Predominantly Erroneous (Exohedron nonsense blog)

"Vegan soylent green" that manages to be both less ethical and worse for the environment than regular soylent green.

 

Five people tied to the tape of a Turing machine and you have to prove the machine halts before it runs over the people.

Note: you do not have to prove that the Turing machine won't run over the people, you just have to prove that the Turing machine eventually halts at all, and you have to produce said proof before the Turing machine runs over the people.

 

Looking at the list of bodily fluids that are derived from blood and the list of bodily solids that are derived from skin.

 

i know about basically everything being derived from blood because of that one tumblr post but what's derived from skin??

 

Teeth and bones being the ones that immediately spring to mind.

 

i think I knew teeth but I did not know bones. mildly unsettling!

 

Bone-esque material originated as external armor for squishy fish, and only later migrated inside.

 

I suppose I really ought to give up on guage theory and just learn differential topology or something instead. Like, most of the math is fine, except for the presentation which is awful because physicists don't know how to deal with nontrivial bundles. It's only when we get to the Standard Model and the author inevitably forgets how to distinguish between arguments from physical intuition, arguments from experiment, and actual mathematics.

 

Judging by my collection my favorite transformers are Arcee and Devastator. This is at least partially a function of the dearth of Whirl toys, but is mostly accurate.

 

That fine line between trivial and impossible

 

Dr. Strange was... okay.

During the movie I had a bunch of thoughts about the pacing of scenes and actions, how there were so many, many points where if they had drawn out the tension for just a little longer, the hit would have been so much stronger. Like, just a slightly longer pause, or one more minor failure before success.
And then the diegetic music happened and totally ruined my ability to take the director seriously at all.
But! Even the diegetic music scene could have been so much better if it had been a little more coherent, with a little bit more build-up! Like, it still would have been stupid as fuck, but it could have been cool stupid. Diegetic music isn't just to fill the audio track! It's soundtrack that's happening on screen! Everything that you could normally do with background, non-diegetic music, for atmosphere, characterization, world-building, but also the fact that it's happening in-universe as well!

There are of course other things to say about the movie, but of course I get stuck on the music and the within-scene pacing.

 

Appears to be a dog except regardless of which angle you approach it at, it always looks like it's staring, in the head-tilted, wide-eyed manner unique to confused dogs, over your left shoulder.

 

Ok, so it turns out that I do in fact feel responsibility, in that there was a bunch of shit that I needed to do for work over the course of the next week and instead I get to sit at home going stir crazy because I got COVID. And this wouldn't be so bad if I was just one ant out of many but instead I'm team lead for several projects and am supposed to be running around like I'm on fire.

 

I just realized that the English phrase we use for "spouse's child" or "parent's spouse" don't follow the "in-law" construction. Like, your sister's husband is your brother-in-law, but your mother's husband (if he isn't your father) is your stepfather, not your father-in-law (unless you married one of his kids, but that's not the point).

 

Yeah, I'm a sucker for clear, layered vocals dripping in reverb.

 

A trump card is usually good, while drawing the Tower card in tarot is usually considered unfortunate, but drawing the Trump Tower card definitely means bad things.

 

Just realized how in like school and shit you're told not to use first-person in formal writing. But in at least math writing in English the dominant pronoun after "it" is "we". "We compute X", "we show that Y".
Huh.

 

I don't think I'm at the age yet, or of the appearance of such, where if I tell people that I lived in Boston for 21 years, "what were you doing in Boston?" counts as a question whose answer is significantly uncertain. I mean, I myself am pretty bad at guessing people's ages, so maybe I shouldn't throw stones. But I was definitely taken aback, given that I am almost the youngest member of the office.

 

It's not exactly surprising, but boy does it take some effort to extract the meat from a lobster.

 

It turns out that some things are much easier to understand if you just bother to write them down explicitly. In this particular case I'm thinking about the Suzuki-Ree groups, which on the face of them make no sense because the relevant automorphisms appear to swap root lengths. But if you actually write out the Chevalley bases for B₂(2²ⁿ⁺¹), G₂(3²ⁿ⁺¹) and F₄(2²ⁿ⁺¹) then you see that in those particular characteristics a bunch of things vanish and so the differences in the root lengths doesn't matter anymore.