Tootfinder

"The overall life expectancy of a programming language has dwindled in the past 56 years. A COBOL developer in the 1960s most probably retired in the 2000s, still writing COBOL. As a former professional VBScript, then C#, then Objective-C, later Swift, and finally Go developer, I can only see this trend accelerating. We should expect our favorite programming language to be replaced and removed from the market in a relatively shorter time every decade."

Alan Perlis And The Evolution Of Programming Languages
Alan Jay Perlis knew a thing or two about programming languages, both as an early pioneer of our industry and as one of the designers of ALGOL. The language that has inspired the one you, dear reader of this magazine, probably use every day to earn a living.

"This is how Lotus was born: as a company featuring unprecedented benefits for their employees, fostering a culture of radical diversity and inclusion, cleverly mixing dashes of 1960s counterculture with the latest 1980s technology.
Two major names stand out in the creation of this culture: first, Janet Axelrod, who passed away in 2021, and who brought her experience at Digital Equipment Corporation in the areas of diversity and inclusion. Second, Freada Kapor Klein."

An oil company ad bragging how many tons of glacier they could melt seemed innocent enough in 1962, but it's a bit more sinister in the climate change era.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/humble-oil-glacier-ad/

Did a 1960s Oil Company Ad Boast How Much Glacier It Could Melt?
An oil company ad bragging how many tons of glacier they could melt seemed innocent enough in 1962, but it's a bit more sinister in the climate change era.

Suleimanov-Talanov self-focusing and the hierarchy of the focusing nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation
Robert J. Buckingham, Robert M. Jenkins, Peter D. Miller
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01393

Suleimanov-Talanov self-focusing and the hierarchy of the focusing nonlinear Schrödinger equation
We study the self-focusing of wave packets from the point of view of the semiclassical focusing nonlinear Schrödinger equation. A type of finite-time collapse/blowup of the solution of the associated dispersionless limit was investigated by Talanov in the 1960s, and recently Suleimanov identified a special solution of the dispersive problem that formally regularizes the blowup and is related to the hierarchy of the Painlevé-III equation. In this paper we approximate the Talanov solutions in t…

My golf buddies and I had a serious discussion, and I need your input. Best Catwoman from the 1960s.
#Batman #BIFF #POW
Julie Newmar
Lee Meriwether
Eartha Kitt

Closure under factorization from a result of Furstenberg
Somnath Bhattacharjee, Mrinal Kumar, Shanthanu S. Rai, Varun Ramanathan, Ramprasad Saptharishi, Shubhangi Saraf
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23214

Closure under factorization from a result of Furstenberg
We show that algebraic formulas and constant-depth circuits are closed under taking factors. In other words, we show that if a multivariate polynomial over a field of characteristic zero has a small constant-depth circuit or formula, then all its factors can be computed by small constant-depth circuits or formulas respectively. Our result turns out to be an elementary consequence of a fundamental and surprising result of Furstenberg from the 1960s, which gives a non-iterative description of t…

OMG. He was my first crush. I was 8 yrs old, and I was in love. 😢 #RIP #BobbySherman
From: @…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.03663 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csDS_…

Fast Geographic Routing in Fixed-Growth Graphs
In the 1960s, the social scientist Stanley Milgram performed his famous "small-world" experiments where he found that people in the US who are far apart geographically are nevertheless connected by remarkably short chains of acquaintances. Since then, there has been considerable work to design networks that accurately model the phenomenon that Milgram observed. One well-known approach was Barab{á}si and Albert's preferential attachment model, which has small diameter yet lacks an algorithm tha…

Undecidability of Translational Tiling of the Plane with Four Tiles
Chao Yang, Zhujun Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19295 https://…

