read | Chris Aldrich

👓 Six ‘X-Rated’ Math Terms That Only Sound Dirty | Huffington Post

Read Six 'X-Rated' Math Terms That Only Sound Dirty by Macrina Cooper-White and David Freeman (HuffPost)

Cox-Zucker machine. What sounds like a high-tech device for oral sex is actually an algorithm used in the study of certain curves, including those that arise in cryptography. The story goes that David A. Cox co-authored a paper with fellow mathematician Steven Zucker, just so that the dirty-sounding term would enter the lexicon.

I always thought he was cool before (many of his students didn’t “get” him), but I’m now even more proud to have had Steven Zucker as my first math professor in college.

Steven Zucker explaining the concept of tangent to a surface.

👓 Congrats, Jeff Goldberg. You Just Martyred Kevin Williamson | POLITICO

Read Congrats, Jeff Goldberg. You Just Martyred Kevin Williamson. by Jack Shafer (POLITICO Magazine)

The <i>Atlantic</i> climbed out on a limb by adding Williamson to its staff. Then they proceeded to saw off the branch.

I noted the hire of Williamson with curiosity when it happened, but I expected it might last a tad longer than this. At least he managed longer than Quinn Norton did at the New York Times, but both seemingly gone for relatively similar reasons.

👓 Apps of a Feather

Read Apps of a Feather …Stick Together (Apps of a Feather)

Third-party Twitter apps are going to break on June 19th, 2018.

After June 19th, 2018, “streaming services” at Twitter will be removed. This means two things for third-party apps:

Push notifications will no longer arrive

Timelines won’t refresh automatically

If you use an app like Talon, Tweetbot, Tweetings, or Twitterrific, there is no way for its developer to fix these issues.

We are incredibly eager to update our apps. However, despite many requests for clarification and guidance, Twitter has not provided a way for us to recreate the lost functionality. We've been waiting for more than a year.

Twitter seems to finally be closing off the remainder of their open API that allowed full-fledged Twitter clients to still exist. This certainly creates a chilling effect in the future on developers spending any time or resources on projects like it that aren’t completely open. This also makes it much harder to build competing services to Twitter which have a similar financial model. I remember the heady days when there were dozens of awesome Twitter clients to chose from and interesting new things were happening in the social space.

If I was sitting on a huge pile of Twitter related code with a full set of Twitter related reading/posting functionality, I think I’d head toward some of the new open protocols coming out of the IndieWeb to build a new user base. By supporting feeds like RSS, ATOM, JSON feed, and even h-feed (possibly via Microsub) for the feed reader portion and building in the open Micropub spec, one could rejuvenate old Twitter apps to work with a myriad of microblog-like (and even traditional blog) functionality on platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Craft, WithKnown, Jekyll, Kirby, Hugo, micro.blog, and a myriad of others in the future. Suddenly all those old Twitter apps could rise from the ashes and invigorate a new, more open community. Given the open “architecture” of the community, it would give developers much more direct control of both their software and futures than Twitter has ever given them as well as a deeper sense of impact while simultaneously eating a nice portion of Twitter’s lunch. With less than a week’s worth of work, I suspect that many of these old apps could have new and more fruitful lives than the scraps they were getting before.

If the bird site doesn’t heed their cries, I hope they’ll all re-purpose their code and support the open web so that their hard work and efforts aren’t completely lost.

🎧 Mitch Landrieu | The Atlantic Interview

Listened to Mitch Landrieu by Jeffrey Goldberg from The Atlantic Interview

A white southern mayor confronts the history in his city.

"There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it," said New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu in his now-famous speech in May of 2017. As Landrieu said those words, city workers a few blocks away uprooted an enormous statue of Robert E. Lee – the last of four Confederate monuments the mayor removed from the city after a years-long process. In a conversation with The Atlantic's editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, Landrieu discusses the politics of race in the south, his grappling with history as a white southerner, and his own family’s connection to the story of civil rights in America.

I miss the days when I had a seemingly unending backlog of episodes to listen to. Now I just wait with bated breath for them to be released.

I love extended interviews on small topics like this one. This does a really good job of taking a look at some of the broader details behind removing Confederate statues in New Orleans.

