@weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz
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weekend_editor

@weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz

Retired physicist, after a career in machine learning & stats mostly for cancer drug discovery. Now blogging about stats in the news.

Avatar: convergence basins in the complex plane of Newton's algorithm searching for the cube roots of unity. (After a NYT column by https://mathstodon.xyz/@stevenstrogatz, long ago.)

Header: Quote from GK Chesterton, London Daily News, 1905-Aug-16 on epistemic humility and the ability to say "I am wrong" as the foundation of idealism.

#statistics #physics #r

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spaf, to random
@spaf@mstdn.social avatar
weekend_editor,
@weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@spaf

In Finland, you get a top hat and a sword when you finish your PhD:

https://www.someweekendreading.blog/finland-phd/

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

This stone circle in the Outer Hebrides has he most metal name possible: Cnoc Filibhir Bheag. It's smaller than another stone circle nearby, but maybe that's why its name is better.

I imagine some long-bearded Druid, feeling a bit outclassed, slamming his staff on the ground and saying

"I hereby dub this stone circle CNOC FILIBHIR BHEAG!!!"

and everyone saying "Whoa, okay, that's cool".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callanish_III

weekend_editor,
@weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@johncarlosbaez

On the other hand, the Gaelic translates to something very approximately like "Little Phillip's Hill".

Which is kind of a let-down, isn't it?

gutenberg_org, to books
@gutenberg_org@mastodon.social avatar

"There came a time, he realized, when the strangeness of everything made it increasingly difficult to realize the strangeness of anything."
Lost Horizon

James Hilton was born in 1900. Hilton's first novel, Catherine Herself, was published in 1920 when he was still an undergraduate. The next 11 years were difficult for him, and it was not until 1931 that he had success with the novel And Now Goodbye. via @wikipedia

Books by James Hilton at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/54898

Title page of The passionate year by James Hilton which is available at PG: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/68676

weekend_editor,
@weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@gutenberg_org @wikipedia

"People make mistakes in life through believing too much, but they have a damned dull time if they believe too little." -- James Hilton, Lost Horizon, 1933.

Been having a lot of fun thinking about Lost Horizon every Memorial Day for the last couple years.

https://www.someweekendreading.blog/memorial-day-2023/

siderea, to macos

A follow up for everyone who helped out with my mysterious backup drive issue:

I bought a fresh 1T drive, and I reformatted it to Mac OS Extended file system (journaled).

The 960 GB of contents on the old exFAT drive fit in EIGHTY-NINE GB of the Mac OS Extended drive.

So, yeah, that was it.

weekend_editor,
@weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@siderea

exFAT is indeed pretty awful.

Even when working in a Windows shop, I used to reformat USB keys to NTFS, which drove IT folks nuts.

2 birds, 1 stone.

luckytran, to random
@luckytran@med-mastodon.com avatar

Throughout history, healthcare workers have complained about washing hands, wearing gloves and other PPE, not being allowed to smoke inside, and much more. Yet we implemented strong guidelines anyway to keep patients safe. We should do the same for masks.

weekend_editor,
@weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@luckytran

We've done even weirder stuff than that:

(1) an Idaho legislator who wants to CRIMINALIZE mRNA vaccines,

(2) some Florida legislators who want to ban them altogether because "genocide" (literally), and

(3) a Montana legislator who wants to forbid the vaccinated from ever donating blood.

I looked back further in history and found similar shrieking resistance to public sanitation (clean water and community sewage processing) in London of 1854, to resist cholera.

References in blog post below:

https://www.someweekendreading.blog/covid-disgrace/

Edent, to random
@Edent@mastodon.social avatar

The UK's Civil Aviation Authority have a brief report about what caused all the flight cancellations the other day:

https://publicapps.caa.co.uk/docs/33/NERL%20Major%20Incident%20Investigation%20Preliminary%20Report.pdf (440KB PDF)

A few interesting thoughts about their findings…

The major cause was:

> The plan included two waypoints along its route that were geographically distinct but which have the same designator.

I don't know enough about ICAO4444 / ADEXP to be sure, but it sounds like an understandable, albeit avoidable, error.

