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gjm
@gjm@mathstodon.xyz
mastodon 4.7.2Mathematician. Reader. Fiftysomething. Cruciverbalist. Not very good at thinking of witty things to put in short bios.
I wasn't on Twitter before that nice Mr Musk suggested that everyone go to Mastodon, and I don't expect to be very active here, but who knows?
101 Followers
113 Following
36 Posts
Joined November 27, 2022
"I am the most physically and verbally attacked public figure of modern times", says Nigel Farage.
Dude, even if we assume you only mean in the UK, there have been two literal murders of MPs in the last 10 years.
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@robinhouston@mathstodon.xyz @ColinTheMathmo@mathstodon.xyz You might be right, but I'd consider a slightly different perspective: the thing that makes email get in the way of being "on the bottom of things" in Knuth's sense is the feeling that when someone emails you you _have to respond fairly promptly_, much more than it is the _total time spent on email_.
So even if the only thing Knuth has done is to provide a good excuse for batch-processing his emails, that seems more than merely aspirational to me.
(Maybe you have evidence that actually he's as distractible by email as anyone else and the whole thing is mere pretence, in which case fair enough. But from the very little _I_ know it seems possible that it's real enough to mean something.)
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@petersuber Actually, it's even weirder. The image accompanying your post, which I assume is extracted from some version of the article, _is_ of the correct library. (I think.) But when I follow the link to the article itself it's got only one image, which isn't that one but a picture of the interior of an entirely different library in Gothenburg.
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@noamzoam@mathstodon.xyz I don't think there is any possible way that two people _independently_ wrote "the electronic computer has come to symbolize the importance of mathematics in the modern world" and also "few professional mathematicians are closely acquainted with the machine". One of them was copying the other, or both were copying something else.
If there's no indication in the Knuth preface that he's quoting Ulam, then my opinion of him just went down a notch in a way I'm very surprised by.
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@dalias@hachyderm.io @Lana@beige.party So far as I can tell, most children who liked those books liked them more because _they_ liked them than because their parents were fans and somehow forced them into it. But, again, maybe we're talking about different age-groups; my own daughter was of about the age to read them as they originally came out and was distinctly more a fan than either parent.
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@shac I'm not sure whether this is made more or less hilarious by the fact that the quotation is actually from Steve Jobs, not from Alan Dye.
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@pozorvlak@mathstodon.xyz I'm having trouble working out whether one of WHR and RG copied the other, or whether maybe the idea of the kind of illustration they both became famous for was already in the air before either of them got started.
Apparently RG's first absurd-machine drawing was from 1912 and WHR's was a bit later, but WHR's "Uncle Lubin" has some absurd machinery by way of incidental detail and that's from 1902.
I completely agree that WHR's drawings have much more character than RG's (but I concede the possibility that I may like them better partly because I encountered them earlier).
Apparently the Danish cartoonist "Storm P." did similar things at around the same time. I'm not sure of the chronological relationship there either.
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@dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @noamzoam@mathstodon.xyz "Completely impossible" is pretty strong. "Extremely surprising" seems more like it. It doesn't seem very possible for Ulam to have borrowed Knuth's wording, given the relevant dates, unless Ulam read a pre-publication version of the preface of TAOCP vol 1? (That _also_ seems fairly unlikely.)
I agree that some sort of accidental copying seems more likely than deliberate plagiarism on Knuth's part, given how waaaay out of character the latter would seem -- but discovering that Knuth somehow _accidentally_ copied someone else's work would still reduce my opinion of him a bit!
(For the avoidance of doubt, my opinion of Knuth was and is very high, whatever turns out to be the case here.)
Knuth's reply to Noam Z. seems to claim that he never read Ulam's article at all (well, strictly it only says that he _doesn't recall_ reading it) which of course is hard to square with an accidental-copying hypothesis.
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@artnacrea@mastodon.ie @inthehands@hachyderm.io I've always heard this (or something very like it) attributed to W S Gilbert, as in Gilbert and Sullivan.
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@christianp Can you export the design into some form you can make the changes to with a script? I would expect that doing that wouldn't be more than 2-3x more effort than just changing all the sizes by hand.
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@cstross@wandering.shop Seems to me that the things you get when hungry are both pangs and pains. "Pangs" is more traditional and a bit more specific, but "pains" isn't a _mistake_ in the way that e.g. "mute point" is.
