Norm Matloff 你有冇諗清楚呀?

CS (frmr Stat) em. prof. Awarded #rstats author. Teach., pub. service awards. Frmr Ed-in-Chief, R Journ. LA native, 1st-gen college. Views mine.

[Tyler Bindi @TripleNetTyler]

Went to vote today for the California primaries

The guy next to me called over an election worker because his ballot didn't include the LA mayoral race

The worker checked and told him it was because his registered address was in Malibu, which is outside the City of LA

The guy then asked if he could provide another address

To my surprise, the answer was yes

So he gave the worker an LA address, they voided his previous ballot, issued a new one, and suddenly he was able to vote for the mayor of LA

How is voter ID not mandatory in all 50 states?

[Mathematica @mathemetica]

Recipient of the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize (2022), Hong Wang is a leading Chinese mathematician specializing in Fourier analysis and geometric measure theory.

She earned her BS from Peking University (2011) and her PhD from MIT (2019) under Larry Guth. She is currently a professor at NYU Courant Institute and Permanent Professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES).
Her groundbreaking work includes major advances on the restriction and local smoothing conjectures. In 2025, she co-solved the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture with Joshua Zahl. She has also made important contributions to the Furstenberg set conjecture (in the plane).

Her achievements have earned her the Salem Prize (2025), the Ostrowski Prize (2025), the Clay Research Award (2026, joint), and the New Horizons in Mathematics Prize (2026), among others.

[Norm Matloff 你有冇諗清楚呀? @matloff]

@drterrysimpson It depends heavily on how you define success.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

💯

[Peter Sarris @peter_sarris]

When I was appointed in 2000, I had to fill in a form identifying my ethnicity. A few years later I received a letter from HR: ‘Dear Dr Sarris, your ethnic identity is no longer valid. Please choose a new one.’ I felt like a Roman in sixth-century Frankia.

[Norm Matloff 你有冇諗清楚呀? @matloff]

@GrantStenger @mgostIH How do the famous bizarre properties of the Curse of Dimensionality relate to all this?

[Imtiaz Mahmood @ImtiazMadmood]

She was rejected 15 times, dismissed as unruly, and largely written out of the conversation. Then the science proved she was right — and changed everything we thought we knew about life itself.

In 1966, a twenty-eight-year-old biologist named Lynn Margulis sat down and wrote a paper that contradicted one of the most fundamental assumptions in all of science.

She was not a tenured professor. She was not working at a prestigious research institution. She was a young mother of two, recently divorced, completing her PhD while raising her sons largely on her own. The scientific establishment had no particular category for her and no particular interest in what she was proposing.

She proposed it anyway.
Her idea was this: that the story of evolution told through competition and conquest was incomplete. That somewhere in the deep history of life on Earth — billions of years ago, long before anything with a spine had appeared — something had happened that was not a battle but a merger. Two separate organisms, each unable to survive alone, had come together and become something neither could have been independently.

The mitochondria in every one of your cells — the structures that convert food into energy, the engine that powers every thought you are having right now — were once free-living bacteria. They did not evolve gradually inside cells. They moved in. They formed a partnership so deep and so permanent that over billions of years they became indistinguishable from the cell itself.

She called the theory endosymbiosis. She called the process symbiogenesis. What she was really saying was that cooperation, not just competition, was one of the engines of evolution — that life's greatest leaps forward had sometimes come not from one organism defeating another, but from two organisms becoming one.

Fifteen scientific journals rejected the paper before it was published in 1967.
Fifteen.

To understand what she was working against, you need to understand the scientific culture of the 1960s. Neo-Darwinism — the synthesis of Darwin's evolution with Mendelian genetics — was the reigning framework, and it was defended with the particular intensity of a field that had recently achieved hard-won consensus. The idea that a bacterium had simply moved inside another cell and stayed there, permanently, was considered not just wrong but somewhat absurd. Evolution happened through random mutation and natural selection, slowly, over generations. Not through dramatic mergers. Not through cooperation.

