Nick has moved to Mathstodon

Moved to Mathstodon.xyz

Theoretical physicist by training (PhD in quantum open systems/quantum information), University lecturer for a bit, and currently paying the bills as an engineer working in optical communication (implementation) and quantum communication (concepts), though still pursuing a little science on the side. I'm interested in physics and math, of course, but I enjoy learning about really any area of science, philosophy, and many other academic areas as well. My biggest other interest is hiking and generally being out in nature.

Pronouns: he/him/his

Public Key

npub1hnphh99kmukqa3qq2axyw9jweek98rchfzchfnjqua7xr79x4xjs5z26ht

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqstesmmjjmd7tqwcsq9wnz8ze8vumzn3ut53vt5eeqwwlrplzn2nfgpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dshegqu0

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1hnphh99kmukqa3qq2axyw9jweek98rchfzchfnjqua7xr79x4xjs5z26ht

Show more details

Last Notes

2025-02-16 23:49:01 GMT

- reply

Presumably, in light of recent events it may have become even more controversial, and it's possible that even those servers that were federating with them (like mastodon.social) may have stopped. I'm not that plugged in to wider Fediverse happenings.

2025-02-16 23:43:15 GMT

- reply

Threads supports ActivityPub (to an extent), so it doesn't require a bridge, just that a Fediverse server federate with it (which was controversial). See for example:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/13/24000120/threads-meta-activitypub-test-mastodon

2025-02-16 21:04:33 GMT

I'm looking at migrating my account to #Mathstodon. One thing I'd like is the ability to follow people from a wide variety of different places, including Bluesky (via brid.gy) and Threads, if possible. I know that the former is possible on Mathstodon, but I'm trying to figure out if the latter is. It seems like maybe not.

2025-02-15 22:40:36 GMT

- reply

If you happen to have a recentish Pixel, I've had good results with @npub1kwa…e0nj. It is de-googled by default but will also allow you to run Google apps with additional sandboxing should you need to.

2025-02-14 23:56:13 GMT

- reply

Initially I thought this was just a creative description of bagpipes.

2025-02-11 05:33:39 GMT

- reply

It's probably worth adding that apparently two different payment processors seemed to assume payments to @npub1rkw…5q62 were fraudulent, so if your donation payment doesn't seem to be working check to see if the payment was declined.

2025-02-11 01:31:16 GMT

I'm guessing that @npub1rkw…5q62 has probably been getting a lot of new users over the last few months, and that will be costing a lot of money. If you use it (or you just value privacy) you might think about donating.
https://mastodon.world/@signalapp/113635632154547730

2025-02-10 03:57:08 GMT

I just donated to the Tor Project because I support the human right to privacy. https://donate.torproject.org/
(ETA: this post came from the post to Mastodon button on their site!)

2025-02-03 15:56:51 GMT

- reply

Ben Stein was literally the first thing I thought of when people started talking about them recreating Smoot-Hawley.

2025-02-03 04:47:25 GMT

- reply

Robenson: "I think you're under-thinking it." 😄

2025-02-03 02:02:24 GMT

- reply

I feel like many things in math and physics are that way: when you're introduced to them someone can give you an explanation that makes sense; then when you think about it more you run into contradictions or incompleteness in the simple explanation. Getting back to the point where it makes sense again can take a LOT of work. Two examples that come to mind would be Hilbert spaces in quantum mechanics including momentum and position eigenstates and the notion of infinitesimals in calculus.

2025-02-02 15:33:29 GMT

- reply

See, they say that, but then you find out that in the latest release of carrot they added a fish scaling function, and you're like "isn't this feature creep?"
https://youtube.com/shorts/x4pRbdjGBxE

2025-02-02 00:06:28 GMT

I just keep looking at this and laughing, so i had to share (even though I assume it's made the rounds many times before).
https://media.social.qoto.org/media_attachments/files/113/931/347/090/109/490/original/a20da8010284dcc3.jpeg

2025-02-01 23:32:32 GMT

- reply

I'm curious in what say Floccus didn't work for you (since that's another I've run across).

