generationP

The newer version is 2021, not 2017, though the title on top of the site says 2017.

You can also get to the new site from one of the hits further down ( https://textbooks.aimath.org/textbooks/approved-textbooks/tr... ) if you pay attention. But it's far from the transparency I'd have expected googling an openly available and multiply linked website.

FYI, there is a newer version at https://sites.google.com/a/brown.edu/sergei-treil-homepage/l... . Google seems to never have learnt about this site, which is weird as it is on a Google server.

More info at https://retractionwatch.com/2023/10/09/how-thousands-of-invi... and https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.02192 . As the latter makes clear, this type of fraud is most likely done by journal editors (or their assistants), not by the authors:

> When registering a new publication and its references at Crossref, a publisher may sneak extra undue references in the metadata sent in addition to the ones originally present. Then, digital libraries (e.g., SpringerLink) and bibliometric platforms (e.g., Dimensions) harvest these metadata, undue citations included. These sneaked references are processed and counted even if they are not present in the original publication.

The three journals in this particular case are all published by Technoscience Academy, an OA publisher operating out of India (not one of the well-known ones). I would think twice as an author before I submitted to any journal from this publisher, lest my paper is abused for manipulations like this (although I'm not sure if it has any journals worth submitting to anyway).

NB (because I got confused first): This is not really about Hindawi. Hindawi published the (trash) article that these fake citations were pumping up, but the pumping-up happened using Technoscience Academy journals.

This looks like someone on the editorial side snuck the references in. Don't think authors have a way to do it.

Windows has a scan app ( ms-windows-store://pdp/?ProductId=9wzdncrfj3pv ) that can commandeer a scanner connected via USB even if the scanner's own software doesn't let you. Not sure it works with every model, and it's not very rich in features, but I've successfully thrown it at two scanners that I couldn't get any use of otherwise.

Good point -- I was implicitly talking about serious instruction on advanced levels. There was no shortage of classes where you got to listen to French music and read some easy books; but nothing that would bring you to fluency.

An exchange program with Manchester, though? That must have been late in the 80s?

I consider the wide-scale and fairly high-quality scientific education system to be the only genuine upside of Soviet communism. Admittedly, part of its success was the fact that it offered many people the only way to the middle or upper class (the Soviet Union was an extreme class society, with peasants forced to stay on their collective farms and non-Muscovites banned from settling in Moscow unless they took up professions that were currently desired by the system). Another caveat is that it was STEM-only, and excluded computer science (which the Soviet system was unconducive to for various reasons) until the 80s. The SU was particularly unwilling to teach anyone foreign languages, unless one chose (and was cleared) to work for intel.

If I am to guess:

- large academic population and high general education

- a tradition of collecting banned and bootlegged content, particularly Western (samizdat, magnitizdat)

- lack of resources to get things legally (e.g. university subscriptions)

- a culture of hacking and tinkering (the best known book scanning middleware, like ScanTailor and ScanKromsator and various djvu tools, comes from Russian hobbyist programmers).

Also applies to adjacent countries like Ukraine.

The Eastern European (not just Russian) book scanning scene seems to have started in the early 2000s, back before the anti-Western turn. Z-Lib is newer, from the 2010s(?), definitely predating the current meaning of Z.

Coming from a field where [n] routinely means {1,2,...,n}, I don't feel like the [1], [2], [3] system can win me over. But I'm ready to see some advantages it has.

Keep in mind that any company operating in Russia (paying taxes, providing data to "law" enforcement, etc.) would fit the same jumpsuit.

We could go that way, but it would be a serious change of rules and create its own perverse incentives.

A 50-page PDF loads a lot faster and shows a lot smoother than an HTML of equal textual length. And I've never seen any modern tools that turn TeX into multifile HTML (one per section).

These examples miss the mark somewhat. The "2" in "2π" can mean several things (the nonnegative integer 2, the integer 2, the rational 2, the real 2) that are all commonly identified but are different. The "2" in "x^2" usually means the nonnegative integer 2. The "2" in "2x" can usually mean the nonnegative integer or the integer 2, but also the other 2's depending on what x is. The problem is not that the meaning of 2 varies across different expressions, but that it can vary within each single expression.

The best example is perhaps the polynomial ring R[x][y], which consists of polynomials in the variable y over the ring of polynomials in the variable x over the real numbers. Any algebraist would tell you that it is obviously just the two-variable polynomial ring R[x, y] in disguise, because you can factor out all the y-powers and then the coefficients will be polynomials in x. But the rings are very much not the same at the level of implementation, and every time you use their "equality" (canonical isomorphy), you need to keep the actual conversion map (the isomorphism) in the back of your mind.

Most of Buzzard's examples are indeed lossless (even bijective) conversions, but the notation mathematicians use (and programming languages often support) makes it look like they are completely absent, which comes back to bite you. In mathematics, it bites you when you want to actually compute your function and realize you don't remember how all those canonical arrows go. In programming, it bites you when the default conversions the compiler inserts aren't the ones you meant.