The reviewers who rejected her paper used words like speculative and insufficiently rigorous. One described the idea as the sort of thing that was interesting to think about but impossible to prove.

She was also described, more than once, as unruly.
It was the specific word that followed women who challenged scientific consensus — not wrong, not misguided, but unruly, as though the problem were her manner rather than her method.

She had been exceptional from the beginning in ways that made people uncomfortable. Born Lynn Petra Alexander in Chicago on March 5, 1938, she entered the University of Chicago at sixteen — intellectually restless, reading at a level that outpaced her coursework, drawn to the questions at the edges of what science had settled. At nineteen she married a young astronomer named Carl Sagan, who would go on to become one of the most famous scientists of the twentieth century. She would later say, without particular bitterness, that during their marriage she was primarily considered someone's wife rather than someone in her own right.

They divorced in 1964. She raised their sons — including Dorion Sagan, who would become her longtime collaborator — while completing her doctorate in genetics from the University of California, Berkeley. She did the work that would change biology while managing the entire domestic architecture of a life that offered her very little structural support.

When molecular biology caught up with her theory in the 1970s — when DNA sequencing technology became sophisticated enough to actually test what she had proposed — the results were unambiguous. Mitochondria contained their own DNA. That DNA was bacterial. The evidence was not suggestive. It was definitive.

The fifteen journals that had rejected her paper were now looking at proof.

The scientific establishment did what establishments eventually do when reality forces their hand — it incorporated her theory, celebrated it as a cornerstone of modern evolutionary biology, and credited her in terms that ranged from gracious to slightly grudging depending on who was doing the crediting. E.O. Wilson, the legendary sociobiologist, called her the most successful synthetic thinker in modern biology. Richard Dawkins — who disagreed with her on multiple other scientific questions — praised her sheer courage in holding to the endosymbiotic theory through years of institutional resistance until the evidence made denial impossible.

Science magazine, the most prestigious journal in American science, called her science's unruly earth mother.
They still couldn't let go of the word.

She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983. She received the National Medal of Science in 1999 from President Clinton — the highest scientific honor the United States government bestows. She collaborated with British scientist James Lovelock on the Gaia hypothesis — the provocative and still-debated theory that Earth itself, its atmosphere and oceans and living systems, functions as a single self-regulating organism maintaining the conditions necessary for life. It was another idea that the mainstream received with raised eyebrows, and another idea that has proven more durable than its critics expected.

She wrote books with her son Dorion that translated complex scientific concepts for general readers — believing that science belonged to everyone and that the story of life was too extraordinary to be locked inside academic journals. She co-founded a publishing imprint. She taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for decades and trained a generation of scientists who carried her framework into fields she never lived to see it reach.

She died on November 22, 2011, from a hemorrhagic stroke. She was seventy-three years old.

What she left behind was a redrawn map of life itself.
Every complex cell on Earth — every cell in your body, every cell in every plant, every cell in every animal that has ever lived — is a collaboration. It contains within it the descendants of bacteria that chose, billions of years ago, to stop competing and start cooperating. The boundary between self and other is not where we thought it was. It never was.

Lynn Margulis saw that when almost no one else did.
Fifteen journals said no.

The universe had been saying yes for two billion years.

[Alina 🩵📖✨ @Alina_P_I]

My outsider take on what comes next:

-OpenAI will continue to rise to the top
-Google will eventually catch up and they will be eternal rivals to OAI
-Anthropic will be successful for 1-2 years but will start to fade after, if it continues on the path of surface level "righteousness" 
-no Chinese company will catch up, but they will supply most of the top open source models and become the first choice for people running local AIs. This will also become a large market segment in two years.
-SpaceX's AI will surprise everyone and will grow the most compared to the present moment.

[Mr PitBull Stories @MrPitbull07]

In 1937, a nineteen year old woman graduated summa cum laude in chemistry. She applied to fifteen graduate schools. Not one offered her funding.

She was told laboratories did not hire women. She never earned a PhD. She later received the Nobel Prize and helped save millions of lives.

