Let's continue our first taste of tango with this one ...
.. chosen for the music.
Bahia Blanca by Carlos Di Sarli.
A sweeping classic that contains all the elements of tango music - gorgeous sweeping melodies, huge percussive "get off your bottom and walk to the music" sections ... the ever-so-interpretable pauses ...
People go to a milonga intending to dance with several others. Only dancing with your own partner is the exception, not the norm.
Walking over to someone and asking them to #dance is considered VERY BAD MANNERS. It places pressure on the invitee, and the act is very publicly visible.
Instead, a silent subtle, almost invisible, look and nod - the "cabaceo" - is used to invite and accept. Declining is without injury - you act as if you didn't notice the invitation.
Now, the cabaceo is a skill to be developed too - like much in tango - it isn't easy, and you risk making a fool of yourself, or going home without a single dance - a rite of passage for tangueros and tangueras.
A lot has been written about the cabaceo - you can read some here:
Let's also bust the myth that creativity is only in leading and following is a passive responsive act.
Sure - as beginners, leaders are learning to lead, and followers to follow
But as dancers progress and become advanced - followers express themselves within the framework of following - and good leaders listen and create the space for followers to do that.
Leaders and followers who can do this are in demand !
As someone who has taught Git to (literally) several thousand people over 15 years, most of them without CS backgrounds, I am deeply grateful to @b0rk and others for producing cheat sheets and being honest up front about how bad its ergonomics are. It is the opposite of gatekeeping: it tells newcomers who are unsure of themselves that it's not their fault when things go wrong (as they invariably do with Git because of the aforementioned ergonomics).
One of the challenges for #generative artists is trying to find a fresh new approach or algorithm. Lots of ideas have been done to death.
Occasionally a new idea pops up.
Q. What's yours?
In the last year, mine was the gradient estimation method for rendering the fine structure of the Mandelbrot and Julia sets. It was an algorithm that was a genuine surprise discovery for me!
Israel - created by the British, breaking promises to the Palestinians - the Balfour Declaration - the Balfour Betrayal. The west has since provided cover for its 75 years of apartheid, violent oppression, murder of journalists, cultural and environmental vandalism, and now - genocide.
#Iran - its revolution was as a direct result of Western interference, overthrow of their leader, and support for a brutal dictator and western stooge, the Shah.
It looks like they've found protonium in the decay of a heavy particle! 🎉
Protonium is made of a proton and an antiproton orbiting each other. It lasts a very short time before they annihilate each other.
It's a bit like a hydrogen atom where the electron has been replaced with an antiproton! But unlike a hydrogen atom, which is held together by the electric force, protonium is mainly held together by the strong nuclear force. It's also much smaller than a hydrogen atom.
There are various ways to make protonium. One is to make a bunch of antiprotons and mix them with protons. This was done accidentally in 2002 during the first experiment that created antihydrogen. They only realized this upon carefully analyzing the data 4 years later.
This time, people were studying the decay of the J/psi particle. The J/psi is made of a heavy quark and its antiparticle. It's 3.3 times as heavy as a proton, so it's theoretically able to decay into protonium. And careful study showed that yes, it does this sometimes!
The new paper on this has over 550 authors, so I won't list them all. It also has a rather dry title - not "We found protonium!"
The idea here is that sometimes the J/ψ particle decays into a gamma ray and 3 pion-antipion pairs. When they examined this decay, they found evidence that an intermediate step involved a particle of mass 1880 MeV/c², a bit more than an already known intermediate of mass 1840 MeV/c².
This new particle is a bit lighter than twice the mass of a proton, 938 MeV/c². So, there's a good chance that it's protonium!
#ClimateDiary It seems, IS, utterly crazy, that amidst everything else the UK government is ruthlessly continuing its clampdown on climate protesters. But it is.
Excellent article by Natasha Walter here on how Dr Sarah Benn got 30 days in prison for holding up a placard saying “Stop New Oil” and overall recent developments:
“the direction of travel is fast and frightening and its repercussions are growing.”
@DrALJONES the USA will suffer hugely if it faces Iran.
Compare with Iraq 2003. Iraq was disabled by a no fly zone, downgraded military, and totally compromised with respect to surveillance. And yet the USA lost (what did it win?). And created two decades of instability, hostility and terrorism in the wider region eg ISIS emerged from Iraq.
You can win $1,000,000 for proving the Hodge Conjecture - it's one of seven Millennium Prize problems.
But if you want to become a millionaire, this is one of the hardest ways. So it's better to work on this for the love of math. Indeed, the only person who has won a Millennium prize so far turned it down, and still lives in his mom's apartment!
So what's the Hodge conjecture? It says roughly that for a smooth complex projective variety, all the rational homology classes that could possibly be represented by linear combinations of subvarieties actually 𝑎𝑟𝑒.
(Do you feel that million-dollar prize slipping further away already?)
I could explain what this means a bit better, but Frank Calegari does a great job here:
So I'll just rhapsodize on what it means that the Hodge Conjecture is still unsolved. It means the human race is profoundly ignorant about how polynomials are connected to topology. For smooth manifolds - the playground for differential geometry - we know a shitload about which homology classes can be represented by smooth submanifolds. But for projective varieties - the playground of algebraic geometry - we are comparatively clueless about the analogous question.
And in sense, the reason is that polynomial functions are a lot less flexible than smooth functions. You can't bend a polynomial in just a small region while leaving it alone elsewhere. So algebraic geometry is a lot further from topology than differential geometry is. It imposes a lot of extra constraints, and we don't fully understand the implications of those constraints.
Sorry, no really serious math in this post, just chat....
if I were to start learning more about one of the listed BSD operating systems, which would you recommend? Guessing the answer could be different if we're talking about daily desktop usage vs server, so maybe clarify your answer via a reply if you can (fwiw, probably more interested in daily desktop usage, but open to whatever too).
