I edited the link to the more "lightweight" version (i.e. just the page, without loading his entire homepage as well, which is kind of heavy), so please consider trying again.
I agree with you RE blog posts, and the point of me linking to Bret Victor's work is to give an example of a form that's better-suited to the media we operate with today. Papers still live in the paper age (pun not intended).
Since Bret has liberated the scientific article from paper, we may as well take advantage of the more flexible layout possible with digital media. Interactive diagrams are so nice for learning that I think it's worth pursuing Victor's idea further. Fred Akalin's blog has a couple great examples! https://www.akalin.com/quintic-unsolvability
The purpose of a paper is to be rigorous and exact and move the field of study forward. That tends to make them dense and use the fields jargon - which is short hand for massive amounts of information.
The problem isn't the jargon itself, it's the fact that most labs have built up decades of institutional knowledge that they hoard for fear of their research being "scooped." I'm just thankful I don't work in downstream medical research anymore, where the number of replicable papers goes from one in two to one in ten, at best.
Your comment about reagents from one manufacturer failing while another succeeded brings back fond memories of trying to make our own botulinum neurotoxin to study neurons- and the rest about hoarding institutional knowledge reminds me why I tried to get out of that. I was one of those ambitious undergrads, but I permitted myself to wilt under the insanity of a system in which I KNEW that a partnered laboratory knew exactly what to do, but they were forbidden to share the knowledge because of politics. By the time I had cut through the wasteful uselessness, I discovered that the only sane person there, one who had been willing to share knowledge, she had actually DIED.
And so I merrily skipped over to the bioinformatics department, which has issues as well but in which I was able to manage them fairly effectively. :D
Unfortunately it's the same for software and algorithms (at least in bioinformatics, which is my field). Everything is treated like closely guarded secrets, at least in the smaller environments.
Thankfully the tendency is slowly being reversed and there are even things developed out in the open: the "problem" with those is that being in the open, it's harder to get publications out.
But imagine if the incentives of scholars somehow shift so that they look less to funding committees and more to the audiences of blogs and magazine articles. I think such a shift would do more good than harm.
Scholars would still write serious papers to establish their reputation amongst each-other, but insofar as they rush to publish, I'd rather they pump out accessible blog style articles than the kind of gibberish that is made today in order to inflate the citation metrics.
you mean something like https://terrytao.wordpress.com/
or
https://blogs.princeton.edu/imabandit/
Then yes I think these are a very valuable and increasingly important part of the scientific process. I think you might benefit from labelling the blog as 'math blog' which is quite distinct from the original link.
This is a function of two things. The first is that venues often have strict page limits for their submissions. Authors typically have a lot to say and not a lot of space to say it, so they pick language that is precise, dense, and typically colorless. The second is that every domain has a lot of style and nomenclature that the layman won't know. It can be learned, but you must remember scientists write for each other, not for the layman.
The second: I was talking about reading papers from my own field. That I don't understand a Biology paper (which indeed I don't -- I've tried) is perfectly understandable, but infosec papers shouldn't (and don't) contain any unknown lingo to me. It's just a very convoluted way of writing.
The whole thing is 283 kB and half of that is due to three small images that are already compressed as much as is possible (but that are actually part of the comment about the paper formatting, not the paper itself).
That seems very reasonable for a scientific paper which would have been about the same size as a PDF.
http://worrydream.com/#!/ScientificCommunicationAsSequential...
which loads the article... plus the entire homepage of Bret Victor, which is kind of heavy.
Personally I'm a big fan of blog posts: they're written for a broader audience in understandable language. I don't have any trouble reading English, but papers are almost universally written in a way that is more complicated than necessary. And in blog posts, if someone made a "novel new algorithm", at least you can be sure there's code, raw test data, screenshots, or whatever else is needed to DIY. And someone on the web is talking about it, perhaps even with comments below the post itself.