Skewray Research

#Math interests
• #Mathematics Foundations [dilettante]
• #Probability
• #Bayesian #Statistics
• #RealAnalysis and #NumericalComputing
• Stable distributions
• Finance and Project Management

#Astrophysics
• #Cosmology - detection of dark matter
• #Neutrino detection (SNAPPY cubesat)

website: https://www.skewray.com
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8690-4830
Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/skewray

Public Key

npub1cd8m89atxa5zznp09awxczr0nvzq6kwv83jk4zp60748hy76t34qsur4z3

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsvxnanj74nw6ppfshj7hrvpphekpqdt8xrcet23qa8l2nmj0d9c6spz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0ds93ynz6

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1cd8m89atxa5zznp09awxczr0nvzq6kwv83jk4zp60748hy76t34qsur4z3

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Last Notes

2026-09-14 15:18:40 GMT

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The real answer is that these very tiny meteors are hitting your eyeball, so you hear it at the same time due to locality. Trivial, right?

2026-08-07 14:34:07 GMT

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IMHO, vim has added little of value for me to vi. I still use the same 10 vi commands that I first learned. But now vim does stupid, like allowing me to open and edit directories. Every time that happens, I'm all wtf wtf wtf get me outta here!?! The context coloring is nice, though, so I magnanimously allow others to use it.

2026-08-07 03:07:11 GMT

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Dude. You been drinking the cool aid. Nothing wrong with csh scripting. I've been happily using csh/tcsh scripting for 45 years. I mean, people out there actually really use emacs, and that's horrifying.

2026-08-07 01:37:07 GMT

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What is "command line"? Can I download it on the Apple Store?
For the last few months, I've been writing far more shell scripts than anything compiled. And all in csh derivatives. None of that bash hooey.

2026-05-02 18:27:50 GMT

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The original argument (It's from the blog of some UCSD professor twenty years ago, and reached a different conclusion) does not take into account that all this virtual property takes energy to maintain, causing data centers to be an anathema upon the face of the Earth. The seemingly stupid Musk idea of putting data centers in orbit thus seems less stupid, although I doubt the total environmental cost of the rocket offsets the off-Earth savings.
Another obvious solution is to maintain "our" 3% growth rate while destroying the growth rate of others. Once "we" are too large, split and repeat.

2026-05-02 14:56:00 GMT

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There is a relatively simple argument that, in order to maintain a 3% growth rate forever, most economic value must become virtual. There just isn't enough stuff on the planet to hold such value. Consequently, the *relative* price of physical things goes to zero.
We are seeing this now. How much of our household budget is spending on things virtual? Internet access, streaming, ebooks, games, bitcoin, NFTs (ha!), LLM access, apps, &c.

2026-04-20 23:34:51 GMT

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The cores of the moons of the outer planets may have serpentinization going on at the boundary with an internal ocean, which is why some think there may be life inside. The oceans exist because of tidal heating from the orbit. Tricky to see under the frozen outer crust, though.

2026-04-20 22:40:31 GMT

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Early life on Earth may have started by eating such rocks where they touched water, a process called serpentinization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpentinization

2026-04-12 00:24:35 GMT

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Whew! At least there were no apes, right?

2026-04-07 17:25:24 GMT

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Leaving us with President Vance. Uh-huh.

2026-04-06 19:56:36 GMT

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They haven't found the mass of the neutrino either. Sometimes numbers are small. (In fact, the WIMP detection floor for small cross sections is due to Solar and Galactic neutrinos.)

2026-04-06 04:42:10 GMT

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Neither had thousands of physicists, apparently. Quite shocking. Someone should update Wikipedia.

2026-04-06 04:37:00 GMT

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There are literally hundreds of papers every month with some clever solution to dark matter, dark energy, and/or quantum gravity.
I had a proposal turned down last year because, according to the reviewer, it was on WIMPs, and most papers now are not on WIMPs, so apparently they are passé. Wut?

2026-03-26 21:58:09 GMT

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I just posted a blog entry today with a Feynman diagram in it. No triangles, but it does have a W+ boson.

2026-02-19 18:06:23 GMT

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I signed a contract for solar panels on April 16th. My panels have, so far, been very decorative.