I think there's literally (like, _literally_ literally_) no situation where using "begging the question" is a good idea other than when you know all the people you're talking to well enough to know how they will understand it. A lot of the problem here is that "begging the question" is a really unnatural way (in modern English) to say the thing it traditionally means, and rather a natural way (in modern English) to say the thing it often means nowadays, and both of those are things it's reasonable to want to say.
So I say something like "assumes what you're trying to prove" when I mean _petitio principii_, and "raises the question" when I mean the other thing.
(Sometimes I might say something like "begs the question, in the original sense": if I'm talking to people whom I know _know_ the original sense but there isn't enough common knowledge -- everyone knows that everyone knows, etc. -- that they can safely assume that I am using the words that way without further clarification.)
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@oantolin@mathstodon.xyz It looks as if the initial Google-failure is in Google Books rather than in Google's AI as such; if you follow that link that says "Google Books" you do indeed find something that (1) purports to be called "Topics in Topology" (though it's a _different_ book with that title) and (2) is given that same obviously-very-wrong summary.
How _that_ happened, I have no inkling, of course.
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@moof@cupoftea.social @pozorvlak@mathstodon.xyz I tried putting "creator of absurd machine drawings" into a search engine. DuckDuckGo gave me a bunch of search results for Rube Goldberg, whose WP page's "See also" section links to Heath Robinson, and an AI-overview thing that mentions both WHR and RG. Google has WHR as its first search result.
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@cstross@wandering.shop Dunno if it helps any, but note that it's only the _start_ of the nineties that was 35 years ago; 1999 was still the nineties and was "only" 26 years ago.
(Dolly was 1996; Sojourner was 1997. Both nearer the end than the beginning.)
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@lowlevel@mastodon.social @cstross@wandering.shop "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent".
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@cstross@wandering.shop These are almost certainly just typos, but just in case they have actually crept into the text: surely "polstilion" should be "postilion" and "obnubliated" should be "obnubilated".
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@cstross@wandering.shop I had a look through and see approximately zero things in the list that Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel et al seem to be taking inspiration from (maybe #59 and #100, I guess) so I think it may just be that they look evil-overlord-like for other reasons. (I acknowledge that it's also possible that for some reason I'm failing to notice the parallels. And I did mostly stop reading after the original 100 rather than proceeding to examine the later annexes.)
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@nixCraft@mastodon.social I'm perplexed by all the Discourse about this. Surely if you have one of these things you're basically never going to be using the power button, so you _want_ it somewhere where there's no danger it'll get pushed by accident. Putting it on the bottom seems like a smart user-friendly choice to me.
Obviously a lot of people disagree, but I don't quite understand why.
(I'm not an Apple fanboy; I have never owned a Mac, iPhone or iPad, for instance. Apple have made some stupid design decisions. I just don't see how this is one of them.)
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@sluggard @ZachWeinersmith Here's the actual thing. I hope it isn't too much of a spoiler to say that you will want to have looked at the actual comic before solving it.
011100101 011111111 110100110 101111010 100010011 010101110 000000000 010011010 001100001 100110001 101111011 011100001 010110111 001111011 111101011 100000000 001100001 011111111 110100110 110101011 000000010 001100100 100001101 001001010 001110111 101111010 111100001 110111000 101010100 100110101 001111011 001110110 011111111 111100001 011010010 001110110 101110011 100001101 001100101 001110110 010101110 111010100 010110101 101110011 001100101 111100000 101111011 110101011 111100001 000101111 010100110 101111011 111110000 000000000 001100100 100001111 011100110 010111000 001101101 101111011 010110101 111100001 111010100 101010100 111100001 111010000 010100110 000101110 001110110
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@tychotithonus@infosec.exchange @inthehands@hachyderm.io And don't get me started on the one about the man from Montero.
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@dalias@hachyderm.io @Lana@beige.party Maybe that's true for people young enough never to have encountered the books without the "author is an anti-trans fanatic" associations.
But, e.g., my university-age daughter was an HP fan and has none of that stuff going on. She thinks JKR is contemptible and is keen to make sure that none of her money ever flows in JKR's direction ever again, but she loved the books when they were first published. She enjoyed the books and the movies "for a reason", but the reason was that the books were fun to read and the movies were fun to watch. (And also maybe that _practically everyone_ of her age was reading the books and watching the movies.)
