Replying to
@robinhouston@mathstodon.xyz @simontatham@hachyderm.io this is the one I remember quite well:
Remote
𝓙. 𝓜.
@tpfto@mathstodon.xyz
mastodon 4.7.2"Not everything written is important; not everything important is written."
------
I strive to write about the mundane, the sublime, and all else in between. Sometimes unjustly accused of actually knowing what I'm talking about.
------
Interested in consulting opportunities; DM me for further inquiries.
171 Followers
170 Following
50 Posts
Joined April 17, 2019
WordPress:
GitHub:
Shadertoy:
Some artwork I did a few years ago.
Replying to
@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz I guess this is related to the "Pauli effect" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_effect)
Replying to
@gregeganSF@mathstodon.xyz In cases like these, a retraction feels not unlike closing the barn door after the entire herd has already fled.
Replying to
@robinhouston@mathstodon.xyz I sometimes get the feeling that the whole of Alpha is a collection of perfectly okay mathematical methods, held together by duct tape and baling wire. That said, I find that when they announced that ChatGPT can interface with Alpha some time back, it seemed like LLMs were the long-missing front end for Alpha.
Replying to
@codinghorror@infosec.exchange it's exactly the same reasoning people give to stay on Twitter, long after... (vaguely motions towards the horizon) all of this happened.
Replying to
@ki@chaos.social well... what I *am allowed to* say about how the business was implemented is that there's a whole lot of pattern recognition going behind the scenes. Since you mention NLUIs: deciding what to do for ambiguous input was part of why I joked about the thing being "held together by duct tape and baling wire" (there's a fair bit of weighting involved, but I am not going to say anything further). (cc. @pozorvlak@mathstodon.xyz @robinhouston@mathstodon.xyz)
Replying to
@liw@toot.liw.fi yeah, the whole "Gell-Mann amnesia" thing certainly comes into play here: unless you know that the journalist was trained as a science/tech journalist, there isn't much hope that whatever is written in the papers or your favorite news website has any modicum of accuracy. And even then, science journalists still get things wrong in their attempt to translate from jargon to a more accessible reading level (cf. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40032569)
cc. @baldur@toot.cafe
Replying to
@wombatpandaa@mastodon.social "you guys do know we don't have to just take Rich Whiteman #3 at his word, right?" - well, you also have to account for principles like Upton Sinclair's "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it". (cc. @baldur@toot.cafe)
Replying to
@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz "These waves were locked in when the alloy quickly cooled after impact, and they've been sitting there frozen in the structure ever since." - quenching (as opposed to annealing) is a truly magical process, a little like catching lightning in a bottle. (See also: Prince Rupert's drops.)
Replying to
@ludicity@mastodon.sprawl.club "I broke a thousand dollars an hour on tasks with measurable success metrics" accompanied with "this was all so easy that I’m going mad with boredom" sounds like a lovely problem to have. :)
Replying to
@mjd@mathstodon.xyz @johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz in Japanese, you will frequently encounter unvoiced vowels when the particular mora is at the end of the word. The common example is "thank you very much",「ありがとうございます」 (arigato gozaimasu), where the terminal 「す」 (su) has the unvoiced vowel. (Contrast this with "excuse me/sorry", 「すみません」 (sumimasen), where the 「す」 is voiced.)
Replying to
Replying to
@sellathechemist@mastodon.social he was a complex character, all the same. (cc. @vnikolov@ieji.de @johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz)
Replying to
@tristrambrelstaff@mathstodon.xyz He brought it up himself in "The Double Helix", no doubt in a self-deprecating vein:
Briefly, the Indiana biochemists encouraged me to learn organic chemistry, but after I used a Bunsen burner to warm up some benzene, I was relieved from further true chemistry. It was safer to turn out an uneducated Ph.D. than to risk another explosion.
Replying to
And in Britain, [Oppenheimer] had a rather difficult time: He tried joining an experimental group, and there was some sort of serious trouble. I can’t remember what the trouble was, but it was really quite serious. He left Britain and went to Germany. And there, he began working under Max Born and decided that he was a theorist, not an experimenter. He would never have been a decent experimenter, he was altogether too nervous. He never stopped smoking, he always had a cigarette in his mouth. He was a very nervous, tense man.
