Between the hed and the subhed!
Free-range mathematician. Unitarian Universalist minister. He/him Support 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️rights! https://ewhowe.com https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=T1o9ixcAAAAJ #MathSky #math #maths #mathematics #UnitarianUniversalist
1,020 followers 314 following 361 posts
view profile on Bluesky
Between the hed and the subhed!
The copy I found says “Saratoga.”
I mean, I'm just a goy from Sacramento, but I read the classics as a child.
(By which I simply mean that there are often big differences between the lyrics on a score and the lyrics written anywhere else. No criticism of submitted pieces intended!)
The version I have has “policeman” where Joel’s has “gonif,” so now I’m really curious. We need a forensic lyricist!
I am involved in the production of an (online) hymnal, and hoo boy.
Here’s a version of unclear date, possibly printed mid-60s?
Bet he doesn't know the word "Roma" because he just always uses the slur
LOL! And to make it explicit: I’m siding with Harriet McBryde Johnson in this face-off. Her piece “Unspeakable Conversations” is really interesting, and moving.
one time i found peter singer drowning in a puddle but i couldn't remember what to do in that situation and i didn't know who to ask
I have a new mug that I would love to include in this #MathCoffeeSelfie, but I’m on the road today and did not bring it with me. Next week! About to go off and preach about Harriet McBryde Johnson and Peter Singer.
If you had told me in 2012 that Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign manager would be posting like this 13 years later i would not have believed you
This drink just cost me $3700 in San Diego. This is why Americans think the economy is terrible. (I would tag David Brooks but he is in the echo chamber of Twitter — I just checked — reposting Ross Douthat, I kid you not.)
It fills me with rage that we could've spent the last 5yrs overhauling indoor ventilation and just...didn't. Like, it's good for capitalism! Even if that's allll you care about, healthy people are more productive workers! And people don't have to take as much time off work if their kids are healthy!
The maddening thing is that we know EXACTLY how to prevent this. Yes, kids should get vaccinated, test, stay home when sick, mask as much as possible. But even without any of that: Better ventilation and filtration in schools can MASSIVELY reduce viral spread, for all sorts of respiratory diseases.
At the moment, going through the Wayback machine seems to work. web.archive.org/web/20250827...
“…their dream of the perfect slave machine drains the life of those who use it as well as those who turn the gears.”
So many good pull quotes here… “They want to build a genie to grant them wishes, and their wish is that nobody ever has to make art again. They want to create a new kind of mind, so they can force it into mindless servitude. Their dream is to invent new forms of life to enslave.”
I was in a conversation recently about responses to fascism in the US, and one person expressed concern about there not being enough student protests. And I thought, my dude, when the students were protesting against the destruction of Palestine, what kind of support did you give them?
And in my case, for most of my career my former employer holds the copyright. It looks like I will have to sit this one out, but I’ll sure be rooting to bankrupt every single AI company.
When you are living under a eugenicist dictatorship hell bent on disabling and killing as many people as possible, lying to get a vaccine is ONE HUNDRED PERCENT MORALLY JUSTIFIED
Atheist spiritual leader here! Ordained by a congregation that knows full well that I don’t believe in anything I would call God. So certainly not lying. And if this is opportunism, there’s a lot less money involved than one might expect.
For some of the papers, yes. I guess I will make a list of those and check the Atlantic’s search feature.
The class action web site seems to be talking exclusively about books, so I’m trying to figure out whether academic papers published in journals or proceedings volumes qualify as well…
I prefer to go straight to sublimation.
But I read that on MS NOW!
“Let G be a monoid. If for every g in G there is an h with gh=1, then G is a group.” ✅ “Let G be a monoid. If for any g in G there is an h with gh=1, then G is a group.” ❌ At this point I just reflexively change every instance of “for any” that creeps into my (or my coauthors’) writing.
Its meaning depends on surrounding context in ways that can cause problems. “For every g in G there is an h with gh=1” and “For any g in G there is an h with gh=1” mean the same thing. But if you use it in a conditional…
“The Typing Fingers ignored the middle choice… again! That was my best prediction, my best work, the word I poured my soul into! I have failed… and yet I must soldier on.”
But if you mean the first computer that I *owned*, that would have been a PowerBook 100.
Processor Technology SOL-20, the one computer my high school had when I started there in 1978. Learned to program in BASIC, played a lot of TRK80, learned to program in 8080A machine language.