(1/n)

weekend_editor,
@weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@Edent
@cstross

In the 90's I worked on system like that, running print operations: high-volume,
image heavy, custom stuff like catalogs that came in GIANT postcript files. There were
all sorts of stages that to be processed: a splitter changed the input postscript into 1
postscript per page, a flat figured out how to position those pages on a large sheet for
later folding & binding, a RIP (raster image processor) changed each page into an
image, and several other things.

We used 90s-era machine learning to predict/guess what resources a job would require &
when. It could add/remove CPUs on demand. It optimized for a goal, often changing:
minimize runtime, use only available hardware, maximize revenue (customers pay only for
on-time work), and so on. Oh, and update the schedule as new jobs came in. And schedule
maintenance. And... and... and...

So we had all these CPUs on an internal network running CORBA and communicating via a
messaging database. (It mostly worked, when the company folded for other reasons.)

(1/2)

gutenberg_org, to books
@gutenberg_org@mastodon.social avatar

"All passes. Art alone
Enduring stays to us;
The Bust outlasts the throne,—
The Coin, Tiberius."
'Ars Victrix' (1876)

Henry Austin Dobson died in 1921.

English poet, critic, and biographer whose love and knowledge of the 18th century lent a graceful elegance to his poetry and inspired his critical studies. via @Britannica

Books by Austin Dobson at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/2155

Title page of Horace Walpole: A memoir by Austin Dobson which is available at PG: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/53649

weekend_editor,
@weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@gutenberg_org

Sappho, "To One Who Loved Not Poetry," ca mid-600BCE:

κατθάνοισα δὲ κείσῃ οὐδέ ποτα
μναμοσύνα σέθεν
ἔσσετ' οὐδὲ †ποκ'†ὔστερον· οὐ
γὰρ πεδέχῃς βρόδων
τῶν ἐκ Πιερίας· ἀλλ' ἀφάνης
κἠν Ἀίδα δόμῳ
φοιτάσεις πεδ' ἀμαύρων νεκύων
ἐκπεποταμένα[8]

But thou shalt ever lie dead,
nor shall there be any remembrance of thee then or thereafter,
for thou hast not of the roses of Pieria;
but thou shalt wander obscure even in the house of Hades,
flitting among the shadowy dead.

https://sacred-texts.com/cla/usappho/sph66.htm

Yeah, in a mood today.

siderea, to random

To everyone who is waiting for me to get back to them about the issue with 's API, apparently I will not, after all, be lightly caressing its surfaces.

I seem to have solved the problem through my favorite method: procrastination. My original cron job, with no changes whatsoever, just started working again two nights ago.

weekend_editor,
@weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@siderea

The only thing worse than a program that doesn't work & you don't know why is...

a program that DOES work and you don't know why.

fkamiah17, to UKpolitics
@fkamiah17@toot.wales avatar

Jesus. How much tinier a violin do I need to get? 🤬

weekend_editor,
@weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@fkamiah17
@cstross

Umm... I gather you find yourself in need of a very small violin, no doubt for some publicly beneficial reason?

The smallest violin with which I'm familiar is from 2010, fabricated at micron-scale using the University of Twente's MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology and their MEMS fab capabilities (MEMS = "Micro Electro Mechanical Systems"). See the conference paper and the press release below.

Other people have built tinier instruments. But because of scale, their strings tend to vibrate in megahertz ranges. Also, I believe they're mostly in vacuo, so "sound" is a bit of an abstract concept for them, let alone music.

These guys though... in a fit of nerdly insanity partaking of the divine madness, they have made vibrating strings which, in carefully titrated pressures, vibrate at human auditory frequencies. Using what amounts to magnetic pickups, they can be played by and for humans.

And so, composers being what they are, a piece has been written: 'Impromptu No. 1 for Micronium' by Arvid Jense, then of the Enschede Conservatorium.

(Some of the novels of @cstross contain rather highly customized violins for extremely specialized musical uses. I wonder what a microarray of those devices, made with this technology, might do? Or, given their likely nature, mostly "undo"?)

References:

JBC Engelen, et al., "A Musical Instrument in MEMS", MME2010 Workshop, 2010, 193-196.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/47936978_A_Musical_instrument_in_MEMS

WR van der Veen, "Making Music on a Microscopic Scale", Univ Twente press releases, 2010-Sep-24.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/47936978_A_Musical_instrument_in_MEMS

ChrisPirillo, to random
@ChrisPirillo@mastodon.social avatar

i think that i shall never see a poem as lovely as a WHAT THE HELL IS THAT

weekend_editor,
@weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@ChrisPirillo

Shoggoth tree.

gbhnews, (edited ) to random
@gbhnews@mastodon.social avatar

And now for the daily poll:

weekend_editor,
@weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@gbhnews

Is Mega-Stuff "one of those new flavors"?