I gotta say... trying to do stuff at 42°C (~108°F) heat and 80% humidity is sorta kinda cramping my creativity. I can't afford to live in a place with air conditioning, and bathing every 30 minutes can only cool you so much. (https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/2230472/heat-index-watch-danger-levels-expected-in-metro-manila-36-others)
Replying to
@ColinTheMathmo@mathstodon.xyz one wonders if a significant fraction of people know about this... I'm sure we can easily rationalize any observations.
Replying to
@mjd@mathstodon.xyz @johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz now to be fair, whether a tiny beastie is a bacterium or an archaean only gets figured out after something involved like DNA analysis; so if you're just looking at a microscope (as one usually does), you won't be able to tell 'em apart.
As you've probably figured out by now, we always knew we had methane-producing microbes in the gut, but we only found out they're archaean relatively recently (cf. https://doi.org/10.3748/wjg.v20.i43.16062)
Replying to
@meltedcheese@c.im @factsentinel@mstdn.social @gregeganSF@mathstodon.xyz and well, who has time to chase papers two levels deep (i.e., a paper in the bibliography of a paper cited by the paper you're currently looking at) or more these days? ;)
Replying to
@dgar@aus.social I'm usually 50-50 on whether to leave a comment or not after responding to a poll, but I think I'll comment this time. :)
Replying to
@matdevdug@c.im ...and well, it's easier (and apparently more fun) to make mean comments than to make constructive observations/addenda.
Replying to
@johndcook for guitar picks, my immediate thought was Bernoulli's "polyzomal curve", \(y^4 - 6y^2 + 4x^2 y^2 + 1=0\); in fact, this gets you two guitar picks for the price of one.
Replying to
@boutiquemaths @andresvillaveces I remember that MathOverflow thread very well: https://mathoverflow.net/a/44213
Replying to
@aaron@chirp.zadzmo.org yeah, atomoxetine would be Lilly's Strattera; bupropion is GSK's Wellbutrin/Zyban. (cc. @infobeautiful@vis.social)
Replying to
@MxVerda@lgbtqia.space heh, I haven't been in the pharma business in a good long while (used to do R&D), but I recall lamotrigine was still mostly intended for seizures, and even then, prescribing Lamictal was still quite controlled due to its unfortunate tendency to mess the liver up. I guess your doctor thought it was still the best choice despite those odds. I hope you are doing better these days. (cc. @infobeautiful@vis.social)
Replying to
@MxVerda@lgbtqia.space naloxone is an antidote to opioid (morphine, fentanyl, etc.) overdoses, so it's not really a drug intended to exhibit effects on the brain. As for naproxen, it's what's called an NSAID (non-steroidal anti-inflamatory drug), often used to treat pain and swelling. It's the same group of drugs aspirin and ibuprofen are in.
Replying to
@infobeautiful@vis.social two faults off the top of my head as I looked through the diagram: 1. aripiprazole is conspicuously missing in the list of 2nd gen antipsychotics (I would have chosen to include that over sulpiride, if space was at a premium); 2. rather than "chloroform" under "sedatives and hypnotics", "chloral hydrate" was likely intended instead. There are more subtle ones, but these are the two glaring ones for me.
Not a fault, but one thing that was left unsaid in that diagram is that flunitrazepam is probably more well-known to people by the brand name Roche gave it, Rohypnol.
Replying to
@707Kat@mastodon.art you might be surprised at the proportion of newspaper articles that are just lightly copyedited press releases pulled from services like PR Newswire (https://www.prnewswire.com/) (cc. @baldur@toot.cafe )
Replying to
@jcolag@mastodon.social I think I said this in another old thread: almost all of our artificial sweeteners were discovered because of poor lab technique. (cc. @johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz)
Replying to
@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz yeah, there are apparently multiple reports of Oppenheimer being a fidgety sort. But he had excellent administrative skills, so I guess it balanced out. (cc. @kimlockhartga@beige.party)
Replying to
@baeuchle@gruene.social "it's unstable in its base config already" - there's a moral lesson in there somewhere, I'm sure of it. :) (cc. @csk@mathstodon.xyz)
Replying to
RE: https://mastodon.social/@docpop/116608515170969849
@subtetralectic@defcon.social after seeing this toot, I think I now understand the situation better. (cc. @gregeganSF@mathstodon.xyz)
Replying to
@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz when I wrote my previous toot, I completely forgot about "Pele's tears" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pele%27s_tears) On that note, all the glass we ever use in applications are amorphous and not quasicrystalline; one wonders how "violent" we need to get to get past boring, amorphous glass and obtain something weird yet exploitable. :)
Replying to
@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz I wonder if one might be able to use a percolation model to analyze this behavior...
