My favorite artistic illustration is probably Jorge Stolfi's drawing inspired by the self-adjusting splay tree data structure of Sleator and Tarjan:
https://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/splay/tree5.jpg
Yes, this efficiency-aspect is not captured in the illustration -- while splitting perfectly _by index_ comes for free, splitting perfectly _by value_ needs nontrivial work (median-finding).
Socrates supposedly loved going to the market. When his students asked him about this, Socrates replied, "I love to go and see all the things I am happy without." :)
"Seeing an astronomer using a telescope to observe a galaxy, no-one will confuse the telescope with the galaxy. Mathematics differs from science in that there is no clear distinction between the tools and the objects of study." -- D.Aldous
You are right in general, but when the quote is from someone on whose research the result builds in an important way (as it is the case here), I would say it is fair.
Your first point is correct, but just to clarify your second point, these two definitions are not quite equivalent, as there is a world of functions growing more quickly than log^k(n) no matter how large constant k, but still within n^o(1).
For an example, consider 2^sqrt(log(n)).
This is a bit similar to something being faster than polynomial, but slower than exponential.
There are a good reasons why we don't usually do average-case analysis of algorithms, chief among them that we have no idea how inputs are distributed (another reason is computational difficulty). Worst-case bounds are pessimistic, but they hold.
Honest question: who does it harm? These aspects that you mention may not be to your (or to my) taste, but if they are relatively harmless and the other stuff is overwhelmingly good, why not let it go?
The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please." He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. "I'll pay you tomorrow," he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in the nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you." "I think otherwise," the door said. "Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt." In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. "You discover I'm right," the door said. It sounded smug. From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt's money-gulping door. "I'll sue you," the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, "I've never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it."
> The Soviets royally sucked in the computation department
To add more nuance, there is an essay [1] telling the history of early maximum flow algorithms and includes this small anecdote:
[An] American asked: ".. how were you able to perform such an enormous amount of computing with your weak computers" to which the Russian responded: "we used better algorithms".
There is some truth to that, besides maximum flow, similar stories can be told about linear programming, data structures (e.g. AVL-trees), numerical computing, etc. The hardware may have been sloppy, but the algorithms-research was top notch.
> However, you're being "too smart for your own good" if you go down this route. A perfectly unbiased input would still have 50% of its inputs rejected, and already you've dropped the speed of the RNG by 50%.
To improve this situation you can use an additional trick: keep track of the sequence of thrown-away pairs, and look at them again in consecutive pairs, and generate some more random bits:
* 00 00 -- throw away
* 11 11 -- throw away
* 00 11 -- output 1
* 11 00 -- output 0
and so on..
see the paper "Iterating Von Neumann's Procedure for Extracting Random Bits" for details.
One small thing in the latest redesign:
if you have two tabs, one active, one not, the visual cues suggest exactly the opposite. The active one seems like a clickable button, the inactive one seems pushed down and not clickable.
After misclicking hundreds of times, I still couldn't train myself to go against my perception and follow the designer's "bold vision", using it feels like writing with my left hand or steering a bicycle with a crooked wheel.
I recognize the symptoms you describe, but I find the picture you painted a bit too pessimistic, given that in the field that I'm familiar with (theoretical CS), groups in Poland have been among the strongest and most visible in Europe in the past 10 years.
This seems like a very accurate description, especially the observation about temporal continuity, which we take for granted, but on occasions it can feel like a fragile illusion.
Relatedly, there was an unintentionally funny translation of Gmail in Hungarian, where it was supposed to say "You have no conversations in Trash", or something like that. The translation was technically correct, but it sounded very much like "No more talking in the trashcan!", which was hard to read without imagining someone shouting at a trashcan with a person inside it.