2025-02-01 17:48:56 GMT

I am looking for a good way to have bookmarks available from all my devices.
I was once a del.icio.us user and have tended to use services similar to that since, because they easily allowed me to have my bookmarks on all devices without worrying about compatibility with a specific #browser or OS. But I've been thinking that maybe I should use something with better #privacy guarantees, like end-to-end encryption.
Since I'm primarily a #Firefox user, I considered just using Firefox's built-in bookmarking and FF sync. But one issue I have is that it doesn't seem to autocomplete tags when you're entering bookmarks. To me this is important because a challenge with tags is consistently using the same ones and not creating a bunch of similar variants, so I want something that makes it easy for me to tell if I've used a tag before when I'm entering tags for a new bookmark.
Are there Firefox extensions or other web services for this with E2EE that I should be considering?
#web #webBrowser #webBrowsers

2025-01-29 05:04:18 GMT

- reply

I find that one of my biggest problems on many sites is just getting a straight answer on which ebooks have DRM.

2025-01-27 00:00:52 GMT

- reply

Yeah, I appreciate all the advantages you listed of in-person meetings. I can believe that some of the advantages that currently come from physical meetings could be recreated in purely-online meetings, but I think the problem is that it doesn't happen naturally as an extension of normal human activities; it would probably require research and a lot of conscious work to structure the correct processes to do it. It seems like an open question how far one could get with a purely online approach.
I'm glad to hear that the IETF does so much with the hybrid approach; I often find hybrid meetings to be highly dysfunctional for either the online or in-person side. I would suspect, though, that it still means there will be effectively be a two-tiered system where, all things being equal, the people who attend in person are taken more seriously. This makes some sense, since attending does require commitment of time and money, but it also works against people with less money, health conditions, or certain nationalities.
[@j_bertolotti](https://mathstodon.xyz/@j_bertolotti )

2025-01-26 18:05:12 GMT

- reply

It's puzzling to me that the IETF of all organizations wouldn't focus on a solution that doesn't require everyone to be co-located. Setting aside border control issues, I would think that any solution based on global travel will still have equity and environmental issues.

2025-01-26 17:36:19 GMT

- reply

Fred Hoyle wrote sci-fi!? I had no idea. I was only familiar with his work in astrophysics.

2025-01-25 20:49:44 GMT

- reply

Thank you for putting this together! It's important context for current events.

2025-01-25 01:41:32 GMT

- reply

I completely support this attitude in principle, but I don't think it really becomes a useful plan until one has a credible alternative approach for long-term sustainability. I know you're actively trying to raise money now, which is good, but I haven't seen anything yet that looks like long-term sustainability one can count on.
Obviously, I'm not trying to single out you or Pixelfed here. I think this is a problem basically all of the Fediverse and all non-ad-funded services are trying to figure out (including Bluesky). My point is more that I don't see that much practical difference between the person who says "we might have to have ads" and the person who says "we'll never have ads" if the latter doesn't have a credible long-term alternative, which I haven't yet seen for the Fediverse.

2025-01-24 19:36:32 GMT

"Seventy per cent of Nature readers who responded to an online poll are using the social-media platform Bluesky"
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00177-1

2025-01-24 15:09:35 GMT

- reply

I'm really fascinated by the idea of this mirror universe where (a presumably goatee-wearing) Cory Doctrow has been convincing the world to love DRM and palling around with Metallica.

2025-01-23 14:45:26 GMT

- reply

For what it's worth, that does sound like it's reasonably simple with Bluesky. But note in that case it just contains your data which is then read by the Bluesky relay; it is not a full parallel instance.

2025-01-23 13:55:01 GMT

- reply

It seemed like maybe the server was having some problems last night. It seems to be loading for me today.

2025-01-23 05:00:15 GMT

- reply

I know what you mean about crackpot theories that take too much work to unravel, but I found the one I linked to pretty hilarious just based on the notion of claiming that Charles Misner didn't know how to do basic GR and furthermore claiming that GR actually predicts that the solar system should be static, which apparently no one realized in the many decades earlier working with, e.g., the post-Newtonian approximation. 😆

2025-01-23 04:47:11 GMT

- reply

I feel like this combination of sentiments distills to much of crackpottery: "I think that it’s mathematically provable that ... However, I don’t know the math to prove it. ... Feel free to do the math and prove it correct." People who are certain they are correct even though they don't know the math. Or people who have decided that, because they don't know the math, the "one true theory" must be expressible in very simple math.

2025-01-23 04:35:43 GMT

- reply

Outlook is a God-forsaken mess. It does support S/MIME, though I think people often use extensions to improve the functionality. Outlook also includes it's own proprietary encryption (along with DRM functionality) that is also labeled "encrypt", just to make it completely confusing to the casual user. As far as I know, it doesn't natively support OpenPGP.

