Posts

Showing posts from July, 2022

Terry Davis Talking About The Design Decisions Behind his TempleOS

Image
See  TempleOS . They're quite interesting. If he hadn't made these choices he might not have got as far as he did all alone. Subscribe to Terry Davis Old Archive .

Laura Kotevska - The Renaissance of Euclid's Elements

Image
Both the Strozzi and the Medici families had a keen interest in collecting manuscripts from around the world. 15:20 The "extra-mathematical" reasons people gave for studying Euclid are still good ones, in my opinion: epistemic humility  in particular! Subscribe to University of Sydney Library .

Amritanshu Prasad on Common Measures in Euclid's Elements Book X (2014)

Image
See  Ian Grant's Weather Report julio 27, 2022 . Subscribe to Amritanshu Prasad .

Freeman Dyson on Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman

Image
See also  Freeman Dyson on Richard Feynman and QED . Subscribe to Web of Stories .

Digital Conference - Jay Livestreaming from Anime Matsuri

Image
You can imagine what a maths/physics/CS conference could be like, ... See also  Digital Chalk - Nathan Doing Topology PhD Qualifying Exam Problems (Live)  for an idea of what a digital workshop/summer school could be like. But you have to supply quite a lot of imagination, and some really fancy communications protocols of the kind Dijkstra describes in EWD196 . See  What is a Screen, Really? Subscribe to Drunk3PO .

Digital Chalk - Nathan Doing Topology PhD Qualifying Exam Problems (Live)

Image
 ... on some sort of pen-tablet. It's almost legible on my phone. No pretty colors though, ... They don't like circular reasoning at UTexas!  The next problem: He does explain that a path is some function from the unit interval [0,1] to points in X , so I guess it takes 0 to x and 1 to y and for points in between it traces out the (presumably continuous) path in X , ... Subscribe to  Chalk . Here's the video about Lawvere's fixpoint theorem: See also  N.S. Yanofsky, A Universal Approach to Self-Referential Paradoxes . Subscribe to Nicolaj-K .

Philip Wadler's Essence of Functional Programming

Image
I spent several weeks in 2012 playing around with this, without getting very far. I was haunted by that phrase "text processing algorithm that passes information both from left to right and right to left". Later I realised that it might be an algorithm for matching regular expressions with back-references. See  Philip Wadler, The essence of functional programming . Here's a good talk by Emily Riehl on the maths behind the ideas. I wonder if the question at  30:10  is referring to the problem of composing interpreters which Wadler says in that paper is not solved. For example, can we compose two computational effects into one interpreter, to get a computation of maybe-lists? That might be useful in the "passing the state backwards" interpreter.  42:24 It sounds like that's the way forward, if not actually the solution! See also  Bartosz Milewski - Category Theory for Programmers  and  Freeman Dyson on Richard Feynman and QED . Subscribe to Lambda World .

Freeman Dyson on Richard Feynman and QED

Image
I was looking for a quote of Feynman saying "The diagram is  the idea!" That's how I feel about some of the programs I've written. See  Bartosz Milewski - Category Theory for Programmers  and for a way of formally explaining what I mean by that, see  https://prooftoys.org/ian-grant/hm/ . Subscribe to Web of Stories .

Sean Carroll Interviews Emily Riehl on Topology, Categories and the Future of Mathematics

Image
Subscribe to Sean Carroll .

Bartosz Milewski - Category Theory for Programmers

Image
On  Natural transformations , see  Two Introductions To Category Theory : This lecture series is based on his book Category Theory for Programmers . I once wrote (in La Paz in 2010 some time) a fairly short program using Moscow ML's higher-order functors which I found I could use to produce a weird axiomatization of Peano Arithmetic starting with the definition of exponentiation and then defining multiplaction and addition in terms of exponentiation. I don't have that code anymore, but I guess it's "out there" somewhere.

Sabine Hossenfelder - What's The Difference Between A Brain and A Computer

Image
Sign-up for her newsletter at  https://sabinehossenfelder.com/ See also  Sabine Hossenfelder - Are We Made Of Math?  and  Ian Grant's Weather Report  today. Subscribe to Sabine Hossenfelder .

Monty Python - The Royal Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things

Image
See  Hal Abelson on Abstracting From Concrete Representation . Subscribe to Tyler Bird .