Undecidability of Translational Tiling of the Plane with Four Tiles
The translational tiling problem, dated back to Wang's domino problem in the 1960s, is one of the most representative undecidable problems in the field of discrete geometry and combinatorics. Ollinger initiated the study of the undecidability of translational tiling with a fixed number of tiles in 2009, and proved that translational tiling of the plane with a set of $11$ polyominoes is undecidable. The number of polyominoes needed to obtain undecidability was reduced from $11$ to $7$ by Yang an…

Brian Wilson, co-creator of iconic 1960s band The Beach Boys, dies aged 82
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg71xrxrn8go

It May Feel Like the 1960s, but It's Worse (Serge Schmemann/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/09/opinion/trump-nixon-war-protests.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/250609/p143#a250609p143

The global economy is projected to slow sharply this year
as Trump’s trade policy disrupts international commerce and increases economic uncertainty,
the World Bank said on Tuesday in a report that underscores the toll of America’s trade war.
Despite the weakening outlook, the global economy is not expected to fall into a recession, the World Bank said.
However, the trade tension is setting the stage for the weakest decade of growth since the 1960s.
Economic dev…

World Bank Forecast Underscores Cost of U.S. Trade War
Along with a sharply downgraded projection for global output this year, it urged a “course correction” on trade to help preserve living standards.

"William Zani, one of the core programmers of the first BASIC compiler, tells the story of the demo of the DTSS system at the San Francisco AFIPS 1964 conference (minute 26:17), sending a BASIC program to from San Francisco to Hanover, New Hampshire over a telephone line, live in front of an audience, who (I quote) “went bananas”."

Dartmouth College
In August 2014, Dartmouth College published a video commemorating the 50th anniversary of the BASIC programming language, the subject of this month's Vidéothèque section. It features original footage from the 1960s and interviews of former students and team members, including Professor Thomas Kurtz, who was 85 years old at the time. But the heart and soul of the video is, without any doubt, Professor John Kemeny himself; not only his technical contributions, which were outstanding by every st…

"You should know Trump isn’t doing this on his own. The Hoover Institution has been plotting revenge against FDR since 1932. Groups like the Heritage Foundation and Heartland Foundation are generations old. The Federalist Society has been promising to overturn liberal justice since the 1960s. The Religious Right started working to overturn Roe v. Wade the day it was promulgated. All these groups have big money, and they play the long game.
What’s happening today is their platform, backed by their research. The fact it won’t work, that the 20th century won’t be put back into a bottle, that the Amendments put in place after 1865 somehow aren’t part of the “real” Constitution, is yet to be proven by events."
https://danafblankenhorn.substack.com/p/all-in-the-family

Research on the "attentional demands of automobile driving" conducted on I-495 and Rt 128 outside of Boston in the mid-1960s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOguslSPpqo

Galactic echoes
Rimpei Chiba, Jupiter Ding, Chris Hamilton, Matthew W. Kunz, Scott Tremaine
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16512 https://…

Galactic echoes
Gaia has revealed a variety of substructures in the phase space of stars in the Solar neighborhood, including the vertical `Snail' in $(z,v_z)$ space. Such substructures are often interpreted as the incompletely phase-mixed response of the disc stars to a single perturbation, such as an impulsive encounter with a satellite galaxy. In this paper we consider the possibility that such structures contain manifestations of phase space echoes. First established in plasma physics in the 1960s, echoes …

Candidate red supergiants from Gaia DR3 BPRP spectra: From the Perseus to the Scutum-Crux spiral arms
M. Messineo (DIFA - Uni Bo,INAF - OAS Bo)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.07097

Candidate red supergiants from Gaia DR3 BPRP spectra: From the Perseus to the Scutum-Crux spiral arms
Context. Our position within the Galactic plane and the dust obscuration make it challenging to retrieve a true picture of the Milky Way's morphology. While the Milky Way has been recognized as a barred spiral galaxy since the 1960s, there is still uncertainty about the exact number of spiral arms it contains. Currently, our understanding of the Galaxy is evolving thanks to the unprecedented detail provided by Gaia's parallactic distances. Aims. To shed light on the spatial distribution of red …