👓 The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete | The Atlantic

Read The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete by James Somers (The Atlantic)

The scientific paper—the actual form of it—was one of the enabling inventions of modernity. Before it was developed in the 1600s, results were communicated privately in letters, ephemerally in lectures, or all at once in books. There was no public forum for incremental advances. By making room for reports of single experiments or minor technical advances, journals made the chaos of science accretive. Scientists from that point forward became like the social insects: They made their progress steadily, as a buzzing mass.

The earliest papers were in some ways more readable than papers are today. They were less specialized, more direct, shorter, and far less formal. Calculus had only just been invented. Entire data sets could fit in a table on a single page. What little “computation” contributed to the results was done by hand and could be verified in the same way.

Not quite the cutting edge stuff I would have liked, but generally an interesting overview of relatively new technology and UI set ups like Mathematica and Jupyter.

🎧 This Week in Google 451 B055man69 | TWiT.TV

Listened to This Week in Google 451 B055man69 by Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Wendy Nather, Ant Pruitt from TWiT.tv

Shooting at YouTube Headquarters. Facebook's continuing kerfuffle. Apple snags Google's AI head. Chromebooks on school buses. Cheaper Pixel 3 on the way - but not for you. Trump vs. Amazon. Security breaches here, security breaches there, even in our underwear. Don't leave your pepperoni on the hotel balcony.

🎧 ‘The Daily’: Linda Brown’s Landmark Case | The New York Times

Listened to ‘The Daily’: Linda Brown’s Landmark Case by Michael Barbaro from nytimes.com

Behind the landmark Supreme Court ruling of Brown v. Board of Education was a girl named Linda Brown, whose story led to states being ordered to desegregate schools, mostly against their will. Ms. Brown died on Sunday. Who was she, and what has changed in the nearly 64 years since the case was decided?

On today’s episode:

• Nikole Hannah-Jones, an investigative reporter covering race and civil rights for The New York Times Magazine.

Background reading:

• The New York Times obituary of Linda Brown.

A fantastic piece of journalism here. Timely, interesting, and important. This is the type of coverage that keeps me coming back to The Daily on a regular basis.

🎧 ‘The Daily’: The Prospect of Pardons | The New York Times

Listened to ‘The Daily’: The Prospect of Pardons by Michael Barbaro from nytimes.com

As the special counsel built his case against Michael T. Flynn and Paul Manafort, pressure was mounting for the men to to cooperate with the Russia inquiry.Then a lawyer for President Trump came to them with an idea: What if the president were to pardon his former advisers?

On today’s episode:

• Michael S. Schmidt, who has been covering the Russia investigation for The New York Times.

Background reading:

• The talks about possible pardons for two former Trump adviserssuggest that the White House was concerned about what Mr. Flynn and Mr. Manafort might reveal to the special counsel in the Russia investigation.

Presidents should not be able to grant or push potential pardons in actions in which they’re so closely involved.

🎧 ‘The Daily’: A Divisive Nominee | The New York Times

Read ‘The Daily’: A Divisive Nominee by Michael Barbaro (nytimes.com)

President Trump has chosen John R. Bolton to be his new national security adviser. In 2005, a Republican-controlled Senate committee refused to confirm Mr. Bolton as President George W. Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations. We look back at those confirmation hearings, which portrayed Mr. Bolton as a threat to national security.

On today’s episode:

• Elizabeth Williamson writes about Washington in the Trump era for The New York Times.

Background reading:

• Not since the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, have national security leaders so publicly raised the threat of armed confrontation if foreign adversaries do not meet America’s demands.

Most outlet’s I’d seen early on simply used shorthand to call Bolton a hawk, but without digging back into history to actually show the broader facts. I love how The Daily has done it here. The fact that he’s a hawk actually seems to be the least of his issues. Worse is that he comes off as a bully and doesn’t understand what facts are.

🎧 ‘The Daily’: A Cold War Flashback | The New York Times

Listened to ‘The Daily’: A Cold War Flashback by Michael Barbaro from nytimes.com

Eight years ago, the United States and Russia agreed to a spy swap that sent a Russian double agent to safety in Britain. That former spy and his daughter were poisoned by a nerve agent this month, and the Kremlin has been accused of orchestrating the attack. Why did it happen now?

On today’s episode:

• Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times.

Background reading:

• President Trump joined a coordinated campaign by more than 20 countries to retaliate for the poisoning of a former Russian spy, ordering the largest-ever expulsion of Russian officials in the United States.

• It may not be a new Cold War, but relations with Russia are in some ways even more unpredictable.