@SvenGeier@mathstodon.xyz
@SvenGeier@mathstodon.xyz avatar

SvenGeier

@SvenGeier@mathstodon.xyz

Geometry, Physics, Art, Math.

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=G0JsJQMAAAAJ

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SvenGeier, to random
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lowqualityfacts, to random
@lowqualityfacts@mstdn.social avatar

Wow, that's a lot of combinations.
https://patreon.com/lowqualityfacts

SvenGeier,
@SvenGeier@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@Greenseer @Walrus @lowqualityfacts
It's definitely true that there are 35 atoms in the universe, though. Maybe even more. But certainly at least those 35.

christianp, to random
@christianp@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Microsoft Teams continues to reveal its true nature as a billion sprint goals in a trenchcoat:

When you attach an image to a post, it's saved at the top of the Sharepoint folder belonging to the channel. (So the "files" tab becomes a cluttered mess, but that's not what I'm cross about now)

As well as restrictions on valid filenames, filenames of attachments have to be unique.

So if you've attached drawing.png once before, and upload another drawing.png, Teams asks if you want to replace the original, or keep both. If you keep both, it adds (1) to the filename.

... unless there's already a "drawing (1).png", in which case it asks you AGAIN what you want to do.

Is there a Big Brain Cloud Services reason it can't automatically find the smallest number that works?

SvenGeier,
@SvenGeier@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@christianp @OscarCunningham
Of course what it should do is drawing (1,(1)).png ...

pvonhellermannn, to random
@pvonhellermannn@mastodon.green avatar

Sums up everything

SvenGeier,
@SvenGeier@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@RubyTuesdayDONO
ChatGPT gives you the most plausible or most likely answer you could expect if you asked the same question somewhere on the internet (or, more precisely, that parts of the internet that was used for training). It is quite literally a mirror, that shows you what humans say and do.
When you see ugliness in a mirror, it does not behoove a self-aware being to try to blame the mirror.

camilo, to art Spanish
@camilo@paquita.masto.host avatar

"Vigo the Carpathian. Born 1505, died 1610. He was poisoned, stabbed, shot, hung, stretched, disembowled, drawn and quartered... Not exactly a man of the people"

SvenGeier,
@SvenGeier@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@camilo
Really? Made it to age 105 in the 16th century? Respectable.

gregeganSF, to random
@gregeganSF@mathstodon.xyz avatar

I guess the best way to get spectacular improvements in the performance of your code is to do something spectacularly inefficient in the first version.

I’ve been working on a project that needs to perform computations on a quantity X along with several dozen of its derivatives wrt a parameter t, i.e. X'(t), X''(t), ... This is a form of “automatic differentiation”, but with a large number of derivatives.

There are simple rules for performing basic arithmetic on these vectors of derivatives; addition is trivial, and multiplication only grows linearly with the order of the derivative in the number of terms in each formula.

But the derivatives of 1/X and √X, written as sums of products of powers of derivatives of X, scale horrendously: the number of terms for the nth derivative is equal to the number of integer partitions of n:

1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 15, 22, 30, 42, 56, 77, 101, 135, 176, 231, 297, 385, 490, 627 ...

And for a while, I thought, well, that’s just the way it is, I’ll have to live with it.

But luckily that turned out to be very naive! In fact, you can just write down the formula for the derivatives of a product, X(t)Y(t) = 1, and then solve that system by back-substitution to get all the derivatives of Y from those of X. Similarly for the square root, from Y^2(t) = X(t).

So the payoff for being dumb in the first place was the glorious feeling of seeing my code now running exponentially faster than before!

SvenGeier,
@SvenGeier@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@gregeganSF
Instead of "I did something stupid" I shall henceforth say "I laid the groundwork for dramatic improvements in the future"

foone, to random
@foone@digipres.club avatar

Properly photographing a 3.5" floppy disk for archival is annoyingly complicated. The label has THREE sides!

I've already built an automated system to take a picture of the front of a disk, but really I need to take THREE photos if I want to get the whole thing.

