rnather @rnather@mathstodon.xyz

Logical fallacies explained by robots!

By Michele Rosenthal. Source:
https://michelerosenthal.com/portfolio/logical-fallacies/

Demon: I am summoned.

Programmer: Hi I'd like to sell my immortal soul in exchange for knowing why the fuck my script isn't doing this clear thing it should by all accounts do.

Demon: :laughing: Done! And now, you're answer is... :terrifying pause: :hideous anguished face: It can't be!!! :Demon burns to a crisp whose ashes are blown away by the wind:

Programmer: Great can you tell my manager that

Owners of web services often don't understand this, but the text of the Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy is intellectual property. Although most of these texts are very similar, this doesn't mean that unauthorized copying of them (even with minor editing) isn't an infringement.

If you have no objection to copying your texts by other people, don't forget to add this notice and refer to some kind of free license.

#copyright #intellectualproperty #IP #privacypolicy #freelicense #cc

#introduction

Hi! I'm a lawyer protecting intellectual property rights in Russia and all over the world and researching in costitutional law. The topic of my current research is the limits of legal regulation of education (please let me know if you have anything to say about this).

I am also a co-author of an amazing podcast about IP "Copycast" but it is only in Russian yet.

My hobby is punk rock.

I usually post something funny about IP law and my cat. Hope you enjoy.

There's a chess trick where you play an odd number of games with many different people all at once. The trick is that you're just mirroring half the players' moves at the person two or three tables away from them so really they're all just playing each other. Then you only have to beat one person in a real match to win a majority of the games. That's what I think of when I see user data turned into money by a third party.

1. Do you remember in "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" Ginny Weasley wrote scary texts in blood on the wall while posessed by the Tom Riddle spirit?

A strange question: Who has the copyright to these texts – Ginny or Tom?

A strange answer: The same question has been considered by UK and US courts.

Here is a thread about the copyright to texts dictated by spirits and ghosts 👻

#copyright #IntellectualProperty #IP #IPlaw #supernatural #harrypotter #jurisprudence #history #thread

And yes, I'm on the schedule. :)

Kim Reece (they/them) (@kimreece) 8/2 5-6pm
Algebraic numbers and dividing the circle -- the Kronecker-Weber theorem.

Factoring in the Chicken McNugget monoid
Article by Scott Chapman and Christopher O'Neill
In collections: Animals, Attention-grabbing titles, Easily explained, Unusual arithmetic, Food, Integerology
Every day, 34 million Chicken McNuggets are sold worldwide. At most McDonalds locations in the United States today, Chicken McNuggets are sold in packs of 4, 6, 10, 20, 40, and 50 pieces. However, shortly...
URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/1709.01606v1
PDF: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1709.01606v1
Entry: https://read.somethingorotherwhatever.com/entry/FactoringintheChickenMcNuggetmonoid

E. pinnatum update: pinhole fenestrations everywhere, this leaf is longer than my hand. It's becoming one of my favorites!

I've admired Sacha Chua for a very long time. I remember seeing a picture of her with an Emacs/chording keyboard/cyborg glasses setup years ago back in 2003. Mind blown! 😄
Her blog is still relelvant. If you're into Emacs, she produces a huuuuge link list of Emacs related items every week. Amazing.

https://sachachua.com/blog/2020/07/why-i-love-free-software/
https://sachachua.com/blog/2013/05/from-cats-to-keystrokes/

https://www.mrlacey.com/2020/07/youve-only-added-two-lines-why-did-that.html

You've only added two lines - why did that take two days!

Because:

* The issue was reported with a vague description of how to recreate it.
* The reported issue was related to functionality, I'm not familiar with. 
* I took the time to investigate the real cause of the issue, not just looking at the symptoms. 
* I investigated if there were other ways of getting to the same problem, not just the reported reproduction steps.
* I took the time to verify if there were other parts of the code that might be affected in similar ways.
* When I found the cause of the issue, I looked to find the simplest way of fixing it that would have minimal risk of introducing side-effects.
* I tested the change thoroughly and verified that it addressed the problem for all the different code paths that were affected.

#programming #management

This is the cyberpunk future I have been waiting for.

and if you ever want to understand why mathematical logic differs from normal logic, 'true on all none of them' is exactly it.

Don't anthropomorphise computers - they hate that.

pangolin
pangola (extinct)
pangocello (extinct)
bass pangol (extinct)

.

(yes i did this gag on twitter a few years back but it feels like time to revive it, with an illustration this time!)

Academic maths pals: the talks from E-Assessment in the Mathematical Sciences, the conference I helped to organise, are now online at https://eams.ncl.ac.uk/programme/

A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems. -- Renyi (although often attributed to Erdos)

19th century mathematicians: all curves that are continuous are differentiable

weierstrass: *defines a curve that is totally continuous but non-differentiable at not only a point, but every single point in its existence*

19th century mathematicians: ​

Ethnic conflict is not human nature. Human nature is coexistence. War is unnatural. "Us vs. them" is the justifications taught to us by greedy men who wanted to write history in their image. Racism and empire are new and unnatural concepts, concepts which we can choose to abandon, because killing each other is a good recipe to just leave us all dead. Compassion is written into our DNA. Spread the news.

A tiny improvement sometimes makes for a big result: In a new preprint "A (Slightly) Improved Approximation Algorithm for Metric TSP" (https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.01409), Anna Karlin, Nathan Klein, and Shayan Oveis Gharan claim a reduction in the approximation ratio for traveling salesperson in arbitrary metric spaces from \(\tfrac{3}{2}\) to \(\tfrac{3}{2}-10^{-36}\). But it's the first such improvement since Christofides and Serdyukov in 1976, on a central problem in approximation algorithms.