need to know about the US Supreme Court is that its opinion in a case about Prince has zero Prince lyrics, but repeated references to The Sound of Music. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-869_87ad.pdf Missed opportunities: "We all need to reach out for something new. That […]

RE: https://xoxo.zone/@b/102974865712800421 Made my first update of Ludwig van Shuffle in ~7 years. So nice having software simple and specific enough that it doesn't require attention. PS: I'm still astonished that I've never seen this functionality anywhere else. I can't be the only person […]

You'll never guess what brand of coffee they _don't_ sell at the Folger Shakespeare Library café. Totally a missed opportunity.

Super-glad I got this op-ed about 12-dimensional spheres into Scientific American before it got sold out. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-heisenberg-uncertainty-principle-of-social-science-modeling/ It's an explainer about the curse of dimensionality and its relevance to social […]

OK, intellectual property fans, here's a draft law review essay I wrote for you about AI and copyright, entitled "The art critics won't save you from the robots". It's really about a trend in copyright jurisprudence which is distorting the AI debate. You shift the trend, you fix the debate—and […]

The golden age of piracy (mid-1600s) wasn't too far behind the popularization of the printing press and establishment of a printing industry (mid-to-late 1500s). Authors of the late 1600s would analogize printers who copied their works to pirates ("land pirates" or "word pirates"), and we still […]

TeX tip: \defs are pattern matched! E.g., \def\todo(<#1>){{\bf #1}} then usage: \todo(<Get yr act together.>) If your heavily-used macros have a different format, you're less likely to drown in curly braces. I'd be interested to hear if you all have other uses for going beyond curly braces in […]

Why are genies always granting wishes ironically? What's in it for them? What motivates them? They seem sidelined as characters. Next time you see something with a genie in it, you can check whether there are at least two genies, who talk to each other, about something other than granting wishes.

Oh, and as a follow-up to my last post, the demonym for a person who lives in Las Vegas is: Vegan. There used to be a free local paper called The Vegan Times, even. Have a lucky day, everybody.

[Unsolicited pronunciation tip] Throwaway particles aren't stressed, like "the PLAINS" and not "THE plains", or even "saint JOSEPH" and not "SAINT joseph". The same works in Spanish! Not "LAS vegas" but "las VEGAS", not "SAN josé" but "san JOSË".

Hey, orchestra nerds, what are your favorite works to perform? I've read more than enough audience favorites lists, but I expect the pieces that excite you as a performer are different.

Card games: they don't all have to be trick taking or set collection. Carbondale is a grid-building, friendly thievery card game playable with the standard decks of cards you have in your house right now: https://carbondale.network . #SelfPromotionSunday

It finally happened: I sent a colleague 200 lines of code, and he 'improved' it by feeding it to an AI. Was so chipper when he sent me 2,000 lines in return, but then having to fix it and explain to them why the robot-generated version wasn't workable took most of my day. I'm never getting that […]

For you fans of science writer/comic musician Liz Landau, her latest is really her finest. Passed it on to an expectant coworker, who commented "I'm tearing up just a little". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ71REKRdWY

At work, have been sporadically passing around that essay I wrote on the history of modern math and how it advises better computing technique (see link below), and I think a few people have taken it to heart and are writing better code. Best reaction so far: "the big lesson is to stay on good […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@ethanschoonover/116426781763284152 This is how I do toothpaste. 💯 , would recommend.

My metaphorical hat is off to those of you in academia. 95% of my interactions with academics are stellar and the highlight of my day, and then 5% are with the most toxic, defensive, gatekeeping jerks I ever have to deal with. I don't know how those of you who encounter those people every day […]

In a feat of incredible brand consistency, you can't even log in to IRS's Free File Fillable Forms without doing mental arithmetic. This is why I wrote a tax calculator in python: https://github.com/b-k/py1040 . I do the math there, then copy to FFFF and everything goes fine.

(1/3) Concrete Blonde:still stuck in my head, still sounds great. Primarily guitarist James Mankey with the finest effects of 1990, and the superlative, superlative voice of Johnette Napolitano. They got a few singles on the radio, about an alcoholic ex ( […]

Imagine being a ghost, you finally have time to read anything you want, but if you can't move physical objects you have to wait for somebody to open the book you want to read. You have to haunt libraries and possibly wait years for somebody to come by, and then most of the time they stop reading […]

And I recently had the epiphany that you can just make hash browns. Shred a potato, add what you will, fry for a few minutes, you've got dinner.

“To opt out, GitHub users should visit /settings/copilot/features and disable "Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training" under the Privacy heading.” https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/26/github_ai_training_policy_changes/

Output passed via named registers, every function in its own file, arrays via name-munging macros: the dream of the 90s is alive in Stata

Talked to somebody who had worked at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve a few years ago and she said its cafeteria was cash only. Astonishing that there are still places that only accept company scrip.

duckduckgo implemented my dream feature: an option to 🚫 block sites from your search results which are spam, AI-generated noise, or otherwise not worth clicking through to. It's made search engines tolerable again.