Condensed math: rewriting maths' foundations with condensed sets

kliuless — Thu, 21 May 2026 06:42:52 GMT

Two Researchers Are Rebuilding Mathematics From the Ground Up - "I think it's fair to compare Peter to Grothendieck in this sense. He is reinventing everything somehow."[0]

How Alexander Grothendieck Revolutionized 20th-Century Mathematics - "Grothendieck is revered in the world of math; outside of it, he's known for his unusual life, if he's known at all. But what were his actual mathematical contributions?"[1,2,3]
Alexander Grothendieck and the Architecture of a New Mathematics [ungated] - "In 1958, Grothendieck was appointed a research professor at the newly founded Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHÉS), located in Bures-sur-Yvette, outside Paris. What followed — the twelve years from 1958 to 1970 — is simply one of the most extraordinary sustained eruptions of mathematical creativity on record."

Then, in 1970, it ended. Grothendieck discovered that the IHÉS was receiving a portion of its funding from French military sources. To many people, this might have registered as an inconvenient administrative footnote — the kind of institutional compromise one quietly accepts and moves past. Not to Grothendieck. His father had been gassed at Auschwitz. He had spent part of his childhood hiding in the woods to avoid being handed over to the same machinery of state violence. His pacifism was not a political position he had arrived at through argument; it was something closer to scar tissue. He resigned from the IHÉS immediately. He never returned to a permanent mathematical position of that kind. The mathematical community, for its part, never fully recovered his attention — and given what he had produced in those twelve years, that loss is worth sitting with for a moment.

also btw!
A ranked list of fields of math, in order of difficulty to master and understand :P

Chewing gum restores man's taste and smell years after Covid

ellieBOA — Thu, 21 May 2026 16:44:47 GMT

A man who lost his sense of taste and smell for years after catching covid has had both senses restored – thanks to specially-developed chewing gum. The revolutionary clinical trial at the University of Nottingham saw a group of participants chew flavoured chewing gums for 12 weeks. The specially-developed gums had different super-strength flavours – including spicy, minty, sour and sweet.

Two reports of speakers being booed at graduation

Rash — Wed, 20 May 2026 21:50:57 GMT

Slate: The Class of 2026 Is Sick of Hearing About AI; and Karl Bode, AI Rage Is Inextricably Fused With Justified Loathing of the Extraction Class. 'Deal With It'

Brunchlords?

Zapper Bolloré

gimonca — Thu, 21 May 2026 16:15:25 GMT

On May 12, a group of 600-plus professionals in the film industry in France published a manifesto against Vincent Bolloré, a right-wing billionaire who controls an increasing share of media and distribution in the country, including the Canal+ media conglomerate. (The original is in Libération, which is behind a paywall, an English translation and analysis is available at Deadline.) In response, the CEO of Canal+ announces at Cannes a few days later that the company would be blacklisting stars who signed the letter, including such notables as Arthur Harari and Juliette Binoche.

Bolloré's media holdings include Canal+, the right-wing CNews and Europe1 "news" media properties, and Hachette publishing. The Bolloré group is also set to control UGC, positioning the Bolloré operations to control much of France's physical movie theaters.

French Culture Minister Catherine Pégard said in a statement that the government regrets the statement from Canal+, but there doesn't seem to be any government response beyond words yet.

Companies in the Bolloré group have a long history in France, and not just in media. For several generations, much of the family fortune was made in colonial enterprises like palm oil. More recently, the Bolloré group has tried to extend its influence in African media as well, including pushing far-right narratives in Africa.

This is not the first time that a Bolloré-controlled media company has been the target of protests due to promoting far-right-wing interests. Earlier this year, a hundred notable authors disassociated themselves from Grasset publishing, a subsidiary of Hachette, after the CEO of Grasset was dismissed.

The liche must die

Lorc — Thu, 21 May 2026 17:28:35 GMT

Sword Interval by Ben Fleuter is a completed webcomic set in a parallel present where magic and monsters are a fact of life. It's a monster-hunting roadtrip with striking creature designs. Originally posted for vertical-scroll, the strip's currently being reposted in page-at-a-time format.