Two Introductions To Category Theory

Image
A short one, ... Subscribe to MetaMaths . ... and a longer one ... I found this tutorial by Bart Jacobs and Jan Rutten interesting. It focuses on connections between initial algebras and final co-algebras by natural transformations. [Having briefly scanned it, I think I must've imagined that bit, ... or it was another text I was reading around the time.] Either way, this is relevant to closed fields and what I was talking about here:  Ian Grant's Weather Report julio 27, 2022 . Subscribe to  Oliver Lugg .

Zachary Denman - Digital ID

Image

Juan Browne at Airventure 2022

Image
Replica Junkers F-13 for sale, ... Subscribe to Blancolirio .

David Lynch's Weather Report

Image
Subscribe to David Lynch Theater . The Roald Amundsen Pullman Sleeper Subscribe to Scottsdale Arizona .

99 Subscribers, ...

Image
See  Sci-Fi Fantasy Short Film: "L'homme est le seul oiseau qui porte sa cage" : Subscribe to Dust .

Ian Grant's Weather Report

Image
See  Brian Keating, Sabine Hossenfelder, Carlo Rovelli and Eric Weinstein on Quantum Physics and the End of Reality . No interesting stuff to say, the dentist prescribed this shit for me. She must be in love!

Florence Reed Interview With Alex Lee Moyer

Image
She produced the documentary Alex's War.  See Brittany Venti at The Pictures . Subscribe to UnHerd .

Jade on The Landauer Limit and Reversible Computing

Image
See also her video on why time flies both ways: Subscribe to Up And Atom .

Chrissie Mayr's SimpCast 36 - Simply Orange

Image
Sunday evening, ... Subscribe to Chrissie Mayr .

David Lynch's Weather Report

Image
See also David Lynch's Weather Report March 25, 2022 and David Lynch's Weather Report October 14, 2021 . Subscribe to David Lynch Theater . The Beatles - Don't Let Me Down (Rooftop Concert Take1) Subscribe to Jose Nevea .

Brian Keating, Sabine Hossenfelder, Carlo Rovelli and Eric Weinstein on Quantum Physics and the End of Reality

Image
This looks like hard work, ... I had better read what I wrote back in 2010:  Relational Semantics subtitled "The Evils of Lego" . It's a great discussion. I can see why you couldn't do something like this over e-mail, ... Eric Weinstein at 46:33 saying Sabine sometimes questions the existence of the community, and then talking about sensory-perception in various non-human animals, reminded me of the work of Francisco Varela in his PhD . See also  R. Hallowell: Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's Contribution to Media Ecology  and for more on Mexican standoffs, ...  William Irwin Thompson on The Male Academic Complex  and my weather report for July 28, 2022 . The reason I claimed in 2010 that consciousness is involved in every measurement is essentially because consciousness is irreducible and a necessary condition for any measurement to have any meaning. I don't claim therefore that any Stern Gerlach apparatus is conscious, ... I claim that in order to

Forest Mommy and Alice Talking

Image
She's not that scary in her live streams, ... Subscribe to Forest Mommy .

Hal Abelson on Abstracting From Concrete Representation

Image
... or, how to get off the top of the pile of crap you found yourself sitting on. See Hal Abelson on Language Embeddings . The audio quality on this is very poor. Subscribe to MIT Open Courseware . At this rate they're going to have more subscribers than Lana Del Rey in a few years, ... Congratulations on 12M baby! 💕  Jean-Michel Jarre Movements 1, 2 and 3 : Subscribe to Lana Del Rey .

Shawn Colvin - Tougher Than The Rest

Image
Subscribe to Shawn Colvin .

Lana Del Rey's Variety Artist of the Decade Acceptance Speech

Image
Subscribe to Lana Del Rey Interviews And Archive .

Anna on Disney Pushing Sexuality in Children's Content

Image
... and robot orgies ... Subscribe to That Star Wars Girl . See my weather report today.

Ian Grant's Weather Report

Image
See  William Irwin Thompson on The Male Academic Complex . Neil Turok on AIMS See also  Fred Turok, chairman of LA Fitness  and  The Plurinational Vegetative State of Bolivia .

David Lynch's Weather Report

Image
Subscribe to David Lynch Theater . Credence Clearwater Revival - Suzie Q Linda Faludi's song: Björk - Like Someone in Love Birgitte Haahr Lund's song: Al Green - Let's Stay Together The Aqua Velvets - Spanish Blue 😂

Summer is Siren & Sushi Season

Image
Subscribe to Saturday Supermodel .

What The Native American (Navajo) Medicine Man Would Tell You

Image
Subscribe to Navajo Traditional Teachings .

