The Eternal Doorman

See the first part:  Spaghoshi - Interview With Richard Anderson, Diné Medicine Man, UFO Investigator and Vietnam Veteran . From April 2025: Frank Smith Jr. in Sanostee Subscribe to Spagoshi . Oregon Public Broadcasting a month ago: Subscribe to Oregon Public Broadcasting .

This is partly about a problem that arose from Thomson's model of the atom , but the general problem is very broad, covering many different situations where one might wish to identify sets of points which are maximally distinct in some metric. See  Five Point Energy Minimization  by Richard Evan Schwartz. Subscribe to  Facultad de Matemáticas - Universidad Complutense de Madrid .

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She's doing it! Premieres tomorrow, ... [it's really great. Many people try to sing this but so few succeed!]  Subscribe to Margherita Pirri .

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 Mas información en https://fundacionsolon.org/  y  https://www.autoridadminera.gob.bo/ . Subscribe to  Fundación Solón .

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See  Sabine Hossenfelder is Out To Lunch . Everything has to be demonstrated to be commercially viable first. But if you're planning on generating gigawatts of power for AI then you don't need to demonstrate anything. And the ironic thing is that because so much effort goes into making shitty little AI chatbots instead of decent communications systems we don't have the necessary software infrastructure to support proper research and development. Subscribe to DW Planet A . 

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See her video about the glorious future. This is just so wrong in so many ways I don’t know what to say. Maybe she has been watching Google's AI hype-fest . This is all so completely missing the point!

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Subscribe to Kalanadi . Interview with Iain Banks from 2011  Subscribe to OpenLearn from the Open University . Paulo Nogueira Batista Júnior has published another book See the publisher’s web page: Estilhaços . Subscribe to Paulo Nogueira Batista Júnior . Toby had an interesting idea about physicalism and functionalism that hasn’t quite sunk in yet, … Subscribe to Tibees .

Angela Collier reviewing PBS Kids shows. She made $800 from this video and donated $1500 to PBS . Support PBS:  https://www.pbs.org/about/about-pbs/support-pbs/ Subscribe to Angela Collier . Level1 Links With Friends Subscribe to Leve1 Links with Friends . And I’m sure there are good Americans who aren’t from Kentucky, … 

It’s really interesting. He looks at the boot-loader ntldr and the early grand ideas about RISC and the Intel-i860. The original boot loader ran under an ARC emulator! Subscribe to Nir Lichtman .

My Comments: 47:40 Roger Penrose says we see gravitational fields. Don't we infer those fields from observations we make of massive objects? And whatever apparatus we use to make these observations, whether that apparatus is our own eye, or maybe a flea's eye, then that apparatus must be located at some point and be in some definite state in order to make the inference possible. I just don't get the fuss about why we never see massive objects in superposition states. What would that even mean? Because of this cognitive disability of mine I find it impossible to make any sense of what most theoretical physicists say. 50:48 The "fact" that dark matter is most of the stuff in the Universe is another inference from exactly those observations of the behaviour of visible matter in gravitational fields. Most reasonable people, I think, would just conclude that we do not have a good model for the behaviour of visible matter at large scales. [a few hours later this appea...

This must've been a really interesting conference. See  https://fomus.weebly.com/ Vladimir Voevodsky on Multiple Concepts of Equality in the New Foundations of Mathematics Marc Bezem on "Elements of Mathematics" in the Digital Age Thorsten Altenkirch on Naïve Type Theory 1:28:08 This idea about freely generating elements in Higher Inductive Types with all the equalities is interesting. See also  Emily Riehl on Univalent Foundations . Subscribe to  FOMUS 2016 .

It's a really nice place. Get her merch here:  https://www.etsy.com/shop/escapingtheindoors/ . She went there to escape the LA fires in January Subscribe to Laura the Explorer . 

See  Discrete Mathematics . Subscribe to Insights in Mathematics .

Part of the Examined Life series (1998) Subscribe to Philosophy Overdose . Martha Nussbaum on her book  Creating Capabilities . Subscribe to Harvard University Press .

