How do you keep things you don’t want out of your Twitter stream? You might say just don’t follow people who post things you don’t want to read, but it’s not that simple.

Some people post worthwhile original material, but they retweet things that are offensive or just not interesting. You can fix that by turning off retweets from that person. Then you’ll just see tweets they compose.

Except until yesterday, there was no way to turn off “likes.” You’d randomly see things someone “liked” even if you turned off their retweets. Now there’s a way to simply see the content you’ve subscribed to. Not only that, you’ll see it in order! Numerous times I’ve tried to go back and find something but couldn’t because Twitter saw fit to edit and rearrange my stream since the last time I looked at it.

The way to simply see your Twitter stream in order isn’t obvious. You have to go to

Settings and privacy -> Account

and uncheck the box that says “Show the best Tweets first.”

Who wouldn’t want to see the best tweets first? Sounds good to me. But by unchecking the box you’re effectively saying “Let me decide what’s best by who I choose to follow.”

I’m pleased by this new feature (actually, new ability to turn off a feature). I’ve tried to maintain a decent signal to noise ratio in my Twitter stream and Twitter has continually tried to erode it, until now.

I’ve updated the icons for my Twitter accounts.

I had a couple tweets this week that were fairly popular. The first was a pun on the musical Hamilton and the Hamiltonian from physics. The former is about Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804) and the latter is named after William Rowan Hamilton (1805–1865).

Hamiltonian: The new Broadway hit about the sum of potential and kinetic energy. pic.twitter.com/PCJk3imDsq

— Differential Eqns (@diff_eq) May 11, 2016

The second was a sort of snowclone, a variation on the line from the Bhagavad Gita that J. Robert Oppenheimer famously quoted in reference to the atomic bomb:

“Now I am become Data, the destroyer of theories.”

— John D. Cook (@JohnDCook) May 12, 2016

I’ve updated the icons of all my daily tip Twitter accounts. My goal was to simplify some the icons and make them all more consistent.

Here’s a page giving links and short descriptions for each account.

Here are wordclouds for some of my most popular Twitter accounts. Thanks to Mike Croucher for creating these images. He explains on his blog how to create your own Twitter wordclouds using R.

My most popular account is CompSciFact, tweets about computer science and related topics.

AlgebraFact is for algebra, number theory, and miscellaneous pure math. (Miscellaneous applied math is more likely to end up on AnalysisFact.)

ProbFact is for probability.

DataSciFact is for data science: statistics, machine learning, visualization, etc.

You can find a full list of my various Twitter accounts here.

Periodically someone on Twitter will suggest that one of my Twitter accounts is a bot. Others will reply in the second person plural, suggesting that there’s a group of people behind one of the accounts. These accounts aren’t run by a bot or a committee, just me.

I do use software to schedule my tweets in advance. Most of the tweets from my personal account are live. Most of the tweets from my topic accounts are scheduled, though some are live. All replies are manual, not automated, and I don’t scrape content from anywhere.

Occasionally I read the responses to these accounts and sometimes I reply. But with over half a million followers (total, not unique) I don’t try to keep up with all the responses. If you’d like to contact me, you can do so here. That I do keep up with.

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