The Eternal Doorman

It's a really great discussion about the novel Trust by Hernan Diaz . It sounds good, but really complicated. I can imagine needing to write notes to be able to figure out what I'm supposed to be reading and if I was doing that I might as well be trying to explain quantum mechanics or something. However, this does remind me a bit of The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt, which I really enjoyed. Apparently (though not to me, I only just read this in another review ) the title is a reference to Margaret Cavendish 's novel  The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World . Subscribe to Angela Collier .

Great talk about open source and FSF politics. See  https://gpg.fail/  and  To sign or not to sign: Practical vulnerabilities in GPG & friends .  19:50 Janitors that are too important to waste their time doing anything better than they already do it. That's not to say that rewriting  garbage in rust is a better thing to do! Don't write garbage! See  Sukyoung Ryu - Programming Language Research for Technical and Social Good (KAIST) .  Talk from December last year: Subscribe to  media.ccc.de . 

This is really interesting. She explains how, through self-reference, she became the Pope. At least that's how I imagine López-Díaz and Gershenson would put it (see Semantic Closure ). See  Emanuele Tesauro's ' Il cannocchiale aristotelico ' : 15:33  What she is referring to by the phrase pre-optical notions of vision is, I think, ideas such as that of  Extramission , which seems to have been entertained by Euclid in his Optics ! I think the quote of Stanisław Lem she is referring to at  30:00 is this passage from Summa Technologiae , specifically the chapter Intelligence: An Accident or a Necessity? : When it comes to changes that would knock an organism out of its environmental equilibrium by “programming” some unforeseeable instincts into it, the answer of the “first-order regulator” turns out to be unsatisfactory—which results in a crisis. On one hand, the mortality of non-adapted organisms suddenly increases, while at the same time, selection pressure privileg...

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See Closing the Loop: How Semantic Closure Enables Open-Ended Evolution?  by Amahury J. López-Díaz and Carlos Gershenson.   I found this sentence quite striking: "This manuscript explores the evolutionary emergence of semantic closure—the self-referential mechanism through which symbols actively construct and interpret their own functional contexts, ..." The paper has apparently been accepted for publication in the Royal Society's journal Interface . One wonders what these little symbols could be getting up to while mathematical biologists aren't paying attention, ... I suppose we should ask Steven Wolfram . See  Martin Elsman - Deriving a Kronecker-Free Functional Quantum Simulator . That talk Samson Abramsky gave in 2012 was really thought-provoking:   In particular A computable expression of closure to efficient causation by Matteo Mossio, Giuseppe Longo and John Stewart. The question about self-representation in total functional programming is an interestin...

See the paper Deriving a Kronecker-Free Functional Quantum Simulator .    17:22  How hard it is to find comprehensible surveys in this field. Reply by Samson Abramsky.   There was also a talk by Martin at ICFP 2026 ( 7:41:22 ) but they forgot to charge the microphone or something. However it's audible from 7:55:13 . Samson Abramsky on Quantum Monads 8:00  On relations and graph isomorphisms: the Heisenberg-Weyl algebra is a special case of generic graph rewriting.  See The algebras of graph rewriting by Nicolas Behr, Vincent Danos, Ilias Garnier and Tobias Heindel. I wonder how much proof theory can fit into this framework of isomorphism classes of graph-rewriting systems. See for example Sequent calculi for a unity of logic by Norihiro Yamada..: "Classical logic is the logic that permits unrestricted premise consumptions and reasoning do-overs , and is unaware of either".  See  The Sheaf-Theoretic Structure Of Non-Locality and Contextuality ...

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This is a really inspiring talk given at The NSF-Simons National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology in June [2025]. See Arthur Winfree's 1980 book The Geometry of Biological Time .     See also  Anton Petrov on Ultra Weak Biophoton Emission and Time Crystals . Subscribe to  NITMB Chicago . I'm reposting this, from a year or so ago, because of the Institut Henri Poincaré thing this morning which asked "What kind of knot is a person?" and it really made me think. Especially, it reminded me of this idea of Algebraic Automata theory . I had never heard of that, but it is about as old an idea as Automata theory itself. See Attila Egri-Nagy on a Concatenative Logic Programming Language .  It seems that lots of things, like knot theory and automata theory, for example, are only accidentally in different categories: if history had been otherwise, then maybe we would have sliced it all up quite differently and we would be amazed by theorems relating knots...

The void here is apparently the Green P car park, on a rooftop in Kensington Market, Toronto. ?! See Laura Pausini - Turista (Official Video) . We need some Nihil Declarandum  here too. Get her new album at  https://laurapausini.lnk.to/iocanto2 . See Laura Pausini Announcing her New Album and Another World Tour . Subscribe to Laura Pausini . Original by Raf: Subscribe to Warner Musica Italia . I also saw this this morning. It's a Green Pod, for peas, ... They seem slightly desperate to me. I suppose it's only to be expected, the economy being what it is:  Subscribe to Maserati .