I don't think justice is served by deciding retroactively that actually the books were obviously saturated with bigotry and that everyone who enjoyed them was a bigot.
(Yes, there absolutely is some shitty stuff in the books -- e.g., ye gods, the goblins -- but not so much that only Bad People could have liked them.)
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@sluggard @ZachWeinersmith It's on the last page, in plain text and also in the bonus thing you get by clicking on the big red button on that page.
I have just discovered that in the botched renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, the company the Trump administration (corruptly?) hired to provide the filtration system that's meant to deal with algae was called ...
Greenwater Services.
They really can't say they weren't warned.
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Microdosing LLMs, self inflicted vibe coding, slopgazing. Long-ish
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@dpiponi@mathstodon.xyz You can use +n or -n and have it still work, no? Just offset the value of n by 1.
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@standupmaths Eh, seems perfectly reasonable to me. It means "truck drivers, please remember that your vehicle might not fit in the tunnel and don't try to drive into it unless you know it will fit".
Given the existence of the sign, I assume there's some history of truck drivers failing to do this. How else should they remind them in the space available?
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@Averixus@toot.wales I don't think those numbers prove that there's anything wrong here.
If there were no "revenue protection" at all, some people who now pay wouldn't pay. To discover whether "revenue protection" is paying its way, you need to compare the cost of "revenue protection" with _what people are paying that they otherwise wouldn't_ as well as the fines and penalty fares.
Imagine a world where everyone cheats if there's no "revenue protection" but some measure that only costs £50k/year makes everyone comply. (Of course this isn't the real world.) In that case, _obviously_ you want to pay the £50k/year, but an FOI request like yours would say: "They pay £50k/year. They earn _zero_ from ticket fines and penalty fares."
So in this imaginary world, "revenue protection" is tremendous value but looks awful by the "fines versus cost" metric.
Back in the real world, I don't know how much cheating they prevent with their "revenue protection", but I bet it isn't zero. Maybe it's more than £800k/year, maybe not. But that's the figure that matters, not what they're getting back in fines.
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@dpiponi@mathstodon.xyz That's very clever!
(It's Euler's 𝑛²+𝑛+41 thing in disguise. And of course it just happens to break down immediately after that 01601 block.)
[EDITED to add:] And therefore the fact that this thing works is ultimately related to the fact that exp(pi sqrt(163)) is so close to an integer!
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@highergeometer@mathstodon.xyz @gregeganSF@mathstodon.xyz At present the AIs seem to be much better, relative to humans, at finding counterexamples to conjectures than at proving them. Cf. Kevin Buzzard's "Human mathematicians are being outcounterexampled".
Of course there's no guarantee that that state of affairs will last.
But the most striking aspect of the play at this moment is the terrible topicality given it by the war. We were at peace when I pointed out, by the mouth of Ferrovius, the path of an honest man who finds out, when the trumpet sounds, that he cannot follow Jesus. Many years earlier, in The Devil's Disciple, I touched the same theme even more definitely, and showed the minister throwing off his black coat for ever when he discovered, amid the thunder of the captains and the shouting, that he was a born fighter. Great numbers of our clergy have found themselves of late in the position of Ferrovius and Anthony Anderson. They have discovered that they hate not only their enemies but everyone who does not share their hatred, and that they want to fight and to force other people to fight. They have turned their churches into recruiting stations and their vestries into munition workshops. But it has never occurred to them to take off their black coats and say quite simply, "I find in the hour of trial that the Sermon on the Mount is tosh, and that I am not a Christian. I apologize for all the unpatriotic nonsense I have been preaching all these years. Have the goodness to give me a revolver and a commission in a regiment which has for its chaplain a priest of the god Mars: my God." Not a bit of it. They have stuck to their livings and served Mars in the name of Christ, to the scandal of all religious mankind.
-- George Bernard Shaw, Afterword to _Androcles and the Lion_
Can't think why it's coming to mind at the moment.
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@xkcd@mastodon.com.br In 1974, one Dennis Upper published in the "Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis" a paper called 'The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of "writer's block"'.
It appears alongside a reviewer's note that says, among other things, "I have studied this manuscript ... and have not detected a single flaw in either design or writing style" and "it is the most concise manuscript I have ever seen".