See  Theodora Scarato Director of the Wireless and EMF Program at Environmental Health Sciences . Subscribe to Kim Iversen .

Sabine just made a video about this September 2024 paper in Nature. See  The number of fundamental constants from a spacetime-based perspective . Subscribe to Sabine Hossenfelder .

Sunflower [the full version]: out 28th November 2025. Pre-save on any streaming platform ... and then get excited, the full single has a bunch of extra magic on it! See  https://ffm.to/sakara-sunflower Subscribe to Sakara .

He is one of the authors of the book  Covid Through Our Eyes - An Australian Story of Mistakes, Mistreatment and Misinformation . See also  John Campbell on mRNA Vaccines . Subscribe to Dr John Campbell .

Here's her interview from 4 years ago: Subscribe to  Math-life Balance . Talk at EPFL Pavilions  in Lausanne: Art, Math, and the Art of Mathematical Mediation — Shapes Symposium See  https://reseau-dda.org/en/artists/sylvie-pic . Subscribe to EPFL Pavilions .

This system was funded in large part by the US Government. Subscribe to Asianometry .

See  http://5greatforestsinitiative.org/shared-birds . Mesoamerica is a biodiversity hotspot; with only 0.5 percent of the world's land area, the region is home to 7 percent of the world's biological diversity, including rare and endangered species. Natural forests such as the 5 Great Forests of Mesoamerica contain more than six times the carbon of the most degraded forests and hold approximately half of the region's forest carbon stocks. They also provide essential ecosystem services to five million people. Subscribe to Cornell Lab of Ornithology .

It's a bit dangerous because of the way cornered rats behave , ... See also  Think BRICS Interview With Paulo Nogueira Batista Jr . Subscribe to Glenn Diesen .  

Everyone thinks it's a great looking aeroplane! Subscribe to  恒庐 Luhengfoto . Subscribe to The Mover and Gonky Show . Apparently the plane was carrying two tons of missiles during that demonstration:  Subscribe to ANI News .

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For more on "man muss" see  John Campbell on mRNA Vaccines . Subscribe to Hopkins Natural Philosophy Forum .

Followup to  Compiler Coffee Club - Interning Cyclic Types in a Compiler . I listened to this talk by Bob Harper and learned about this paper by Rossberg, Russo and Dreyer. See  https://people.mpi-sws.org/~rossberg/f-ing/  and for some background:  https://sdiehl.github.io/typechecker-zoo/system-f-omega/system-f-omega.html . See also Xavier Leroy's slides for his course  Programming = proving? which are very readable:  Polymorphism all the way up! From System F to the Calculus of Constructions .  Subscribe to Topos Institute .

This is about:  The SWEET project: probing sugar crystals for direct dark matter searches : See  Jenann Ismael - Cracks in the Edifice of Determinism . Thermodynamics of measurement turns out to be pretty complicated business! See e.g.  Detection of Low-Energy Electrons with Transition-Edge Sensors . These sensors work by operating a superconducting junction close to its critical temperature so that very small changes in temperature near the junction result in large changes in the resistance which result measurable changes in current flow. Subscribe to Anton Petrov .

That’s why handing over public services to private corporations is such a good thing.  See also  John Campbell and Claire Craig on COVID and mRNA Vaccines . Subscribe to Dr. John Campbell . What Hannah Arendt meant by “banality” was more like “outrageous stupidity”: Subscribe to Philosophy Overdose .

With a response on mathematical modelling by Harrison Hartle .  This was given just a few days after this recording of her talk at Santa Fe appeared:  Jenann Ismael - Laplace meets Godel: How Self reference Foils Prediction . See her paper  A Participatory Universe in the Realist Mode: On the Separation of Observational and Agentive Perspectives in Classical and Quantum Mechanics . I'm sure there's something interesting going on here with entropy when systems contain representing records of their history. See  Rüdiger Schack and Gabriele Carcassi on The Character of Physical Law  and  Assumptions of Physics - Reading the Book . Also hear John Norton’s discussion of entropy of physical representation . Subscribe to Hopkins Natural Philosophy Forum .