Her name was Gertrude Belle Elion.

Born in New York City in 1918 to immigrant parents, Gertrude was brilliant from childhood. She skipped two grades, graduated high school at fifteen, and entered Hunter College during the Great Depression. Her family could only afford college because Hunter offered free tuition to women.

Then tragedy changed her life forever.

When Gertrude was fifteen, her beloved grandfather died painfully from stomach cancer. Watching doctors fail to save him gave her a purpose she never abandoned. She decided she wanted to fight disease through science.

She graduated from Hunter College in 1937 at just nineteen years old, but the scientific world had little interest in hiring women. Graduate schools rejected her requests for funding. Laboratories turned her away. Some employers openly admitted they did not want female chemists.

So she worked wherever she could while studying at night.

Everything changed in 1944 when she joined Burroughs Wellcome and began working with scientist George Hitchings. Together, they pioneered a revolutionary method called rational drug design — creating medicines by understanding disease at the molecular level instead of relying on trial and error.

Their discoveries transformed medicine.

Elion helped develop 6-mercaptopurine, one of the first successful treatments for childhood leukemia. Before it existed, most children diagnosed with leukemia died within months.

She later helped create azathioprine, the first major drug that made organ transplantation possible, along with groundbreaking antiviral medications that changed treatment for herpes and helped pave the way for AIDS therapies.

In 1988, Gertrude Elion received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

She was seventy years old.

And she still did not have a PhD.

The young woman fifteen schools rejected ended up reshaping modern medicine anyway.

[Liz4SF @incitafusio]

they got rid of the standardized tests to hide the skills gap and they got caught; from ucla med school to UC berkeley, SD, SB etc; UCLA med rationalized that more Black and Brown patients would die bc only doctors of same race could give equal care; turns out not being able to do middle school math means all patients die of overdosing; equity achieved!!

[NOLLY @omoelerinjare1]

Benicia, California Police Corporal Kirk Keffer spotted 19-year-old Jourdan Duncan walking alone late at night through a dimly lit industrial area.

Jourdan was making the tough 7-mile (2.5-hour) commute home to Vallejo after his graveyard shift—his car had broken down. He turned down other ride offers, determined to handle it himself.

Impressed by the teen’s strong work ethic, Officer Keffer gave him a ride home and later returned with fellow officers. They surprised Jourdan with a new bicycle, purchased by the police association, to make his daily journey easier.

Keffer went further: he helped raise $38,000 to buy Jourdan a car and mentored him toward his dream of becoming a police officer. Jourdan even rode along on shifts with him.

What started as a simple act of kindness and grew into a genuine mentorship and lasting friendship. It is a powerful true story of human connection.

[Inna Vishik @InnaVishik]

Pre-2020, my department had a colloquium speaker arguing that the physics GRE is not predictive of success in PhD. They received a lot of pushback from my colleagues, to the point that students complained to the department chair. The speaker was particularly pilloried for the figure below.
The x-axis is percentile score on physics subject GRE and the y axis is measuring Prize Postdoctoral prize Fellowships in Astronomy. The argument was that candidates with very low physics GRE still got fellowships. It should be noted that astronomy is not the same is physics, and many astronomy students do not heavily use core physics topics covered on physics GRE and grad coursework. It should also be noted that this figure indeed shows correlation: higher GRE, more fellowships.

[The Figen @TheFigen_]

This dog has incredible technique...sign him up. 😂

[Scott Jennings @ScottJenningsKY]

🚨After receiving a briefing from a Senior TRUMP Administration Official on the status of the Iran negotiations (someone in the know & not just speculating), I can tell you the following:

-USA IS NOT GIVING IRANIANS MONEY FOR NOTHING. All speculation and propaganda to the contrary is false. Some hardline elements of Iran’s govt (IRGC) have pushed fake stories & propaganda to try to kill this negotiation.

-Iran deal is NOT done (95%, but still haggling over some language). No deal being signed today. May be a few more days before this is done.