Asking for a friend.

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

Musical tuning systems is the subject where you get mad at irrational numbers. Nothing works perfectly - and it's not your fault: it's math's fault. It's all about pushing around lumps in the carpet.

An 'octave' is the chord where the high note vibrates 2 times as fast as the low note. In a 'perfect fifth' it vibrates 3/2 times as fast. In a 'perfect fourth' it vibrates 4/3 as fast. In a 'major third' it vibrates 5/4 as fast. Our ears love these simple fractions.

But if you go up 4 perfect fifths, it's not quite the same as going up 2 octaves and a major third, since

3/2 × 3/2 × 3/2 × 3/2 = 81/16

is not quite

2 × 2 × 5/4 = 5 = 80/16

AARGH! 😠

The difference between these is called the 'syntonic comma'. Well, actually the ratio

81/80 = 1.0125

is called the syntonic comma. Listen to two notes with this frequency ratio:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntonic_comma

You can hear they aren't in tune, and it probably sounds annoying. This is why we can't have nice things.

Another problem is that if you go up 7 octaves it's almost but not quite 12 perfect fifths, since

2⁷ = 128

is not

(3/2)¹² = 129.746337890625

The ratio of these is called the 'Pythagorean comma':

531441/524288 = 1.0136432647705078125

This is why a 12-tone scale with all the notes equally spaced can't have perfect fifths. But for vocal music, the syntonic comma is more urgent problem, since it involves simpler fractions. It shows up in lots of different ways: two people can sing two different parts starting in tune, each singing beautifully, and wind up out of tune.

weekend_editor,
@weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@johncarlosbaez @highergeometer

Right -- most compromises stop a conflict, but make things slightly worse for everyone.

But equal tempering is a compromise that ends a couple thousand years of conflict and makes music intelligible to all. Plus... you get to learn about continued fractions! 🙂

https://oeis.org/DUNNE/TEMPERAMENT.HTML

Whether the fact that we've dropped all but 2 modes (major & minor) is another such compromise... I have my doubts. Some of those lovely old modes are quite nice, once you get used to them.

siderea, to random

Huh. is serving me a "403: Forbidden" error in response to my trying to wget the public (unauthenticated!) API page for my account from my server (part of a cron job script, but also tested manually at the command line, which is how I found out about the 403), even while serving it to me just fine in the browser. Yes, even while not logged in.

This change started sometime in the last ~28 hours. Script ran fine at 03:08:00+0100 yesterday.

I filed a support request, but Patreon has largely disavowed their API. Poot.

weekend_editor,
@weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@siderea

As the spouse of a psychologist, and myself a (retired) physicst turned statistician and erstwhile Lisp software engineer, I see that your 2 wolves need be approached carefully.

Henceforth, I shall make sure to have a really large, high-quality dog biscuit in each hand.

'Cause wolves are formidable, but... kinda distractable.

siderea, to random

Okay, so, it turns out that the sack of cumin that I bought at the halal store about 20 years ago did not in fact turn out to be a lifetime supply.

weekend_editor,
@weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@siderea

Sure it was: it supplied you with cumin for the entire lifetime of the bag.

mcnees, to random
@mcnees@mastodon.social avatar

Getting an earthquake during a hurricane is the sort of story you get when your writers are all on strike.

weekend_editor,
@weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@mcnees

Ok, suppose that's true.

When the writer's strike is over, I have some notes to give.

The main thrust is that you should pitch less Dante's Inferno, and more The Good Place.

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

What's interesting about the number 52?

  1. It's the number of weeks in a year.

  2. It's the number of cards in a deck, not counting jokers. This may not be a coincidence: the 4 suits correspond to the 4 seasons, there are 13 weeks per season, and the total value of all the cards is

(1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 + 10 + 11 + 12 + 13) × 4 = 364

with the joker giving 365. (The second joker helps out on leap years.)

  1. There are 52 partitions of a 5-element set into disjoint nonempty subsets. So, we say 52 is the fifth 'Bell number'. They're named after Eric Temple Bell, who wrote the famous book Males of Mathematics. He did not discover these numbers.