2025-01-23 04:29:58 GMT

- reply

I think that will almost certainly mean S/MIME. I know that it is use by at least some federal agencies. I'm not aware of OpenPGP currently being used by any of them (though my knowledge on the topic is certainly not extensive).

2025-01-23 04:27:02 GMT

- reply

This thread may be of interest:
https://misskey.de/notes/a3b41p8prp

2025-01-22 20:49:57 GMT

- reply

There is the occasional more scholarly work of crackpottery. I actually find these more enjoyable, because they are at least coherent enough to allow some sort of criticism of the content. One of my favorites in this genre is https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9506082

2025-01-22 20:20:13 GMT

- reply

Wouldn't an Erdös number at least imply having published something with a coauthor? I feel like that's already putting one in the upper echelon of crackpots. Often it seems like they can't find even one other person who buys into their ideas (probably because they're usually incoherent).

2025-01-21 17:07:39 GMT

- reply

Thanks! Hopefully someone else can suggest something written, which would be easier to refer people to (or quote), but I'll take a look at the video.

2025-01-21 16:12:43 GMT

I have a question about buying a #book on #amazon that I'm hoping people on Fedi can clarify: I believe I saw an author complaining that if Amazon ran low on the stock of their (new) book they would instead produce a poor-quality print-on-demand version and send that to the customer. Can anyone confirm whether this is the case and under what circumstances it happens?
I don't buy books (or anything else, if I can help it) on Amazon, so I have no personal experience. If I can get accurate information on this, though, I'd like to share it with people who do, since I think this is a deceptive practice.
#bookstodon

2025-01-21 14:32:33 GMT

- reply

Mazel tov! How to they rate on the Crackpot Index? :-)
https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html

2025-01-21 00:33:11 GMT

Wireless routers always look like either a smart speaker or an alter to an eldritch power. Why are these the only two options?

2025-01-20 02:44:16 GMT

- reply

3. For storage you can again find recommendations on those two sites (under "cloud" or "cloud storage"), but I think there are some subjective questions to answer about what you want out of it. Presumably you are worried about the privacy of your files, but how concerned are you about them becoming unavailable (because the service went down)? What rough amount of stuff do you want to store? Are we talking a few GB or many 1000s of GBs? For example, for privacy one option is not to use any special service but instead to use software (e.g. cryptomator) that encrypts you data prior to uploading it. Then you can just use whatever without worrying about the privacy features of the service, but the cost is a bit of extra hassle.

2025-01-20 02:34:11 GMT

- reply

2. Again, secure turns out to be a little subjective because it depends on what types of threats you want to be secure from (what cybersecurity types like to call your "thread model"). For example, Google offers pretty good features against, say, cybercriminals getting access you your account, but it also analyzes the content of your emails, so in that sense it's not very private. Proton offered a zero-knowledge end-to-end encrypted architecture that meant your emails could be quite private (under certain conditions), but now there are some questions about whether the people running it are trustworthy.
You can again find recommendations for email services on the two sites I mentioned in response to #1. I think Tuta is the option I see mentioned most often as a replacement for Proton (since they also have an end-to-end encrypted architecture).

2025-01-20 02:29:00 GMT

- reply

1. What is a good VPN is a little subjective based on what you want out of it, but you can check recommendations by privacyguides
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/vpn/
and Techlore
https://www.techlore.tech/resources#vpns
to get some good leads. The latter also has a big table with feature comparison if you feel the desire to dig deeper. Note that I would not expect either to have been updated in light of the Proton mess.

2025-01-20 02:23:31 GMT

- reply

To, I'm not an IT person (though I do work related to software), and I'm definitely not an expert on the things you're asking about, but since you haven't gotten responses yet, I'll tell you want I know in the mean time. I'll do it as a thread to respond on each subject in turn.

