bertwells

@bertwells@mathstodon.xyz

Bit by a radioactive mathematician

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rebeccawatson, to random
@rebeccawatson@mstdn.social avatar

What are the chances that RFK, Jr.'s brain was eaten by a worm at the same time he got mercury poisoning AND was going through a contentious divorce in which he testified that his cognitive problems impacted his ability to pay spousal support? https://skepchick.org/2024/05/did-a-worm-really-eat-rfk-jr-s-brain/

bertwells,

@rebeccawatson I will be dissapoint if a Bay Area act misses the clear band name opportunity here

christianp, to random
@christianp@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Is it true that it's always snowing somewhere on earth?

bertwells,

@christianp Almost certainly, yes.

Consider just the western cordillera of North America, along with the Andes range. Those two mountainous provinces span an enormous north-south distance, proximal to a maritime moisture source. Two locales alone, Torres del Paine national park in SA, and Wrangel Saint Elias park, record snow 71 and 93 days per year respectively (at visitor elevations, figures for upper elevations would be much higher at these locales). Given that they are at opposing latitudes, the days probably dont overlap much. So that is around 160 days per year in those small samples alone.

fraying, to random
@fraying@xoxo.zone avatar

Every time I make a post here, get a pile of annoying replies, and then make a followup post to complain about the replies, I get one step closer to abandoning this place altogether.

bertwells,

@fraying Amen. I keep going back to what I consider a basic faulty assumption: that what Zuck called "frictionless" social media interaction is somehow a good thing.

Making interaction "frictionless" (in replies, at least) is a stunning misnomer, because social friction is •increased• by giving assholes easy access to someones attentional space.

If we are gonna use inapt physical metaphors, I want controllable "viscosity" in replies: Low viscosity for those who I have experienced to make a positive contribution, "january molasses" viscosity for known crummy reply guys.

ct_bergstrom, to random

Never mind at the first sentence is bullshit—they’re running because they’re the incumbents and what the hell else are they going to do—the entire Biden-Harris statement in the Washington State voter pamphlet is unfathomably badly written.

I’ve seen better in high school student council elections.

bertwells,

@ct_bergstrom Arm chair quarterbacking - so hot right now

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

Viktoria Mullova describes Arvo Pärt’s works as carrying "a lot of pain", a comment that echoes the composer’s own description of his music as "works of suffering".

But, she says, she actually asked Pärt if he holds politics or national imagery in his mind when composing. "He said he doesn’t. It’s just what he hears." So she followed up by asking where those ideas come from, and how he harbours them and transforms them into music. "He just said, 'It’s all mathematics. And love.' Which makes sense."

https://www.gramophone.co.uk/features/article/arvo-part-and-viktoria-mullova-searching-for-musical-freedom

bertwells,

@johncarlosbaez "He just said, 'It’s all mathematics. And love.' Which makes sense."

That interior quote is the best sentence I have read so far in 2024. What makes it great is that I don't have to talk about why it applies to this, or that, aspect of math.

futurebird, to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

In these times I consider the life and work of Lawrence Summers.

bertwells,

@futurebird I am not the kind of dude who hates on people. It is a practical principle more than a moral one for me, I just don't want to waste any of my one precious life in hate.

But damn, dudes like Lawrence Summers and Henry Kissenger test me. The impunity of their lives, keeping their seat at the tables of power, no matter how much harm they do, is too much.

I don't know Claudine Gay, but I do know this: If what happened to her was just, then the lives of men like Summers are a curse on all of our consciences.

