(cont'd from last toot) I'm still hoping that someday I can easily write things like $$[x=y]$$ in some text and have people easily get what I mean, without having to write "where $$[p]$$ is the Iversonian bracket" immediately afterwards. Same goes for the Stirling cycle and Stirling subset numbers.

I've been doing a little bit of contract work for a company almost halfway around the world for a while now, but I still feel it's nice of them to say things like "It's OK, you don't have to stay up late for this meeting. We'll e-mail you the meeting notes."

Going back to basics. I've always been impressed by situations where two seemingly unrelated things give rise to the same result. In this case, two different curve families generate the same envelope: a nephroid.

Software defaults are often a prime example of "pleasing nobody by trying to please everybody".

stylized depiction of a Hilbert curve

Overheard: "Would you have paid attention to a preprint containing a breakthrough if it was written in crayon?"

Don't cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it -- Anon

I've found formatting to be one of the most annoying parts of writing... anything. So much effort to make something look "just so"...

What I hate about a lot of popular math books is that when they want to show how big something is, they often compel me to count zeroes.

I've come to accept that I will always be dissatisfied by anything I've written or made after releasing them to the public.

I really could use a spot of tea...

It's exhausting to read a paper that uses mathematical conventions that are quite different from your preferences.

Perhaps this is a weird way to put it, but I argue that constant dissatisfaction is what propels the world. If everyone were satisfied, there'd be no drive or need to pursue anything.

Yet another thing I've found in my experience is that people who tend to say "'nuff said" are more often than not poor storytellers.

After a decade+ of ridicule and dismissal, it's no longer possible to deny that broadband is a human right, nor is it possible to deny that private monopolists suck at safeguarding this right.

pluralistic.net/2020/03/30/med

To understand how badly broadband monopolists failed, just look at the bankruptcy docs from Frontier. The company chose not to make a \$800m profit providing 100gb fiber to its customers because making long-term investments would hurt its stock price.

pluralistic.net/2020/05/01/ica

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I wrote up an example showing how to solve a differential equation using continued fractions: tpfto.wordpress.com/2020/05/25 That being said, I'm still not certain if this can be systematized into an algorithm for holonomic ODEs.

Let us remind all novice geometers that there is a marked difference between a ruler and a straightedge.

It's been my experience that people who say sentences that start with "In no world..." often haven't seen much of the world, at all.