Matt McIrvin

he/him

I'm a programmer who was trained in physics long ago. If on Bluesky, follow @ap.brid.gy so I can see you.

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Last Notes

2026-08-30 20:34:51 UTC

"Coyote vs. ACME" is surprisingly good, the funniest and cleverest Looney Tunes movie and it's not even close (unless you count "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" and it's about on par with that).
Apparently the distributor paid $50 million to rescue it from Warner's ashcan and another $10 million or so on marketing. Will they make money? Unclear, but I suspect this thing is a word-of-mouth movie that is going to have legs.

2026-05-08 12:36:06 UTC

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@nprofile…et8z @nprofile…6tqp That's not being bad at stats, that's intentional abuse. There is no misunderstanding here, just dishonesty and malice.

2026-02-01 20:55:01 UTC

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@nprofile…g0zc THIS IS THE VOICE OF WORLD CONTROL

2025-11-23 12:52:04 UTC

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@nprofile…e4ry My experience as a tutor and a teaching assistant in math-heavy subjects was that, while it's not everyone, there are a lot of kids who basically get the material but who need someone to occasionally encourage them that they're on the right track when they seize up and second-guess themselves.
The second-guessing can be useful in more advanced study if it's targeted appropriately. If I didn't know for sure that that diagram was supposed to represent Euclidean geometry, I *couldn't* actually say that the congruent angles followed from the symmetry of the triangle without further assumptions. (Maybe the metric space it's in doesn't share that symmetry!) Then, that student's suspicion of intuition would be warranted. It's just misfiring in situations where it's not.

2025-11-11 15:48:23 UTC

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@nprofile…gfh6 This reminds me very much of John Archibald Wheeler's fragmentary 1970s musings about an algorithmic approach to quantum gravity from the end of Misner, Thorne and Wheeler's "Gravitation". He imagined a geometry being created by a machine that hooked chainmail links together. The approach never really panned out in physics, but it's interesting nevertheless. And also, yes, highly reminiscent of knitting/crocheting.

2025-11-08 19:54:05 UTC

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@nprofile…stct I feel like you could somehow get this result using density matrices?

2025-10-27 20:31:09 UTC

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@nprofile…8eua right!

2025-10-27 20:17:59 UTC

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@nprofile…8eua I remember a long discussion where we were going around and around on "what happens if you try to jump into the white hole?" and we kept saying "it turns into a black hole and you fall in". Which, yes, is pretty counterintuitive.

2025-10-09 21:25:29 UTC

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@nprofile…saev I saw many quite little kids riding it, since it has a fairly low height limit and it's not super intense. Like Jack Rabbit, I think they'll give you a sticker or something for your first ride when you reach the magic minimum.
Tivoli also has a couple of steel family coasters and a B&M floorless looper, and those are fine, but this ride is special.

2025-10-09 20:43:54 UTC

Rutschebanen at Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen, which I believe is currently the second-oldest operating #rollercoaster in the world, opened 1914.
This is a side-friction coaster, which means it has no upstop wheels holding it vertically to the track (one of the first to have them was Jack Rabbit at Seabreeze which I rode earlier this year), and this one also has a brake operator who rides on a jump seat in the middle of the train.
It's a good ride that actually gives little pops of airtime on some of the drops, remarkably given the mechanics of it (aside from the train having no upstop wheels, the brake operator basically has no restraint either, so obviously it couldn't give too much). I love the old-school rockwork and many dark tunnels too.
#rollercoasters
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/115/346/104/562/773/049/original/313b21ac741316cb.jpg

2025-06-20 12:48:22 UTC

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@nprofile…cas5 @nprofile…yu7x For systems corresponding to our everyday intuitions (like a localized gravitating system with a flat background at long distances), it's possible to define a "gravitational energy" such that everything is conserved. But not for the general case.

2025-06-20 10:33:41 UTC

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@nprofile…yu7x @nprofile…cas5 This is something that Albert Einstein got stuck on for about a year (if I recall correctly) before just giving up. Emmy Noether came up with the original formulation of Noether's Theorem to clarify the situation.

2025-06-17 12:42:38 UTC

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@nprofile…hr6z not being able to see doesn't mean you don't have some idea what color is! And I know these things appear on devices that appear/are used in public (my wife's aunt has one), so how they look is a thing one might care about.

