love/ hate letter to stackexchange summer 2017 at ½ decade mark

hi all, have now been on stackexchange over 5 yrs, focusing on CS-related groups, mainly theoretical computer science and the computer science sites. its been a wild ride and full of a lot of color and online adventures. the cyber culture is quite rich. full of dynamic psychology and ripe for a sociological/ anthropological study. when finding this site early on and seeing their rapid growth, thought it could be a like a mini-facebook. but alas, there are really no other mini-facebooks! (lol at someone-or-other who told me in chat not long ago that SE is not a “social networking system”!) its a winner-take-all situation in capitalism and mirrored in cyberspace.

for 4 years focused on building up my online rep. shew, it sure/ really isnt easy! esp if one wants to have a personal style to their posts! the site culture is very “left brained”. analytical. exacting. its that old japanese expr applied to cyberspace:

the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.

visa ban connections/ impact with science/ tech/ research/ edu

hi all, ideally technology advances might exist in some kind of vacuum that is unimpacted by politics. technology does have a huge resilience these days to shifting political winds du jour but alas, it can be highly impacted by political currents/ decisions. after a major regime/ administration change, these heretofore “hidden” dependencies can come into more stark focus, as is the case lately.

am trying to come up with a personal strategy/ pov/ philosophy toward the Age of Trump, still under development/ construction. have been through major election disappointments before. was mostly apolitical before Bush and then became much more political after bush, just trying to understand the world we live in and the direction it was going. bush 2004 election was a big disappointment to me. it seemed like a victory for warmongering. its strange how delayed the publics reaction to Iraq invasion was. it seems it took over a decade for the public to sour on it. but its heartening to some )( degree that those types of shifts can eventually happen and affect mainstream politics.

math celebration 2016: pythagorean triples empirical attack conquest

actual U Texas Stampede supercomputer where proof was run [a2]

➡ 💡 ❗ ⭐ 😎 😀 hi all. RJLipton recently covered the amazing/ brilliant breakthrough of solving the pythagorean triples problem by empirical work namely a reduction to SAT and analysis by a supercomputer by Heule, Kullmann, Marek and its a nice pivotal trigger/ tipping point for my own writeup along with related stuff.[a] (have been waiting for opportune time to write this up since may.) proofs like these are a complex or “complicated relationship” for mathematicians (aka facebook-speak), a love-hate affair. (did the extraordinary/ breakthrough/ revolutionary/ paradigm-shifting 4-color computer proof ever win any awards? and how much despair/ handwringing and further effort has there been over it over the decades?)

the breakthrough is celebrated but mathematicians would like to see shorter proofs that are human-comprehensible, so there are mixed/ ambivalent feelings about it within the community. have written on this topic quite at length in this blog even since its beginnings, and this latest breakthrough is delightfully affirmationally crosscutting across many of this blogs categories, and think this is the tip of the iceberg of 21st century mathematics in a way not yet fully recognized. its a dramatic, vivid realization/ materialization of an idea suggested a few years ago here called “SAT induction.” think that these types of proofs will lead to new theory that is indeed human comprehensible but some of the isolated theorems will be claimed first by computer analysis before the more thorough theory catches up to integrate them.

code/ CS 2015 highlights/ retrospective/ compilation, topnotch links

hi all. another year swooshed by at rapid, sometimes near mind-melting pace. 2015 was again a banner year for CS and coding related areas.

CS/ coding has a huge cultural prestige/ cachet at the moment. public interest can be a fickle and transitory thing and am really enjoying this moment in the limelight so to speak, but am not expecting it to last. other moments like this have come and gone such as during the dotcom frenzy at the turn of the century. it seems to be a high water mark at the moment.[a]

we have stories about Kim Kardashian making record sums from her mobile app[a3][a16], obama encouraging coding[a5][a14], minecraft founder Persson selling for about $2B to microsoft and outbidding beyonce and Jay Z on a $70M hollywood mansion[a6][a8], large tribute essay in Bloomberg to code.[a9][a12][a13] and theres still a dribble of attn on the legendary steve jobs with a new movie etc.[a21][a22]

controversial STEM clockmaker ahmed mohamed meets obama etc

hi all. the age of internet celebrity is truly wild at times. it reminds me of that old zen-like saying “be careful what you wish for because you just might get it.” 14-yr old “high school dropout” ahmed mohamed clock engineer (covered here 1mo ago) made it to astronomy night at the whitehouse and did meet obama in the crowd. but not before meeting the president of Sudan a few weeks ago who has been accused of human rights/ war crimes.

he also met up with google CEO Brin at the google science fair. whoa! a lot sure can happen in a month! (wikipedia entry [a22])