| gendered pronouns | he/him |
| GitHub | https://github.com/PeterVenable |
A group of nearly 400 prominent Christian leaders called Donald Trump’s administration
“cruel and oppressive”
and accused the government of being corrupted by an aberrant form of Christianity,
in an Ash Wednesday statement
Join Christians in resisting the rise of authoritarianism, defending democracy, and living out faith through justice, compassion, and biblical principles in challenging times.
Right off the bat: I loved the #BadBunny halftime show.
Yeah, I could do without some of the over-the-top sexy shit — but let’s be real, that’s his bread and butter. I’m not excusing it, just saying: if that’s all you saw, you missed the whole damn point.
From the very first image — people cutting sugar cane — this was political as hell. Sugar cane isn’t some random aesthetic. It’s the industrial agriculture imposed by the United States after they took over Puerto Rico in 1898. That was the moment communal farming was destroyed and Puerto Ricans were forced into brutal export agriculture for U.S. profit. That history matters.
The entire performance was an homage to the island I grew up in. The neighborhoods, the sounds, the colors, the references — there’s so much nostalgia packed in there I honestly can’t even list it all. They went down the fucking list. Every Puerto Rican I know was watching this with tears in their eyes.
And maybe most important of all: he did the whole thing in Spanish. At a time when Spanish has basically been criminalized — when people are afraid to speak it in public, afraid of having the “wrong” accent, especially after years of Trump-era racism — that alone is a massive political act.
I need to rewatch it because there’s so much going on, but I wanted to put this out there now. Because I already know a lot of people aren’t going to get it at first glance.
But make no mistake: this wasn’t just a halftime show.
It was a huge cultural and political moment — and for Puerto Ricans especially, it meant a hell of a lot.
¡Pa'lante!🇵🇷✊
When David Smith, Joseph Myers (@jsm28), Chaim Goodman-Strauss and I posted our paper "An aperiodic monotile" (https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.10798) back in March, we answered the open problem of whether a single shape could tile the plane aperiodically.
Some people observed that tilings by the "hat" used both unreflected and reflected tiles. Although the einstein problem was answered, in some contexts (e.g., tile floors), you'd likely have to manufacture two separate tiles. Our paper left open the question of whether a shape could tile aperiodically using translations and rotations only, with no reflections.
I hate to sound like a broken record, but then, on March 26th, Dave noticed something interesting. (1/n)
A longstanding open problem asks for an aperiodic monotile, also known as an "einstein": a shape that admits tilings of the plane, but never periodic tilings. We answer this problem for topological disk tiles by exhibiting a continuum of combinatorially equivalent aperiodic polygons. We first show that a representative example, the "hat" polykite, can form clusters called "metatiles", for which substitution rules can be defined. Because the metatiles admit tilings of the plane, so too does the hat. We then prove that generic members of our continuum of polygons are aperiodic, through a new kind of geometric incommensurability argument. Separately, we give a combinatorial, computer-assisted proof that the hat must form hierarchical -- and hence aperiodic -- tilings.
Hey folks. Everyone--EVERYONE--can get got by a scammer at some point.
When we blame folks who get socially engineered for their carelessness or lack of vigilance, we're making it less likely that people will self-report when they got got, and perpetuating the myth that all we need is vigilance to avoid scams.
The narrative that only fools get scammed helps scammers. Don't fall for it.
Sometimes people use "respect" to mean "treating someone like a person". And sometimes people use "respect" to mean "treating someone like an authority".
And sometimes people say "If you don't respect me, then I won't respect you" and they mean "If you don't treat me like an authority then I won't treat you like a person".
And they think they're being fair, but they aren't. And it's not okay.
Chuck Darwin
Franklin López
Craig S. Kaplan
Annalee
𝐿𝒶𝓃𝒶 