Gavin Zhao @[email protected]

In math research papers (particularly the "good" ones) one often observes a negative correlation between the conceptual difficulty of a component of an argument, and its technical difficulty: the parts that are conceptually routine or straightforward may take many pages of technical computation, whereas the parts that are conceptually interesting (and novel) are actually relatively brief, once all the more routine auxiliary steps (e.g., treatment of various lower order error terms) are stripped away.

I theorize that this is an instance of Berkson's paradox. I found the enclosed graphic from https://brilliant.org/wiki/berksons-paradox to be a good illustration of this paradox. In this (oversimplified) example, a negative correlation is seen between SAT scores and GPA in students admitted to a typical university, even though a positive correlation exists in the broader population, because students with too low of a combined SAT and GPA will get rejected from the university, whilst students with too high a score would typically go to a more prestigious school.

Similarly, mathematicians tend to write their best papers where the combined conceptual and technical difficulty of the steps of the argument is close to the upper bound of what they can handle. So steps that are both conceptually and technically easy don't occupy much space in the paper, whereas steps that are both conceptually and technically hard would not have been discovered by the mathematician in the first place. This creates the aforementioned negative correlation.

Often the key to reading a lengthy paper is to first filter out all the technically complicated steps and identify the (often much shorter) conceptual core.

I hope this email finds you well, and taking better care of yourself.

At last, some information from Google that students can really use!

this might be the first haskell program in the world that natively runs on arm64 windows

user: hello company, i would like to access your main product, you know, the one people come to you for, the main thing

company: HAVE YOU HEARD OF A I

During lunch a friend mentioned that you can just supply a HTTP URL to vim on the command line and it would use curl to download that resource and allow you to edit the content. I jokingly asked whether if you enter :w it would then issue a HTTP POST back to the origin which is of course ridiculous.

It issues a PUT

#foxesInLove #comic

Source: https://foxes-in-love.tumblr.com/post/750807931496333312
Copyright: https://foxesinlove.net

Curve fitting methods by @xkcd

WARNING! This image may trigger PINSecurity.

From an analysis of 3.4m PIN code leaked from several data breaches https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/most-common-pin-codes/

Haskellers can have a little UwU, as a treat.
https://haskell.org/?uwu=true
#Haskell

[Well-Typed Blog] Improvements to the ghc-debug terminal interface

`ghc-debug` is a debugging tool for performing precise heap analysis of Haskell programs (check out [our previous post introducing it](https://www.well-typed.com/blog/2021/01/fragmentation-deeper-look/)). While working on [Eras Profiling](https://www.well-typed.com/blog/2024/01/ghc-eras-profiling/), we took the opportunity to... #haskell

https://www.well-typed.com/blog/2024/04/ghc-debug-improvements/

Enjoy these two concentric circles