It's hard to remember the smell of a place when you're not there, but when you're in a place you love where you haven't been for a long time, it really hits you.

Does anyone know a good estimate of the total amount spent on open access fees / article processing charges by the UK government (or really any government)? I'm only interested in public funds, i.e. total cost to the taxpayer.

I wish there was a browser that just didn't have the concept of tabs at all, but instead just kept track of your history in an organised way, such that you can always restore the state of a page you visited previously but never actually have more than one process running at once.

Question for mathematicians: what do you do when your progress on a topic surpasses your ability to easily explain it to another person? It seems like sometimes there's a big gap between this point and the point where you're ready to present it - how do you keep your motivation going in this period?

An actually useful use for AI would be if my system spellchecker could figure out that "operadic" and "retrocoalgebra" and "submanifold" and "submanifolds" and "shipbound" are words and not bother me about them, while still alerting me if I mistype them.

This is fantastic! This website allows you to watch TV stations from around the world. I just watched 2 minutes of Afghan volleyball. All the small regional TV stations from Germany are here too. Spread the word! Source: tv.garden

We finally have the strong law of large numbers in Markov categories.
arxiv.org/abs/2503.21576

Dumb question, but how do you find good music these days? Not music "for studying" etc. but music that has something to say. I feel like good new music used to just be everywhere but now I don't know how to access it at all. Is it just me getting old or is it genuinely harder to find?

A thread for some attempts at generative art. I'm trying to keep it as naive as possible, just writing Python scripts that spit out RGB arrays.

I wrote an equation that I thought was great, so I drew a star next to it, but then I realised it was wrong, so I drew a sad face on the star, but then I realised it was right after all, and now I've got pages of notes about "the sad star equation".

In this thread I'm going to write some science fiction. It's not going to have any characters or plot, it's just some wild speculation about what we'll find in the Universe in the coming decades. It's not meant to be a prediction, it's just a plausible story invented for fun.

There's a Wikipedia app that you can install on your phone, which has a *map mode*. It's a really fun way to find obscure yet notable things nearby.

Go home mathematical typewriter, you're drunk

Please tell me a cool theorem or mathematical fact that you learned about recently

It's long past time I gave this site a go. How do I find all the category theorists and other fun maths people?