Brittany Venti on Driving for the First Time At 25

Image
To understand this you need to see her car, and her nails: Subscribe to  Saturday Supermodel . Subscribe to Brittany Venti .

Sci-Fi Short - The Study

Image
The perils of higher education these days. See  William Irwin Thompson on The Male Academic Complex . Subscribe to Dust .

William Irwin Thompson on The Male Academic Complex

Image
Quoted from  R. Hallowell: Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's Contribution to Media Ecology . See  Men of Ideas - Bryan Magee Interviews Noam Chomsky . See  Gaia 2: Emergence : the New Science of Becoming  and these recent posts:  Ian Grant's Weather Report Julio 18, 2022  and  William Irwin Thompson on Paleolithic Cave Art . Note how the interest of some students picks up once they learn that the tech here (in 1986) is worth a few million dollars:  Gerald Sussman on Rewriting Systems .

David Lynch's Weather Report

Image
See  David Lynch's Weather Report February 15, 2022  and  David Lynch's Weather Report October 26, 2021 . For more on dogs, see my comment on yesterday's weather report : Subscribe to David Lynch Theater . Smokey Robinson and the Miracles - The Tracks of My Tears (1965) Subscribe to Smokey Robinson . Linda Faludi's song: Marianne Faithfull - Counting Jim Donahue's song: Tina Tikaram - Twist In My Sobriety These are two rather nice examples of the kind of composition I imagined that these sorts of biological expert systems Gerald Sussman describes here could analyse/synthesize:  Gerald Sussman on Rewriting Systems  and  Ian Grant's Weather Report julio 27, 2022 .

Ian Grant's Weather Report

Image
See  Gerald Sussman on Rewriting Systems  and  Spectral Graph Theory . Also, Gibbons, Unfolding ADTs  ... ... and  https://github.com/IanANGrant/red-october/blob/e454a6401a7223a45d617a3ea29cb083cb8ce0f2/src/dynlibs/ffi/complex.sml   Here's the vector representation code I mention. The vector calculus stuff with continuous maps is called  Gauge theory .

Gerald Sussman on Rewriting Systems

Image
I wrote something similar to what he describes at 17:45 in Standard ML using parsers defined to work on quasi-quotations specifying the rewrite rules. See  this example , which is a kind of simplifier for C language type declarations. Terms like specifier-qualifier-list and declaration-specifiers are terms that come from the C language grammar originally written by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie.  The guts of the rewrite engine are here:  https://github.com/IanANGrant/red-october/blob/master/src/dynlibs/ffi/GrammarSyntax.sml  but there is a lot of other code to allow the quasi-quotations to be written in a user-friendly syntax. There are a lot of better ways to do this, witnessed by the debugging infrastructure I had to build in just to get the f*cking thing to work! These kinds of rewriting systems are capable of evaluating expressions, so this language is a programmable evaluator for interpreted languages. 19:32 But I never thought of it as a biological process! See  Stuar

On How Language Works With Perception To Construct The World We Live In

Image
If you think of a glass, you can think think of it as an object existing independently out there in the world, and you can create representations of that object, like this: It is quite difficult to see how language is involved in this process. See John Searle and Bryan Magee on The Philosophy of Language . But if you take a longer view and see how this particular glass was made, ... Subscribe to Ed Pickard . ... or an even longer view, to see how the material was made ... Subscribe to  Serenity Designs . ... then it is easier to understand how language is a necessary part of the cognitive process by which something like a glass comes to exist as an independent physical object, and how much he existence of this glass in the photograph is a slice of a continuous process of things coming into being and then changing their form and then ceasing to be anymore. At 6:57 there is a glass of water which reacts in a very interesting way: Jokes about missing the bucket: Maybe those hints about

Commercial - Niki Terranova at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology

Image
Just hearing her makes me feel better about the world! I saw this half a dozen times before the video appeared in my recommendations. See  https://www.thechicagoschool.edu/ .

John Searle and Bryan Magee on The Philosophy of Language

Image
Magee's opening quote of Bertrand Russell is very telling! Thinking of Russell's On Denoting  which was published in Mind in 1905, and Gerald Sussman's comment ( 18:19 ) about referentially opaque contexts in the MIT Structure and Interpretation course:  Gerald Sussman on Using Languages To Construct Continuous Solutions . There really is a lot you can learn from the act of programming. As to why language is an important part of how we experience the world, listen to Searle at 5:04  " ... the words are part of the experience". And this is the key to understanding the approach Maturana and Varela take on epistemology (called The Santiago Theory of Cognition ) in The Tree of Knowledge . See  Men of Ideas - Bryan Magee Interviews Noam Chomsky  and  Hal Abelson on Language Embeddings . Subscribe to Philosophy Overdose .

