Andrew McGregor

@hadi_hoss @penn_state Congrats!!

It's great to stop assisting and start associating, with tenure @penn_state! I am grateful to all my amazing students, world-class collaborators, and extremely supportive mentors. This journey has been intellectually stimulating and unbelievably fun with you all.

I always enjoy talking about "How to design talks"; thanks to @PLMentoring @PLDI for the chance to do so this year -- maybe you'll find the slides useful!

@MAliakbarpour @RiceCompSci @RiceUniversity Congrats to Rice and congrats to Maryam!

@TonyWirthPhD @MathsBirmingham @chitnis_rajesh You should get a tour t-shirt printed!

Take two, delivering to @MathsBirmingham, set up by colleague @chitnis_rajesh. (Sorting out the mic.)

@geomblog Asymptotic faculty?

We've moved away from saying 'junior' faculty to saying 'early-career' faculty. Is there a similar move away from 'senior' faculty to.......? (right and wrong answers welcome)

I’ve just had a scary thought that should strike fear into the heart of every mathematician and theoretical computer scientist: With loss of generality would also be abbreviated wlog. And you’ll never know what the author of the proof intended.

@ShriramKMurthi @MoldyBasil They give the scale for width so I don’t think it’s ambiguous how to read the plot. I agree the change in volume with time could mislead though.

@MoldyBasil It's good but not great. In return for showing periodicity, it gives later years more area, which may or may not have been intended. Or did they correct for it? The problem is, there's no way to know!

@thesasho I could imagine writing “While I place little value on h-indices, I note in passing that X has a surprisingly high h-index of Y.” I.e., I don’t want to contribute to normalizing h-indices but also want to help the student’s application however I can.

Thoughts about advisors talking about their student’s h-index in a reference letter for a job?

Are there any results on scheduling that would dictate whether my next task should be the one that has a) most recently became overdue or b) been overdue the longest? Needs to be robust to "not strict deadlines" and "forgetfulness that others".

UMass Amherst is hiring in Theoretical Computer Science: cics.umass.edu/jobs. Apply to join our great theory group! It’s an amazing place to work, and Western MA in general is an amazing and beautiful place live. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions!

@ShriramKMurthi Well, not an explanation but I don’t think the specific incorrect time was a coincidence. I’ve seen 9:41 showing up when various colleagues have shared their iPad screen over zoom. No idea why.

@polylogblog Oh, good point, I'd seen this article some time ago…but surely that doesn't explain my situation? Surely? SURELY?!?

iOS/iPad users, help? Normally my iPad keeps time just fine; it's on Set Auto. Yesterday I taught from home and used my iPad as a whiteboard. At some point it began to show time as 9:41 (at least 10 mins BEFORE it was 9:41—panic!) and stayed that way for well over an hour! WTF?

When I drink decaf coffee in the evening, my body takes about half an hour to realize it’s being duped. But until that happens, it’s all hands on deck trying to get some work finished.

At @cis_unimelb, we’re hiring a theoretical computer science academic (aka faculty member). Happy to tell you more about the role! jobs.unimelb.edu.au/caw/en/job/909…

Failed to convince my 8 y/o that John Lennon had a whole song about giving peas a chance. Also failed to get him to eat peas, but that’s secondary.

@mahdi_tcs I agree. I was just arguing that the fact we were fine when the population was lower in the past is insufficient to argue that we could return to that population without negative consequences. Personally I’m also more concerned by climate change though.

@mahdi_tcs The original comment may or may not be nonsense but I don’t think it’s trivially nonsense since the derivative of the population size impacts the age distribution of the population and that can have economic ramifications.

@nutanlimaye Because we can’t just treat all the values as O(1)?

Why is it that I can do math reasonably well, but suck at everything related to money and personal finance?! Hmph....

Congrats to @raghav_addanki for successfully defending his Ph.D thesis yesterday! @polylogblog and I were very lucky to have you as an advisee. @hunglvosu