2025-06-16 19:20:14 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k the nation that controls magnetism controls the universe!

2025-06-15 12:31:38 UTC

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@nprofile…saev @nprofile…fa4k @nprofile…6cfc @nprofile…hszg @nprofile…mlph reminds me of They Might Be Giants' early song "Rhythm Section Want Ad":
"Do you sing like Olive Oyl on purpose?
You guys must be into the Eurythmics"
while in the background John Flansburgh is chanting "NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO"
(mind you, I personally dig the Eurythmics)

2025-06-15 10:27:33 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k @nprofile…6cfc @nprofile…hszg @nprofile…mlph This is definitely a case that's bugged me for a long time: I remember reading textbooks that started out giving the zero case explicitly every time when talking about power series because they didn't want to define 0⁰=1, and then just sort of dropped it hoping you wouldn't notice.

2025-06-13 12:32:36 UTC

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@nprofile…yu7x this seems obvious in hindsight... I suppose it wasn't explored in detail before because orbital angular momentum isn't considered that important in a system without rotational symmetry.

2025-06-10 01:27:01 UTC

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@nprofile…59k6 right now we have Stephen Miller actually getting mad about the "nation of immigrants" rhetoric you often hear, not because he's acknowledging the shame of our long history of xenophobia, but to assert that xenophobia is good and proper Americanism. While his family wonders what the hell happened to him.

2025-06-09 23:54:43 UTC

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@nprofile…59k6 The US War Department produced a lot of propaganda during World War II declaring race, ethnic and religious prejudice un-American, because we were fighting Nazis. Sometimes today you see people passing this stuff around saying "when did we forget?" and so forth, but I remind myself that the same War Department was putting out incredibly racist propaganda against the Japanese at the same time, and they were rounding up Japanese Americans into camps, and the Army was segregated.
Still, after the war a lot of people seemed to think a bit about the contrast between that anti-racist message against fascism and what we were actually doing at home, and that helped.

2025-06-09 23:17:48 UTC

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@nprofile…59k6 I don't get upset by that rhetoric because I understand what they're trying to do: shift *normative* "Americanness" in a better direction. Descriptive Americanness is another thing entirely.
It's really the only tactic that's ever worked here. Yes, it's bizarre that this country was founded by a bunch of slavers and genocides who declared it was self-evident that all men were created equal. But to move the needle in the right direction, you point to the lofty ideals and say "look, we're supposed to actually be *doing* that".

2025-05-17 11:47:31 UTC

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@nprofile…yu7x Huh.
This is so *almost* but not quite related to some of the stuff I was poking around recently--constructible regular polygons, particularly. (The odd-sided ones have numbers of sides whose prime factorizations are square-free, with unique primes of the form 2^(2^n) + 1. But those really have to be primes.)

2025-05-16 02:38:11 UTC

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@nprofile…hujc I happened to see the London cast during, I think, the last period it was in London. I've never been to Pittsburgh to see the original.

2025-05-13 20:58:51 UTC

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@nprofile…yu7x @nprofile…fa4k @nprofile…xrxy there are some bits of Project West Ford (an early experiment to blanket the Earth with a reflective orbital shell of tiny needles) still up there being tracked-- that wasn't supposed to happen, but I think some of the micro-needles clumped together and were less susceptible to drag. I think about that whenever I am in Westford, Mass., the town they were named after (because a project antenna was there, I think).

2025-05-06 00:11:35 UTC

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@nprofile…3eq4 it has sort of a Saul Bass Hitchcock opening quality

2025-05-03 16:42:06 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k I noticed you said a civilized *country* which in the UK has a pretty specific meaning...

2025-04-14 21:23:28 UTC

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@nprofile…59k6 Doubtless more correct than my proposal after Nigel Tufnel to simply construct a regular 65536-gon and then go one bigger.

2025-04-14 21:10:30 UTC

"Although it was known to Carl Friedrich Gauss by 1801 that the regular 65537-gon was constructible, the first explicit construction of a regular 65537-gon was given by Johann Gustav Hermes (1894). The construction is very complex; Hermes spent 10 years completing the 200-page manuscript."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/65537-gon

2025-04-10 00:08:50 UTC

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@nprofile…qmju if nothing else, it's assuming a partial derivative is a total derivative-- that raising the tariff on imports doesn't affect exports at all. That seems unlikely.