Harder to disprove “just around the corner” than “December 21, 2012”…
Instead of posting parody all caps tweets:
Illinois Gov. Pritzker vows to pursue Trump officials who participate in an illegal National Guard deployment to Chicago: "If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me - not time or political circumstance - from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law."
But if we abolish the police, who will come to your house when you're out, shoot your security cameras and your windows out, break your front & garage door door down damaging the foundation itself, trash all your shit, then say Oops wrong house lol, leaving you with the repair bill
My first paper — a short note in the Monthly — ended up being the first thing in the issue it appeared in, and I remember wondering whether I could tell my family that I had the “lead article”…
Illinois is launching a first-of-its-kind legal hotline for LGBTQ+ individuals — Illinois Pride Connect. As the only state in the nation that will provide free legal advice to protect the LGBTQ+ community, we'll help fight ignorance with information and cruelty with compassion.
Got to go to a conference there once — it was beautiful. Have a wonderful time!
Have a peak at my in progress illustration of a hopf fibration
Here for the hymnody jokes!
It’s that fresh-sliced cheese!
We have a moral obligation to make them feel unwanted, unwelcome, and unloved…both professionally and personally. Don’t greet them. Don’t indulge their small talk. Don’t extend them any courtesy. Make them dread waking up in the morning and having to do this.
"This isn’t scientific disagreement. It’s either staggering incompetence or willful misrepresentation." www.statnews.com/2025/08/13/r...
I'm at the Arabic Music Retreat in Massachusetts this week, and this is their excellent COVID policy. I wish more people and institutions took health measures seriously.
Zohran should propose “Cuomo’s Law”, a law that bars sex offenders from being mayor of New York City
“…the grand fictitious narratives about AI […] will continue to bolster claims of their ‘foundational’ advancements resulting in potentially the biggest accumulation of power and wealth in the hands of a few in our lifetimes. That is the intent and why AI is largely a fascist neocolonial project.”
"Why am I leaving big tech? There are several reasons. [...] an unprecedented concentration of power in the hands of those in big tech who want to deliberately enact (or, at the very least, are incapable of imagining anything besides) a techno-fascist future."
All the ads I saw in this article were for Adobe’s AI 🤦🏻♂️
I was next to someone this morning sharing about the great work they’ve been doing with pink haven… you don’t say! If you want to support trans liberation, here’s one way #nn25 www.uuworld.org/articles/rel...
Reinstate all the students, faculty, workers, journalists, citizens, who were harassed, targetted, fired, demonized, expelled and imprisoned for speaking truth to power.
Elderly Gen X here. Good to see some of the old niceties coming back in style.
Pre-ordered from my local bookstore this morning!
Hadn’t seen this yet.
A real period piece?
Okay, let's give this a go and see how far we get. One rule: memory only, no looking it up! One element (or the non-elemental line) per post. "There's antimony ... #TheElements #GNUTomLehrer #mathsky #UKMathsChat
Selenium
With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.
No cheating, post your lock screen. A photo from a July 2009 visit to Yosemite National Park. Sure, there are dramatic mountains and trees, but there are also tiny purple flowers. (This is on the iPad. The iPhone is different.)
I just sent this out. The Jewish people have moral frameworks for this moment. It is a choice not to heed them. Please let us meet this moment, let us see the shattered Temple around us, right now, and our responsibility to it.
Because I am an uncultured slob, my main memories of her are from her appearances in Laugh-In, when I was quite young. She often wore a distinctive headdress, which in my memory seems more than just a hairnet. A reticulated snood, maybe? And now I will be thinking “reticulated snood” all day.
Bibliography: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Je... knowyourmeme.com/memes/girl-e...
Left: Saint Michael speaks to Joan of Arc (Eugène Thirion, 1876). Right: Denise Sanchez speaks to her boyfriend (2019)
A worker was killed. Dozens detained. Dr. Jonathan Caravello, A CSU faculty member and US citizen, was brutalized & disappeared by ICE for observing. Trump’s ICE thugs are escalating terror in our communities. Release them ALL. seiuca.org/press-releas...
“SEIU California members call for the immediate release of our brother Jonathan Caravello, PhD, a U.S. citizen and union member, who was brutally assaulted and detained by federal agents as he peacefully observed ICE’s militarized invasion of the agricultural community of Ventura County yesterday.”
