@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net
@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

wrog

@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net

genuine Internet Old Fart (if you're under 40, I have email that's older than you are).
sometime Democratic activist/party-hack & professional clueless, middle-aged white guy. He/him.
Math/computer-science degrees + physics courses. Music theorist by marriage.
Seattle area resident; orig. from New Jersey. Former Microsoft.
#LambdaMOO #perl #scheme #AlgebraicTopology #concurrency #Princeton #Cambridge #Stanford #autism #AbsolutePitch #RomanHistory #BoardGames #atheist #piano #microtonal

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moira, to cycling
@moira@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

I was really pleased with this cleanup filtering until I noticed what it was doing with diagonal roads. :(

(Yes, this is part of the redo project with better tools. I'm also taking the opportunity to improve the background King County map.)

wrog,
@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

@moira

Problem with all of these is they have "Lake Forest Park" in them. I'm now officially tired of cities with 3 nouns in their name that aren't actually any of them. Please do something about this. kthxbai

wrog,
@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

@moira

also looks like whatever filter you used for versions 2 and 3 was effective at getting rid of those annoying bike paths. Good job.

(maybe I should write a Lake Forest Park filter)

cdarwin, to random
@cdarwin@c.im avatar

New York Times editor Joe Kahn says defending democracy is a partisan act

and he won’t do it
https://presswatchers.org/2024/05/new-york-times-editor-joe-kahn-says-defending-democracy-is-a-partisan-act-and-he-wont-do-it/

wrog,
@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

@cdarwin

"NYT fully believes they have no obligation to stop the fascist attack on America. They’ve finally said so explicitly."

It should be noted they did this the last time around, too (lots of glowing articles about Hitler in the mid 1930s).

wrog, to random
@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

so... what pissed me off the most about the JJAbrams Star Trek movies:

seeing the trailer for the 2nd movie with Benedict Cumberbatch and Alice Eve, realizing that JJ had found the perfect re-casting for Gary Mitchell + Elizabeth Dehner and that this was obviously going to be a re-imagining of "Where No Man Has Gone Before."

Note that, generally, a pilot is made before the showrunners have fully figured out the worldbuilding/etc. There'll always be mistakes + stuff that no longer makes sense in the series context that eventually develops.

This was especially true of WNMHGB.

For a reboot/reimagining, that's what you need to re-do. Good episode, but so much to fix: Middle initial on the tombstone is the least of it.

1/4

wrog,
@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

And of course, dropping a rock on Mitchell would never have been enough to kill him.

That was clearly all staged for Kirk's benefit, to get him to go away and never come back so that they could enjoy their super-powered utopia in peace or fuck off to infinity and start the Q or whatever it was they were supposed to have done.

Naturally, there turns out to be Something They're Missing and they have to come back to get it … with suitably horrific consequences for humanity if they should succeed.

The plot writes itself.

2/n

wrog,
@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

And ALL of the property destruction you see in that trailer is completely explainable in terms of Mitchell's powers (Dehner's too; even in the original episode, once she gets her shit together, she goes from 0 to 60-Full-Ass-Beam-of-Death in no time, even if the 1966 special-effects/budget couldn't do it justice -- really needed to be detonating half of the landscape behind him whenever she missed).

Even if the movie were to end on a single half-destroyed ship fleeing the multi-solar-system battlefield with a message,

"Dear Organians/Metrons/Treylane's-People/ANYBODY:

We've well and truly fucked ourselves now. PLEASE HELP.

kthnxbye,"

it would still have been magnificent.

I was so looking forward to that movie.

3/n

wrog,
@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

Instead we got this completely lame rehash of Wrath of Khan, the original version of which, I might remind, was basically the culmination of TOS -- one of the best things they ever did with that cast + Ricardo Montelban in top form.

(I will still put Doomsday Machine in 1st, but that's me...).

I mean, maybe JJ could have found a way to make it better, but the odds were so stacked against that happening, it was ridiculous.

A complete waste of opportunity.

ok, I'm done.

4/4

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

"Nature in Descending Regions" from Levi Walter Yaggy's 1887 𝐺𝑒𝑜𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑝𝘩𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑙 𝑃𝑜𝑟𝑡𝑓𝑜𝑙𝑖𝑜—𝐶𝑜𝑚𝑝𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑃𝘩𝑦𝑠𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑙, 𝑃𝑜𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑙, 𝐺𝑒𝑜𝑙𝑜𝑔𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑙, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝐴𝑠𝑡𝑟𝑜𝑛𝑜𝑚𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑙 𝐺𝑒𝑜𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑝𝘩𝑦. This popular set of maps and charts was intended for use in classrooms. Each page was 2 feet by 3 feet in size!