2025-04-07 13:11:42 UTC

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@nprofile…args The math and physics pages have a different problem: they have a generally very high level of accuracy but are incomprehensibly written. If you try to write or rewrite a page along the lines of an encyclopedic but readable popular exposition, people will jump in with expert "corrections" and additions that interrupt the flow of the development and send readers down circular rabbit holes to figure out what is being said. The single-author approach of traditional encyclopedias like the Brittanica does better there, though you're subject to luck of the draw.

2025-04-07 11:04:53 UTC

Seeing some buzz about the April 20th deadline for Trump's executive order on using the Insurrection Act to put down protests, and speculation that the swelling protest movement in the US is playing into his hands for totalitarian rule.
I don't *quite* agree. Here's a thing I noticed about the protests last weekend: the crowds are *way* older and whiter than I expected. It's a lot of grannies protesting about Social Security. And they're also decentralized--it's not just big rallies in the big cities, it's absolutely everywhere, it's podunk towns in red states.
Minorities and young people are staying home in part because they've already got the agent provocateur/crackdown scenario in mind. The speakers at the Boston Hands off rally already brought this April 20th date up. And what you're left with is a mass movement of people who cops do not instinctively want to beat up or shoot.
I don't think Trump expected that--he expected George Floyd redux. He's fighting the last war. He's malevolent and a fascist but he's not a chessmaster. He's also actively pissing off his billionaire base at the same time.
So I'm sure he'll *try* a lot of this. But the movement is trying hard not to play into his hands. When the army guns down some protesters, they won't be the people who Fox News viewers are scared of, they'll be 70-year-old white ladies and guys in veteran caps waving American flags on Main Street. Not the example you necessarily want to make.

2025-03-26 11:32:03 UTC

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@nprofile…d6h6 @nprofile…args @nprofile…m0ac I think it wasn't originally LLM-based. Maybe another example of someone throwing LLM technology at a thing and making it worse, so they can get that AI buzz in the market.

2025-03-26 11:06:48 UTC

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@nprofile…args @nprofile…m0ac @nprofile…d6h6 I see a huge amount of YouTube advertising for Grammarly, and the focus of the ads seems to be on secondary and university students who speak English as a second language, to produce native-reading prose.

2025-03-22 11:48:30 UTC

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@nprofile…args Humans have been cooking for so long that our guts have evolved to work best at digesting cooked food. Our ancestors were probably knapping flint for about as long.

2025-03-19 02:51:21 UTC

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@nprofile…saev Long before I heard of any of this τ stuff, I recall idly thinking "gee, maybe 2π ought to have been the constant with the name," but I never bothered to get particularly worked up about it.
But when I was going down a rabbit hole of studying slide rules, I discovered one obsolete reason for preferring π = 3.14... as the named constant: the "folded scales" on slide rules exploited the coincidence that it is very close to the square root of 10. That made the same scale useful both for performing calculations involving multiples of π, and for doing calculations with proportions that might run off the end of the rule with the regular scales.

2025-01-29 02:43:01 UTC

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@nprofile…59k6 for anyone who knows statistical physics, softmax is a Boltzmann distribution with the inputs intepreted as minus the energies of the states, if I recall correctly.
Of course when I heard that, I immediately wondered what using a Bose-Einstein or Fermi-Dirac distribution would do, but I suspect it wouldn't actually be that interesting--kind of like turning the "temperature" way down or way up respectively. But I haven't experimented with this.

2025-01-28 13:06:18 UTC

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@nprofile…args Anyway... I think there are these intuitive ideas most people have about purity and contamination which come from practices to avoid disease, but don't always jibe 100% with what you actually have to do to avoid disease. And what a lot of alt-medicine does is tickle those intuitions and tell you you can trust your gut on this, and don't have to do anything too counterintuitive.
(I was going to say "anything too hard", but a lot of people who are into this stuff are actually extremely dedicated to their health and put tremendous effort into diet and exercise. They're not lazy, and some of what they do really is good for them. But they're going on instinct and sales pitches.)
It's very similar to destructive political slogans, and conspiracy theories. But what there isn't is any kind of logical coherence to the worldview. These kinds of things don't really need one, all they need is a response to any objection.