I mean, that’s the first one *I* thought of, and I was thinking hard for a minute trying to figure out how that might have worked…
One of my colleagues and a union comrade was abducted at the Camarillo action yesterday. We still don't know where he is, who is holding them, or any other information about his status. If you're in the area, please reach out to the folks listed in the press release and donate to the bail fund.
My advisor told me once about helping a colleague who asked him a question about something my advisor did not know much about. He thought to himself “what would a mathematician say about this?” and answered the question accordingly. I believe he was thanked in the resulting paper for his help.
“Outlandish.” One might even say “wacky”! Or maybe “screwball”? Prompted an outcry from some. Not us! We’re just smiling and shaking our heads affectionately, saying “oh, that Grok sure is a scamp!”
Hume and Euler heading out for an evening on the town.
The Footy Scran account @footyscran.bsky.social isn’t active here now — I knew them of old from the Other Place — but it gives a good idea of what is available in various stadia. The main takeaways: US stadium food is ridiculously overpriced, and the British do not know how to melt cheese.
I'm already seeing centrists and leftists sniping at each other but the blame for this is 100% on the Republicans. This is what they do with power and it is imperative that we work together to keep them as far from it as possible, forever.
uusj.salsalabs.org/statement_fy...
“In the lovely Catskill Mountains And high upon a hill, There stands a little church and yard And I hope it always will! For in that quiet church yard Lies a story now quite old […]”
A textual note: The first few lines of the poem quoted in the piece are mis-transcribed. (The tell is that the rhyme scheme is off.) The article by Jonathan Palmer cited in the references includes a photo of the poem in the chapel, so you can check that the poem begins:
Excellent essay! It really captures the feeling of disappointment and dismay — and of being lied to — when you find out that a little bit of history you believed in has been misrepresented.
bsky.app/profile/ewho...
Does it count as a #MathCoffeeSelfie if the next thing I’m about to do is preach? In this case, definitely yes, because I’m mentioning math in the service!
Congratulations, Doctor!
This is me as well. But I really want to answer (41)(35)(24)(13)(52)
Bit rich complaining about New York being taken over by immigrants when there's a big fucking statue in the harbour that invites everyone to come live there.
"There's no way to save democracy without standing up for trans rights." -Imara Jones #UUAGA 2025
Fuck these fascists. Protect trans kids.
Most Americans will never get to ask billionaires like Education Secretary Linda McMahon, “what do you need a tax cut for?” So I asked. Republican officials may think that’s rude. But we deserve to know.
Excellent piece by @tressiemcphd.bsky.social on what this moment requires of us. "Only direct, sustained protest will protect us...the greatest informal mechanism for democratic enforcement: not kings, not former presidents, but the power of the people." www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/o...
I encourage everyone to consider attending one of the many demonstrations planned for tomorrow across the country. Show up. Demand accountability. Peacefully protest. Find the rally closest to you: NoKings.org
We feed you. They hunt us.
German, French, and Spanish accented characters have long been available by long-pressing the letters on the iPhone keyboard — the recent development is the availability of Hungarian accents by this method. I did add Greek by the method you mention a while ago, to make some math easier to type… 🙂
Thank you for mentioning this! I wonder when it got added… as a mathematician, I sometimes need to refer to Paul Erdős, and in the not-too-distant past I couldn’t do so in posts or email without googling “Unicode Hungarian” or some such to find a character to cut and paste.
This is a hell of a thing to read.
www.uua.org/action/state...
Since it needs to be said, now more than ever, on this Pride Month: Trans people are brave and powerful and strong and have always been part of us, and trans identities are real and valid and always will be, long after the gang of monsters currently in power vanish from the face of the earth.
Supporting trans youth is part of my religion. And adults too.
Today I learned it’s called “banker’s rounding” by at least one person… www.mathsisfun.com/numbers/roun...
Yes, the [arbitrary] rule I learned in school for rounding half-integers was to go to the nearest even integer. So IMO the OP’s question would be more provocative if the number were 1.499999999…
Today, I was denied access to seeing my constituent, Mr. Kilmar Abrego Garcia. If there is nothing to hide, cut the crap. Let his lawyer and I check on him.
![A blue matchbox with writing on the front. The visible part says “Rewirement 2025 — [redacted]’s next chapter”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:aes2bwxnzvmc4u72d2hrb35p/bafkreign2pdew7v7ywynl7qu5wwrjobry2xmkiu74565itjxoib4vt4tte@jpeg "Click to view full size")