It turns out you need more than just a financial investment! See her course:  https://www.escuelaconcreta.net/mercado-del-arte . Subscribe to Julia Buenaventura .

11:10 on Frequencies and Repeated Trials. Gabriele Carcasssi just posted another essay:  Ensembles all the way down . See also  Quantum de Finetti Theorems as Categorical Limits, and Limits of State Spaces of C*-algebras  by Sam Staton and Ned Summers: De Finetti theorems tell us that if we expect the likelihood of outcomes to be independent of their order, then these sequences of outcomes could be equivalently generated by drawing an experiment at random from a distribution, and repeating it over and over. In particular, the quantum de Finetti theorem says that exchangeable sequences of quantum states are always represented by distributions over a single state produced over and over. The main result of this paper is that this quantum de Finetti construction has a universal property as a categorical limit. This allows us to pass canonically between categorical treatments of finite dimensional quantum theory and the infinite dimensional. ... Subscribe to  Erwin Schrö...

This is really good. She gets to prune an olive tree. Subscribe to Bloomberg .

Life is so fragile! See  Toby Reviewing Books - Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past . Subscribe to Tibees .   Subscribe to The Big Think . Subscribe to Closer to Truth . See  Toby on Something Special About Three Dimensions .

That lecture represents an awful lot of hard work. I guess it's part of the necessary background for the ideas she wrote about in  How Do We Observe Relational Observables?   Subscribe to  Hopkins Natural Philosopy Forum .

This is really good. You see this correspondence between fractions in the Stern Brocot tree and continued fractions very clearly. See also his previous lecture on this . You could make a great text book for discrete maths and functional programming out of Norman's videos. Just about everything he does is programmable because of constructivist, finitist stance. See  Doron Zeilberger and Persi Diaconis on Probability and Mathematical Knowledge . Subscribe to Insights into Mathematics . And you can look at matrix multiplication as circuits: 42:06 So  it turns out that the category of matrices is a full subcategory of the category of finite dimensional vector spaces over a field. This means that you can define finite dimensional vector spaces over some field and then you have matrices ( 1:06:50 ). See the lectures below. So does this mean that the natural numbers can be modelled as matrices? And could you then use rational matrices like those that Wildberger uses above as eleme...

This is better than I thought it would be from the title alone, ... See his paper  Conscious artificial intelligence and biological naturalism .  The sense I get from both these talks is that people are attributing consciousness to individual beings whereas it seems to me to be something proper to dynamic interactions within systems that have an auto-poetic character. Panel discussion. Wow, they did a lot on one day! 42:36 Question about the Mentaculus. See  Curt Jaimungal, David Albert and Naftali Weinberger Talking About The Character of Physical Law . See also the fiducial counterfactual measurement probabilities in QBism:  Rudiger Schack - Can Two QBists Experience One Thing? QBism's Take on Wigner's Friend .  See  these posts of mine . Subscribe to Hopkins Natural Philosophy Forum .

It's about something called Above Threshold Ionization and was part of the 2023 Nobel Prize. I am posting this because I was reading about  Kirchhoff's law of thermal radiation , where there is a claim that " Historically, Planck derived the black body radiation law and detailed balance according to a classical thermodynamic argument, with a single heuristic step, which was later interpreted as a quantization hypothesis ." I was struck by the similarity of the experimental setups: resonant cavities with pinholes ( 15:50 ).   Subscribe to Nobel Prize . The connection came from this presentation by Chantal Roth (see  Marek Danielewski and Chantal Roth on Quaternionic Foundations of Quantum Mechanics ). See Self-consistent Maxwell-Pauli theory by Sergey A. Rashkovskiy . 42:42 Oh dear. It was going so well up to this point! The point is that it is a model , not the actual fabric of reality. So you want to proceed by making as many models as you can and ruling out thos...

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This interpreter frees up its own initialisation code to make space for user programs, ... See  CuriousMarc - Mini Micro Designing and MC6850 Serial Interface for a Teleprinter . Subscribe to CuriousMarc .