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

For my Christmas present this year I hope Santa fixes this website - or shuts it down. This symbol does not mean "approximately equal to" - that's

≈

This symbol means "isomorphic to", or "congruent to". I cannot stand another year with this misinformation ruining my Google searches.

https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/266f/index.htm

𝐍𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐫: 𝐁𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐦 𝐠𝐨𝐞𝐬 𝐝𝐞𝐞𝐩𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐧 𝐁𝐚𝐞𝐳 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐤𝐬. 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐨𝐧!

bertwells, (edited )

@johncarlosbaez Speaking as a math educator who believes that a major barrier in math education is the way we mathematicians abuse and muddle notation in the name of convenience (cf. A/B as “A divided by B” or “A mod(quotient structure sense) B”, “field extension of A” among other disparate usages), I really don’t think we have a leg to stand on here.

bertwells,

@johncarlosbaez Yes, of course. I especially remember the feeling of wonder when I first learned of Lagrange's Theorem and how it was the first opening of the door for me to the structured relationship of groups to subgroups. Quotienting out sets is a big deal, and the notation A/B allows us a shorthand for a set of cosets that -yes- can be thought of as a form of division of sets...

...but I don't think that is a case of the notation being "smarter" than we are, whatever that may mean. Certainly, it is a clever thing that people have done with notation. But in education I have come to be wary of cleverness when it comes at the cost of ambiguity. Because students vary wildly in cleverness, and the cognitive load of reconciling a strained "division metaphor" can really put a damper on the pedagogical activity of actually teaching, for instance, how Z/nZ actually builds a set of residue classes as cosets.

Your initial point (I think) was that it is a problem if a symbol that stands for some important types of equivalence relations gets muddled up by also denoting "is approximately equal to". I guess my own point is that humans seem to always be looking for ways to muddle and stretch the linguistic metaphors, referents, and notations that we use. Math benefits from this activity sometimes, because sometimes we land on a clever way to re-use notation and extend an idea into a new area. But there is always a cost to this activity, in ambiguity.

mcnees, to random
@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar

The X-10 graphite reactor at Oak Ridge went critical # OTD in 1943.

Built as part of the Manhattan Project, it was the second artificial nuclear reactor (after Fermi's Chicago Pile 1) and the first to operate continuously.

Photo: Ed Westcott

bertwells,

@mcnees I was about to respond that CP-2 at Argonne was the second artificial nuclear reactor, but then I checked, and even though CP-2 was operational before the X-10, I see that what they did was dismantle CP-1 and build CP-2 out of the same graphite bricks and uranium eggs.

So CP-2 is just CP-1 with a rearranged pile. I didn't know that.

fraying, to random
@fraying@xoxo.zone avatar

The 2024 US Presidential Election is about one thing and one thing only: do Americans want a fascist dictator or not?
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/trump-milley-execution-incitement-violence/675435/
https://thehill.com/homenews/4221310-trump-pledges-to-investigate-msnbc-parent-for-threatening-treason/

bertwells,

@fraying That Milley article really got to me. It is trivially true that guys like that have outrageous self discipline, but even though discipline is his superpower, I cannot imagine what it must have been like for him to have to bite his tongue when Trump disrespected the disabled vet who sang at the memorial. I cannot imagine it.

So Milley and I have almost nothing in common, but I see his fight as my fight.

I think that is the key. People like me and Milley have arrived at our antifascist stance via very different paths, but the thing about antifascism is that it is only one thing:

Fascists will kill us and the people we care about if they get the chance, so lets stop them from getting the chance. This is something that Milley and I can totally agree on.

mcnees, to random
@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar

Every story the Universe tells is a history.

Danish astronomer Ole Rømer was born in 1644. His observations of Jovian moons confirmed light propagates at finite speed. This profound conceptual shift opened the door for work by Huygens, Fresnel, and Maxwell.

Portrait: Jacob Conring / Wikimedia Commons

bertwells,

@mcnees I go back and forth on how the speed of light should be conceptualized when teaching.

On the one hand there is the modern view that every physical interaction is a field interaction, and that changes in state are mediated by the speed at which changes in field states propagate, is the speed at which field's force mediating particles travel. So in this view, c is sort of a "universal field process propagation speed".

But that view, as modern as it is, completely ignores the history of our understanding of c. The great history you relate here of how humans began to notice that light takes time to get from one place to another is the origin of our evolution towards the modern view. Student understanding is enhanced by that story, that takes us them through Maxwell, Einstein, and on to modern quantum field theories.

I guess what I am saying is I would like to have it both ways, on the one hand teaching the modern view from the get-go, but on the other leading students through the process of how we got to the modern view.