2025-01-18 17:15:43 GMT

- reply

Another antidote is actually starting to understand what Mars colonization would realistically entail. The book "A City on Mars" by @npub1rkp…dy04 and his wife is a good way to do that, or even a Kurzgesagt video is a decent introduction to some of the difficulties:
https://youtu.be/uqKGREZs6-w

2025-01-18 16:21:56 GMT

- reply

Oh, I agree. If the question is "should people use them," my answer is no. LLMs only look like they're summarizing, as far as I can tell; I think that what they're actually doing is making up something that's statistically similar to a summary of the information. If the relevant data in their training set is sufficiently complete, accurate, and consistent (not a given), that means they may have a decent probability of making up something that approximates the truth, but even then there's no guarantee. This is of limited value if you know what you're getting, and potentially of negative value if you don't.
And, as far as I understand, this is not a limitation of the current GenAI models but inherent to the fundamental nature of such models. I think it might be possible to train a model to more reliably produce accurate summaries, but it would function and be trained in a fundamentally different way than these text generators.
I don't blame DDG for offering a feature people want (even of it's dumb), with a disclaimer about the pitfalls and a mechanism to disable it. And if they are offering a more privacy preserving interface to such tools, there can even be a harm reduction aspect. (It would be even better if the linked to some resources about the limitations of such tools.)

2025-01-18 15:47:16 GMT

- reply

As far as I can tell, plenty of people want and use AI-generated search responses. I don't use them, and I think they're a fundamentally very bad use case for LLMs, but I see people talk about using them online and in real life.
I think that there's a bit of group think on this topic on the Fediverse, that because many of us don't like or use these tools, no one does. But from what I can see, that isn't an accurate perception.

2025-01-18 15:20:59 GMT

- reply

It is dumb, but at least you can turn it off in your settings. I saw that once, turned it off, and have never seen it again.

2025-01-17 20:09:39 GMT

- reply

I don't know about BC, but I'm surprised about Seattle. I live in a major metro area in the US and buy most things in cash for the reasons @npub1z3l…qvzu states. While I do encounter some businesses that don't take cash, it's a small minority in my experience.

2025-01-16 12:29:11 GMT

- reply

Let's be honest, the worst is CGS units. ;-P

2025-01-16 04:14:04 GMT

- reply

I think many scientists see Twitter and its successors as an important venue to promote their work, network, etc., so I think they will tend to be pragmatic in gravitating to where they think they can best do that.
Mastodon doesn't make it that easy to connect people to the information they're interested in, so it would be hard for people to rely on for those purposes. The same dynamics will apply for anyone who relies on social media professionally to some degree (unless maybe they're such a big fish that they know people will seek them out).
@npub1tx7…47wc

2025-01-16 04:03:29 GMT

- reply

I'm sure @npub19kd…t56d has some very-well-informed opinions on this. 😉

2025-01-15 20:15:18 GMT

- reply

I find this an ironic contrast to a current fad online to rail against all food dyes irrespective of any evidence of harm.

2025-01-15 15:36:12 GMT

- reply

I will say that for some organizations even Bluesky is too small to bother with (compared to, say, Instragram, Tiktok, and Youtube), but I assume that Nature is really mostly interested in a Twitter successors, since Twitter was where more scientist discourse was happening.

2025-01-15 14:44:40 GMT

- reply

My impression (based on discussions with people who talk about their research on both platforms), is that Bluesky has a considerably more vibrant research community than the Fediverse at this point. Indeed, many of the researchers I follow who migrated to Mastodon in 2022 seem to have stopped posting here. And generally Bluesky has a larger and more rapidly growing user base. So I suppose I'm saying that it seems highly unlikely that Nature would move here, despite the advantages in principle.

2025-01-15 03:13:47 GMT

- reply

Yeah, it looks like it's using some sort of responsive design to change the layout for mobile and the RSS feed link doesn't seem to appear there (unless you choose to view the desktop version).
I did manage to use the link on the desktop version to add you to my RSS reader. 🙂
https://media.social.qoto.org/media_attachments/files/113/830/172/412/837/122/original/ae2218a9dcb8275b.png

2025-01-15 01:58:09 GMT

- reply

Well, i was looking on my phone earlier and didn't look all that closely, so I was giving a sort of generic answer. On Blogspot with your theme it shows a link to the RSS feed at the bottom left of the page with the text "Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)". @npub1z3l…qvzu

2025-01-14 23:29:14 GMT

- reply

You can feed the site URL into a tool like this to find the feed: https://www.rsslookup.com/

2025-01-14 20:17:50 GMT

- reply

Well, his first reply after you objected started with "sorry" and I read it as him saying that he assumed you were using the service by choice and acknowledging that it was a bad assumption he should not have made. It's terse, so one has to interpolate some subtext, but that was my reading.
Anyway, I think you were reasonably annoyed by his original response, and I agree that's the sort of thing that people don't like about Mastodon.