The problem is that no one thinks of type conversions as taking any explicit paths! It's one thing to view the actual process of long division as path-dependent (something everyone who learns about Gröbner bases is familiar with, as at the right level of generality even the result is path-dependent); it's another thing to apply the same intuition to the way the inputs are parsed. (You said divide 3 by 2 with remainder? Sure, the quotient is 3/2 and the remainder is 0. Problem?)

This is not the point of the article. Even at the level of the objects themselves, 1 : integer is not 1 : rational. The latter is an ordered pair (1, 1) of two coprime positive integers, or an equivalence class of ordered pairs up to cancelling. Some ugly hackery is required to really make the integers equal to their respective rationals, and its consequences aren't great either (just imagine that some rationals are pairs while others are not -- that's what you get if you forcibly replace the rational k/1 by the integer k), and no one wants to do that.

This is exactly the "specification by universal property" that the author is talking about. In your case, it's saying "a 3-dimensional vector space is a vector space with three chosen vectors e, f, g and three linear maps x, y, z such that each vector v equals x(v) e + y(v) f + z(v) g". But as the author points out, not everything follows from universal properties, and when it does, there is often several universal properties defining the same object, and that sameness itself needs to be shown.

This is probably better known here under the name of implicit type conversions. Strictly speaking, the rational number 1 is not the same as the integer 1; we just have a conversion map that preserves all the relevant properties. It's all fun and games until there are 1000 types and 10000 conversion maps involved and the relevant diagrams no longer commute (i.e., it depends what order you go).

Is it good at digesting huge lists of PDFs (say, 100 000)?

Which of the suggested "Steps to help" would have helped prevent the xz infiltration? For a single-maintainer project, adding bureaucracy can only make things worse.

The Stacks project is meant to be a comprehensive Bourbaki-style textbook, not an encyclopedic survey, so the Wikipedia comparison is a miss. (The WP has a textbook level of detail on some topics, with proofs and examples, but these are few and far between and come from enthusiastic editors going above and beyond the WP's declared goals.)

Stacks is not finished, however -- still a lot of "Proof. Omitted.". From what I understand, the goal is to fill them all in (otherwise there would be references to the literature in their stead), but ultimately it is still mostly a one-person project (see https://github.com/stacks/stacks-project/graphs/contributors ).

I once filled in one of those missing proofs, only to see Johan replace it by a much better one that I would never have thought of. And this was (for him) a technical lemma, not one of the crown jewels of the project. His dedication to the project is truly incomparable to anything except Bourbaki and Serre. And the usefulness of the work extends far beyond algebraic stacks, just like Bourbaki is much more than a textbook on Lie algebras.

I think Lenny's constant might be better suited https://old.reddit.com/r/itslenny/

If German intel serves personal data to a known fugitive from justice working with the GRU, then EU regulation is a lost cause. If anything, I want them to know as little as possible.

That Marsalek works for Russian intel isn't new. Many of the details are.

Interestingly, the article completely avoids mentioning the familial trail:

> Marsalek's grandfather, [Hans Maršálek](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Mar%C5%A1%C3%A1lek), was a member of the Austrian resistance and later a suspected spy for the Soviet Union.

And following the link to Hans Maršálek's page:

> He was long suspected of being a Soviet asset. Recently uncovered documents indicate that are grounds to believe he was responsible for helping the Soviets kidnap at least four people and illegally render them to Moscow for torture and interrogation.

While I am not surprised that a socialist persecuted under the Nazis would join Soviet efforts, this is some useful backstory in understanding why Marsalek the younger apparently had no reserves in collaborating with the KGB.

> For people who might not know, Rhapsody of Fire broke into in two bands, one keeping the original name and the other becoming Rhapsody.

Ehm, this is not what happened. In 2006 Rhapsody became Rhapsody of Fire to avoid some trademark dispute. Then they split around 2009, though the main chunk is still called Rhapsody of Fire whereas the spinoff is called Luca Turilli's Rhapsody.

The Sacrament of Sin is their best; almost every song on that one is great. It's one of the rare examples of a band that was boring and bland at first and then greatly improved. Call of the Wild is a close second. On their other albums I like 1-2 tracks each.

Probably true, but there are more rooms in the Villa yet to be excavated. What we have is essentially a bookshelf in a larger library. If it is sorted by alphabet, it might be representative, but what if it is sorted by topic?

This is from 2013, so the bet that "nobody will want to read [PDFs] in 5 years" can be considered failed. If anything, PDF has become the lingua franca of the academic web, crowding out even DjVU at the thing that DjVU was made for and PDF was not.

I have not been following the development of mathjax, pandoc, etc. carefully, so I'm wondering: Have the main issues been solved? By these I mean

(1) support for most popular packages,

(2) automatically breaking long outputs into small pages that don't overheat my laptop or crash my browser and yet reference each other properly,

(3) printability (without lines broken in half, senseless overflows and the likes) or cross-compilability with a regular PDF compiler?

I know the ar5iv project is getting closer and closer to (1) and (3), but is that available to regular users?