Predominantly Erroneous (Exohedron nonsense blog)

That horrific day and a half when argumate wasn't posting

 

Like many other animals, the ants aren't afraid of me, but they are afraid of the vacuum cleaner.

 

So I have finally read a pretty-complete proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. Do I understand it? Kind of. Can I reproduce it? Probably not. Can I sketch it? Maybe. Can I explain it to anyone else? Fuck no.
But I understand it better than I did in January, which is the last time that I saw part of the proof, and maybe someday I'll revisit it, although to be honest arithmetic geometry is really not my thing.

 

The best thing about ShowZStore over the other transformers-centric online retailers is that they show every in-progress development shots that third-party company designers produce, so you get to see them go from CAD models to unpainted test shots to painted test shots to final production versions.
This is also the worst thing, because every single update on the Cang Toys not-Predacons just increases my desire to plop down several hundred dollars.

 

The fact that the d-dimensional Ising model for d > 1 only has a sharp phase transition in the infinite-particle case makes me feel a lot better about it; the finite-particle case is smooth, as it should be, but the limit of a sequence of smooth things is allowed to be discontinuous.

 

The problem with hoping that someone dies from the coronavirus is not so much the wanting them dead part, but rather that what you'd probably be happier with is the platform or movement or group that said person stands for being delegitimized and removed from power, and while it might be nice to think that the irony inherent in said person dying from the coronavirus would lead to such a delegitimizing, given how politics tends to work that is probably not the case. Depending on the circumstances, it may simply lead to martyrdom, of the appearance of self-sacrifice, rather than irony. It's not like contradictions are exactly a problem in politics.

This is not to say that one cannot get some utility out of said person dying from the coronavirus. But such people are rarely truly load-bearing, and their corpse may make their platform more stable rather than less.

 

I just love the idea of people living in a giant, out-of-commission machine. Like, a space colony that's actually the hollowed-out corpse of a giant laser cannon. Or like, a bunch of people living on a Death Star that hasn't been fired in a thousand years.
And they don't necessarily know that it has a purpose other than providing a space to live in; they just know that it's got some weird parts that aren't really good for habitation, and maybe don't touch the glowy bits.
And then it turns out that it still functions, although the people living inside the big hollow shaft in the middle might want to consider moving their stuff first.

 

If I took a nap in the Catskills I wouldv woken up on time.
RIP van Winkle but I'm different.

 

I should start telling people that "mining bitcoin" is a euphemism. Euphemism for what? Well, that's kind of the point of euphemisms, now isn't it.

 

I'm always impressed by how much math my mom remembers, considering she hasn't done any herself for like 50 years. Also how much she remembers of the stuff I told her about, at least the names of topics that I've been interested in or learned 15 years ago.
From what I can tell, she was probably good at math in school, she just doesn't care for the subject beyond the fact that I like math. Which makes me really sad about the general math-phobia in this country, that it is possible to be good at math despite not liking it at all. I mean, I would prefer people to like math, but if they can't like it I would rather they didn't fear it.

 

My mom is absolutely convinced she’s bad at most STEM subjects, then I start explaining asymmetric encryption to her and she not only gets the point of authentication and nonrepudiation before I’ve gotten halfway through the explanation, she then intuits that this is related to certificates. Which, yes exactly. She’s done this with chemistry recently as well, though I don’t remember the specifics. She seems sincerely confused when I tell her she’s just done something very unusual. She had some pretty terrible teachers is what I’m getting from this.

 

Regardless of whether it's correct or not, "octopodes" is definitely the version that sounds coolest.

 

Things I might have built in high school except that the science team supervisors were actually somewhat responsible people: combination hot glue and staple gun.

Actually, no, that's not true; we only used epoxy for everything. Or solder if we were doing electrical stuff.

 

Did you see that a grad student solved the Conway knot problem?

https://www.quantamagazine.org/graduate-student-solves-decades-old-conway-knot-problem-20200519/

 

That's pretty cool! I wish I knew more knot theory; I got into it during grad school but had to set it aside to focus on my own research.

 

It may be that I've only met one of them, but I have a hard time understanding why someone would take quantum field theory as a logical necessity. Like, I understand that it has gotten us very, very good experimental results, but it's a mess from a mathematical perspective with a number of large, unhappy holes. So it might even be true for whatever notion of "true" you'd like to employ, but I like to think that logical necessity is a bit stronger a condition than mere truth.

 

I only have a vague intuition about why some cheese types have specified wheel sizes, rather than just being arbitrary amounts of a mass noun.

 

So when is Disney going to make a completely unnecessary sequel trilogy to the LOTR? We've already had the OT, which people generally like, and then we had a prequel trilogy, much maligned for a number of reasons; we might as well complete the parallel, right?

 

Bayesian interference

 

I was thinking about reasons why I might want to move my bijou thread to the private subforum, but I realized that none of my thoughts that would merit movement to the private subforum are interesting enough to post. I guess most things that would require privacy tend to be personal, and I just don't find myself all that interesting.