If you followed Andy Drucker’s series of posts on infinite trees and were craving more, be prepared for more foliage:
Via Ars Mathematica, a pointer to Keith Devlin’s column on a bizarre counter-version of Konig’s tree lemma: namely, if you have an uncountably large tree with countably large levels, then it is not necessarily true that an uncountable path must exist.
Continuing my part-time obsession with fonts (Helvetica II: Arial strikes back !), allow me to present this delightful tale about how the right font can save lives:
What I saw, Pietrucha knew, was what we all may see soon enough as we rush along America’s 46,871 miles of Interstate highways. What I saw was Clearview, the typeface that is poised to replace Highway Gothic, the standard that has been used on signs across the country for more than a half-century. Looking at a sign in Clearview after reading one in Highway Gothic is like putting on a new pair of reading glasses: there’s a sudden lightness, a noticeable crispness to the letters.
It’s a fascinating tale of 10 years of research and lobbying that went into replacing the fonts used on all the Federal highway signs in the U.S. I was driving along I-15 today and almost got into an accident trying to tell whether the local highway sign fonts had changed. Apart from the inside-baseball of how to design a font, always guaranteed to send a shiver through my spine, the story draws out the tale of how the team of designers got together, designed the font, and managed, after repeated lobbying, to convince the Department of Transportation to replace the original fonts with the new ones.
There was an amusing line in the article about American-style engineering:
The letter shapes of Highway Gothic weren’t ever tested, having never really been designed in the first place. “It’s very American in that way — just smash it together and get it up there,” says Tobias Frere-Jones, a typographer in New York City who came to the attention of the design world in the mid-1990s with his Interstate typeface inspired by the bemusing, awkward charm of Highway Gothic. “It’s brash and blunt, not so concerned with detail. It has a certain unvarnished honesty.”
If you remain unconvinced about the difference, look at the accompanying slideshow.
I was recently at AT&T visiting for a few weeks, and I was lucky enough to catch a talk by Amit Chakrabarti on lower bounds for multi-player pointer jumping. A complexity class that figured prominently in his talk was the class ACC0, which consists of constant depth, unbounded fanin, poly sized circuits with AND, OR, NOT and MOD m gates, for all m.
Suppose we make our life simple by fixing m to be a single prime, like 3. It turns out that the corresponding class AC0[m] can be contained strictly within NC1: this arises from results in the 80s by Razborov and Smolensky. Now suppose that instead of picking a prime integer, we choose a number like 6, which is the product of distinct primes. We do not even know whether AC0[6] = NP or not !
Since Bill brought up Jeff Westbrook (yes, people, I have co-written a paper with a Simpsons screenwriter, thank you very much), I thought that I should mention that he’s now, along with everything else, a sailboat racer !
He’s racing in a race called Transpac, from Long Beach, CA to Honolulu, HI. His boat is called the Peregrine, and it has a 4-man crew. You can track their position (they were leading when I last checked) at http://www.transpacificyc.org/ (go to “track charts,” then click the center logo. when the page loads, hit boat selector, pick division 6, then hit boat selector again, then wait). You can also visit the boat blog (bblog?) at http://peregrine-transpac.blogspot.com/.
One should note that Jeff, being the considerate soul that he is, signed off on revisions to pending papers before he left.
(Source: Adam Buchsbaum)
Piotr asks if anyone else has been having problems with the SODA 2008 server shortly before 5pm ET (i.e around 90 minutes ago).
Update (7/707): At least one person thinks the server was on (and accepting submissions) for a few hours after the deadline. If this is true, this would be quite interesting, considering that I’ve never heard of this happening before (if the server did crash, it’s a rational response of course).
P.S Maybe the server was out watching fireworks.
In studies of breast cancer cells, [senior investigator Dr. Bert] O’Malley and his colleagues showed how the clock works. Using steroid receptor coactivator-3 (SRC-3), they demonstrated that activation requires addition of a phosphate molecule to the protein at one spot and addition of an ubiquitin molecule at another point. Each time the message of the gene is transcribed into a protein, another ubiquitin molecule is chained on. Five ubiquitins in the chain and the protein is automatically destroyed.
A counter on a separate work tape: neat !
Main article at sciencedaily; link via Science and Reason.
The good news from today is that the Demaine-O’Rourke book on folding and linkages is finally out. Erik had a copy of the book at the conference, and it’s a handsome volume that will hopefully soon reside on my bookshelf.
The authors have a web page associated with the book, and it has a number of applets that go along with constructions from the text.
The publisher of this book is Cambridge University Press, which is great, because I love their fonts 
. CUP clearly has a plan for domination of the entire computational geometry catalog: along with the folding book, they are publishing:
Phew ! Looks like CUP will be making a tidy sum off of me. Now if only bloggers got review copies (hint hint hint).
My ex-advisor, long time VC, and the M in ALMSS, Rajeev Motwani, will be one of the experts assisting to select 20 startups to fund as part of the TechCrunch20 conference.
Maybe he’ll sample a few slides from each presentation….
If you’re travelling to Korea for SoCG, and you need a visa, then there are a few things not mentioned on the Korean consulate web page:
Paul Graham has a short note on judgements which seems apropos to dealing with rejection of various kinds (papers, jobs, grants, etc):
Our early training and our self-centeredness combine to make us believe that every judgement of us is about us. In fact most aren’t. This is a rare case where being less self-centered will make people more confident. Once you realize how little most people judging you care about judging you accurately—once you realize that because of the normal distribution of most applicant pools, it matters least to judge accurately in precisely the cases where judgement has the most effect—you won’t take rejection so personally.