  2. In Japan, 52 chapters of the Tale of Genji have traditional symbols on the top called 'genji-mon', which correspond visibly to the 52 partitions of a 5-element set. Unfortunately the Tale of Genji has 54 chapters, so they needed to make up two extra symbols.

For more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_number

weekend_editor,
@weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@johncarlosbaez

When you want some recreational reading, you should definitely check out Scott Alexander's novel, Unsong.

It's a novel in which kabbalah is a real thing, but all the combinatorial searches for the names of G-d have been captured by the Big Theonomy companies and the known ones are encumbered by patent/IP restrictions.

Oh, and puns about whales and Torah. Really, really obscure puns.

The characters are always going on about the symmetries and analogies of this or that number (as you just did), and then saying: "This is not a coincidence, because nothing is a coincidence."

This is apparently inspired by the way some of the patients would rattle on in Scott's psychiatry practice.

https://unsongbook.com/

weekend_editor,
@weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@johncarlosbaez

Well, his patients were... inspiring.

Which is also your aim, no? 🙂

flexghost, to random
@flexghost@mastodon.social avatar

“DONALD JOHN TRUMP solicited Acting United States Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Acting United States Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue to make a false statement by stating, ‘Just say that the election was corrupt, and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen'"

  • pg 45 of the Georgia indictment

Ever wonder why Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Josh, Holly, MTG, and the rest of the sedition caucus defend Trump so passionately?

Traitors.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23909553-read-trump-indictment-in-fulton-county-georgia-probe

weekend_editor,
@weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@flexghost

Do you really think they're that bright, though?

Cruz is definitely bright enough to realize this, but I'm not sure about the others.

helenczerski, to climate
@helenczerski@fediscience.org avatar

Some questions that should be asked about every new piece of tech:

  • Does it actually work?
  • What are its side effects, especially for ecosystems, communities and the physical/chemical state of the natural environment?
  • What’s the lifetime carbon cost?
  • What’s the lifetime energy cost? If renewables, how much capacity is that taking away decarbonising the grid?
  • Will scale-up cause damage?
  • Who benefits most from it and who will control/regulate it for the public good?
weekend_editor,
@weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@helenczerski

Also, since everything wants to use the cloud somehow:

Does it require a network connection?

If so:

  • Has it been security audited by a 3rd party and the audit results published?

  • Does it give up ANY personal information?

  • Can the manufacturer EVER brick it if they are unhappy?

spaf, to random
@spaf@mstdn.social avatar

Also, what is the protocol on decorations for 4th Indictment Day celebrations?

We still have all our decorations up from 3rd Indictment Day!

And can we reuse them for 5th and subsequent Indictment Day? (I'm hoping prosecutors In MI, PA, AZ, take some hints)

weekend_editor,
@weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@spaf

Honestly, I'm trying not to overdo it for Indictment Day.

I'm looking forward to Conviction Day, and most of all to Sentencing Day.

For Sentencing Day I will be making some of @scalzi 's infamous Schadenfreude Pie. Because of all days, that day will be WHAT IT IS FOR.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2006/09/26/how-to-make-a-schadenfreude-pie/

johncarlosbaez, to random
@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz avatar

The orange spore awakens. It seeks to grasp itself.

But each time it almost succeeds, its arms split, delaying the process!

Eternally frustrated, after an infinite agony it dies and becomes a pathological object called the 'Alexander horned sphere'.

The Alexander horned sphere is topologically a 3-dimensional ball, but its exterior is not simply connected:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_horned_sphere

Animated gif of the formation of Alexander's horned sphere, by Gian Marco Todesco: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Construcci%C3%B3n_de_esfera_de_Alexander_con_cuernos.gif

weekend_editor,
@weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@johncarlosbaez

AKA John Conway's hair. An animation would be truly terrifying.

siderea, (edited ) to random

Hey, philosophers, Latinists, & historians, I got a question about Seneca.

I was just reading a popular press article about Stoicism, and it had a quote attributed to Seneca:

"For we must have someone according to whom we may regulate our characters; you can never straighten that which is crooked unless you use a ruler."

That's kind of wild, because my understanding, from what little I know of the histories of clothing construction, building construction, and mathematics, rulers - measuring devices that involve periodic markings along their length - weren't invented until something like the 16th century CE.

