Some Miscellany From the Week

1)  This week The Aperiodical tweeted out that, "A little birdy tells us that Mochizuki's abc conjecture proof will be accepted into a journal "in the next few months". Hope it's not in The Journal of Irreproducible Results ;-)

Seriously, how does a journal even have room for such a proof, or do I assume they print summary and commentary, and give a digital link to the actual paper proof?

2)  Short Thomas Lumley piece on brute force in 'linguistics' computation (with interesting quote from Geoffrey Pullum):

http://www.statschat.org.nz/2016/10/20/brute-force-and-ignorance-2/

3)   "Why Science Needs the Humanities" from John McGowan here:

http://experimentalmath.org/2016/10/why-science-needs-the-humanities/

4)  Fantastic followup on negative numbers from James Propp:

https://mathenchant.wordpress.com/2016/10/16/going-negative-part-2/

(and next month he'll be writing about self-referential sentences, one of my favorite topics)

5)  Andrew Gelman complains (I think rightfully) about Dan Gilbert's prior "inane" or "ridiculous" defense of social psychology's replication rate:

http://andrewgelman.com/2016/10/20/we-have-a-ways-to-go-in-communicating-the-replication-crisis/

6)  I'm not one of them... BUT, if you're a fan of philosopher Alain Badiou, worth noting he has a new volume out, "In Praise of Mathematics":

http://amzn.to/2eyDkUg

7)  Wendy Menard encourages teachers to blog, and links to a lot of her own favorite math education resources/blogs here:
http://www.mathforamerica.org/news/enrich-and-enhance-your-professionalism-through-blogging

8)  Two of my loves in life are math and birds, so, hey, how could I resist citing a blog-post that combines the two:

http://www.statschat.org.nz/2016/10/17/vote-takahe-for-bird-of-the-year/

9)  And there's always more weekly math-and-learning fare at Mike's Math Page:

https://mikesmathpage.wordpress.com

Potpourri BONUS! (extra NON-mathematical links of interest):

1)  From last week's TED Radio Hour this (re-run) segment of Margaret Heffernan talking about the nature of work:

http://www.npr.org/2015/10/02/443412777/is-the-professional-pecking-order-doing-more-harm-than-good

2)  And this is just one of my all-time favorite This American Life episodes ("The Family That Flees Together, Trees Together"), about the Jarvis family. It goes all the way back to 2001, and I find most people either missed it, or have forgotten it:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/177/american-limbo?act=1#play