Posts

Showing posts from January, 2026

Maria Popova - Cover Song for the Second Law

Image
I found this after listening to the first few minutes of Janet's  Allegiance to Aliveness, The Lost Words and the Writings of Maria Popova .  See  https://www.themarginalian.org/about/  and  https://www.thelostwords.org/ . On connections and people ( 24:00 ) see  Scott Aaronson on Computational Complexity and Explanations in Physics  and  Tracks - Arte - Sneakernet and Dead Drops .  Now listen to  Janet Axelrud - A Song for Wanderers .  Subscribe to Marginalian . 

Janet Axelrud - A Song for Wanderers

Image
Subscribe to Curious Wandering Souls . 

Scott Aaronson on Computational Complexity and Explanations in Physics

Image
1:01:12 See...  Well, who knows! Maybe John Norton:  Curt Jaimungal Intervew With John Norton .  See also  Maria Popova - Cover Song for the Second Law .  Subscribe to Paul G. Allen School . 

Arte Documentary on Datacenters in Chile

Image
See  Tracks - Arte - Sneakernet and Dead Drops 19:14 Google profiting from the  1973 Chilean coup d'état . ( 3:00 ). And they get all this for only US$4 billion.  23:46 They ask Google AI for advice.  9:32 On storing photos,... Well, the idea is that actual photos are of real things, and if you collect all the photos of all the real things together, then you can achieve very, very, very efficient data compression, and in the process you generate a ground truth which could be used to verify and locate images. It would also be a good source of data for training machine learning networks and stuff. But for some reason nobody wants to do this. They would rather make crappy little AI videos.  Subscribe to Arte .  Subscribe to  Teddy Lambek . 

PBS Origins on Herman Husband

Image
See  Regulator Movement in North Carolina .  Support PBS financially, because your president wants to give US$1500,000,000,000 to "the department of war" and he needs to save up for that. See  https://www.pbs.org/donate/ . Subscribe to PBS Origins . 

Tracks - Arte - Sneakernet and Dead Drops

Image
6:33 Dead Drops. That's probably a better idea than dropping a USB memory in some random French chick's pocket,...  12:33 Actinomy https://actinomy.org/ See my blog post of Thursday, 17 April 2014 What is The Cloud? Subscribe to Tracks - Arte FR .

Teddy Lambek - Toutouyoutou (Ukulele & Kazoo)

Image
Subscribe to Teddy Lambek . 

Machine Thinking on Extreme Precision

Image
This started a few years ago with a documentary, ... See  The World's Oldest Micrometer .  Subscribe to Machine Thinking . 

Tres Pesos Cubanos

Image

The Economist Podcasting on Trump's Venezuela Strategy

Image
Subscribe to The Economist . 

Julie Nolke - How to Milk a Ponzi Scheme

Image
Subscribe to Julie Nolke  and support her on Patreon.  

Paulo Nogueira Batista Jr on AI Fake Videos

Image
From the video description: In recent weeks, a large number of fake videos attributed to me are circulating in the Internet. There are more than 40 such videos out there. In this video, I try to explain how the faking is done and what general pattern these videos follow. I also ask you to help me report these fabrications and inform your contacts about them. In Portuguese: See  Fake AI - Paulo Nogueira Batista Jr. on United States Desperation  and  Paulo Nogueira Batista on the Possibility of a New International Reserve Currency .  Subscribe to Paulo Nogueira Batista Jr.  

Moshe Vardi talking about LTLf

Image
See  Symbolic LTLf Synthesis . Subscribe to Ndea .  See Church's lecture delivered to the International Congress of Mathematicians at Stockholm on August 20, 1962  Logic, Arithmetic and Automata  and Rabin and Scott's (1959)  Finite automata and their decision problems  Also Frederic B. Fitch's 1958 paper  Representation of Sequential Circuits in Combinatory Logic  Philosophy of Science Vol. 25, No. 4 (Oct., 1958), pp. 263-279. See also the Wikipedia pages for  Borel set  and  Büchi automaton . On Temporal Logic  see Vardi's  From Church and Prior to PSL : "In this early work, Prior considered time to be linear. In 1958 however, he received a letter from Saul Kripke, who pointed out that this assumption is perhaps unwarranted. In a development that foreshadowed a similar one in computer science, Prior took this under advisement, and developed two theories of branching time, which he called "Ockhamist" and "Peircean". See...

