@TonyVladusich@mathstodon.xyz
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TonyVladusich

@TonyVladusich@mathstodon.xyz

I'm a computational neuroscientist & software engineer. Colors, photos, brains, nature, science, software & chess, preferably all at the same time!

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

bwrensch, to random German

Does someone know a permissively licensed, reliable, and reasonably fast 1D FFT implementation in C - preferably just a single header?

I would love the get my audio visualizer back into my new custom sound system. All my findings so far can merely be described as "diverse".

TonyVladusich,
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@bwrensch is fftw not the gold standard anymore? optimised free C lib https://www.fftw.org

johncarlosbaez, (edited ) to random
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Peter Woit exposed the problems with string theory. Then Sabine Hossenfelder brought the news to a bigger audience. Now, in this hilarious video, Angela Collier brings it to the Gen Z gamer crowd:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kya_LXa_y1E

Yes, she shreds the repeated grandiose claims of string theorists while gaming!

I agree with her main points. Some pedants (like me) will notice mistakes. I think they arose because she has a PhD in astrophysics, not particle physics. Also, she said she didn't want to talk about the physics, just the sociology. None of these mistakes affect her actual point, but just to keep up my nerd cred:

  1. The pion was not one of the particles whose existence was predicted by the Standard Model. Yukawa predicted it way back in 1935, and it was found in 1947.

  2. The cost of the never-finished Superconducting Supercollider would have been $11 billion, not $200 billion. I think she was just being flip here. By the way, the US spent $2 billion building it before giving up.

  3. There are 5 superstring theories, not 10.

  4. Bosonic strings work best in 26 dimensions, not the numbers she haphazardly guessed.

A bit more importantly, I think she said the Superconducting Supercollider was cancelled much later than it actually was: October 1993. So this gums up her chronology a bit.

Still, I enjoyed this a lot!

TonyVladusich,
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@johncarlosbaez @kat

I love that you study only the things that interest you: you're a role model for me (and I'm sure many others out there)!

while I was a postdoc at BU, I used to joke to my friends that my goal was to become an "emeritus postdoc". since I moved into software engineering, my science thinking has involved only those things I'm interested in too, so I guess I kinda achieved my goal 🙂.

TonyVladusich,
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@johncarlosbaez I know, right! Dream outcome. Interestingly, moving to software engineering has benefited me in a few ways: (a) I don't have to waste my time crafting questionable grant proposals, reviewing questionable research lines/programs etc, (b) any free time I have to think about science is spent thinking about the things I find interesting, rather than the fashions of the day, and (c) I am able to now actually build out in software the ideas I could only dream of building while in academia.

TonyVladusich,
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@johncarlosbaez

I spent several years building "The Colors App" (https://complexionsoftware.com). It's an iOS/macOS app for editing photo colors, based on my research near the end of my academic career. I also published a short description of the app in SIGGRAPH a few years back (https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3450415.3464399).

The cool thing about that app is it applies some math tools you'll be very familiar with: namely, it allows the user to manipulate the gradient magnitude of the image and constructs a new image using an FFT-based Poisson solver. In fact, the algorithm does two things: it models how the human visual system represents perceived image colors, and it allows the user to edit those very perceived colors!

I've also created a plugin for the DaVinci Resolve video editing app, which film studios and the like use for movie "color grading". This one is still in beta, but it's based on my research since I left academia; namely, the algorithm constructs an atlas of charts for different color categories, effectively mapping the 2D chromaticity manifold (or 1D hue circle) to a higher dimensional categorical color space. There's still a lot I don't understand about this though, and it's a very exciting area of discovery for me right now! Hopefully the plugin can make enough money over the next few years to sustain my "research program", such as it exists.

ct_bergstrom, (edited ) to random

"Our neocortex is entirely controlled by our lizard brain."

How is this guy real?

(For a while I found this sort of bullshit really annoying, but now I'm just embarrassed for him. And what sucks is that he's totally right about LLMs as a dead end on the road to AGI.)