From March 2019. See  Christopher A. Fuchs on the Day QBism Shot Itself in the Foot  which was the same year.   My comments: 7:41 A consistency requirement would be connected to more than just one individual's knowledge though. I'm sure there is a better one, I just don't know what it is! [ 8:31 But it's connected with how the reference measurement is established [ 14:11 Oh, he says as much himself! [ 18:23 and confirms it explicitly! ]]] 25:59 Regularities one expects are always conditioned on some context. I expect the apple to fall, but not if it's on a shelf, for example. So ultimately our expectations are conditioned by our abilities to prepare experimental conditions. When our expectations are not met the most likely reasons are that the [experimental] conditions were not in fact met, or there were [experimental] conditions that we thought were universal but which turned out not to be, and these are novelties. I have...

See Remembrance of Earth's Past by 刘慈欣 . It sounds like it is in part an allegory of the collective state of mind of the community/communities who do research in physics, ... Dark Forest indeed. Subscribe to Tibees .

Published in Nature in 2019:   Arrival Time Distributions of Spin-1/2 Particles : In non-relativistic quantum mechanics, the probability of finding a particle in a small spatial volume d³ r around position r at a fixed time t is given by Born’s rule |Ψ( r , t )|²d³ r , where Ψ( r , t ) is the wave function of the particle. This formula is experimentally well established. However, a formula for the probability of finding the particle at a fixed point r between times t and t + dt is the matter of an ongoing debate. Subscribe to Cheshire Cat . See also  On the spin dependence of detection times and the nonmeasurability of arrival times  by Sheldon Goldstein, Roderich Tumulka & Nino Zanghì: The probability distributions they found depend upon the spin of the particle and for some choices of the spin the distribution exhibits intriguing characteristics. They assumed that the arrival times could be measured using appropriate detectors. In fact, it was partl...

See this project on nLab:  Hegel's "Logic" as Modal Type Theory . 12:00 Hegel sought to make a science of philosophy by starting with nothing and then teasing it out into opposites in some sort of rational process. His introduction to Category theory is a good one. See  Curt Jaimungal and Jonathan Gorard talking about Peer Reviewed Journals and Funding in Academia . You have to keep going beyond 1:02:58 to see what it has to do with Hegel’s unity of opposites idea. 1:40:00 See Smooth Sets of Fields and this pedagogical introduction . 2:12:00 When pressed, his answer to “How would you like to be remembered?” Subscribe to Know Time . Before this I watched a few minutes of a dharma talk by Sister Chan Duc which was a kind of reversal of this idea. 36:00 I had never heard it ( प्रतीत्यसमुत्पादt ) called conditioned co-arising before. Subscribe to Plum Village .

This system wasn't designed, it's just what grew organically out of learned societies and was then developed and preserved by vested interests, sustained by the likes of Robert Maxwell. Here's the full interview: 7:16 To me, the interesting thing about the ideas of computation and order theory is that they indicate that it is possible to represent a certain class of systems very precisely, yet completely independent from any underlying concrete representation. So for example you can establish a class of effective methods for describing an abstract process of 'computation' just by showing that three quite different formalisms are all capable of describing exactly the same class of computations, and thereby abstracting a general (i.e. Universal) class of computation. If the same idea were applied in physics, then you would be looking for a completely Universal description of physical systems that would be independent of any particular underlying (i.e. fundamental) ma...

Software adventure coming up, ... see  CuriousMarc Time Travelling 8080 Microprocessor Development . And that reminds me, what the heck is electric charge supposed to be anyway? See  The Action Lab - Cloud Chambers and the Mott Problem . Subscribe to CuriousMarc .

This starts at both ends of the spectrum: the phenomenon and the theory. See  The wave mechanics of ∝-Ray tracks by Nevill Francis Mott : The wave mechanics unaided ought to be able to predict the possible results of any observation that we could make on a system, without invoking, until the moment at which the observation is made, the classical particle-like properties of the electrons or α-particles forming that system. If we consider the ∝-ray alone as the system under consideration, then the gas of the Wilson chamber must be considered as the means by which we observe the particle ; so in this case we must consider the ∝-ray as α-particle as soon as it is outside the nucleus, because that is the moment at which the observation is made. If, however, we consider the α-particle and the gas together as one system, then it is ionised atoms that we observe ; interpreting the wave function should give us simply the probability that such and such an atom is ionised. Until this final in...

