Portuguese fried fish was imported to the UK by Jewish immigrants. Portuguese fried fish was imported to Japan by Jesuits. So tempura and fish & chips share history.

Repost from 2017

TIL Brian Aldiss was author of a "game" for the BBC Micro https://bbcmicro.co.uk/game.php?id=2314

Science Fiction Quiz

Published by Acornsoft, Ivan Berg Software in 1983

bbcmicro.co.uk

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/openai-says-it-has-solved-a-millennium-prize-problem-a-holy-grail-of-math/ar-AA2bOYrB

Try to play music from my phone to the car by Bluetooth has a 10% chance of success without rebooting the infotainment system. So I'm smart, I use a USB cable. It works more than 80% of the time and replugging the cable raises that to over 90% I don't […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

https://www.anthropic.com/research/formalizing-fermats-last-theorem

I found Williamson's "The Humanoids" an interesting read that frequently made me think of The Forbin Project and Pluribus. It was published in 1949 but had an early version of an AI alignment problem. The machines are intended to enforce peace among humans but […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

Littlewood's law states that a person can expect to experience events with odds of one in a million (referred to as a "miracle") at the rate of about one per month. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littlewood%27s_law

First thing in the morning I hoped on the exercise bike and played the first video that appeared on YouTube. A POV run alongside Sheffield canal. And half way through I spotted this thing on the water.

it's sad how humanity has lost the ability to write code to search for things. Whether it's Google, or Apple Music, or eBay, typing in exact substrings of the title of something is no longer guaranteed, or even likely, to find matching entries.

The thing that makes modern dimmers for lighting complicated is basically what Einstein got his Nobel prize for.

There's a class of horror movie I think of as Geometric Horror. The first I recall watching is Cube. Backrooms and It Ends are current ones. What are some others?

A propos of nothing: I often think of this work of art although I don't think it was on display last time I visited the Tate. It's a map of the US showing only the place names containing the word "Lost". https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/prendergast-lost-p78411

‘Lost‘, Kathy Prendergast, 1999 | Tate

‘Lost‘, Kathy Prendergast, 1999

tate.org.uk

Anyone else have to go through the annoying round of apologies and explanations for how stupid and ignorant their compatriots are any time they talk to their friends and family who live in other countries?

Lean is handy for managing structured tasks. Here's how I shop.

"The 6-sphere is a complex manifold." Huge if true. https://mathoverflow.net/questions/1973/is-there-a-complex-structure-on-the-6-sphere

Is there a complex structure on the 6-sphere?

I don't know who first asked this question, but it's a question that I think many differential and complex geometers have tried to answer because it sounds so simple and fundamental. There are even a

mathoverflow.net

To tell if a maze is solvable, just hang it by its corners If it tears into pieces, you’ve found a solution

I regret not publishing more papers. I spotted my trick for computing Laplacians appearing in ML papers recently. https://blog.sigfpe.com/2011/08/computing-errors-with-square-roots-of.html This is actually how it is used - simulating stochastic processes […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

The PDP-8 was a game changer. It was so small you could fit one in the back of a VW Beetle.

😢https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/aug/27/yayoi-kusama-dies-aged-97-artist-dead I think I've visited infinity rooms in multiple museums and they were all wonderful.

Yayoi Kusama, Japanese artist who became a global superstar, dies aged 97

From the 1950s to the 2020s, Kusama produced vivid paintings, sculptures and vast installations that often drew on her experience of hallucinations

theguardian.com

This algorithm blows my mind. I'm amazed you can sample trajectories exactly(*) from an SDE like this https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0602523 (*) for some value of "exactly"

Something I've wondered for a while, but I usually think is a bit crazy to mention, is that one way to formalize Dirac deltas is somewhat like algebraic effects. A Dirac delta is an algebraic effect whose handler finds the limit of the surrounding expression as you apply it to a sequence of […]

I thought Tangerine Dream were pretty excellent in SF tonight; some spiffy visuals too.

Every couple of years I assess the tablet situation for doing mathematics working and it's still poor. The iPad is amazing as a display device but a non-starter for scribbling mathematics. You simply can't expect to rest your hand on the tablet. My Kindle Scribe and Supernote are both […]

I've never heard the term "jump drive" outside of FTL spaceship design and yet everyone in Reacher uses the term. I must have been living under a rock all these years. (Yeah, I watch Reacher.)

I was a bit behind the times. I was astonished to find you can just guess an ansatz, shape it with a neural net, and solve ab initio for the full wave function for a ground state of a multi-electron atom, with the energy computed to many decimal places. Small atoms and maybe even molecules on […]

Reading some zombie fiction that feels very dated in the way it talks about FEMA and CDC and other branches of government as if they were real things that would have some useful role to play if the zombies happened.

A large amount of business in the US is basically scams that are obviously scams but the amount of money you expect to recover per hour of disputation is less than the amount you get paid so it's easier to just let them go.

In the old days hexadecimal was written using FGJKQW, not ABCDEF https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/31652/what-was-the-reason-for-the-weird-hexadecimal-letters-used-on-the-lgp-30