2025-01-14 20:17:40 GMT

- reply

2025-01-14 19:32:14 GMT

- reply

I was with you until this reply. When someone apologizes and admits error, don't assume bad faith. And I don't see anyone playing the victim here. @npub1rth…8g9j

2025-01-14 04:51:15 GMT

- reply

As someone else put it, the world of Star Trek will still be real, but our timeline will be the one where everyone has a goatee.
[@argv_minus_one](https://mastodon.sdf.org/@argv_minus_one )

2025-01-14 04:28:39 GMT

- reply

Isn't starting up an competing indexer essentially what Free Our Feeds is talking about doing?
https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/13/free-our-feeds-campaign-aims-to-billionaire-proof-blueskys-tech/

2025-01-14 04:23:53 GMT

I just donated to Pixelfed, the Fediverse's alternative to Instagram, to help it cope with the influx of people leaving Meta. If you also hope people can find a home away from the influence of Meta and Zuckerberg, consider doing the same. People can't switch if it has been brought to its knees.
See this thread for details on how to donate:
https://mastodon.online/@mastodonmigration/113822682112072218

2025-01-13 23:11:59 GMT

- reply

She did also talk about brining a "community notes"-like feature to Bluesky (and ATProto), and that sounded more Pollyannish to me. My (admittedly limited) understanding of the research on misinformation is that this sort of measure is far too little to effectively fight it. This seems like wishful thinking from someone who wants to believe that this sort of value-neutral decentralized mechanism can work. I sympathize with the desire, but I'm skeptical of the reality.

2025-01-13 23:06:39 GMT

- reply

I also think that Bluesky made a couple other good decisions in pursuing composable moderation (which I think will be much more practical at scale, especially for specific subgroups of users, than the server-locked model Mastodon uses) and in making credible exit fundamental (more so than Mastodon).
Now if only they can get to the point where it is actually decentralized in practice before the VCs come home to roost. I'm not super optimistic, but I do think that they are honest in their intent and have a chance.

2025-01-13 22:59:23 GMT

This Decoder interview from March with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber was interesting. It seems that in doing the research to select the technology for Bluesky she was able to recognize something that it took me much longer to see: the Fediverse will never be able to displace closed social media, not for any technical shortcoming but for cultural reasons.
Many people in the Fediverse don't want information to be easy to find. Many people don't want to interoperate with those they disagree with. Both of those arise from understandable sources and aren't necessarily bad (if not taken to extremes), but they are fundamentally opposed to creating a usable open social ecosystem.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/25/24108872/bluesky-ceo-graber-federation-social-media-decoder-interview

2025-01-13 03:04:10 GMT

- reply

For a minute when I saw that they were a set of posts from sci.physics I wondered if I would recognizing them upon reading, but sadly no. I think that was after I stopped reading it as religiously.

2025-01-13 01:26:46 GMT

- reply

I'm probably somewhat more sensitized to this issue because I sometimes have to worry about converting between "inertial" coordinates (whose axes are fixed with respect to distant stars) and Earth-fixed coordinates (whose axes are fixed relative to the Earth's surface).
We like to think of the Earth as a rigid sphere that rotates along a fixed axis, but when you have to get a bit more precise it turns out it's none of those things; it's more of a wibbly-wobbly Earthy-worthy ball of stuff (to paraphrase Dr. Who). @npub1nf4…nqe4

2025-01-13 01:09:32 GMT

- reply

Agreed! Another interesting thing to think about is how constellations will change over time, since, for the most part, they're just apparent patterns of stars that are not gravitationally bound to one another (or even necessarily that close together). Of course, since they're mostly more distant, I think it will generally take a long time for them to change significantly.

2025-01-12 23:10:56 GMT

- reply

But I believe the change in which is the "north star" has less to do with the relative motion of stars and more to do with the changing orientation of the Earth (precession of the equinoxes).

2025-01-12 18:00:14 GMT

- reply

Also it's cool to have really clever setups with just the right, hand-picked tools, but if, like me, you may have to do things on other systems you didn't setup, it's much easier if you're used to working with relatively standard settings of standard tools.

