Posts

Angela Collier on Quarks and Bootstraps

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She read this book by Geoffrey F.Chew:  S-Matrix Theory of Strong Interactions .  Wow, you don't hear much about ideas like this these days! See Fritjof Capra's 1984 interview with Geoffrey Chew and Wikipedia's entry on The Bootstrap Model . And I just found out that my old boss Peter Landshoff was doing S-Matrix stuff in 1966, and he co-authored a book called The Analytic S-Matrix  by R. J. Eden, P. V. Landshoff, D. I. Olive and J. C. Polkinghorne which CUP will print-on-demand for the princely sum of US$71 (plus postage I shouldn't wonder).  I remember he used to write his own numerical calculations in C and run these programs for days on end. One in particular he unwisely named www  (because it was a 3-particle weak-interaction calculation) and this stupid computer officer (not me) killed it because they thought it must be a web browser zombie process, because it had been running for three days and was taking up 90% of the CPU. My comment : 29:05 Well I don...

Karolina Żebrowska making Strange Dutch Headgear

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There's a story behind this:  The Blue Cloak . See also Sophia Coppola and Karolina Żebrowska on Marie Antoinette . Subscribe to Karolina Żebrowska .

The History Guy on the Great Leonid Meteor Storm of 1833

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I'd never heard of this! He's right that they don't write newspapers like they used to in 1833! Subscribe to The History Guy .

Ally Berry on Water

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19:07 My favourite bit: the top few meters of the ocean store as much heat as the entire atmosphere. So these Kelvin waves crossing the Pacific contain an awful lot of energy. Subscribe to AquaDiary . Subscribe to Action Lab . Subscribe to GeologyHub .

Food and Financial Security

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Even in South Los Angeles people feel they have space: See Andrew Millison in Village Homes, Davis CA and Luisa in the Garden of the Gods . Subscribe to PBS SoCal .  Subscribe to Leave Curious . Subscribe to Johns Hopkins Centre for a Livable Future . Subscribe to Asianometry . Subscribe to Dr Elaine's Soil Food Web School . See Money and Regenerative Agriculture .

Mike McCulloch and Anton Petrov on Dark Comets

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My comment : You completely lost me here. You seem to be applying this idea of minimum acceleration component-wise separately, otherwise what is the difference between acceleration in the plane of the ecliptic and perpendicular? If the thing is in orbit about the solar system (otherwise it wouldn't be a comet, would it?) then it is accelerating towards the center of mass (because that's what being in orbit means.) But you seem to be saying that there are other minimum-accelerations that apply to this motion as in the direction of motion. Are these due to drag and solar radiation pressure and stuff? Subscribe to Mike McCulloch . See The Dynamical Origins of the Dark Comets and a Proposed Evolutionary Track by Aster G. Taylor, Jordan K. Steckloff, Darryl Z. Seligman, Davide Farnocchia, Luke Dones, David Vokrouhlicky, David Nesvorny and Marco Micheli and Two distinct populations of dark comets delineated by orbits and sizes by Darryl Z. Seligman, Davide Farnocchia, Marco Micheli...

James Grime on a Single Binary Operator for "Continuous Mathematics"

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See All elementary functions from a single binary operator by Andrzej Odrzywołek. My comments : This exercise covers most of what used to be called O-level maths in my day. Not bad for 17 minutes.  There are also various single-point bases for combinatory logic, which is Turing complete. I think you should be able to get that down to two characters, just a left and a right bracket, so binary trees or Dyck words. And I guess then there is a correspondence between eml expressions and terms in CL because they are both just the Dyck words. Get Sophie Maclean to explain it. And the Sheffer's Stroke formulation of Boolean logic also can be written in terms of just one binary operator and one operand, so that has the same syntactic structure.  Subscribe to Numberphile . 

Gianna Nannini - Ricominciassimo

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See https://gn.lnk.to/GIANNAGOLD  for the album and she's still touring too  https://www.giannanannini.com/ . See also  Gianna Nannini - America Inc .  Subscribe to  Gianna Nannini .

Tomas Petricek's Cultures of Programming - 5. Fundamental limits of proofs of programs

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See https://tomasp.net/cultures/  and these earlier post of mine . My comment : 40:06 That's really interesting. I'd never heard of Fetzer before. The "Machine as empirical description" seems not to have been much appreciated by the MIT AI people in the early eighties. See for example the introduction in Jon Doyle's 1980 PhD thesis A Model for Deliberation, Action and Introspection. The sense then in which proof is empirical knowledge is entirely predicated on the machine actually behaving in the way its formal description says it does. So for example if a track on the PCB is cut at a certain place then your empirical knowledge about the device is quite possibly not worth anything. So empirical knowledge doesn't really sound like the right way to describe a proof. It's interesting that a year before Brian Cantwell Smith wrote that commentary on proof he wrote Reflection and semantics in LISP which led to all that "reflective towers of interpreters...

Tomas Petricek's Cultures of Programming - 4. Mathematical science of computation and structured programming

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See https://tomasp.net/cultures/ .  My comment : 29:02 That's funny! What I noticed was that because the chief programmer wasn't actually looking at any code (seriously, he just saw the specifications) he couldn't see the stupid things they were paying people to do. We were mostly writing glue code to connect separately developed subsystems, but that glue was pretty complicated because connecting independent developed APIs together is complex.   See also these earlier posts of mine . Subscribe to Tomas Petricek .