Sword Interval is also a reboot (let's call it a second take) of his unfinished previous comic, Parallel Dementia (archive link).

Or for a shorter read, The Beekeeper's Tale is a dramatic prologue to a comic that never happened, but worth reading on its own merits.

Fleuter is currently colalbroating with Natasha Tara Petrović on Sever & Pierce - a comic about a ghost--hunting automaton and their vampire companion.

I am going to do this the way I want to do it

jomato — Thu, 21 May 2026 04:41:14 GMT

"Mei Semones is an artist creating jazz influenced indie pop songs with lyrics in both Japanese and English, currently based in Brooklyn, NY." Her debut album is Animaru.

Music videos:

Declining America

slater — Wed, 20 May 2026 21:23:27 GMT

"I'm Canadian and as a matter of principle feeling negative about visiting a neighboring country whose leader has repeatedly threatened our sovereignty and shown massive disrespect for our nationhood."

Declining America [sltb]

"Our debates about 'AI' grow out of 1990s science fiction."

kmt — Sun, 17 May 2026 13:14:28 GMT

Henry Farrell & Cosma Rohilla Shalizi: AI as Social Technology

"In the rest of this paper, we briefly situate AI in the historic context of the Long Industrial Revolution. Next, we explore the relationship between social technologies and coarse-grainings or abstractions, emphasizing their lossiness and consequences for power relations between different social groups. That allows us both to describe the apparent strengths and limits of actually-existing AI and start applying Simon's ideas to the intersection between AI and bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is a crucial, ancient social technology which played a central role in Simon's work. Its relationship to AI is urgently topical: claims about AGI were seemingly one influence on the Trump administration's sweeping cutbacks to the administrative state. We contrast these ideas with our own, to draw out the many important questions and problems that are elided or ignored by AGI-fueled speculation. Rather than expecting AGI to resolve perennial problems of human social organization, we should treat AI as a new social technology which will alleviate some problems, exacerbate others, and create new ones, just as other social technologies have done in the past. That, in turn, suggests the urgency of cooperation between social and computer scientists to figure out its social consequences, and broader social and political coordination too, of the kind that happened in previous stages of the Long Industrial Revolution."

The actor Michael Keating has died at the age of 79

chariot pulled by cassowaries — Thu, 21 May 2026 14:02:17 GMT

The actor Michael Keating, best known to generations of science fiction fans as the roguish and irrepressible Vila Restal in Blake's 7, has died at the age of 79.

Chasing the Bullet

storybored — Wed, 20 May 2026 19:03:11 GMT

The secrets of the Shinkansen. Japan is the land of the train. 28 percent of passenger kilometers in Japan are travelled by rail, more than anywhere else in the developed world. France achieves 10 percent, Germany 6.4 percent, and the United States just 0.25 percent. Travel in Japan is over a hundred times more likely to be by rail than travel in the United States....

It also puts pressure on the idea that the demise of rail is the inevitable consequence of cars. All countries saw some shift to cars in the twentieth century, and all rail industries had to respond to that. But public policy had an enormous effect on how successfully they did so. The rise of zoning restrictions on density, excessive price controls, nationalization, and vertically disintegrated privatization have hampered Western rail in remaining competitive against cars since the 1920s. By maintaining and restoring the institutions that built the first railway systems in the nineteenth century, the Japanese have created the mightiest railway system of the twenty-first.

the Police who police the police do in fact police the police

chavenet — Thu, 21 May 2026 10:00:00 GMT

You will have to excuse our simplified notation here, but as this is not an official document sent by any of the Police forces we can afford a certain easing of official terminology.

