Betsy DeVos Fails the Test

Mitt Romney said: Betsy DeVos is a smart choice for education secretary. The Wall Street Journal said DeVos knows how to fight and how to make the moral case for reform. Andrew Rotherham called her a pretty mainstream pick. Rick Hess, purveyor of straight talk on education issues, informs us that DeVos is a solid pick who is smart, thoughtful, and committed to doing what she thinks is best. It\u27s too bad none of that was on display yesterday when DeVos in the hearing yesterday to determine if she should become the next U.S. Secretary of Education. [excerpt

Cocycle superrigidity for ergodic actions of non-semisimple Lie groups

Suppose $L$ is a semisimple Levi subgroup of a connected Lie group~$G$, $X$ is a Borel $G$-space with finite invariant measure, and \alpha \colon X \times G \to \GL_n(\real) is a Borel cocycle. Assume $L$ has finite center, and that the real rank of every simple factor of~$L$ is at least two. We show that if $L$ is ergodic on~$X$, and the restriction of~$\alpha$ to~$X \times L$ is cohomologous to a homomorphism (modulo a compact group), then, after passing to a finite cover of~$X$, the cocycle $\alpha$ itself is cohomologous to a homomorphism (modulo a compact group)

Kickshaws

A collection of linguistic kickshaws

Solving the quartic with a pencil

This expository paper presents the general solution of a quartic equation as a jump off point to introduce Lefschetz fibrations. It should be accessible to a broad audience.Comment: final versio

Why Is Mulvaney Opposed to Feeding Poor Kids at School?

Folks, you\u27ve got to get a load of this guy Mick Mulvaney. Just looking at his name conjures images of a character from a gangster novel set during Prohibition, but he\u27s actually the Trump White House\u27s director of the Office of Management and Budget. That means he\u27s the hatchet man—the guy responsible for making sure everything Trump wants to cut gets cut. And it means he\u27s a real human, too. Allegedly. Case in point: Mulvaney has been producing amazing sound bites lately to explain the contents of Trump\u27s proposed federal budget. [excerpt

These Testing Obsessions Are Getting a Little Weird

This morning, as she was getting ready for work, my wife noticed something unusual about our son, who is in third grade. He was quietly eating breakfast, like he always does, but something about him was different. He was wearing a plain white t-shirt. He must have noticed that she was looking at him, because he looked up and said: Do you think it\u27s okay if I wear this shirt today? His wardrobe normally consists of about five t-shirts that he cycles through, one after the other, and sometimes tries to wear twice in a row if we don\u27t catch him.[excerpt