2025-01-27 22:09:12 UTC

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@nprofile…h94j Oh, it's along a free-fall geodesic from your current state of motion. Better time your exit just right or you'll be somewhere inside the earth.

2025-01-23 11:54:13 UTC

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@nprofile…args I spent some time watching videos in that rabbit hole a while ago--if I recall correctly, the character entropy of the whole thing is not far off from written language but is a bit low, and there are individual sections that are very repetitive, very low-entropy. Almost as if it has some characteristics of a conlang but there are bits where someone is going "hummina hummina hummina".
Also that it's possible to divide it into sections where the art is noticeably different *and* the text has different characteristics, as if there were different scribes/artists working on it.

2025-01-20 18:26:55 UTC

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@nprofile…args @nprofile…slew I figured the whole thing was a pre-planned drama to curry favor with Trump. You go down for a few hours, claim Biden shut you down and Trump brought you back. He's happy and will treat you nicely! For a little while. With Trump it's always only a little while; he has the memory for favors of a goldfish.

2025-01-18 19:06:15 UTC

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@nprofile…args @nprofile…6tnw It's not that it doesn't resemble human thought so much as that it resembles the laziest form of human thought (but after reading an inhuman amount of input).
I know there are mathematicians trying to develop machine learning tools that go beyond the language model approach. But LLMs can't do mathematics worth a damn *because* they are language models.

2025-01-17 13:54:28 UTC

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@nprofile…yu7x I think you can intuitively see that the white lines are not geodesics just from the fact that the fish fins consistently meet in a four-way vertex on one side and a three-way vertex on the other. If they slide along the line, they've got to be turning toward the three-way vertex.

2025-01-13 03:52:35 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k It says the new one is a sub-Earth rocky planet with a 3-day orbit, so, nothing like the refuted 2018 claim. Or anything like van de Kamp's planets, which were Jupiter-sized giants.

2025-01-13 03:42:07 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k For those who didn't click through, that picture is an artist's conception of the planet, not an actual image--there are no images at all of most deduced exoplanets, and images of a few that show them as dots.
Largely because it's so near, Barnard's Star has the fastest visible motion across the sky of any star. It's moving fast enough that if *it* were bright enough to be visible to the unaided eye (which it is not), its position in the constellation Ophiuchus would have noticeably changed over your lifetime.

2025-01-13 03:25:28 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k It's also news to me that Barnard's Star actually has a planet--apparently the discovery of it was announced just a few months ago! Barnard's Star has an old history of spurious exoplanet claims. Peter van de Kamp claimed he'd found evidence of some in the 1960s!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnard%27s_Star_b
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnard%27s_Star

2025-01-13 01:04:34 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k @nprofile…c9js so we can combine the "star registry" scam with the nearly identical "Established Titles" scam--call me the Laird of HD 203291...

2025-01-12 23:36:19 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k I recall an old kid's book on astronomy that described Alpha Centauri as "actually three stars close together", but from a visual perspective that's not quite right: Proxima's orbit is so huge that if it were bright enough to see with the naked eye, it wouldn't even look like part of a multiple star system; it'd just be another star in Centaurus. We can't resolve it easily because it's dim.

2025-01-12 23:25:48 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k My reaction to this was "wait a minute, since when were 'Rigil Kentaurus' and 'Toliman' specifically the names of α Cen A and B , rather than just being two different old names for the A/B pair?"
Turns out the answer is: since 2016 and 2018 respectively, by somewhat arbitrary decision of the IAU, since they decided to start blessing proper star names. It's elegant, though perhaps not ratified by history.

2025-01-07 04:29:20 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k @nprofile…yu7x ...it used to frustrate me that it was so hard to explain why "pushing off of the quantum vacuum", as one of the shifting explanations of the EmDrive claimed it was doing, wasn't a thing.
(Regardless of how many virtual particles you use to describe it, the quantum vacuum is a Lorentz symmetric state, so it has no net momentum. If you were to push off of it, you'd have to give it some momentum, which means you're changing it to a state that has some momentum. Which means there are quanta in it now. You just made a normal rocket, maybe a photon rocket. Not a thing that moves without emitting stuff.)