King Charles III (1948 - 2026+)

Wordshore — Wed, 20 May 2026 20:42:58 GMT

Guardian: "Due to a computer error at our main studio, the Death of a Monarch procedure, which all UK stations hold in readiness while hoping not to require, was accidentally activated on Tuesday afternoon (19 May), mistakenly announcing that HM the King had passed away." Euronews: "Caroline has been pleased to broadcast Her Majesty the Queen's and now the King's, Christmas message and we hope to do so for many years to come," he said, referring to the monarch's traditional Christmas Day message to the nation. "We apologise to HM (his majesty) the king and to our listeners for any distress caused," Moore added.

"Truth doesn't live in a book; you find it in the little surprises"

Kitteh — Thu, 21 May 2026 15:28:04 GMT

Halifax musician Ben Caplan is this week's CanCon!

Ben Caplan works in a very Eastern European folk vein. The linked video is a live performance of "Truth Doesn't Live in a Book," a number from a play that Caplan, Hannah Moscovitch (playwright) and Christian Barry (director and additional lyricist) created called Old Stock. The title famously refers to a comment former Canadian PM Stephen Harper made about refugees not being "old stock Canadians."

Two more songs from Old Stock:

Traveler's Curse

Widow Bride

Other Ben Caplan goodness:

From his album Bird with Broken Wings:

title track of the album

40 Days and 40 Nights

From his most recent album, The Flood:

Again, the title track of the album!

Candy and Balloons

If you're in New Brunswick or Nova Scotia, he's got a few shows lined up for you to go see!

Elite controllers

goo — Wed, 20 May 2026 20:09:22 GMT

My diagnosis seemed like a death sentence – how have I survived for another 40 years?

An elite controller is a person living with HIV who is able to maintain undetectable viral loads for at least 12 months despite not having started antiretroviral therapy (ART). Elite controllers are rare: for every two hundred people living with HIV, approximately one may be an elite controller (0.5%).

Murray-Darling Basin's apex predator back from the brink

chariot pulled by cassowaries — Thu, 21 May 2026 02:53:32 GMT

Murray-Darling Basin's apex predator back from the brink. Murray cod numbers have bounced back across much of Victoria and New South Wales, and that's good news for the whole Murray-Darling Basin ecosystem.

The music video has been going viral for good reason!

DoctorFedora — Fri, 22 May 2026 01:59:07 GMT

"Storm" by Gener8ion featuring Yung Lean. If the first half doesn't grab you, I promise it's worth sticking around, since the second half is why it's one of the best music videos in a while.

If Only The Ball Were Made Large - Pushball in the early 1900s

mhoye — Tue, 19 May 2026 16:18:43 GMT

"If the ball were only made large", he thought, "yes, large enough so that a player on one side could not see who was on the other, you would then have a chance to interest spectators in watching the whole game and in introducing much merriment, as well as skill".

Sesame Street has a long reach

Higherfasterforwards — Tue, 19 May 2026 16:45:23 GMT

A fish related to the seahorse has been named Mr. Snuffleupagus due to its resemblance to the character.

Cris Derksen, 1981 - 2026

jokeefe — Wed, 20 May 2026 03:21:27 GMT

The brilliant Indigenous Cellist and Composer Cris Derksen has left this world. Canadian musician and composer Cris Derksen, member of the Tallcree First Nation in northern Alberta, a founder of the Indigenous Performing Arts Alliance, collaborator with Tanya Tagaq and many others, was killed on May 15 in a car accident while returning home from their father's funeral service.

The Canadian music and Indigenous arts worlds are in mourning. The Globe and Mail obituary (archive link), and from the Winnipeg Free Press; more tributes can be found on their Facebook page. A list of her compositions with some Youtube links is here.

A graphic novel wins the $60,000 Stella Prize for the first time ever

chariot pulled by cassowaries — Wed, 20 May 2026 07:26:13 GMT

Graphic novel wins $60,000 [US $42,654] Stella Prize for first time in award's 14-year history. Lee Lai's debut graphic novel, Stone Fruit, was longlisted for the Stella Prize in 2022. Four years on, she's won the prestigious award for her latest book, Cannon.

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