Leo C. Stein

We're NOT having a free & fair election. We're having one where the authoritarian ruling party has made it very difficult to remove them from power. Remember purged voter rolls, closing of polling stations, restricting mail-in ballots, & gerrymandering. We need a massive repudiation at the polls.

Apparently I can only get things done by procrasti-working

One code to rule them all One code to find them One code to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

Lynn Fitch is the "pro-life" attorney general who successfully led the state's side in the Dobbs case, overturning Roe v. Wade.

Nuance? In this economy?

Tired of only being wrong about 632 things, Malcolm Gladwell tees up topic 633 to completely whiff

I realized that I hadn't posted my visualizations of the *index* of a vector field on bsky! Pick a point where v=0, and take a tiny circle around that point. Walk around the circle (blue dot on the left) counterclockwise, noting where the vector field points (orange arrow). 1/9 🧮

Well, I'm never going to top this score! www.maptap.gg October 15 100🎯 96🔥 100🎯 99🎯 100🎯 Final score: 993

Peter Minkowski's 1977 PLB "μ→eγ at a Rate of One Out of $10^{9}$ Muon Decays? inspirehep.net/literature/4... reaches 6,000 citations. This paper is a (perhaps the) classic "sleeping beauty"

LMAO I just noticed that the "Captcha" to reply on a lichess.org forum post is a chess puzzle (it's a M1 so pretty trivial ... but apparently there must be enough bot traffic that this approach is still useful!)

New working paper: the Norwegian wealth tax was a huge success. The "exodus" of wealthy people never happened (less than 100 individuals left). Tax revenue increased by 71.5%. No changes in business activity or investment. www.nber.org/papers/w35854

Occasional PSA, 2026 edition: @duetosymmetry.com and I made a graph paper package for LaTeX. Various styles (graph, quadrille, hex, iso, dot grid, etc) with pre-defined or custom colors. Print it or make templates for your tablet. 🧪 Github: github.com/mcnees/LaTeX... CTAN: ctan.org/pkg/gridpapers

😔 news.mit.edu/2026/margare...

The Lichess Board Editor now supports importing board positions from images! Available now on lichess.org/editor and coming soon to mobile.

Who else has 3 hours of telecons starting at 8am in the morning

J. D. Jackson, _Classical Electrodynamics_

"I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal." buff.ly/pykYN6f

Confidently answering the wrong question… The Netherlands is literally named after being low-lying. Its average elevation is 30m above sea level. (The correct answer is Bhutan at 3.28km, just edging out Nepal at 3.27km)

And here's a plot of workforce changes relative to 2024.

Research units from across government have been gutted. More than 10,000 PhDs have left government. For example the research arm of the Department of Education lost 90% of their staff and the research office for the Secretary of Health and Human Services lost an estimated 60% of their staff.

Is it so easy to forget that people like beautiful things

Horrific though unsurprising report from @propublica.org: Ectopic pregnancy deaths have basically doubled since the end of Roe

Have you ever wanted to hear @cjdenial.bsky.social, @thetattooedprof.bsky.social, @liznorell.bsky.social, and me talk about the need for resisting AI in education? If so, you're in luck! On October 13th, we're doing a reprise of a session on this topic, and we're hosting it on Zoom FREE OF CHARGE.

Grantmaking has leveled off, so it looks like NSF will make around 6,200 new grants—down from an average of ~11,000. That's a historic low, not seen since the 1980s, when NSF was a far smaller organization. Left was our projection three weeks ago, right is the current data.

Kinda bullshit that none of these items are used to make tea, Earl Grey, hot

Does Renee Good’s widow also get a @nytimes.com column? Alex Pretti’s parents and sister? Or the widows and widowers of the people who died (were murdered) in ICE concentration camps?

Hey Cornell faculty. Sweeties. Honeybunches. Y’all need a union. Because what the hell is this?!

Lovely article about a 99-year-old retired math professor who recently published a major result. It's the story of mentorship and multi-generational collaboration. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/s...

This is pretty fucking wild. I had assumed in a worst case scenario he would target blue zip codes and toss ballots based on technicalities but this is even worse than I imagined.

It breaks my heart that it wasn't the ankle monitor that broke him—it was the way his college classmates treated him for having to wear It. Which says so much about the kinds of hatefulness that permeate American culture and that made it possible for MAGA to gain so much power.

I adopted a pixel!

I'm going to run a group - Painting the OEIS. Please share your favorite sequences and why. I'll share what art I do with any of them. #oeis #mtbos #mathArt

Tim Curry and Dolly Parton both demonstrated how gender is a social construct. RIP legends

“A 1-year-old baby appeared in immigration court without legal representation in Arizona and received an instruction: File an asylum application before the next hearing or face deportation.”

💥 ICE drag mom & teen daughter out of hospital room—in middle of being treated after car accident. Still wearing hospital gowns. Both victims of car collusion, with asylum case pending in good standing & valid work permit. Grace Calero 39, & Giulianna Carriel 19, from Ecuador.

Optimist: The cup is half full. Pessimist: The cup is half empty. Measure theorist: There are an infinite number of (non-canonical) measures on your space.

The culprit? Like last year, NSF is spending more up front, discontinuing multi-year awards and paying off the mortgage on existing awards. But FY26 and FY25 have similar budgets. What accounts for the difference is that NSF has withheld $1 billion—$1,016,862,632, to be precise.

Scoop: For nearly a year, NSF has struggled to make new grants. Now we know that it will not catch up. In fact, NSF will award just 6,100 new grants—a 30% y/o/y decline, itself down from a previous avg. of 11,000+. In fact, the last time NSF awarded so few grants was in the early '80s.

The gravity + astrophysics group at UMiss has a totally overhauled web page! Many thanks to João Dinis Álvares for his work overhauling the site. www.phy.olemiss.edu/GR/ ⚛️🧪🔭

Woah.

"A database of federal law enforcement officer misconduct records. A survey measuring physical, sexual and emotional violence against children and youth. Real-time pollution readings collected by air quality monitors from US embassies around the world."

I think part of the pundit crack-up has been that they missed the big call of their lifetimes about which was the bigger threat to America: wokeness or authoritarianism. And rather than admitting that, they are doubling down on wokeness, while ignoring an authoritarianism that does not threaten them