Nadia Heninger and Annie Dai on the Ragged Edge of Telecommunications Security

Image
See https://satcom.sysnet.ucsd.edu/ See this comment : 34:24 PG&E's SCADA system was sending unencrypted traffic through satellites which were making it available across the whole of North America,...  Subscribe to  media.ccc.de .  Subscribe to Corduroy Media . 

The Ideas of Phillippe de Bellescize

Image
This appeared on a YouTube "communities" post: But YouTube communities posts are not linkable, nor can one copy the text, nor can one translate it,...  Fortunately he has a web site:  Le principe moteur de l'univers et l'espace-temps .  See also the Assumptions of Physics project : Subscribe to Gabriele Carcassi .  See  William Thurston on the Mystery of Three-Manifolds  and  John Baez - Pauli Spin Matrices . 

John Baez - Pauli Spin Matrices

Image
See  John Baez - The Standard Model .  Subscribe to John Baez . 

Curious Marc fixing HP Oscilloscopes

Image
That was a really great company! See  these posts .  Subscribe to Curious Marc . 

William Thurston on the Mystery of Three-Manifolds

Image
This was given in 2010. See  John Milnor on the Development of Topology . 52:46 There are algorithms for computing knot equivalence. See  Computation of Hyperbolic Structures in Knot Theory  by  Jeffrey R. Weeks .  Subscribe to Clay Mathematics Institute . 

Yves Lafont - Interaction Nets The Movie

Image
From his 2017 research web page . See also  Stephanie Weirich Hunting Dragons .  Subscribe to Devine Lu Linvega .

Edgeburn in Calgary

Image
Subscribe to John Bae . 

Chris Hedges Interview with Seth Harp - Drug Trafficking and Murder in US Special Forces

Image
See his book  The Fort Bragg Cartel : 36:07 On the CIA and US Special Forces involvement in heroin production in Afghanistan. Obamacare++.  He recently posted something on  https://x.com/sethharpesq . Subscribe to Chris Hedges . 

R. U. Sirius - President Mussolini Makes the Planes Run on Time

Image
Subscribe to  Ken Goffman a.k.a. R. U. Sirius . 

Ben Visness on High-level Low-level Programming

Image
He makes a lot of good observations here. See  https://handmade.network https://bvisness.me/about/ Maybe there's some overlap with FUBS? See  Eron Woolf on Why Open Source is Failing . There are also radically different ways to think about applications software design. See  Melinda Lu - Functional Distributed Systems Beyond Request/Response . Subscribe to Ben Visness . 

John Milnor on the Development of Topology

Image
He wrote a review:  Topology Through the Centuries: Low Dimensional Manifolds .  Talk given in 2014: Subscribe to Stony Brook Mathematics .  I heard about this from Daniel Tubenhauer's talk: Subscribe to Daniel Tubbenhauer .  Then I listened to this brilliant talk by William Thurston on the future of three dimensional topology and (at 19:36 ) the future of software like Curved Spaces : At 24:42 he goes on to relate the idea of bit-rot in software to the language used in mathematics. I think these ideas could be formalised and that would tell us something about algorithmic solubility (see the theorem of A. A. Markov Jr. mentioned in Milnor's talk  52:51) .  See  Daniel Tubbenhauer on Algebraic Geometry and Edward Frenkel on The Langlands Program ... See also  Time Travel in Programming Land .  Subscribe to Clay Mathematics Institute . 

Curious Marc and Curious Mike Reverse Engineering the Apollo Analog Multiplexor

Image
If you only have one A/D convertor and you need to sample dozens of signals,... It uses special four-legged transistors designed to be operated backwards,... See the documents at  https://www.curiousmarc.com/space/apollo-s-band-communications . Subscribe to Curious Marc . 

Tea With Janet Axelrud

Image
See this post of mine:  Curious Wandering Souls .  Subscribe to Curious Wandering Souls . 

Melinda Lu - Functional Distributed Systems Beyond Request/Response

Image
From the video description : If we shift our intuition about application development away from request/response and toward event-driven patterns, we can develop distributed systems that are composable, scalable, and resilient by design — and avoid much of this complexity. More fundamentally, building our application programming model on composable streams gives us powerful decoupling and flexibility by letting us decompose our business logic into linear operations, allowing us to add machine learning and other rich functionality without exploding the complexity of our system. 10:49  There are type systems that can support static analysis of chains of events in systems. See  Par .  See also  Time Travel in Programming Land ,  Stephanie Weirich Hunting Dragons  and  HVM2 Interaction Combinator Evaluator .  Subscribe to Strange Loop . 