(1/3)

wrog,
@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

@johncarlosbaez

wow, that's....

... way more crowded than the actual Artic

ColinTheMathmo, to random
@ColinTheMathmo@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Space I can recover. Time, never. -- Napoleon Bonaparte

wrog,
@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

@ColinTheMathmo

probably just as well Napoleon didn't know about String Theory

Lazarou, to random
@Lazarou@mastodon.social avatar

so many purple cars.....

wrog,
@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

@Lazarou

"so many purple cars....."

Colorization Fail.

lowqualityfacts, to random
@lowqualityfacts@mstdn.social avatar

We made a comic about Achilles.

wrog,
@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

@fkamiah17 @DaPickle @lowqualityfacts

THEY WERE JUST COUSINS!

wrog,
@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

@fkamiah17 @DaPickle @lowqualityfacts

wait, what?

(I was talking about Achilles & Patroclus; no idea how one squeezes Biden into this one;

in fact, ew...
)

wrog,
@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

@fkamiah17 @DaPickle @lowqualityfacts

ok, educate me: where does Biden show up in the Illiad?

(I know he's old, but...)

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

EDIT: Problem diagnosed, a plan has been formulated. Further suggestions and comments welcome, but please read the thread first.

Time for today's adventure in understanding why things don't work the way I think they should.

Please feel free to boost this for reach, or ignore it if you have no interest, and think none of your followers can help.

Today ... a USB disk mounted on an Ubuntu machine.

1/n

wrog,
@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

@ColinTheMathmo

(apologies in advance for stupid-question):

Do we know the cd command didn't silently fail?
(i.e., are you in the directory you think you are? There might also be some special treatment for // that differs between commands. These are not URLs.)

(admittedly it's been a couple decades since I last had that kind of fail -- these are more NFS-ish kinds of problems)

wrog,
@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

@ColinTheMathmo

so is this a case of

(0) we can rebuild the inode table without having to mess with the rest of the disk
(1) we need to reformat the disk (copy everything out and back)
(2) we need to recompile the kernel to allow bigger inode values
(3) we're fucked because inode_t is int32 and we have more than 4 billion files in the same filesystem

?

Conan_Kudo, to random
@Conan_Kudo@fosstodon.org avatar

All this talk about over the weekend, I want to also point out that it's important to remember that the "software supply chain" largely does not exist in regards to open source, because most people have no real relationship other than parasitic consumption with the project.

@Di4na's great blog post on this topic explains it quite well: https://www.softwaremaxims.com/blog/not-a-supplier

wrog,
@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

@Conan_Kudo @Di4na

"You are not buying from a supplier; you are a raccoon digging through dumpsters for free code."

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

Hardcore math tweet:

The complex numbers are nice in two ways. They are an 'algebraically closed' field, meaning that every polynomial equation with complex coefficients has a complex solution. And they are 'Cauchy complete' metric space, meaning that every Cauchy sequence converges.

We can get the complex numbers in two ways. We can start with the rational numbers and take their Cauchy completion. This gives us the real numbers. But these are not algebraically closed. So we can take their algebraic closure. The result is the complex numbers, which is still Cauchy complete.

Or, we can start with the rational numbers and take their algebraic closure. This gives us the 'algebraic numbers'. There's a way to define a nice metric on these, but the resulting metric space is not Cauchy complete. To fix that, we can take its Cauchy completion. The result is the complex numbers, which is still algebraically closed.

In the first route I used the usual metric on rational numbers. But what if we use one of the p-adic metrics?

We can start with the rational numbers and take their Cauchy completion using the p-adic metric. This gives us the p-adic numbers. But these are not algebraically closed. So then we can take their algebraic closure. There's a nice metric on it, but it's 𝑛𝑜𝑡 still Cauchy complete.

So we can take the Cauchy completion 𝑎𝑔𝑎𝑖𝑛. You may feel sort of pessimistic right around now... but this time the resulting field 𝑖𝑠 algebraically closed, and of course Cauchy complete by definition. So yay, we're done! 🎉

The weird part: the resulting field is isomorphic to the complex numbers equipped with a weird metric. Using the axiom of choice. 😬

wrog,
@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

@johncarlosbaez

"The weird part: the resulting field is isomorphic to the complex numbers equipped with a weird metric. Using the axiom of choice. 😬"

Is this something someone has actually proven or is it just something that people assume?

Because when I took the seminar on this (circa 1982) , the word then was that we know very little about Ωₚ (the ultimate algebraically closed Cauchy-completion of 𝐐ₚ), that so far as we know, it has nothing to do with the complex numbers and Koblitz's book (what we were using) had nothing further to say,

and it seems to me there's rather a lot of work to do to axiom-of-choice a consistent metric out of this. But maybe somebody's done it in the last 30 years.