VeryBadLlama, to random
@VeryBadLlama@mas.to avatar

I’ll admit that I don’t fully understand all the warning signs of a looming economic recession but I bet it’s a bad sign that the drug store I just walked into is actively setting up locked cases for the deodorant

bertwells,

@VeryBadLlama The invisible armpit of the Free Market, just doing its thing

davidnjoku, to worldwithoutus
@davidnjoku@mastodon.world avatar

I've always been a little uncomfortable with Black America's and its space age aesthetic, the way it reimagines Africa as this sci-fi landscape.

That's not us. What you're doing smacks of the kid who goes to school and claims his dad is an astronaut cos he's ashamed that he's really a plumber.

isn't perfect, but we're proud of who we are. If you care, you should be too.

(Please educate me if I've got it all wrong. I'm happy to learn.)

bertwells,

@futurebird @davidnjoku I've always enjoyed fantasy, sci-fi and comic books, as well as being a fan of big, dumb high concept movies made in those genres. But sometimes these works make me feel icky, and I have recently been trying to figure out why. The first time I got this icky feeling was actually when I was quite young. I had a copy of a Tolkien work that had this blurb on it:

“We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers - thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.”

The blurb is gross, but young me couldn't put his finger on why. Now however, I think I am starting to figure it out. The blurb writer wasn't wrong about murder and thievery being bad. But then he went on to praise "the colonizers of dreams", as if being a colonizer of any kind was cool, as long as you didn't do too much murder and thievery.

When does a work of art give a person a fun imaginary place to play in, and when does it colonize their dreams? I am still trying to figure it out.

bertwells,

@Virginicus I get what you're saying, but let's see if it passes a simple translation from the terrain of the mind to real terrain: "If you still are standing on land after it was colonized, it wasn't colonized."

Do you see the problem? I am not being snarky or trying to prove you wrong, because I think you make a valid point. But let's think about the point of view of, for instance, some of the folks whose minds live in Africa and care about the past, present and future of Africa, and have something to say about people on another continent creating Afrofuturism.

bertwells,

@Virginicus I dunno, I appreciate your takes on the subject tho, and your care in word choice. I personally don't know enough to say anything apt about what colonization is or is not, because that isn't my area of expertise. What I can say is that the colonization of dreams, even by beloved figures like Tolkein, is something that deserves scrutiny. I can enjoy a comic book, or some work of sci fi/fantasy, and I can also think critically about the ways a creator goes about their world-building impact how I think of things outside the fantasy world.

I find that critical thinking about that sorta stuff enhances my experience of being a fan. I can enjoy Tolkein more now, for instance, that I have figured out why the "celebrate the colonizers of dreams" blurb was so gross to me as a kid, even though I couldn't put my finger on why back then.

futurebird, to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

I'm in detention for serving Pica her breakfast on her favorite plate, but I failed to cut it up for her first, and I am so ashamed of rendering such substandard service. I will learn to do better I promise.

(posting this of my own freewill not under duress in any way. )

bertwells,

@futurebird Our dogs Steve and Tally play a super fun game with us. They occasional refuse to eat, but (and this is the genius of the gameplay design) sometimes it is because of one of our many moral failures, and sometimes it is because something is wrong and one of them needs to be taken to the vet right away.

They each recently leveled up and gained the ability to notice if the other dog is stressed enough not to eat, then the unaffected dog goes on food strike, adding a need for us to differentiate which one is the source of the unknown problem! Do we take both dogs to rhe vet? Do we need to walk them to the park and clear a “need to sniff things” deficit?

Review: gameplay is varied and challenging, 7/10

futurebird, to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

Half hearted advertisement for mathematics.

Anyone got some suggestions?

we should tell them about the logics and the theorem proving engines I think

bertwells,

@futurebird

Mathematics Fucks

Teri_Kanefield, to random

deleted_by_author

    •
    bertwells,

    @Teri_Kanefield The seagulls CAN be annoying at times, but a gag order seems excessive

    futurebird, (edited ) to random
    @futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

    They let New Zealand and Hawaii design the view of earth for the official flag.