Dustups and Growtree Organics

Image
A Quonset hut is a WWII design evolved from the WWI  Nissen hut . I guess there'll be another improvement coming along in a few years,...  Subscribe to Dustups .  Subscribe to Growtree Organics . 

Ecole des Nouvelles Images - Atomic Chicken

Image
Subscribe to Kis Kis . 

Railway Mania in Japan

Image
In the 1800s the railway engines were imported from Britain. See  Richard Murphy talking with John Christensen About Rational Agency in Economics .  Subscribe to Life Where I'm From . 

HVM2 Interaction Combinator Evaluator

Image
See  Stephanie Weirich Hunting Dragons  and A Really Great Talk on Robot Brains .  Subscribe to ACM SIGPLAN . 

Karl Popper on Consciousness and Science

Image
What he says at 2:07 really leaped out at me: "... we search for our errors, and this is the critical method which exists, I think, only on the human level." Popper initially thought that mathematics was not a science, that mathematical statements were more than conjectures and that mathematical proof was different. This was what led Imre Lakatos to write his series of lectures which was posthumously published as the book Proofs and Refutations .  Subscribe to Philosophy Overdose .  Gabriele Carcassi is hoping to get some mathematicians interested in the Assumptions of Physics project: Subscribe to Gabriele Carcassi .  Mura Yakerson interviewing Dennis Gaitsgory, a mathematician, about physics and things, including Vikram Seth's novel  A Suitable Boy  and travelling in India.  Subscribe to Math-life Balance .  See also  Brian Keating interview with Terrence Tao . 

Netzpolitik in Switzerland

Image
11:00 On the botched E-GD see  Georg Greve on Self-Sovereign Identity in Swiss Healthcare . It's complicated because the digital identity thing is being associated with other initiatives like CBDCs.  Subscribe to  media.ccc.de . 

Devine Lu Linvega's Neural Notepad

Image
I think I might be one of these. But some of the links take up to 18 years to appear:  Stephanie Weirich Hunting Dragons .  See  https://rabbits.srht.site/decadv/ . See  https://forum.malleable.systems/t/mcculloch-pitts-neural-nets/303/2 . Subscribe to Devine Lu Linvega . 

Janet Axelrud's Scavenger Hunt and Myra West's Rebellion

Image
It's over, a long time ago, but I got it !  See  Curious Wandering Souls .  Myra West's video is at a right-angle: Subscribe to Myra West .  Subscribe to Suzanne Vega . Subscribe to Bob Dylan . 

Felix Domke and Karsten Burger - Dieselgate A Decade On,...

Image
This is interesting. It's about a kind of game that is played between the regulators and the regulated. It's a very silly game, but it makes some lawyers rich. Subscribe to  media.ccc.de . 

How To Make A Rose With Snow

Image
Subscribe to I'm a little mole . 

Travis Holt Hamilton Starting a YouTube Channel

Image
See  https://www.holthamilton.com/  and  Julie Nolke talking about her Career .  Subscribe to Holt Hamilton Films and Travis-Holt-Hamilton . 

Curious Wandering Souls

Image
Here's an example of the kinds of things she does: To apply, go to  https://tally.so/r/RGdyaQ . See also  Janet Axelrud Explaining Her New Business .  Subscribe to Curious Wandering Souls . 

Stephanie Weirich Hunting Dragons

Image
See  A Type-Preserving Compiler in Haskell  by Louis-Julien Guillemette and Stefan Monnier, also  https://git.marvinborner.de/marvinborner/bruijn/about/  (from  A Really Great Talk on Robot Brains ). See also  Par, an experimental concurrent language based on linear logic with an interactive playground  and Víctor López Juan's thesis  Efficient Functional Programming using Linear Types: The Array Fragment . See also this ICFP'12 paper by Philip Wadler  Propositions as Sessions .  This is why I wrote what I wrote in  Time Travel in Programming Land . Is it just something about having to make money from ad clicks which makes people stupid?  There was also an interesting talk a few weeks later on impredicativity in System-F and Hindley-Milner type inference by Simon Peyton Jones:  Subscribe to  Chalmers Functional Programming .