So I'm wondering if anybody has a source for this, either the cite or even better the original Latin. This smells like an entirely spurious quote, given that it hinges on English language wordplay. But that could be a translation. In which case I would very much like to know what word in Latin got translated as "ruler".

weekend_editor,
@weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@siderea

Caution: The last time I was under Latin tutelage was in the Nixon administration. (And you know how THAT worked out.)

Still, it seems like a pretty reasonable translation of the original, to me. Though I see your difficulty with the English word "ruler" (see below).

Google books has Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales (Moral Letters to Lucillius). The piece you are quoting is here, at the end of Epistle XI, "On the Blush of Modesty":

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Ad_Lucilium_Epistulae_Morales/H3w6AQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=For+we+must+have+someone+according+to+whom+we+may+regulate+our+characters%3B+you+can+never+straighten+that+which+is+crooked+unless+you+use+a+ruler&pg=PA65&printsec=frontcover

English:

"For we must indeed have someone according to whom we may regulate our characters; you can never straighten that which is crooked unless you use a ruler. Farewell."

Latin (Google translate mangles this fairly badly, so don't bother with that):

"Opus est, inquam, aliquo, ad quem mores nostri se ipsi exigant; nisi ad regulam prava non corriges. VALE."

So your question is about "regulam", which does indeed translate to "ruler". But not quite the tic-marked stick you're thinking of, more like a "master" or "governor". In particular, Wiktionary gives the more medieval example of a "book of rules for a religious establishment", e.g., the Rule of St Benedict. Clearly it's not a measuring rule, but a set of rules as given by a mentor.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/regula

The previous sentence, for context, says: "Choose a master whose life, conversation, and soul-expressing face have satisfied you; picture him always to yourself as your protector or your pattern." The whole paragraph before this is about choosing a mentor to follow who will help one's moral development.

So: yes, ruler; no, not THAT ruler.

mmitchell_ai, to random
@mmitchell_ai@mastodon.social avatar

I'm often asked by journalists what kinds of advice an LLM might easily foreseeably spit out that could harm people. Off cuff, one set of examples has been instructing people to consume poison.
And...yep, here it is.
https://gizmodo.com/paknsave-ai-savey-recipe-bot-chlorine-gas-1850725057

weekend_editor,
@weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@mmitchell_ai

You asked about what " might easily forseeably" happen.

May I assume that what ACTUALLY HAS HAPPENED is admissible evidence?

Gruesome example: a man in his 30s, married with 2 children, was talked into suicide after several weeks of conversation with a GPT-J derivative from EleutherAI.

Obviously the man had some psychological difficulties and the details are not disclosed to the public. But it seems clear to his spouse and police that the AI talked him into suicide.

L Walker, "Belgian man dies by suicide following exchanges with chatbot", The Brussels Times, 2023-Mar-28.

https://www.brusselstimes.com/430098/belgian-man-commits-suicide-following-exchanges-with-chatgpt

weekend_editor,
@weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@mmitchell_ai

And here's a spreadsheet of numerous examples of AI learning to cheat by finding loopholes in the specifications of games.

Moral: No matter how tightly you think you've specified the situation, there will be holes in your specification that allow cheating.

We can't get AI safety by tightly constraining acceptable behavior because we can't write precise enough constraints. Only an AI that wants to be good to humans will be safe for humans.

The gaming application is interesting, because arguably the AI is smarter than us, and can do things we CANNOT predict, and hence cannot forbid in advance.

If we do this outside of games, the consequences will be deadly.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRPiprOaC3HsCf5Tuum8bRfzYUiKLRqJmbOoC-32JorNdfyTiRRsR7Ea5eWtvsWzuxo8bjOxCG84dAg/pubhtml

spaf, to random
@spaf@mstdn.social avatar

I’m here in Colorado to straighten out the Space Force folks.

We’ll, that’s what I’m told by the implant the aliens placed after the second-to-last abduction. (No, nothing like the movie “Imposter” at all, they tell me. Nope. Nothing to see here. )

weekend_editor,
@weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@spaf

Have you ever thought of explaining to the aliens who keep abducting you about consulting?

I mean, surely a consulting arrangement with you (for a reasonable fee, of course) would be much less trouble than abducting you again and again?

I've no idea, though, what the disclosure issues are about extraterrestrial income that shows on your taxes.

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