u/abecedarius

I wonder if the measurements were correct but misinterpreted: the Earth's rotation has noticeably slowed since antiquity, and this is evident in historical eclipses -- e.g. one that hit Athens 1500+ years ago would've been 30 degrees off given a constant day length. Longer days imply shorter years when measured in days.

More likely you're right: I have no idea what "Walther's observations made at Nuremberg" were.

Yeah, that's fair. I agree the card fees were an objection worth raising.

A lot of things "just don't work" until someone finds a way to make them work. It used to be conventional wisdom that video phones weren't happening because people didn't actually want video calls (to pick an example less culture-war-prone than digital cash).

To pique my interest it'd have to lead with something interesting. The readme takes several screens to get down to language features, then orders them starting with comment syntax.

"Between ML and Lisp, on the BEAM" was a good start but it needed more than that.

Why do you want this non-Meissner superconductor? Do you have some hack in mind to use it? (besides the infinite power brocht brings up)

So, let's boycott them. I do.

IANAL but this case sort of reminds me of embezzlement. They represented to their funder that they were doing honest work, which they weren't.

They may have gone to the same schools (mostly), but they didn't necessarily come to math through school. Like, a pretty common origin story in my generation starts with "I wanted to make computer games".

Huh. Tossing someone out on the streets is normally done when they've kept failing to pay rent, not for their benefit but because the landlord wants a renter who pays.

Consider an immigrant P moving from nation A to nation B because they see life as better in B. Governments are supposedly instituted by people including P, to secure a good life. P judging B a better deal, and B failing to stop them from moving, are "tossing A out on the streets". I'm just pretty boggled by this analogy. I guess I shouldn't be since I've seen kinda similar claims about exit from public schools or from planet Earth, etc. Can you or someone help me see where this is coming from? Should I go read Exit, Voice, and Loyalty or what?

One I remember seeing at a used bookstore was about an old Chinese text on solving linear systems (gaussian elimination). TBH it didn't look like much fun to me; I wish I knew of mathematically fun-to-read books in this vein, e.g. about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madhava_of_Sangamagrama

I wish he'd engage with the more object-level arguments instead of taking it to be mostly about trends and psychology.

That's why I don't really want to engage with this article either... but some points he brought up apparently to support something like "nothing wild ever happens":

Even if we achieve speeds on the order of (say) 10% of the speed of light, which we almost certainly can’t for simple relativity reasons

At 0.1c relativity is still a small correction. The rest of this paragraph against interstellar travel suffers from argument-by-my-solution-wouldn't-work. (I'd agree that probably it'd not be done with rockets. The rocket equation is harsh.)

We’ll never “upload” our consciousness into computers to live forever, which suggests that there is some such thing as our consciousness separate from the physiological structures that contain it, which is a dualist fantasy

Argument by name calling.

When Szilard conceived nuclear chain reactions years before anyone else, this "nothing wild" heuristic seems to have been his biggest obstacle to getting others to treat nuclear physics research as special.

Added: Is AI R&D special in some similar way? The brain's components work on the rough order of a million times slower than our computing devices. Nuclear energies are on the rough order of a million times greater than chemical. It's a funny coincidence. (Yes this is not itself an argument that brain equivalence is imminent.)

If it'd come first, I can't really imagine anyone proposing sigma/pi as an improvement. But maybe there are other tweaks to these notations that would feel nicer -- e.g. Knuth advocated a different way of notating the bounds.

Rather a shame nobody uses big + and big × for Sigma and Pi.

More to the point, it was before soybean oil and cheap sugar.

Is the 600BC typical of that time there? I'm surprised by the difference just 60 years later. (I've seen the like of the 540 in museums but have only a vague impression of the era.)

iirc a Roman copy of a Hellenistic original, though I'm not sure.

As an old fart with old eyes, I can't see the nostalgia value outweighing the tiny screen with tiny characters.

I was going to link the first reference: "Info tech of ancient democracy"

In fact Leo Szilard thought of nuclear chain reactions for the first time in the mid-30s in direct reaction to Rutherford's "Anyone who expects a source of power from transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine". And he did try to be responsible about where he disclosed that idea. (Same guy behind the later Einstein letter to FDR.)

Back on AI, I recommend a 2017 book of interviews of AI people including Lecun, Architects of Intelligence. The state of things in mid-2024 is hard to reconcile with the general vibe from almost all the interviewees about progress towards general intelligence, their views before GPT-2. I mean, there are few specific-enough predictions to grade them as necessarily wrong, but if you'd been trying to take away a feel for the near future you would've been far behind in your estimates.

This is not really about a programming language (though you can treat it that way), and I'm not sure what sort of beauty you mean, but:

https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp

There used to be a stackoverflow question about this where I posted more good books with good code, but the question got deleted along with all of the answers.

Maybe you're thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropic_gravity ?

It'd distinguish energy and torque, unlike standard units. So consider formulas about torque/power tradeoffs? (I'm not a mechanical engineer even on the internet.)

I guess there's action vs. angular momentum, relatedly.

I sorta wish we used unary / for reciprocal, in the same way we use unary - for negative. You'd need to parenthesize it more often than we do for power-of-minus-1, so I'm not sure it'd be comfy enough in the end. But maybe with some further adjustments we'd find a strictly better notation.

Does anyone else suffer from the OmegaQuant finger-pricker? It's not so bad immediately, and I bandage the fingertip after, but the site would still hurt weeks later if I happened to brush against it. That was at least a couple weeks the first time, and definitely three weeks the second time -- if I do this test again I will pick a different site rather than find out what a third prick at the exact same site will do.

(I pricked the left ring finger on the outside rather than the fleshy fingerpad. I guess people are defaulting to the pad, and that heals better?)

This was collected June 24, following my first one in March. That first one was a non-fasting afternoon sample, while this was in morning fasting. Probably any trend signal here is overwhelmed by the fasting difference? Posting it anyway for Science and for /u/exfatloss's chart.

Over this interval I cut out pork and chicken (except for what was in the fridge at the start, for up to a couple weeks), reduced egg consumption, substituted wild for farmed fish (like once or twice a week), increased beef somewhat and introduced cacao butter chips as an end-of-eating-window snack.

Weight roughly unchanged. (I don't have a scale I trust, just a tape measure.)

I got 25% off by ordering through LifeExtension rather than direct from OmegaQuant. (This deal might not be there anymore, but I'd check for it at least, next time.)

Right after this omegaquant I left for a family vacation in Sweden, with a totally different diet. Lots of bread, no problem -- I went gluten free 12 years ago, after years of mysterious problems; in recent years I'd become able to tolerate bread again, but this was the first time unlimited amounts caused no digestive upset. (Maybe Swedish bread is healthier, but I would not put too much weight on that, because I had already been Weston-Price-influenced in the years up to going gluten-free.)

A random extra note: I'm trying to pick up more bio/medicine/chemistry, and while I don't have any recommendations specific to this sub, one recent book that stood out was Uri Alon's Systems Medicine. There's math but it's not too fancy, and it's meant to be accessible for a general science background, not only biologists/doctors.