David Lynch's Weather Report

Image
Subscribe to David Lynch Theater . David is continuing with the theme of covers, I think.  Lissie - Go Your Own Way Subscribe to Lissie . Fleetwood Mac - Go Your Own Way (1977) Subscribe to Fleetwood Mac . Linda Faludi's song: Joan Armatrading - Together in Words And Music (1973) Subscribe to Joan Armatrading . This reminds me of when I lived in Putney with Rose and Alan and Julie who introduced me to Joan Armatrading. Happy birthday Helen Mirren and  Happy Birthday Sandra Bullock .

Lana Del Rey - Text Book

Image
Subscribe to Lana Del Rey .

Chrissie Mayr to Host The Great US Treasure Hunt Series

Image
Subscribe to Chrissie Mayr . The Great US Treasure Hunt starts in Las Vegas on July 30, 2022: Register at  https://thegreatustreasurehunt.com/ Subscribe to The Great US Treasure Hunt . See  David Lynch's Weather Report July 14, 2022 : Don't worry if you can't get to Vegas, the consolation prize is even better: Shawn Colvin - Viva Las Vegas Subscribe to erppsirili . Chrissie's alternate universe love story: Mylène Farmer - Je te dis tout Subscribe to Mylène Farmer . August 7, Los Angeles: Our only SUNDAY hunt. The coin will be within 50 miles of the HOLLYWOOD sign: Subscribe to Lana Del Rey .

Gerald Sussman on Using Languages To Construct Continuous Solutions

Image
This is the next lecture in the series MIT 6.001 Structure and Interpretation (1986). See  Hal Abelson on Language Embeddings . At 5:36 on the problem of integration expressed by rules which increase the complexity of the expression which has to be integrated, see Knuth Bendix Completion . 9:00  On how sums are going to be expressed, ... The A1 and A2 arguments are what in the terminology of yacc are called semantic values.  See this message:  Infix arithmetic module , so I was only fourteen years behind, ... That's still progress, right? See my reply to Michael Vanier on July 14, 2000. Is eelectrical engineering the same as mathematical engineering? At 36:40 the representation of arithmetic expressions could be being done as proofs based on axiomatic formulation of arithmetic over some field. Joe Hurd did this for HOL in his PhD thesis, using an interesting representation of exact rational arithmetic using multiples of 2 and 3 which he found in something written by Donald

Coffee Time

Image

Men of Ideas - Bryan Magee Interviews Noam Chomsky

Image
This introduction of Magee's reminds me of a conversation I once had, (if you can call two people each making one statement a conversation)  with Conor Houghton in the HEP group coffee room once around 1999. Subscribe to Philosophy Overdose . My mother sent me this reply on July 10, 2022: Hi Ian I'm afraid your long, technical message is way beyond my comprehension!     I only heard the very end of a Chomsky interview on a Cape Talk radio show and have no means of replaying the whole myself.      I imagined it would have been about the political rather than the technical aspects of elections. I was impressed that the radio presenter had managed to interview someone of Chomsky's calibre on his programme.    We're having very cold weather  here and daily chores dominate the 50 percent of the day not affected by electricity blackouts. Love Mum On 07 Jul 2022 5:15 AM, "eternal Doorman" <....> wrote: Hi Mum, Was it things like the electoral colleges that he

David Lynch's Weather Report June 23, 2022

Image
For some reason Blogger didn't publish this at the time I posted it. That makes this post number 8,400 on this blog. Subscribe to David Lynch Theater . The Shirelles - Baby It's You (1961) Subscribe to MrBadgerFan .

David Lynch's Weather Report

Image
See these posts of mine. Subscribe to David Lynch Theater . ? and The Mysterians - 96 Tears (1966) Subscribe to ? and The Mysterians .