Replying to
@AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz "They cite the lost-in-stupid-parentheses syntax as the reason why they hate LISP. But the real, yet often unacknowledged, reason is their inability to grasp FP." - I'm told the kiddies these days refer to that as a "skill issue". ;D Admittedly, getting the hang of FP does not always come naturally (unless you already knew something like lambda calculus beforehand).
Replying to
@Heterokromia@aus.social @johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz the more pressing concern when one takes statins is the increased risk of muscle wasting and rhabdomyolysis (if your muscles start feeling sore and tender while you're on the drugs, please consult your doctor). This can be managed through supplementation with coenzyme Q10 (cf. https://doi.org/10.1161/JAHA.118.009835) (I'm not your doctor, much less a doctor, so please consult with an actual one before starting supplementation.) As for methanogenic microbes: it is possible that this extra effect could be used to alleviate constipation in some patients (cf. https://doi.org/10.1111/apt.13469) (That said, remember that the statins were derived from substances produced by a fungus that are, as is usual for these, often intended to weed out competing microbes through inhibiting enzymes the fungi don't have, but their competition does.)
Replying to
@magnus@mastodon.world @johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz it's like the terrestrial version of cleaner wrasse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrasse#Cleaner_wrasse)
Replying to
@dougmerritt @johndcook a possible starting point would be the polar curve \(r=\tfrac{3}{3+\tfrac13 \cos 3\theta}\).
Replying to
@johncarlosbaez all the focus on "growth" in various companies' quarterly reports sometimes reminds me of the "cancer cell" analogy; after all, if there's anything cancer cells are widely known for, it's unchecked growth. Unchecked, because the limits on cell division (e.g. telomeres) that are usually in place have been completely bypassed. You sometimes wonder if "we're doing okay, because this quarter, we earned just as much as the previous one" couldn't be ever considered enough.
Replying to
@ids1024@mathstodon.xyz sure, because what the world needs is more rodents of unusual size... :)
Replying to
@johndcook@mathstodon.xyz Yes, in that particular case, you actually get an indeterminate form, so you have to take limits after doing the expansion for generic a. This was fresh on my mind when I read your blog entry, since I had recently figured out a slightly more tractable implementation of Bürmann (at least, compared to repeatedly differentiating that divided difference in the original formula).
Replying to
@infobeautiful@vis.social for some of us folk, the "watch TV" is completely replaceable with "check social media/get sad" and "destroy body with food or alcohol", and not necessarily in the order I gave.
Replying to
@beaiouns@is.nota.live for quite some time in the past, I had thought Multiply (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiply_(website) ) was going to be a Big Thing™, since it even let people who are not exactly experts at making/laying out websites to have all of that while still retaining the social media experience. The fact that it's no longer around shows what I know about predicting these things. :P (cc. @lunarloony@dosgame.club @ifixcoinops@retro.social )
Replying to
@skeletor@mas.to this isn't all that different from "would you jump off a bridge if you saw a bunch of other people doing it?"
Replying to
@simontatham@hachyderm.io @csk@mathstodon.xyz @pieter@mathstodon.xyz the distinction between the two seems to imply to me that you've better odds winning at Las Vegas than at Monte Carlo.
Replying to
@robinhouston@mathstodon.xyz how about the following alternative: make this a thread, with one toot for each Platonic solid (probably set to "Quiet public"), and each favorite counts as a vote? Problem with this is people can star more than one toot, so how you deal with dupes is up to you.
Replying to
@mjd@mathstodon.xyz this is interesting to juxtapose with this even earlier toot: https://goblin.camp/@sugar/109418593279912357