TonyVladusich,
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@ct_bergstrom and on the other hand you have Hinton telling us how scary chat bots are gonna take over the world. they're all a bunch of fucking charlatans.

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

Music theory: the bebop major scale. 🎷

Though people say 'octave', there are only 7 different notes in the major scale. This is annoying if you're trying to play scales in melodies with, say, 8 beats per measure. The scale keeps drifting out of synch.

One solution is to add an extra note to your scale! In this video, jazz cat Adam Maness explains the virtues of the 'bebop major scale', where you add a minor 6th to the major scale:

1 2 3 4 5 ♭6 6 7

Just playing this scale up and down, 8 beats per measure, already suggests some melodies. Even more so if you play it with both hands in 'contrary motion' - up with one hand, down with the other. Listen to the video and you'll see what I mean!

Why do they call this the 'major sixth diminished scale'? Barry Harris introduced this term: he said this scale is derived from a major 6th chord (1 3 5 6) and a diminished 7th chord starting at the 2 (that is, 2 4 ♭6 7).

You can get other bebop scales by putting the extra note somewhere else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n0vuuKdUyM

TonyVladusich,
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@johncarlosbaez do you watch Rick Beato's videos? He's a record producer with a jazz background, and he's deeply into music theory (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tsb0oibEEqE&list=PLW0NGgv1qnfwOCvaua3pRBCT7Vx-mlrHI&index=8)

tonyarnold, to random
@tonyarnold@mastodon.social avatar

It's a "the compiler is unable to type-check this expression in reasonable time; try breaking up the expression into distinct sub-expressions” kind of day again.

There's really not enough information to do anything directed with this error 🥴

TonyVladusich,
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@tonyarnold @ryanbooker 🤣

johncarlosbaez, (edited ) to random
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A minus sign can make a huge difference. Einstein discovered that the difference between space and time is all due to a minus sign.

Another amazing fact is that the difference between 'matter particles' (or more precisely fermions, like electrons, quarks, etc.) and 'force particles' (bosons, like photons, gluons, etc.) is mainly due to a minus sign:

When you switch two fermions, their quantum state gets multiplied by -1, while when you switch two bosons it get multiplied by 1.

This was discovered by Pauli, who realized that there must be some reason why the electrons in atoms go into 'shells' - why all the electrons in a big atom like iron don't all fall into the same lowest-energy state. The reason is that if two electrons were in the same state, switching them would do nothing but also multiply that state by -1: a contradiction. This rule, that fermions can't be in the same state, is called the Pauli exclusion principle.

Bose and Einstein realized that on the contrary, bosons actually like to be in the same lowest energy state at low temperatures! This is called Bose-Einstein condensation. Similarly, a laser beam has many photons in the same state.

Later people realized that if we replace vector spaces (like the Hilbert space of quantum states of some system) by super vector spaces, where every vector is a sum of a bosonic and fermionic part, we can impose a rule saying that switching two fermionic vectors should always introduce an extra minus sign.

It turns out that this rule is not arbitrary - it's mathematically very natural and it's lurking around all over in mathematics, even in contexts that superficially have nothing to do with bosons or fermions!

TonyVladusich,
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@johncarlosbaez that's super interesting (haha). I had not heard of super vector spaces before!

davidgarywood, to internet

deleted_by_author

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    TonyVladusich,
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    @davidgarywood omfg in the last 17 seconds I've become aware of this and come to loathe it. does nobody stop and think anymore?

    TonyVladusich, to random
    @TonyVladusich@mathstodon.xyz avatar

    meanwhile over in bizarro world https://twitter.com/MarkusDeserno/status/1649598441750769665?s=20

    TonyVladusich, to random
    @TonyVladusich@mathstodon.xyz avatar

    The Chromatic Snake illusion: all the diamonds are physically the same grey! From Akiyoshi, after Adelson, shared by Sobotka.

    image/png

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