2025-01-12 16:29:20 GMT

- reply

While the observation about Germanic and Scandinavian countries is generally valid, I have run into people in Switzerland and Austria who don't (or prefer not to) speak English (mostly older people in rural areas) and were happier to deal with my rudimentary German.

2025-01-12 16:22:34 GMT

- reply

Not sure how much of it is a computing resources problem, but I assume a number of people would be willing to chip in to help get over the growing pains in order to get more people off of Instagram. Might be worth a little funding campaign if it would help.

2025-01-12 01:37:25 GMT

One silver lining to the TikTok ban I look forward to is the spotlight it will likely shine on the iOS walled garden. While other phone users will be able to sideload a banned app, I believe that iOS users will not be able to install it (if they don't already have it) or update it. It may help people understand that Apple treats an iPhone as theirs, not yours.

2025-01-10 23:37:06 GMT

- reply

See for example:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/4/24313187/encrypted-apps-salt-typhoon-hack-telecom-fbi-cisa

2025-01-10 22:47:36 GMT

- reply

Would it help to point out the recent US government guidance to use encrypted messaging in light of the Salt Typhoon hack of the telecomms providers? (I think you're in the US.)
@npub1sd8…la5d

2025-01-10 02:52:10 GMT

- reply

Looks like the answer is that is survived for now.
"Update via Mt Wilson [as of 4:55 pm PST]
We are relieved to report that the flare-up of the Eaton Fire near the Observatory seems to be under control for now. We are grateful to firefighters & mountain staff for their dedication to keeping the mountain safe. We will monitor the situation as things can change quickly."
https://bsky.app/profile/fvhollywood.bsky.social/post/3lfe25pfxj22c

2025-01-09 19:02:44 GMT

- reply

I know people who work on social accounts with many millions of followers who can't get the attention of a Meta rep when something goes wrong. It's madness!

2025-01-09 00:15:26 GMT

- reply

I'm confused, @npub1lmv…nrv4 you compared these to Kepler's laws, but the triumph of Newton was to prove that those were *not* fundamental and instead arise from a universal law of gravitation. So your analogy seems to argue against them being fundamental.
@npub1nf4…nqe4

2025-01-07 02:40:42 GMT

- reply

Fair enough. It was obviously a very obscure question, but you were the only person I could think of in the Fediverse that seemed to have much chance of knowing such E&M arcana. 🙂

2025-01-06 22:19:21 GMT

- reply

You might consider using https://fed.brid.gy/ to keep publishing to the Fediverse (using your Bluesky account).

2025-01-06 22:15:13 GMT

- reply

Mastodon has a place for you to put private notes on each user's profile, which is basically for exactly this.

2025-01-06 03:27:44 GMT

- reply

There was actually a recent thread by @npub1nf4…nqe4 that was sort of on what you're terming the string theory "brain drain".

2025-01-05 23:35:16 GMT

- reply

Now that I think about it, because the pivotal issue in this example is that the differential equation is a non-Lipshitz function of the dynamical variable (position here), in E&M the analogous situation would probably involve a non-linear medium, so now I'm even more curious if @npub1l0c…kzlu may know of some such example.

2025-01-05 22:25:49 GMT

- reply

I guess now I feel the need to temper what I said a bit. The fact that this is all related to what happens at one infinitesimal point has always made me not too nervous about this paradox, since we know Newtonian mechanics breaks down for small length scales anyway. But I do wonder if that's the only way in which this sort of thing can arise, so it seems to merit plenty of thought to see if one can construct even more vexing versions.
I guess I'm always a bit wary of talking ourselves too easily into dismissing troubling questions. It makes me think of von Neumann's purported proof that one could not construct a hidden variables theory of quantum mechanics, which seems to have been widely accepted for decades even though it was shown to be flawed only a couple years after it was formulated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden-variable_theory#Von_Neumann's_proof

2025-01-05 19:48:08 GMT

- reply

One thing this made me wonder is whether there's an equally tidy example from electromagnetism. Maybe @npub1l0c…kzlu knows. I would assume that it would be achieved similarly by coming up with a situation where one or more of the source terms in Maxwell's equations so not Lipshitz continuous, but I haven't checked the relevant theorems for PDEs.

2025-01-05 18:24:42 GMT

- reply

It feels like Norton's Dome would be disturbing if we were discussing it in the 19th century, when Newtonian mechanics was (presumably) regarded as a theory of universal applicability. But since we now understand it as a theory that does not apply to predictions related to very small distance scales, it seems like any anomaly that occurs only at a point (or more generally on a set of measure zero) isn't necessarily so disturbing.
But I agree that it's still interesting to think about and consider the implications (and other such examples).