-Iran will NOT get any money or sanctions relief up front.

-Iran must turn over nuclear stockpile to get anything. USA position is that failure to meet deal commitments means Iran gets nothing.

-Long term USA objective is preventing Iran from having nuclear weapon.

-Initial deal point is to re-establish free flow of commerce by reopening Strait of Hormuz.

Deal should have 2 phases:

Step 1 - Open Strait of Hormuz. Give world economy breathing room. Iran agrees to give up enriched uranium.

Step 2 - Get the nuclear material turned over. Only then can Iran get sanctions relief.

Bottom line: goal is to make a deal that lowers costs for Americans, calms world energy markets, and guarantees that Iranians cannot have a nuclear weapon over the long term. We aren’t there yet. Iran takes forever to get you a response on even small things. But we are close although it still could be a few days.

“If we get what we are demanding, this is going to be a historic deal,” SAO says.

SAO sounds prepared to do no deal at all if all Iran will do is a “bad deal.” SAO admits deal could fall apart yet. But if a deal is reached, SAO expects very senior USA admin officials to take part in a signing ceremony of some sort.

Iran has agreed in principle to the framework but there are still a couple points USA isn’t satisfied with. 95% done. But literally changing words sometimes requires days in Iran’s system. Haggling over language. But USA feels like we have a commitment on nuclear stockpile and on opening Strait of Hormuz.

If IRAN doesn’t deliver on commitments, they get nothing.

“Iran’s ability to project power is a lot more limited than it was two months ago,” SAO says. “Their industrial base for building ballistic missiles has been substantially destroyed.”

[Flopping Aces @FloppingAces]

The New York Times’ 1619 Project wasn’t some innocent history lesson ... it was a straight-up ideological assault on America, cooked up by Nikole Hannah-Jones to brainwash an entire generation into hating their own country. They shoved 1619 down our throats as the “true founding,” lied that the American Revolution was fought to protect slavery, and painted the United States as nothing more than a white supremacist slave empire built on evil capitalism.

Pure, poisonous garbage.

Now the adults in the room ... real historians like Gordon Wood, Sean Wilentz, James McPherson, Allen Guelzo, Peter Wood and others ... have taken a meat cleaver to the entire rotting corpse. They didn’t nibble around the edges. They eviscerated every major lie, exposed the fake scholarship, and left this racial resentment scam bleeding out on the floor.

And what did the Times do when they got caught? After Jake Silverstein sneered “no corrections are warranted,” they quietly started deleting and watering down their boldest lies like the gutless frauds they are.

This wasn’t a debunking. This was a total slaughter. The 1619 Project has been completely gutted, humiliated, and left with nothing but a smoking crater where its “scholarship” used to be.

They tried to murder America’s founding story. Historians just murdered theirs instead.
(article below)

[Casper @CasperOnChain]

Shaq reveals he tracked down his biological father who abandoned him and found out he lived 40 blocks away the whole time

"My mother said you should connect with your biological father. I called my uncle who's a cop. He said, 'You ain't gonna believe this, you know that restaurant we eat at all the time? He lives in that building'"

"There was always a chef there who'd start crying when he saw me. He said, 'I'm Joe's best friend. I just hope one day you come down here and y'all can eat'"

"He's 40 blocks away. I went to meet him. He said sorry. I said, you don't need to say sorry, everybody has their problems"

[Eli Steele @Hebro_Steele]

This is the Democrat Party summed up.

A white candidate visits a black community during the campaign for photo ops.

Residents know they’re being exploited and yet demand not better schools but reparations checks.

Bottom feeding.

https://t.co/CKgQ22CL48 https://t.co/CKgQ22CL48

[𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗠𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗰 ✨🎵 @Hoang_HQ]

One of the most beautiful versions of Hotel California I have ever heard. It's magical.😱
🎶The Eagles - Hotel California - | Moyun

[Norm Matloff 你有冇諗清楚呀? @matloff]

@allenholub Math is not used directly, but the general analytical skills that are developed in math are very useful coding practice.