Oh my god.

1/1² - 1/2² + 1/4² - 1/5² + 1/7² - 1/8² + ⋯ Announcement that Dimitrov and Tang proved this number is irrational... and on April 18th they won the $100,000 2026 New Horizons in Mathematics prize!

1/1² - 1/2² + 1/4² - 1/5² + 1/7² - 1/8² + ⋯

Together with Calegari, Dimitrov and Tang proved this number is irrational... and they just won a $100,000 prize!

It's the biggest advance in irrationality since Apéry showed

ζ(3) = 1/1³ + 1/2³ + 1/3³ + ⋯

is irrational back in 1978.

(1/n)

BUCKCHERRY-TO DRUNK... (NEW SINGLE) YouTube video by cudlesmycat

Song for the Day: Too Drunk - Buckcherry (Not Safe For Work)

youtu.be/CtGXOrz5Tgo?...

Screenshot from the website of Yale University Press showing praise for my book, Darwin and the Queer Origins of Life. It reads: “Evolution from an intersex ancestor? What a wondrous Darwinian idea! In this electrifying book, Ross Books helps us see the canon of natural history as queer from the very beginning. Sharp, clever, and as replete with evolutionary diversity as a history of biology could possibly be.”—Alison Bashford, author of An Intimate History of Evolution “Darwin and the Queer Origins of Life is an invigorating read pulsing with queer life. As politically essential as it is compelling, it's a rich counterhistory of biology which shows us how scientists always knew queerness was natural and nature was queer.”—Kit Heyam, author of Before We Were Trans “Ross Brooks’ smart new book is as fun to read as it is useful for rebutting all the bad takes on sexuality and gender that clog contemporary discourse. He has a delightfully ‘queer eye for the hermaphrodite guys’ of life’s evolutionary history, and more than a few arch words for Darwin and other biologists who’ve straightjacketed an abundance of animate forms into an unnatural binary.”—Susan Stryker, author of Changing Gender “Everything you need to know about sex and evolution, but were too indoctrinated by the cisheteropatriarchy to know to ask.”—Subhadra Das, author of Uncivilised “From Linnaeus to Darwin, Brooks brilliantly shows us how biology always has, and will always be, delightfully queer. A much-needed account of the queer history of natural history.”—Josh Luke Davis, author of A Little Gay Natural History “Few know of Darwin’s fascination with the queer biology of sex. This compelling, insightful, and original narrative illustrates Darwin’s (and others’) contributions and hesitancies in the enabling and restricting of queer evolutionary analyses.”—Agustín Fuentes, author of Sex is a Spectrum

Jacket design for Darwin and the Queer Origins of Life: A History of Sex and Science by Ross Brooks. It features a historical, drawn image of a gynandromorph gypsy moth, with distinctive female patterning on its left side and male on its right. Against a black background, the image and text (title and author's name) are brightly rendered in a spectrum of colours resonant of the Progress Pride Flag.

I'm bowled over by the first endorsements my forthcoming book has received. Such brilliant authors - WOW!

You will love it too . . . 🐟🌈📚

UK: yalebooks.co.uk/book/9780300... @yalebooks.bsky.social

US: yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300... @yalepress.bsky.social

#booksky #histsci #queerhistory 🗃️

Another fantastic and spot-on accurate review of #AI for Communication @routledgebooks.bsky.social This one was written by @robertdiab.bsky.social for the National Communication Assocation journal "Critical Studies in Media Communication."

doi.org/10.1080/1529...

get em

alt text seems scary and hard at first, but the truth is: even crappy or clunky alt text is better than no alt text.

No problem! I tend to be over literal, so that's how I thought about it. It is kind of crazy to imagine them going at 30knots!

Seraj-class speedboat - Wikipedia

I guess Iran has what looks like weaponized cigarette boats:

Could you be mistaken on that? Quick web search shows top speed of cruise ships 29-30knots; top 5 classes of USN ships all exceed this, though I can't see if Iran has any ships this fast.

But I guess, in full disclosure, that missing the train *could* be blamed on us arriving too early (1 hour). That gave time for my son and his girlfriend to wander off, get in an argument, and then return, taking approximately 1 hour and 10 minutes.🤣

To each his own! But last summer, we missed a train in Italy. It cost us $350 and no, I don't really want to pay that extra cost for no good reason. And we had a hard time getting ground transportation at the destination because of it.

Soundgarden - Been Away Too Long YouTube video by SoundgardenVEVO

One of the last CDs I bought was King Animal and it's got some good songs, certainly this one

Great essay!