2025-01-05 18:02:31 GMT

- reply

Oh good! I honestly felt a little silly doing it, but I figured "who does it hurt?" I'm actually not quite done yet. Real life intruded on my listening, so I'll have to get back to it later today.
One thought specifically for you, though, is that I was wondering if it might make sense for you to link in the show notes to the article you mention in your correction as well as Ashley's book (which is mentioned in the podcast).

2025-01-05 17:12:26 GMT

- reply

18:27 -- I would normally think that the main issue with quantifying human behavior is that it usually happens in the context of conflicting incentives, e.g. measuring employee performance as part of determining salary, so humans have reasons to want to game it. For personal goals, you're the one measuring but also the one setting priorities and values, so it doesn't seem like the same conflicting incentives exist. ...I guess maybe sometimes people want to lie to themselves.

2025-01-05 16:24:30 GMT

- reply

Hey, for myself if they all turn out to be actual words and it's approximately grammatical, I count it as a win.

2025-01-05 16:10:21 GMT

- reply

14:22 -- Yes, I think it can be really powerful to be able to confront people with the statistical facts when it comes to DEI issues, because otherwise many just hear it as "whining". That being said, it's probably much better if those statistics can be paired with some particularly moving anecdotes. Presumably there's a lot of research on this.

2025-01-05 16:04:31 GMT

- reply

13:17 -- I also feel strongly that we need to keep trying to use measurements in organizations (even though we should also maintain skepticism about them due to Goodhart's law).
This makes me think of a past discussion where I was saying that I don't believe in judging job applicants too strictly based on their education or other objective factors that you can readily see from their resume, because I think you can miss a lot of great people who have acquired great skills in less conventional or readily apparent ways. But at the same time, I fear relying too much on gut feelings from talking to candidates, because I'm afraid that gut feelings are far too susceptible to unconscious bias.

2025-01-05 15:57:20 GMT

- reply

12:17 -- "I'm feeling like arguing with you a lot," and there's the other danger of doing a podcast with your spouse, I guess. 😅

2025-01-05 15:54:34 GMT

- reply

11:00 -- I also immediately assumed we were talking about a mouse as in the biological organism, not the computer input device.

2025-01-05 15:51:42 GMT

- reply

09:40 -- "Can I feel safe and secure going on a hike with you on vacation?" Having both knee and back problems these days, boy do I relate to that sentiment. I can say from experience that being on an alpine peak with a thunder storm quickly rolling in is not when you want your knee to suddenly stop working right.

2025-01-05 15:44:51 GMT

- reply

07:44 -- An essay about the limits of data? Something to add to my reading list.
https://issues.org/limits-of-data-nguyen/

2025-01-05 15:43:07 GMT

- reply

07:42 -- Getting off-track seems like a definite danger of hosting a podcast with a spouse (or a good friend), though it also turns out to be charming in this case.

2025-01-05 15:39:28 GMT

- reply

06:00 -- Recording progress on resolutions/goals but viewing it as more journaling than tracking seems like kind of a nice change of perspective.

2025-01-05 15:34:50 GMT

02:51 -- Sounds like it as a positive experience, but I'm not sure a New Years party where you workshop New Years resolutions sounds like fun to me. The very concept makes me feel self-conscious.

2025-01-05 15:32:19 GMT

For whatever reason I had the impulse to live-microblog listening to the latest episode of the Change, Technically podcast. Probably just because it tends to spur a lot of thoughts. I recognize that this is entirely unnecessary, but I'm doing it anyway in the thread below. The episode in question:
https://www.changetechnically.fyi/2396236/episodes/16381126-the-magic-of-little-boxes

2025-01-05 00:51:12 GMT

- reply

I believe it's referring to the iPod digital music player. Its functions eventually got more or less absorbed into smart phones once they had enough onboard storage (or a fast enough data connection to stream everything).

2025-01-05 00:20:17 GMT

- reply

Switch to coop board games! "Pandemic" is a classic, but might be a little too real for some folks these days.

2025-01-04 20:46:54 GMT

- reply

I haven't read that much of it, but Undark seems good. However, it's free to read, not subscription. I don't know if they take donations.