2025-01-07 00:12:59 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k @nprofile…yu7x bullshit needs to be called out, regardless of who has the guns.
Physics is what I actually know something about but the "COVID lab leak hypothesis" gave me that "taking crazy pills" feeling: the way all the virologists and epidemiologists who seemed to actually understand the subject said one thing, and the cops and spies and miltiary analysts said a different thing, and the papers all assumed the second category were the ones who were right because they know secret stuff, don't they?

2025-01-06 22:42:15 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k Reminds me of that long stream of papers claiming positive results for reactionless space drives like the "EmDrive". If all you were reading were the headlines, you'd get the idea that there was increasingly solid consensus that this was real. If you read the actual papers, the results all contradicted each other and all they had in common was that they were right at the limit of sensitivity of the experiment, and when they improved the controls, they'd get another "positive" result that was marginal for the new controls, which would be touted as a replication.
Meanwhile, the theoretical justifications made no sense, and the discussions would spin off into wild science-fiction speculations about applications. Classic pathological science.

2025-01-06 18:00:48 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k @nprofile…2qpe @nprofile…n0jg like I said, the one before this was the "dark energy is hidden inside black holes" one, where my immediate reaction was "that doesn't work, does it? I mean, Alan Guth was studying what amounted to a black hole full of dark energy way back in the 80s and it doesn't do that! The no hair theorem still applies, right? From the outside, it's just a regular black hole!"
But, again, it got all this hype.

2025-01-06 17:23:56 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k @nprofile…2qpe Thanks, I hate having to bend over backwards to try to make sense of one of these stories where there's a claim that doesn't sound like it makes any sense, but everyone acts as if it does so I have to try to figure out what's going on and if there's anything to this.
The claim that every conventional cosmologist is making an elementary mistake (ignoring the effect of gravity on clocks) should have been a red flag.

2025-01-05 20:03:59 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k And the pop science news always emphasizes the papers making extraordinary claims that throw out huge chunks of theory: this or that does not exist. I'm always suspicious of these.

2025-01-05 19:57:25 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k It's from psychology: when you take away the reward for some behavior, at first you get an increase in the behavior apparently because the subject assumes they need to do it harder. Then they start to give up and the frequency drops off.

2025-01-05 18:29:31 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k I got into the field right after this and I was excited by all the ideas popping up as possible next steps: GUTs, supersymmetry, technicolor, quark components, inflationary cosmology, string theory. In hindsight it all seems like a kind of extinction burst.

2025-01-02 00:29:09 UTC

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@nprofile…args In the infrastructure bill that passed a while back there was a surprising amount of money for trains. More than we've seen in a while, and a lot of that hasn't been spent yet.
The incoming administration isn't going to want to do anything about it, but it's not that nothing is happening. We spent many years the 1950s thinking that trains (at least as passenger transit) were just going away, and I don't think they're going away.

2024-12-28 17:58:16 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k @nprofile…cnse ...The only real further clue *this* article gives is the quote from the 1703 "Histoire de l'Academie Royale des Sciences":
"We said in the Histoire of 1700, that Kepler had changed to ellipses the ancient circles of planetary movement, and that Cassini had also changed the ellipse of Kepler, which was the common one, to a new ellipse, where instead of the sum of the two lines drawn from the foci, it's their product which is always equal to that of the two parts of the major axis determined from the focus. This ellipse corresponds better to celestial observations, if any regular curve so corresponds exactly."
So, not a lot of new detail except to say it fits better. But I do suspect what's going on here is that observations were getting good enough to detect the deviations from a Keplerian ellipse from planet-planet perturbations, and that confounded any attempt to fit a simple geometric curve to the observations, much as de la Hire and Fontenelle suspected.
But that of course was no shade on Newton, since his theory was still good to explain the deviations until the observations got good enough to detect relativistic effects in the late 19th century.