I would suggest if you want to share it, share it with "this is from 2018" and possibly add "and his view hasn't changed"

People talk about the risk of crack and pack gerrymandering: if you take voters from districts you win by 20% to create districts you win by 10%, but the popular vote swings 11%, you get wiped out. But this is the only case I know where it seems to have happened. Other examples?

Trump, IRS in talks to settle US president's $10 billion lawsuit Lawyers for Donald Trump ​and the Internal Revenue Service are in talks to settle the U.S. president's $10 billion lawsuit against the tax ‌collection agency for leaking his tax returns to the media i...

Every presidential administration gets accused of corruption—sometimes with good reason, sometimes not. But the corruption of the Trump administration is of a magnitude that is not only without precedent in American history but so large and brazen as to be difficult to wrap one's head around.

An infographic. There are six panels. 1. "Slow internet. Alt text is shown in place of unloaded images." a drawing shows a phone with poor signal, and alt text is visible where the image should have loaded. 2. "Findabillity. Alt text helps to search content." A drawing shows someone searching 'dog with banana' and a post is shown underneath without the words 'dog' or 'banana'. It is implied to be part of the alt text. 3. "Screen readers. Alt is read out to people using text-to-speech software". There is a drawing of the output a screen-reader would show when viewing an image with alt text on bluesky. 4. "Translation. Alt text can be translated". A drawing shows a post being translated. The alt text is also translated into german. 5. "Readability. Text in images can be made legible" There is a drawing of some truly awful handwriting inside a speech bubble. The alt text clarifies what the text is supposed to say. 6. "Disambiguation. Description helps clarify intent." There is a drawing of a post with a picture of a creature. This is styled after the famous optical illusion of a rabbit and a duck. The alt text clarifies that the animal is a rabbit. It definitely looks more like a duck.

Generally we think of alt-text as the domain of those with accessibility needs.

However alt-text is useful for many reasons, which benefit your viewers, as well as you, the creator!

You probably know this, but apparently Trump orders the shoes using a size he guesses and then they are too chickenshit to tell him. But, you are right, even given that, I don't understand why they don't immediately call the company and buy another copy of the same shoes in the right size.

MOTHERFUNCTOR! structure-preserving political commentary for mathematicians

I've had a complicated few days, but they gave me a chance to launch my political mathy newsletter:
buttondown.com/crgibbons

Subscribe if you want to!

I have a script I'll be testing to scrape interesting/relevant things from the Federal Register to send out regular updates (with short commentary)

Trump is very good at market manipulation but very bad at actual diplomacy or war fighting. He is also completely disconnected from reality, which should (and does) worry the entire world. None of the claims he made in Friday are true.

The "we're not saying he's guilty of criminal fraud, but we're not not saying that and many people are saying he's fraud-adjacent" edition.

@ronanfarrow.bsky.social and Andrew Marantz joined @klonick.bsky.social on Lawfare Daily to discuss their recent @newyorker.com article which investigated Sam Altman, the products he's building at OpenAI, and how he's selling them. youtu.be/O2GNrY63_2c?...

the United States’ duty to safeguard tax return information under 26 U.S.C. § 6103 and the Privacy Act. The case remains in its early stages. Good cause exists to grant an extension in this matter while the Parties engage in discussions designed to resolve this matter and to avoid protracted litigation. This limited pause will neither prejudice the Parties nor delay ultimate resolution. Rather, the extension will promote judicial economy and allow the Parties to explore avenues that could narrow or resolve the issues efficiently. II. Argument A. Good Cause Supports a 90-day Extension. Courts routinely grant extensions motions where, as here, an extension serves the interests of justice and efficiency without harming any party. The Parties are engaging in discussions and need time to work through how to ensure those discussions can take place productively to avoid protracted litigation. This brief period will allow the Parties to initiate and structure those discussions in a manner that best serves the interests of all Parties and the Court

BREAKING: IRS confirms it's negotiating with Trump family to pay a "settlement" in the wildly defective lawsuit over the leak of his tax returns.

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

This is HUGE!

Maxwell's demon of Hormuz

Schrodinger’s Strait of Hormuz

This is the first year of a new course I built called Computing and Data Sciences. The tools used this year:

Semester 1:
• Whiteboards
• LaTeX (on overleaf)
• Sheets + Desmos visualization

Semester 2:
• Python in Colab with:
- NumPy
- Pyplot
- Pandas

#ITeachMath #TeamCompSci

Sorry to pick on your first decimal place, but 10 km^2 = 3.16 x 3.16 km. Doesn't change anything substantial in your post.