2026-02-18 00:34:11 GMT

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Sounds like an asymptotic expansion, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptotic_expansion

2026-02-08 02:19:43 GMT

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When I was growing up, my parents dragged me all over New Mexico, visiting sites like this one. I did not appreciate it at the time, but as long as there were not actual Indians still there to stare disdainfully at us tourists, I was okay with it.

2026-01-31 03:21:45 GMT

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My son was coming in to town for lunch, otherwise I would have done that. Sorry!

2026-01-30 19:08:19 GMT

John Baez talk in Claremont
@npub1nf4…nqe4
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/115/985/616/254/251/928/original/926632a2d2201f7d.jpeg

2026-01-28 22:10:12 GMT

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I am coming to your talk on Friday. As it is on music theory, I expect the talk to be given in heroic couplets with lyre background strumming.

2026-01-27 01:11:53 GMT

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(I sometimes use Math Stackexchange.)
I can imagine a better way to structure a question/answer site. Given AI destroying all that is good, there is no point in bothering.

2026-01-27 00:28:52 GMT

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I am unable to answer the question you asked, as I have little to do with MO. Too snobby for me. However, I can bloviate ignorantly on why I think MO is not attractive to women:
The structure of MO (and SO) is to gamify mathematical problem solving as an incentive. Asking and answering questions builds "reputation" which can be compared to others, resulting in a game where the competitors jockey for higher rankings. I posit that this incentivization holds little attraction to most women. The dominant cultural paradigm is that men compete and women work together. In order to make a system like MO appeal to women, I would suggest that a solved problem congratulates everyone who helped, no matter how small the contribution, and no one gets brownie points to collect.

2026-01-15 18:23:35 GMT

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Their rankings for the Arts includes Architecture. Perhaps MIT's Architecture school excels? Depending on how stupid the rankings are with the math, I can see this popping MIT to the top.

2026-01-15 03:21:30 GMT

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Clearly, this should never have been unclassified. We will never put the Adolf back in the box now. How could we just hand out the roadmap?

2026-01-07 22:03:55 GMT

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Sadly, we lack time travel, and so cannot inform the bishop that listening to the prayer *is* the reaction. It's even equal and opposite.

2026-01-07 16:46:23 GMT

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And yet, the bible is full of, "X prayed to G-d and G-d was moved and did something." Did the bishop not read a major reference?

2025-12-24 16:50:56 GMT

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(Typo in first post...missing the 'h' in 'http' for the slides link.)

2025-12-05 00:41:50 GMT

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I am sure there is someone out there who thinks that handing a child a copy of Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis to work their way through is a good approach. "Okay, children. Let's draw the Cantor set!"

2025-11-29 16:50:02 GMT

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Arrhenius assumes thermal equilibrium. 5.6 eV is about 220 nm, so UV light would accelerate decay substantially. Keep your diamonds inside and away from cosmic rays.

2025-11-04 16:23:59 GMT

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Pinyin is not based on English; they just used a handy set of letters. Dropping that misconception makes Pinyin seem...less weird?
Your textbook was competing for the World's Worst Explanation...and won! I can't hear any difference between the ch's in church, and I've been speaking Mandarin daily for 25 years. Neither 'ch' nor 'c' sound anything like anything in church (in standard American English). Maybe the author spoke some arcane dialect of English?

2025-10-31 12:37:35 GMT

Breaking news! Physicists discover that Godel's incompleteness theorems apply to reality! And get it published! Who knew mathematics could be, yanno, used for something?
https://phys.org/news/2025-10-mathematical-proof-debunks-idea-universe.html

2025-10-25 14:34:06 GMT

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Seems like a sad attempt at a pun, as oriented and oriental sound similar. Hardy-har-har-har.

2025-09-26 14:34:15 GMT

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My God, someone reinvented Athenian democracy!

2025-07-02 15:51:55 GMT

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I've never come across empty sets with regard to AoC. Just that, if the drawers contain shoes, which come in left and right varieties, then AoC is not required.
https://proofwiki.org/wiki/Axiom_of_Choice/Examples/Russell%27s_Socks_and_Shoes

2025-06-29 15:16:31 GMT

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The cloud of particles, if left long enough, will settle into a planetary disk. This will increase the collision rate by shrinking the available volume.