2024-12-28 17:39:25 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k @nprofile…cnse OK, the crucial bit here is on page 79, but it doesn't say anything about Cassini's reasoning and implies that this is an opinion Cassini had had for a while previously. Leibniz had asked whether Cassini and another astronomer, de la Hir, had been satisfied with Kepler's ellipses. Fontenelle says back:
"You undoubtedly know, sir, that a long time ago M. Cassini abandoned the ellipse of Kepler, substituting another one, where, instead of the sum of the lines drawn from one point on the circumference to the two foci, it's the rectangle of those lines that is always equal. M. de la Hire doesn't seem to be committed to any curve, and I confess I suspect a bit that he finds, in the end, that celestial bodies aren't described effectively by any such thing that is regular and exact. That irregularity, bounded however by certain limits, strikes me as more consistent with physics, however inconvenient for astronomy."
So, yeah, what Fontenelle describes is the Cassini oval. But whatever ideas led Cassini in this direction are still opaque.

2024-12-28 16:53:18 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k @nprofile…cnse ...This reminds me that I keep forgetting I can probably get past these academic paywalls with my alumnus status, and I need to get around to figuring out how to do that, but their free tier is pretty generous anyway.

2024-12-28 16:49:56 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k @nprofile…cnse and he's saying "you undoubtedly know..." as if this is something people had been buzzing about in these circles.

2024-12-28 14:16:54 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k A graphic designer friend who was playing with Cassini ovals told me that Cassini thought planetary orbits had the shape of a convex Cassini oval. Why Cassini believed this, I don't know. But I suppose that for the nearly-circular ones, the difference from an ellipse is small.

2024-12-24 13:32:40 UTC

Do I need to declare here that I oppose the invasion of Canada, Panama or Greenland and consider these to be profoundly stupid ideas? Yes? Well, this is the declaration.

2024-12-21 13:44:50 UTC

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@nprofile…args @nprofile…xh7u @nprofile…xf95 About iteration: I remember that when I was first learning BASIC and FORTRAN as a kid, a concept that took a long time to sink in was what arrays are for. For some reason, for a long time I couldn't imagine why I would use them. But I kept getting frustrated that I couldn't somehow iterate over different variable names in a loop. And I think it took a couple of *years* before I put two and two together and realized you could do that with an array index.

2024-12-21 13:35:40 UTC

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@nprofile…args @nprofile…xh7u @nprofile…xf95 The thing I think is coolest about scratch is that it's inherently multithreaded. When I was first learning programming, that kind of programming was such wizard-level stuff that even professionals didn't entirely have a handle on it, and languages usually didn't have support for it built in. Now it can be part of an educational kid's language.
My least favorite thing about it *was* that when I was first playing with it, when my daughter was a little kid, you couldn't define your own functions (there were forks of it that added that). But now you can.

2024-12-16 04:40:32 UTC

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@nprofile…wewz @nprofile…args @nprofile…snsa Remember the pre-Google search engine world? Altavista wasn't great by modern standards but it had a spare, one search box UI, and it worked better than anything people had seen before. Then there was this really rapid enshittification round where everything became a "portal" site cluttered with junk to try to make money. Then Google brought back the Altavista interface but also made it so the first few links it returned were actually the good ones, with PageRank. And that felt like a miracle, because nobody had managed that last part before.
Maybe we need another cycle of that, somehow. Is somebody running one that works?

2024-12-16 03:42:02 UTC

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@nprofile…vrl0 Royalty

2024-12-15 16:26:09 UTC

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@nprofile…r5mx Trump can say that inflation is over, because the high inflation essentially IS over, and has been for a while--it's just that prices are still higher than we remember and would like them to be.
But he'll say he fixed it. Somehow.
Trump's supporters still insist that the economy was a dumpster fire under Obama and Trump fixed it. Of course, you can't see that in any economic indicator you look at--there was a gradual recovery from about 2010 on, and it continued under Trump.
But when Obama was in, Republicans insisted that any improving economic indicator was fake. When Trump entered office, these numbers abruptly became real, like Pinocchio becoming a real boy. The key element was the permission to believe.
Liberals are also unwilling to full-throatedly take the opposite side and say everything is great, because they actually care about longstanding structural inequities. It's what political commentators sometimes call "the Hack Gap"--if you're unwilling to construct your entire worldview around cheering for your team, it's a political disadvantage relative to someone who will.

2024-12-14 00:22:52 UTC

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@nprofile…args Rich people seem worse than they've been in decades. They were never great but for Christ's sake, they've lost all sense of fake propriety. That's my biggest complaint.