That means either three cameras or I need to rotate the disk 90° and then 180°, which is going to really stress the limits of my mechanical engineering skills.

SvenGeier,
@SvenGeier@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@foone @The4thCircle I'm almost certain for the money you're spending on multiple cameras and 3d printed gadgets you could just hire a couple poor slobs on fiverr and make them take the pictures by hand...

ProfKinyon, to random
@ProfKinyon@mathstodon.xyz avatar

The purpose of a morning plenary conference talk is to give audience members time to prepare their afternoon talks

SvenGeier,
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@ProfKinyon Also to read today's program and mark out what to go to later in the day

christianp, (edited ) to random
@christianp@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Pals, what's the least egregious TV I can buy today, in the UK?
I want as little "smart" internet-connected nonsense as possible. Not bothered about 4k or massive size, but it should sound and look good.

That is, what's the Brother laser printer of TVs?

SvenGeier,
@SvenGeier@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@christianp As a US reader I don't know who or what currys is, but you can use Loeb's theorem to prove that 50 inches is too small...

quixoticgeek, to random
@quixoticgeek@v.st avatar

A friend of mine is a Doctor. On the train this morning on their way to work the call comes out. "Do we have any doctors on board?".

Finally. Friend grabs their bag and makes way through the train. Only to find 14 other doctors had done the same thing...

Guess that route is popular with medical staff on their way to work...

SvenGeier,
@SvenGeier@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@quixoticgeek

ProfKinyon, to random
@ProfKinyon@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Creating slides for a half hour talk (25 minutes + 5 for questions). So 100 slides should do, right? 😁

SvenGeier,
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(\tt \documentclass[1pt]{article})

SvenGeier, to random
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foone, to random
@foone@digipres.club avatar

Personally I only use the most legitimate of software.

SvenGeier,
@SvenGeier@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@foone Ohhh... you have disk 8 and 9. I think I have 3,4,7 and 11. Now we just have to find someone who has the other 5 ...

Lana, to random
@Lana@beige.party avatar

What Your Piano Says About You: A Thread

1/🧵

You don't play the piano and you don't know anyone who does. What you do have is money. Lots of it. You are either a doctor or a lawyer by profession. The piano is likely placed in a prominent location in your expansive house, such as tucked under the stairs, where the sound can be muffled, or next to a bay window, where it can echo weirdly off the glass. The lid of your grand piano is always closed. There are photographs of you and your wife and kids arranged tastefully on the top and a soft accent lamp on the left hand side of the music desk which absolutely will not illuminate any part of the music adequately.

SvenGeier,
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@rcoshow @Lana Yeah, same here - definitely a yamaha upright, but I drive a 1 year old Nissan Leaf with less than 5k miles on it...

SvenGeier, to random
@SvenGeier@mathstodon.xyz avatar

And they say math has little applications in the real world...

cdarwin, to random
@cdarwin@c.im avatar

French company has developed a swimming device that uses your own leg power to accelerate you through the water at superhuman speeds.
This crank-driven pusher prop looks a bit like an ...
The idea is simple enough; you extend the Seabike's pole to the appropriate length, then strap it to your waist with a belt. Then you find the pedals with your feet, and start turning the crank, with the waist strap to push against.
https://newatlas.com/marine/seabike-swimming-propeller/

SvenGeier,
@SvenGeier@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@cdarwin How does it compare to fins? I can already move at "superhuman speed" (whatever that may mean) underwater with regular old fins on my feet which I always thought were about the most elegant propulsion devised by man. Is this better in some way?

dpiponi, to random
@dpiponi@mathstodon.xyz avatar

One of the weirder bugs I've experienced: you know how you're always being told to make sure caps lock is off when you enter your password? My Mac is currently enabling caps-lock at login and you can't disable it. It took a long time to deduce this was the problem but surprisingly I was able to log in after going round a few loops and realising an obvious trick...

