Oh, another tweet calling black people dumb. And it's not from Andrew Sullivan!

You thought HPV was HIV and looked directly into an eclipse https://t.co/nuzfL63Lt8

— Jess Dweck (@TheDweck) August 4, 2018

Another reminder that we have an old-fashioned stone racist in power, and lots of people love him. There's no "but" or "despite" in that sentence.

1) Time to step up, Michael "Republicans buy shoes, too" Jordan.
2) Lebron's school sounds cool.
3) Lebron has an extraordinary memory.
4) Lebron is smart. (That video is 90 seconds and worth watching even if you don't know basketball. Cleaning the Glass is gold for explaining basketball.)

Don Lemon is still dumb, though, right? That's how I remember things.

I have in my notes that I was planning on posting back in April that QAnon was a bunch of conspiracy theorists who were peddling the idea that Trump was a secret genius, and all the tiny little winks and pixelated clues were intentional signals from signs from the big guy that his Administration's incompetence was a farce and only Qanon was detecting the real, secret truth. I don't think I ever posted it, or at least I can't find it, but it was supposed to be at least somewhat lighthearted at the mental backflips required to convince yourself that all Trump's dumbest shit is intentional and genius.

Now everyone's talking about them and they're much less funny.

First off, I have literally almost no opinion on Elon Musk individually when you boil it down. I've posted on things related to him on the premise that he seems to generate a splash and maybe people will argue.

Second, I barely know anyone IRL who has a strong opinion. In fact, I know exactly two people, both who love him, both who I've hung out with in somewhat close succession.

Here's what's so funny about both of them, and maybe this generalizes: They are both very, very INTENSE about the fact that their fandom is LOGICAL and RATIONAL and if they can lay out the pieces for you, you'll be forced to accept the proof that you love him too. Or that you withhold your love for petty reasons. (Also, neither of them like it if you have a trying-not-to-laugh big grin on your face while they talk, but that would be obnoxious, so I'd only do that if I'd had exactly two drinks, and then I'd pay for it by being unable to sleep all night.)

Anyway, this may be a topic where it becomes apparent that I'm missing out on mainstream urban life, in which case, I dunno. Berate me.

We had the opportunity to meet Jammies' little brother's fiance, who is just learning English. Jammies' brother has spent about four years in Brazil, learning Portuguese from a base of Spanish, so the two of them are mostly conversant in Portuguese.

I'm intensely curious about the lower bounds of communication within couples - what's present for a particular couple that's absolutely mandatory, and what's not present that doesn't bother them. (I'm imagining answers like "Once you've had a conversation about X, you can piggy back on the vocabulary from that particular conversation to have a more complex conversation about X the next time, and so on, so that you can get as deep and subtle as you want on a topic but it takes a couple iterations" or "our humor is mostly goofy and physical - not a whole lot of arcane cultural references because it's not worth the effort" or whatever.) However, I'm not going to ask Jammies' brother this in full nosiness because that would be rude.

This is a fun read.

The new math that's supposed to reveal all about the universe or something. One major theme in the article is that octonions are so counterintuitive that only one person before this mathematician (Furey) have ever bothered to do a deep dive into them.

I'm really curious about what makes them counterintuitive, because this isn't doing it:

Real numbers can be ordered from smallest to largest, for instance, "whereas in the complex plane there's no such concept." Next, quaternions lose commutativity; for them, a × b doesn't equal b × a. This makes sense, since multiplying higher-dimensional numbers involves rotation, and when you switch the order of rotations in more than two dimensions you end up in a different place. Much more bizarrely, the octonions are nonassociative, meaning (a × b) × c doesn't equal a × (b × c). "Nonassociative things are strongly disliked by mathematicians," said John Baez, a mathematical physicist at the University of California, Riverside, and a leading expert on the octonions. "Because while it's very easy to imagine noncommutative situations -- putting on shoes then socks is different from socks then shoes -- it's very difficult to think of a nonassociative situation." If, instead of putting on socks then shoes, you first put your socks into your shoes, technically you should still then be able to put your feet into both and get the same result. "The parentheses feel artificial."

There's probably no good way to simplify what makes them hard, but I'm curious anyway. Tensors are not intuitive to me! Cohomology is not intuitive to me! What's so hard about putting your socks in your shoes first? Also, that Fano Plane diagram is neat.

(I am primarily posting this for it's thread-appeal, fwiw, so keep your admonitions about why didn't I just read some obvious source to yourself.)

(I'm so out of shape as a mathematician, it's embarrassing. I have a few little problems that I dink around in, but I feel a little bit like a SAHM of math compared to my graduate peers. "I'll just take care of these undergraduates while you guys go have real careers and do the heavy lifting.")

I had planned to post this article about hackers changing votes in 2016, but it was retracted due to disputed assertions.

This is an intense confirmation bias situation for me - I am still sort of believing the original article. Pardon the analogy, but I've always felt like if you discover your 4 year old can access and take the lid off the cookie jar, do you really think they put the lid back on without eating a cookie, just to prove to themselves their capability?

This is a bit navel-gazey, but I suppose evidence of vote-changing serves a wish-fulfillment purpose for me - the election was stolen, and in stark enough terms that wishy-washy centrists who pride themselves on staying above the fray would acknowledge that this situation is clear cut, and a fucking crisis.

During the Bush administration, I was horrified but I also intuitively understood that it did not rise to the kind of crisis that would feel salient to a low-information voter, because the people in power maintained the veneer of business-as-usual, we are grown-ups wearing serious faces. To be fair, during the Trump administration, I suspect that this does feel like a crisis to many of the people who were not concerned during W's time - but the remaining uninformed, unconcerned mass of citizens drive me crazy, and I want them desperately to admit I'm right.

(Trump supporters are moral monsters and far worse than uninformed people. However, my guard is up around them, in a way that it's not around an uninformed person. It's easier to be merely irritated by the uninformed.)