    (But also I look at this a lot and think about my ambition to sail across it. Radar, satellite phone, all the tech or not... that is a lot of big angry water.)

    (But also... can you really claim to know the earth if you don't know anything about all of this?)

    bertwells,

    @futurebird That some idiot conquistador named Panthallassia’s mighty daughter the “Pacific” ocean just goes to show what lengths History will go to punk us.

    futurebird, to random
    @futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

    Yall think I'm kidding about that "sailing to Borneo to see the giant ants" thing... But I do really know how to sail granted... only in LI sound (We went from CT to NYC and more.) not the open ocean as of yet. But with a big enough boat and my husband's help I think we could totally do it.

    The only real question is if we should go east or west to get there.

    bertwells,

    @futurebird One of my great friends is a sailor and is prepping his California to Hawaii solo sail. He is an electrician by trade, so he is familiar with how to respect the forces he works with. He grew up next to the Pacific and has spent his life surfing and sailing on it. He grew up in family of migrant farm workers, and I don’t know anyone who works harder, or more methodically and thoughtfully. He has been carefully planning his sail for years. His gear ia solid and his tech is modern and awesome. He’s about to go. No one could be more suited or prepped. I am happy for him.

    I am also terrified for him, because that ocean is huge and dgaf

    rebeccawatson, to random
    @rebeccawatson@mstdn.social avatar

    Here we go again: popular YouTube physicist Sabine Hossenfelder is extremely wrong about something! This time, she argues in favor of capitalism, saying that without it, we wouldn't have scientific progress. The Nobel prize winner she cites begs to disagree. https://skepchick.org/2023/09/sabine-is-wrong-again-capitalism-wouldve-killed-penicillin/

    bertwells,

    @rebeccawatson wtf is up with physicists’ urge to pontificate outside their subject? Did the failed “Theory of Everything” project just ruin them, or something?

    And I find it hilarious that a physicist is on that beat. Outside of Bell Labs (which received significant public funding), there has been almost no significant private-capital-funded physics discoveries since Michelson freaking Morley.

    futurebird, to random
    @futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

    Been observing the fight to negotiate medicare drug prices carefully. It’s the right thing to do. It’s depriving some very wealthy and powerful people of a lot of money and they can’t be happy about it. I’m looking for the blowback. I’m always curious how these targets are chosen— the slow addition of drugs is a bit of political genius that flips the script. No one wants to get dinged again. Some won’t.

    They gotta be so pissed.

    bertwells,

    @futurebird @not2b Sinema is one of the most demoralizing modern politicians. She basically performed at total act, a completely made up progressive persona, for years and years, to get into the Senate. Once there, she instantaneously turned into Mitt Romney.

    There have been other pols who were frauds who changed over the long term, but I have never seen such fraudulent act do a complete 180 that quickly. Gotta hand it to her, she played her part to perfection.

    bertwells,

    @passenger @futurebird @not2b The US senate is a uniquely corrupting institution. It basically turns everyone who enters it into an oligarch-class member.

    I have no insight into Sinema’s psyche. But she spent no time in the “becoming corrupt” phase, and simply skipped straight to “being corrupt”. IMO the simplest explanation is that she’s a sociopath, and her previous progressive persona was an affectation.

    christianp, to random
    @christianp@mathstodon.xyz avatar

    Good news: my daughter's school has a maths puzzles club.

    Bad news: not enough people have signed up to it.

    bertwells,

    @christianp meta math puzzle

    fraying, to random
    @fraying@xoxo.zone avatar

    Rock music wouldn't exist without Black people and Jan Wenner, who started Rolling Stone, can't think of one he'd call a "Master," which, given the term, says so fucking much.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/19/arts/music/jann-wenner-rock-and-roll-hall-of-fame.html
    https://archive.ph/tpkGz

    bertwells,

    @fraying At first I though “Damn, if I’m the publisher, I fire the editor who let this happen.”

    But then I remembered that this old white man probably said to himself “I founded Rolling Stone, it is ME who tells editors what to do, not the other way around.”

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