A known problem with a venerable history: https://iboysoft.com/tips/macbook-stuck-on-caps-lock.html

SvenGeier, (edited )
@SvenGeier@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@4raylee @dpiponi I annoys me greatly that I still have to poke around in the guts of my OS in 2024 to get rid of Caps Lock. I don't want it, don't need it, haven't needed it since maybe the 80ies (and I'm not even sure then). And I don't change computers often enough that I can just do "whatever I did last time" - every new computer I have to learn a whole new set of nonsense to disable Caps Lock. 🙄
If some company made a decent keyboard that is exactly identical to all other keyboards but simply doesn't have a Caps Lock key, I think that would be a viable product...

ProfKinyon, to random
@ProfKinyon@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Sometimes I think I should treat my job as if it were an adventure game, but then I remember that my colleagues probably wouldn't appreciate me taking all their stuff just because they left it lying around.

SvenGeier,
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@ProfKinyon

ProfKinyon, to random
@ProfKinyon@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Started typing "is dark matter compatible with" and Google completed it to "windows 11".

SvenGeier,
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@ProfKinyon
And, what's the result? Is it?

christianp, to random
@christianp@mathstodon.xyz avatar

I'm going to tell you two statements, each made by YouTube about a video I uploaded:

a) it was uploaded 1 year ago.
b) it was uploaded on 5th June 2022.

Could these statements both be about the same video?
If so, are they both accurate?

SvenGeier,
@SvenGeier@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@christianp Depends: "uploaded one year ago" on which planet?

SvenGeier,
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@christianp
Mars orbital period is 687 days.
687 days ago was Jun-23-2022. If we allow for 2 weeks slack, that fits quite well... 🤷‍♂️

j_bertolotti, to random
@j_bertolotti@mathstodon.xyz avatar

People studying brains: "We found no correlation between number of neurons and IQ."*

People talking about AI: "If we just add more nodes to our deep neural network we are surely going to create a super-mind!"

SvenGeier,
@SvenGeier@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@j_bertolotti @apodoxus Dunno - to within some range, surely there's some sort of trade between the number of neurons used and the cleverness of their arrangement. I highly doubt that LLMs are anywhere near as well-organized as the human brain, so they may well be in the realm where "more neurons" still gives huge advantages. 🤷‍♂️ At some point there's a diminishing return, and then we'll need to talk about "better structure" (which I, personally, would guess means "more complex structure" - I'm staggered by how 𝑝𝑟𝑖𝑚𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒 the current crop of AI really are) but at any one time we might well be at a point where sheer quantitative growth can still beat out real advances...

johncarlosbaez, (edited ) to random
@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Tolstoy: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Mathematics: "Real tori are all alike; every complex torus is complex in its own way."

To be precise, a 'n-dimensional real torus' is a real manifold of the form V/Λ where V is an n-dimensional real vector space and Λ ⊆ V is a lattice of rank n in this vector space. They are all isomorphic.

An 'n-dimensional complex torus' is a complex manifold of the form V/Λ where V is an n-dimensional complex vector space and Λ ⊆ V is a lattice of rank 2n in this vector space. These are not all isomorphic, because there are different ways the lattice can get along with multiplication by i. For example we might have iΛ = Λ or we might not.

And so, it's possible to write a whole book - and indeed a fascinating one - on complex tori. For example a 1-dimensional complex torus is an elliptic curve, and there are whole books just about those.

SvenGeier,
@SvenGeier@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@johncarlosbaez
@wnj
I may not have learned much in my years on this planet, but I have learned this: if John Carlos Baez says "not easy", there is no point for me to even look at it... 🤷🏽‍♂️

SvenGeier, to random
@SvenGeier@mathstodon.xyz avatar

i guess?

whitequark, to random
@whitequark@mastodon.social avatar

please tell me the most obscure joke you know

(feel free to explain or not explain it, depending on what you find more amusing to think of me reading it)

SvenGeier,
@SvenGeier@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@SnoopJ @whitequark Bartender says "you guys just don't know your linits"

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