Author: Chris Aldrich

I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history. I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.

👓 Three Decades Later, We’re Getting a Coming To America Sequel | Vulture

Read 3 Decades Later, We’re Getting a Coming to America Sequel by Jordan Crucchiola (Vulture)
Jonathan Levine will direct and Kenya Barris will write a sequel to ‘Coming to America’, which is being developed with cooperation from Eddie Murphy.

👓 3 Ways To Read Sen. Bob Corker’s Retirement | FiveThirtyEight

Read 3 Ways To Read Sen. Bob Corker’s Retirement by Clare Malone (FiveThirtyEight)
It’s not unusual for a 65-year-old to announce his retirement, but a lot of people were caught by surprise when Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee did so on Tuesday. In a statement, the senator, who has found himself increasingly at odds with President Trump, said he he hadn’t planned to serve more than two terms in office. But is there more at work in the departure of this influential senator than simple adherence to a self-imposed term limit? What does it portend for the Republican Party establishment, Trump and the future of the party? There are a few ways to think about it.

Algebraic Geometry Lecture 1

For those who are still on the fence about taking Algebraic Geometry this quarter (or the follow on course next quarter), here’s a downloadable copy of the written notes with linked audio that will allow you to sample the class:

Algebraic Geometry-Lecture 1 notes [.pdf file with embedded and linked audio]

I’ve previously written some notes about how to best access and use these types of notes in the past. Of particular note, one must download the .pdf file and open in a recent version of Adobe Acrobat to take advantage of the linked/embedded audio file. (Trust me, it’s worth doing as it will be like you were there with the 20 of us who showed up last night!)

For those who prefer just the audio files separately, they can be listened to here, or downloaded.

Lecture 1 – Part 1

Lecture 1 – Part 2

Again, the recommended text is Elementary Algebraic Geometry by Klaus Hulek (AMS, 2003) ISBN: 0-8218-2952-1.

For those new to Dr. Miller’s classes, I’ve written up some hints/tips about them in the past as well.

👓 Ergodic | John D. Cook

Read Ergodic by John D. Cook (John D. Cook Consulting)
Roughly speaking, an ergodic system is one that mixes well. You get the same result whether you average its values over time or over space. This morning I ran across the etymology of the word ergodic.
I’d read this before, but had a nice reminder about it this morning.

👓 Technology preview: Private contact discovery for Signal | Signal

Read Technology preview: Private contact discovery for Signal by moxie0 (Signal)
At Signal, we’ve been thinking about the difficulty of private contact discovery for a long time. We’ve been working on strategies to improve our current design, and today we’ve published a new private contact discovery service. Using this service, Signal clients will be able to efficiently and scalably determine whether the contacts in their address book are Signal users without revealing the contacts in their address book to the Signal service.
There’s a lot of work involved here, but this is an intriguing proposition for doing contact discovery in social media while maintaining privacy. I can’t wait to see which silos follow suit, but I’m even more curious if any adventurous IndieWeb creators will travel down this road?

h/t cryptographer Matthew Green

🎧 This Week in Google: #413 You Never Know What’s Not Going to Happen | TWIT.TV

Listened to This Week in Google: #413 You Never Know What's Not Going to Happen from TWIT.tv
Today is the Net Neutrality Day of Action. Go to BattleForTheNet.com and write your congressperson. Also, The Pixel XL 2 may feature a squeezable frame. Allo is coming to the desktop in "a few weeks." Android 7.1 has "Panic Detection" mode. Facebook will sell ads in Messenger. Amazon Prime Day sales up 60% over last year's record-setting haul - with Echo Dot as the top-selling item. Samsung Galaxy Note 8 may explode onto the scene on August 23rd. Make Nokia great again. China teleports matter to space. Jeff's Numbers: Google spends $800,000 on newsbots that write 30,000 articles a month in the UK. Google doesn't owe France 1.1bn euros in back taxes. Danny's Stuff: Silk Vault Slim Wallet Case, The Big Sick Stacey's Thing: Fibaro HomeKit Sensors

👓 Giving you more characters to express yourself | Twitter

Read Giving you more characters to express yourself (Twitter Blog)
We want every person around the world to easily express themselves on Twitter, so we're doing something new: we're going to try out a longer limit, 280 characters, in languages impacted by cramming (which is all except Japanese, Chinese, and Korean).
I’m sure I could say something flip, like my own website doesn’t impose any arbitrary limits like this on me, but honestly, where Twitter is involved, it’s just become painfully old.

I have taken to always posting on my own website(s) first–where the sky is the proverbial limit–and only then syndicating out to places like Twitter. While Twitter’s got a reasonable network and there are lots of interesting people who might not otherwise be online interacting, I really haven’t been using Twitter as much in the past two years as I had previously. This change isn’t going to affect me at all from a publishing perspective. There are much more valuable tools to be using now. (Though I do wish the rest of the web would catch up on some of the new technologies they’re really missing out on.)

I do appreciate that it will allow some others who don’t have their own websites some more flexibility. I’m hoping that the Twitter apps that handle notifications add the extra content as Twitter’s own mobile app notifications cut off even before the 140 character limit, which makes them painful to use from a UI perspective.

If nothing else, it’s nice to see them iterating a little, but they need to be doing it at a faster velocity.

👓 Secret Service protection for Donald Trump Jr. reactivated: report | The Hill

Read Secret Service protection for Donald Trump Jr. reactivated: report by Rebecca Savransky (The Hill)
Jr. reportedly has his Secret Service protection back, sources told CNN. The news comes after a previous report that Trump Jr. gave up his protection from the Secret Service because of privacy concerns. A senior administration official told The New York Times earlier this month the Secret Service had stopped protecting Trump Jr.
I’m curious what prompted the de-activation and then a subsequent re-activation so close to each other. Makes me wonder which body(ies) he may have disposed of in the interim?

👓 Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js | Facebook

Read Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js by Adam Wolff (Facebook)
Next week, we are going to relicense our open source projects React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js under the MIT license. We're relicensing these projects because React is the foundation of a broad ecosystem of open source software for the web, and we don't want to hold back forward progress for nontechnical reasons. This decision comes after several weeks of disappointment and uncertainty for our community. Although we still believe our BSD + Patents license provides some benefits to users of our projects, we acknowledge that we failed to decisively convince this community.
This won’t bode well for large portions of the web…