Anyway: citation needed.

wrog,
@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

@johncarlosbaez

ok, thanks.

I guess the idea is that the theory of algebraically closed fields can't do anything to distinguish or relate algebraically independent transcendentals,

which means if we have two extensions of 𝐐 with their respective transcendence bases having the same cardinality, ANY bijection at all between those bases can be extended into a field isomorphism,

... and if it so happens there's no way to have such an isomorphism respect convergence of sequences (i.e., f(lim xₙ)=lim f(xₙ)) w.r.t. ANY of the metrics, we just don't care.

Seems like something they ought to have known about in 1982.

OTOH it's a completely useless isomorphism, so maybe it just wasn't worth mentioning.

Bleah.

wrog,
@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

@johncarlosbaez

and "choosing" every element of the (uncountably large) bijection

I knew that part. (ANY pulling of uncountably large rabbits from hats ⟹ AoC)

What I was missing was how to deal with the question of how you map some z that's the limit of a sequence in ℂ, to something appropriate in ℂₚ, where, even if the sequence were entirely rational numbers, it might not even converge in ℂₚ because the metric there is totally different and so you won't even have anything to choose from.

And the answer is if your z is algebraically independent of all of the z's you've considered thus far, then you just pick ANYTHING AT ALL that's algebraically independent of all of the previous f(z)'s and the metrics can go fuck themselves.

jmac, to random
@jmac@masto.nyc avatar

This is where my SOP is:

  1. If I haven’t seen spam from this domain before, report it to them
  2. Open the spamming server in a new browser window
  3. Confirm that neither the admin nor the most recent non-spam user have posted in the last six months
  4. Go to my server’s admin interface
  5. Suspend the spamming account
  6. Limit the spamming server, if not otherwise active

Step 3 seldom fails. Sometimes I find servers that have been running with no new legitimate posts since November 2022.

wrog,
@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

@jmac
@moira

So let me see if I have this right:

The default config for a mastodon server is open registration? (And thus people who randomly try it out without knowing to turn this off and then fall under a truck turn into spam factories)

Or is it that we have people ignoring the warnings + turning on open registration, and then abandoning their instances?

Or is it that there are no warnings about turning on open registration?

moira, to random
@moira@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

The spaceship bridge where they have the big fight scene at the end in The Marvels is like... it's like they're fighting in German Expressionist Tron and it doesn't quite work.

wrog,
@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

@moira

"fighting in German Expressionist Tron"

I might pay to see that.
(or I might just rent Tron).

moira, to architecture
@moira@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

this... I haven't seen a McMansion Hell update in a while, but this...

this is magnificent.

i want more photos. i want them so bad. but for now just... start here:

https://www.tumblr.com/mcmansionhell/741171396971053056/weve-found-it-folks-mcmansion-heaven

wrog,
@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

@moira @rmd1023

What level of corruption do you need for a $5 million house to be assessed at $237,000?

(I know, Alabama, but yikes...)

jmac, to random
@jmac@masto.nyc avatar

Lupine Dominus is that song I try to get you to listen to even though it begins with 20 seconds of UFO smoke alarm and I’m like ha ha it starts off like that yeah and then the drum and bass come in and I sit up, but before I can ask for your agreement that this is great, it proceeds into hyperdistorted guitar flatulence for most of a minute and I slink back down in my chair again, mortified. Then the vocals kick in and I stand up so fast I hurt myself on the coffee table https://youtu.be/rt5bybIbgjI?feature=shared

wrog,
@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

@jmac

Are the vocals supposed to be completely unintelligible or is that just me?

wrog,
@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

@jmac

ok, so, purposefully trying to be annoying, then.

(they have a ways to go to catch up with this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ8P4DNQA90
)

daylightatheism, to atheism

The rapid, unprecedented growth of the "nones" continues apace.

The nonreligious are now larger than any single religious group in America, including evangelicals and Catholics. What's more, they've become an outright majority in multiple states:

https://onlysky.media/alee/new-map-captures-explosive-rise-of-the-nonreligious/

wrog,
@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net avatar

@daylightatheism

I'm thinking there's a potential category error here, or maybe too much jumping to conclusions about what a "none of the above" response to a survey question actually means.

Just because someone doesn't want to be associated with existing organizations of a particular type doesn't always tell us much about what they believe or even necessarily that they've given a whole lot of thought to it.

Could be a rise in secular humanism / rationalism / atheism (hint: these aren't all the same thing). ... or a vacuum waiting to be filled by Something Else. Nor are these mutually exclusive.

(eg, QAnon + antivax woo peddlers gaining traction worry me)

(sure would be nice if a survey could drill down on the "none"s)

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