julesh

johncarlosbaez, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago) to random

I love this picture comparing different telescopes. Space telescopes are sexy - but the really big telescopes are down here. The Overwhelmingly Large Telescope is so big you might miss it: 100 meters across. Unfortunately the European Southern Observatory wimped out and decided to build a merely Extremely Large Telescope instead.

Radio telescopes are even bigger. The 305-meter dish at Arecibo is famous. In 2020 scientists decided to shut it down after it was damaged by a hurricane and two earthquakes and two important cables snapped. But before they could even shut it down, more cables snapped and the support structure, antenna, and dome assembly fell into the dish, destroying the whole thing.

Luckily in 2016 the Chinese had built an even larger radio dish in Guizhou: the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST. It's the largest one shown here. But in Russia there's a radio telescope 576 meters across - not a dish, but a bunch of separate structures.

And then there's the xkcd cartoon....

(1/2)

julesh, 2 months ago to random

All attempts to update mathematical terminology result in "X, formerly known as Twitter”

julesh, 2 months ago to random

Unbuttered bread is unoriented. Buttering it fixes a choice of orientation

julesh, 2 months ago to random

Lovecraftian categorical semantics: fibrations that don't admit a right adjoint are incomprehensible

julesh, 2 months ago to random

Theory and practice are like 2 tunnels dug from opposite sides of a mountain that don't line up by 1m

julesh, 2 months ago to random

This is the oppportunity for me to finally get my head properly around Markov games and multi-agent dynamic programming, but it would be good if I didn't need to ship a lecture on it as soon as tomorrow

julesh, 2 months ago to random

TeX has scopes in the same sense that dynamically typed languages have types, ie. it doesn't, it just pretends and most of the time nobody notices

julesh, 2 months ago to random

I have to write basically an entire paper today, and this figure alone just took me an hour

julesh, 2 months ago to random

I've encountered some very bad programming languages, but I think TikZ is the worst I've ever used by a very wide margin

julesh, 2 months ago to random

Until today I had never seen conference formatting instructions specify that the maximum paper length is also the minimum paper length. Absolutely deranged stuff 🤡

julesh, 2 months ago to random

Every single bullet point here represents a software engineer who would be barred from professional practice in literally every single other field of engineering
https://codeofmatt.com/list-of-2024-leap-day-bugs/

julesh, 2 months ago to random

I think we could make call/cc go faster if only we could make a cpu with a hardware level feature to dynamically remap chunks of address space, so every use of a memory address is first run through a bit of circuitry that redirects it

julesh, 2 months ago to random

New book!

julesh, 3 months ago to random

We've known about this for a couple of months but it finally hit the news today. Basically every university in the UK is incredibly financially dependent on scamming kids all over the world out of their families' life savings, sorry, "tuition fees”. Things are about to get really rough around here.

julesh, 3 months ago to random

The phrase "snooze fest" is used negatively, but I would 100% go to a festival where everyone just sleeps a lot

julesh, 3 months ago to random

An economy built on technical debt

julesh, 3 months ago to random

Ideas for how to address a lecture theatre

julesh, 3 months ago to random

I feel like there's a gap in the market for a book like "dependent types for functional programmers", that assumes you already know something like ML or Haskell or Scala or whatever, and teaches you all the folklore that's not obvious about writing Agda or Idris. Basically a whole book about how to avoid green slime

julesh, 3 months ago to random

I want to be scary as a mad scientist, not scary as an authority figure

julesh, 3 months ago to random

It's a momentous morning, this morning we teach the baby 2nd years about monads

MartinEscardo, 3 months ago to random

@christianp Could we have polls with more than four options here on mathstodon?