2025-06-01 18:50:18 GMT

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This is a horrific idea. Also, you will probably want to have a long stem with a nozzle to get the spray away from the fan thrust. Better than an aerosol can would be a CO₂ cylinder & paint tank. Airbrush parts would work for a lot of that. Software would need to use the camera to actively stabilize the drone position relative to the surface.

2025-06-01 00:36:58 GMT

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Similarly, the Chinese space program began because Qian Xuesen, one of the founders of JPL, was treated poorly by the US and returned to China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qian_Xuesen

2025-05-29 18:59:21 GMT

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It is "just" systems analysis, but what I find new (to me) is that the approach is like software engineering patterns. There, someone can say, "Oh, this looks like a FactoryMakesLittleWhiteBunnies" and everyone knows what the structures and algorithms are. They've laid out the patterns the recur when people work together. That's pretty cool.

2025-05-29 17:26:41 GMT

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I could easily come up with dozens of examples. The entire 6-sigma process, for example, is mathematically broken, so it often fails for the processes which appear to need it the most, while working on those that don't. I should write that up....

2025-05-29 17:05:36 GMT

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Only 29 libraries in Worldcat have this book, and none are nearby me. But the PDF certainly is available.
I am interested because, over the ten years I was in industry, I saw the pattern in the image over and over. Just as an example, the industry facility I was at proudly displayed time since last injury. Then they asked how many people were injured but did not report it, since they didn't want to be blamed for breaking the safety streak. Result: overwhelming positive response. Solution: take down display of time since last injury.

2025-05-29 16:47:02 GMT

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ISBN works...but the cheapest copy used is $100. Guess I'll hit the library.

2025-05-29 15:08:24 GMT

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If I put "System Archetype Basics" into Bookfinder.com, nothing comes up. Is that really the title?

2025-05-19 18:51:21 GMT

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I can sort of believe that, but it makes me wonder why vorticity is considered something about incompressible fluids.

2025-05-19 16:00:15 GMT

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Pretty sure all conserved quantities have a symmetry. The Wiki article mentions chirality???

2025-05-17 15:59:00 GMT

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This is all so upsetting because I was planning to lose weight by Hawking radiation, and now I have to diet.

2025-05-10 16:00:12 GMT

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A really good use of ChatGPT would be to generate letters to academics that meet all 37 points of John's Crackpot Index.
When I was in grad school, there was some guy who printed up his ideas as a hardback book and mailed a copy to every physics professor is the US. I was surprised by how often I saw it retained on office bookshelves; for some of us back then, throwing out a book was blasphemy.

2025-05-05 15:30:12 GMT

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I really think this is great...LLM training material.

2025-04-29 21:06:46 GMT

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Is a grant a contract? I am slightly skeptical, admittedly through ignorance. I know Caltech has a prime contract with NASA to run JPL, but any grants JPL has can and often are stopped at will.

2025-04-19 22:44:46 GMT

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Agreed, but whatever it is won’t be based on the Democratic Party. So, then what?

2025-04-12 19:40:08 GMT

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Hi, Jennifer. @npub1nf4…nqe4 lives in Riverside, so that must be who this unknown caller is. Glad I could help!

2025-04-08 22:44:30 GMT

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Just implying that killing entire families is very French Revolution. Otherwise, sign me up.

2025-04-08 22:16:36 GMT

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The fortunes of the richest families in the world are generally far larger than single individuals. That doesn't lead to a good place.

2025-03-18 03:19:11 GMT

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Over the last 75 years, America has had the economic power to reshape the world however it wanted. The result was, overall, pretty fucked up. Let’s see how the Chinese do, shall we? Unless, of course, Europe gets its act together. How about it?

2025-02-17 03:06:48 GMT

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There occasionally giant methane leaks from oil fields around the southwest. Just be prepared.

2025-02-17 01:02:41 GMT

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Could make a blimp with methane. That would be about half the lift of hydrogen.

2025-02-16 23:54:18 GMT

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I’ve researched a bit. A hot air blimp would be huge and ungainly. Helium too expensive. Hydrogen perfect but illegal in the US, where I am. Laws from when morons here still thought the Hindenburg was a hydrogen fire.