Schrodinger's Cat

I'm a cat who doesn't want to be put in a box.

[Josh Barzon @JoshuaBarzon]

5,000 years of world history on a single timeline. Zoom in. You could spend 30 minutes exploring this.

[The Sacramento Bee @sacbee_news]

El Niño’s first ‘atmospheric river’ could bring California a month of rain in just a few days https://t.co/xjp3fSPe1B

[Enrico 🇩🇪🇺🇲🗽💙💙💙💙💙 @ANY151161719021]

DING DONG ❗️ 🚨 ❗️ 💥💥

STEPHEN MILLERS EPIC MENTAL MELTDOWN ❗️☝️

A MUST SEE 👀 👌 👏

💙💙💙💙🗽🇺🇸

[Schrodinger's Cat @SVDMatrix]

https://t.co/wEg4DM3J6J

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Ladies and gentlemen! The president of the United States 🇺🇸

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Gilbert Strang, an MIT professor, taught the same linear algebra course for 62 years. When he delivered his final lecture in May 2023, students from around the world tuned in online to watch.

The course is MIT 18.06 Linear Algebra. Millions of machine learning engineers, data scientists, quants, and self-taught programmers learned the essential math behind AI from his clear, free video lectures, even though most never stepped foot on the MIT campus.

Strang joined the MIT faculty in 1962 and retired in 2023. When MIT launched OpenCourseWare in 2001–2002, he was one of the first to embrace it fully. While many professors hesitated, Strang saw it as an opportunity to share mathematics with everyone. He filmed his lectures and made them freely available.

He completely changed how linear algebra is taught. Instead of starting with abstract vector spaces and proofs, Strang began with something simple and visual: matrix multiplication. He built intuition first using concrete examples, then introduced more advanced ideas like eigenvectors and singular value decomposition. He insisted that students should be able to explain every concept with a small, tangible matrix before moving to theory.

Beyond the content, his teaching style stood out. He spoke to students with genuine respect, patience, and kindness, never using words like “obviously” or “trivially.” He regularly paused to check if anyone was lost and treated beginners as thoughtfully as he would his colleagues.

As a result, Strang became the default linear algebra teacher for much of the planet. Universities in many countries began recommending his lectures to their own students. Some even replaced their in-person courses with his videos because they could not match their clarity.

His final lecture ended with a long standing ovation. Strang seemed surprised by the applause, smiled humbly, and simply thanked everyone.

In his short comment under the YouTube video, he expressed gratitude for a wonderful life of teaching and hoped others would continue teaching the subject well. No self-promotion, no grand farewell—just quiet sincerity.

When you add up every version, every upload, help sessions, and all the different recordings MIT has shared over the years, the total has surpassed 20 million views.

Today, the full course, including all lectures, problem sets, and solutions, remains freely available on MIT OpenCourseWare. One of the most important mathematical foundations of modern AI is still just one click away.

[Mathematica @mathemetica]

Linear algebra was not built overnight; it was sculpted across centuries.

Before matrices had names, mathematicians were unlocking secret ratios inside systems of equations. From Seki's early determinants to Peano's vector spaces, a disjointed set of tools transformed into the universal language of modern structure.

Order shapes space, and dimensions find their voice.

[Mathematica @mathemetica]

That single minimization is what a neural network actually solves.

min_{w ∈ ℝᵈ} (1/n) ∑_{i=1}^n ℓ(h(xᵢ ; w), yᵢ)

The vector w stores every weight; the map h(· ; w) composes them into successive affine transforms and pointwise nonlinearities that turn each input xᵢ into a prediction.

The loss ℓ then scores the gap between that prediction and the observed label yᵢ. Averaging the scores and descending the resulting high-dimensional surface converts a finite collection of examples into a function that generalizes.

The same expression is convex for linear models and wildly non-convex for deep nets, yet the points gradient methods reach still produce intelligent mappings.

[The Washington Post @washingtonpost]

A powerful heat dome — which will become the strongest on the planet Wednesday — will tower 3.7 miles above Tennessee, drawing extreme heat and humidity into the central U.S.

“I don’t even know what to say anymore,” meteorologist Pete Delkus said. https://t.co/koGO2Vrbpw

[Rick Dickert @RickDickertWX]

El Niño continues to strengthen across the equatorial eastern Pacific and there is now a greater than 90% chance of a “very strong” event this upcoming winter.

The @NOAAClimate precipitation outlook for the Jan-Mar period reflects this warming.

[Climate Watcher 🔥 @pmagn]

Up n up we go 🌊

The sea level along California’s coast will increase by about a foot by mid-October due to the influence of El Niño, which is driving a large volume of water northward from offshore of Mexico and Central America.

Sudden sea level rise — tied to El Niño — is about !
https://t.co/UrFlTwS9wq

[Amazing Maps @amazingmap]

The United States divided by the shape of the land instead of by state lines, and the country reorganises into great bands running north to south. The blue line across the north marks how far the continental ice sheets reached.

[Colin McCarthy @US_Stormwatch]

Temperatures hit as high as 43°C (109°F) in France today as the fifth major heatwave of the year has arrived in Europe. Hundreds of cities and towns across the continent experienced their hottest August temperatures ever recorded.

This is getting ludicrous.

[Daniel Swain @Weather_West]

Aug update from ECMWF predictive ensemble is genuinely extraordinary from extreme #ElNiño perspective. One implication: it is now indicating not only 70-100% odds of above avg winter precip California-wide, but also 70-100% odds of DJF 26-27 being among the top 20% of wettest CA winters (!).

[😱 Scary Larry 😱 🇺🇦✊🏻🇺🇸🗽 @aintscarylarry]

Fuckface fall down go boom. He would’ve broken something if the full load in his industrial-sized diaper hadn’t provided plenty of squishy padding. And the same media who dragged Biden through the mud for being “too old” won’t say a goddamn thing about it.

[CALL TO ACTIVISM @CalltoActivism]

🚨HUMILIATED: Trump is forced to sit through the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner as journalist Zeke Miller is honored for exposing a leaked story revealing Trump fired National Security Council staff who weren’t loyal to him.

Look at Trump’s face! He is FUMING.

[Schrodinger's Cat @SVDMatrix]

@FarmerH79709 @DemocraticWins Spoken like a true fascist

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Trump Bingo: The Likes of Which You’ve Never Seen

On Thursday the President will once again stand in front of a microphone and produce sounds. Not sentences. Sounds. And since nobody’s listening to the content anyway, we might as well make ourselves useful.

So here it is: the Gandalv Trump Bingo card. The rules take three seconds to learn. He says “Tremendous”, you cross it off. He says “Many people are saying”, you cross it off. Five in a row is Bingo. The full card is a Total Landslide, Frankly, at which point you may pour yourself something strong.

The centre square is a free space. It says “China”. That’s not a joke, it’s statistics.

Best of all, the card is fully reusable for every speech from now until the end of time. The world changes. The material never does.

Good luck on Thursday. You won’t need it.

[Gabriele Corno @Gabriele_Corno]

A heartwarming scene unfolds as this big, gentle old Pitbull recognizes a familiar face in the shelter and slowly leans in for a hug.
You can feel the joy in the room as the Pitbull melts into the man's arms-proof that dogs never forget the ones they love.

[Damaan, AKA 'Philly's Finest!' @Damaan4u33]

First thoughts? 🐷