Ian Grant's Weather Report

Image
Malcolm Sabin,  Contouring — the State of the Art NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) : "Previously, SRTM data for regions outside the United States were sampled for public release at 3 arc-seconds, which is 1/1200th of a degree of latitude and longitude, or about 90 meters (295 feet). The new data have been released with a 1 arc-second, or about 30 meters (98 feet), sampling that reveals the full resolution of the original measurements." Ian Grant's Weather Report julio 18, 2022   Malcolm Sabin,  Mathematical Methods for Curves and Surfaces https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriging Bresenham's line algorithm https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bresenham%27s_line_algorithm . For some ideas about how language serves as a framework for abstraction listen to Searle: On Wittgenstein's Notion of Private Language  D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson On Growth and Form https://g.co/kgs/7o5B4n Phytotaxis?! Phyllotaxis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllotaxis and Mo

Hal Abelson on Language Embeddings

Image
Subscribe to El Evans . Here's the full lecture: the first part covers basic lisp stuff, the second is a prelude to the above lecture and the third part continues with this method of describing pictures using computations on linguistic structures. After watching that you might wonder "Well how the hell did we end up with TeX and LaTeX?!" Subscribe to MIT Open Courseware . I remember having fun embedding little languages into the SML top-level. Godel's System-T was only a dozen or so lines of code. That said, I am not exactly sure what sort of embedding I was doing! There are some examples in this Standard ML functional implementation of Hindley-Milner Type Inference:  https://prooftoys.org/ian-grant/hm/ . See  Hilary Putnam on Philosophy And our Mental Life . See  Ian Grant's Weather Report julio 22, 2022  for some more ideas about language Embeddings. There is also this message from July 13, 2000  Infix arithmetic module  describing a way of embedding parsers i

Sci-Fi Short - Antumbra

Image
Dude liked the razor so much The Company bought him, ... Subscribe to Dust .

Gigi Young - The Holy Human Form

Image
The Dark Age, Dark Entities and Genetic Manipulation, ... Subscribe to Gigi Young .

Lila Hart - American History of Voter Fraud

Image
It may not be around for long, ... I think she said it's also on Rumble though. Subscribe to Lila Hart .

SimpCast 35 - Simp Daddy

Image
It sounded like a very subdued affair when I just checked in. Live now, ... Subscribe to Chrissie Mayr .

On Wittgenstein's Notion of Private Language

Image
A few clips of a discussion on Wittgenstein's private language argument. The discussants include Stephen Mulhall and Denis McManus with the host Shahidha Bari. ... Clip from this BBC programme: Free Thinking: Could there be a private language? Shahidha Bari investigates Wittgenstein's response to scepticism and discusses what it means for how we should think about ourselves and our relationship with others. I have only listened to the first four and a half minutes or so, but I was put in mind of Putnam's Meaning and Externalism:  There's a bit at 6:00 which is relevant to what I was thinking/talking about this morning. See  Ian Grant's Weather Report  and  Hilary Putnam on Meaning and Externalism junio 25, 2022 . Taylor expansions, damn that stuff can get you into a whole mess of trouble! At  7:22  those sensations, for me at any rate, are always identified with things I've learned through reading about them. But whether I am "right" or not in making

Dr Becky Reacting to Carl Sagan's Contact

Image
I just picked this back up at 3:41 ... See  National Science Foundation - Beyond The Visible (The Very Large Array Radio Telescope) ,  On Being Missed by the Bus and Ending Up Paddling Someone Else's Canoe  and  Ian Grant's Weather Report . Subscribe to Dr Becky .

On Being Missed by the Bus and Ending Up Paddling Someone Else's Canoe

Image
See Ian Smith's 1967 Speech on the Constitution  and  Ian Smith's 1967 Speech on Independence . We didn't actually miss the bus, we were waiting at the bus stop and it just went by without stopping. And I never had my own canoe in Bolivia, ...  ... But neither did Simon Chapman either! 😂

Ian Smith's 1967 Speech on the Constitution

Image
See  Ian Smith's 1967 Speech on Independence . Subscribe to AP Archive .

Brittany Venti at The Pictures

Image
Subscribe to Brittany Venti . Trailer - Alex's War Subscribe to Play Nice .

Ian Grant's Weather Report

Image
See Sabine Hossenfelder - Does The Past Still Exist? Minkowski Space   Bilinear Form   See also  Hilary Putnam on Philosophy And our Mental Life  and my earlier post on this from November 2021:  Hilary Putnam on Philosophy And our Mental Life . See  La Escuela Británica de Artes Creativas y Tecnología (EBAC) Conway Free Will Theorem Lectures playlist Brian Josephson on ESP and Paranormality See the book  Peter Atkins - Creation Revisited   On Music and performances: See  https://rhcp.lnk.to/DreamCanteen  and subscribe to Red Hot Chilli Peppers . Eatablishment science can get on the right track by doing what the RHCPs do with science, can't it? Fractran - A Ridiculous Logical Language See  A Concrete Way to See What Computable Functions Actually Are September 1, 2019