I've been following along these sessions. I don't understand most of the maths, but it's still thought-provoking. They're reading the book  Assumptions of Physics by Gabriele Carcassi and Christine A. Aidala . Today we got to a specially good bit, about Langrangian mechanics with multiple degrees of freedom. (Towards the end of page 51.)  My comments:  46:24 Bells and bright lights and sparkles. What "velocity is a derived unit from position and time" means is that in order to make a measurement of velocity, you must have in hand a means to measure time intervals, and a means to measure position, and to these are associated some units, so you have some clocks and measuring rods, but in addition you need an actual observer to make a judgement and that judgement itself constitutes a space-time event. Then your physical theory needs to be based on the coherence of the descriptions that a collection of such actual observers make and which they describe to each o...

These talks were given in the same afternoon: His paper "Hard Proofs and Good Reasons" is here:  https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.18994   30:02 But that “coevolutuon” is what Lakatos wrote about in Proofs and Refutations, isn’t it? And another thing: 27:39 “There’s no causality in mathematics” What about axioms? I mean the fact that some structure is a group causes a whole lot of theorems by Cayley, Sylow and others to hold for that object. Isn’t that the same sort of causality that applies in physics? That this particle of certain size, mass and charge moves in this path in a certain field when propelled in a certain direction at a certain speed from a certain point. There is another theorem of Lagrange that holds for this situation in a very similar way. The only difference is that in physics we don’t always know the precise masses, velocities, positions, fields etc, but under some assumptions we are reasoning the same way, aren’t we? I must have totally missed the point here! ...

The University of Cambridge put their "Commitment Accounting System" in the hands of a company called Peoplesoft  which Oracle bought in 2005. That system has data about the finances of every proposed research project years in advance. But that's OK, because whoever heard of anyone misusing data like that? Subscribe to More Perfect Union .

Watch this and don't complain about being censored on social media any more: Gina Louise Phillips has an Instgram page and Julie Nolke has a Patreon page . Subscribe to Julie Nolke .

These are really interesting to watch one after the other! This one is on an ultrafinitistic foundation for probability: (see also  Sabine Hossenfelder on Ultrafinitism in Physics ) Subscribe to Harry Crane . Subscribe to Statistical Machine Learning . This is on mathematical knowledge and the use of probability: Subscribe to  Experimental mathematics .

What a brilliant lecture! It's just a coincidence that it was given by a Colombian at a Mathematical Association of America meeting.  Subscribe to MAA .

You should turn off the awful auto-dubbing and you can choose English subtitles, maybe. Depends on what YouTube app/web browser you're using. If you use Apple iOS with Safari then stop. Subscribe to  Ribeirinha da Amazônia Fabiola Alves Pedrosa .

This was in April 2025. See also  Neil Turok on Lambda CDM .  Subscribe to Curt Jaimungal .

Really makes you wonder what we're doing to people with microwave communications. Hameroff's talk starts at  1:26:41 . Subscribe to TSC .  

Talk given at TSC 2019 at Interlaken, Switzerland, 26 June 2019: See  Unknown Quantum States and Operations, a Bayesian View by Christopher A. Fuchs and Ruediger Schack  (2004). The following slides appear in the reverse order in Fuchs' talk: Subscribe to Chris Fuchs . Roger Penrose gave a talk just beforehand: he starts by characterizing understanding, giving examples from games like chess and go, where simulation leads to bad decisions when started from "stupid positions": His slide on the evolution of mathematical ability, starting from a completely stupid position: 22:42 He says the he holds the view that "what goes on in our brains is part of the physical world." If by that he means neurophysiological phenomena such as synapses, blood-flow, neurotransmitters etc, then that is surely incontestable, so he must mean something stronger. He means that understanding is something that goes in a human brain, and that understanding itself must therefore be part...