2024-12-14 00:14:29 UTC

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@nprofile…args I keep hearing cultural critics and educators talking about the young as if they are intellectually stunted in some unprecedented and alarming way (and they always say they know the reason: it's the pandemic closures, it's smartphones, it's social media, it's that they don't read books, it's pop culture)
and I think, I don't know, maybe they're talking about the ones I haven't met. The kids I've known seem all right.

2024-12-11 17:58:27 UTC

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@nprofile…fa4k a video game cheat code originating in the 1980s, which makes this already an old dad joke, but it keeps showing up in newer games as a sort of industry in joke.

2024-12-11 12:48:47 UTC

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@nprofile…6al5 @nprofile…fa4k "There is no Konami Code to geometry"

2024-12-07 13:12:19 UTC

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@nprofile…args Hey, thanks, this is a great pointer! I actually comment on YouTube a lot, and there are parts of YT where the comment community is not so bad. But I have notifications turned off now because I can't find any way to enable them just for desktop, and YouTube notifications on my phone are just too much. This at least offers a way to go back to my comments.

2024-11-26 02:44:23 UTC

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@nprofile…args @nprofile…ygk6 This was the big problem I had moderating sci.physics.research back in Usenet days. Our charter made it basically impossible to permaban somebody and I felt compelled to give posts a fair hearing before booting them as "overly speculative" (that is, crank work). So I spent about 90% of my time dealing with what we called borderline crackpots--people whose posts hovered right on the edge of maybe making sense.
At least, until a certain actually credentialed physicist started going out of his way to pick fights with people, and *then* 90% of my time was spent trying not to miss vile personal insults that were hidden in the middle of several pages of dense technical jargon.

2024-11-24 12:21:37 UTC

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@nprofile…args and when they start building civilizations, that's when you see faces. But they're always portraits of the big leaders and gods, at first. The face as a representation of power.

2024-11-20 13:50:01 UTC

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@nprofile…m3p2 @nprofile…args @nprofile…gepc @nprofile…0pnq For what it's worth, labor strikes in the US have been getting both more disruptive and more effective in the past 10 years or so. I do expect the counterreaction to get more violent but that comes with the territory.

2024-11-17 14:59:50 UTC

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@nprofile…args "no mods no masters" reminds me of 1990s Usenet, most of which prided itself on being this moderation-free Wild West where the playing field was level and any discussion was fair game, but in practice that meant it only *really* felt welcoming if you were a white male geek who wanted to talk about stuff white male geeks were interested in.

2024-11-17 13:17:45 UTC

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@nprofile…606h @nprofile…args @nprofile…5nuy Where I wish people understood calculus is in *political* discussions, particularly involving economics. Not any of the techniques, just the basic idea of a function, its derivative and its integral being different things.
And maybe the idea that if you have a function of multiple variables, its rate of change is going to depend on which specific things you're holding constant.
But that last one is a HARD idea. It doesn't even really show up in AP Calculus, it's a later class. It trips people up when they're studying college-level thermodynamics.

2024-07-12 12:52:58 UTC

As well as inventing the use of logarithms and Napier's bones, John Napier *also* invented a system for doing binary arithmetic. Here's Chris Staecker explaining it.
(Well, part of it. It sounds like there's more.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVoMdddBQ5k

2024-05-26 14:04:03 UTC

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@npub14nt…2m6q I don't know how much difference it makes, but I do occasionally read the local feed here on mathstodon.xyz just to see if anything interesting is happening among my math-interested non-follows.

2024-05-23 21:26:10 UTC

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@npub1zdp…vqv8 Nah, it's kind of cool, like "oh, some aliens set us up an old science fiction universe populated with people in unusual outfits."

2024-04-23 14:19:45 UTC

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@npub1md3…dzzu Cats are such bendy creatures.

2024-04-14 20:30:25 UTC

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@nprofile…kjrk the one on the right is "this is one of my own posts that I'm particularly proud of and might want to refer to later"

2023-09-11 12:38:42 UTC

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@nprofile…ccgl I'm a programmer and I think I could give a 10,000 foot view of what happened when you did this in 1996, but there's so much extra magic in there now since they got rid of an independent search bar that I might second-guess myself.