Wherein philosophy is dragged, kicking and screaming, into the twentieth century.

I think I am just about ready to make my own search engine.

Ruth Kastner has some things to say about field theories..

It must be so frustrating to have billions of dollars and still be a miserable a**hole.

The principle of "two big ideas": one contains the other, or else they are not big ideas.

If people are going to continue to put the introduction to their paper in the abstract, then i'm going to put my paper's abstract in the title.

Any sufficiently complicated physics paper contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of an idea from algebraic geometry.

Today's OEIS fishing expedition. The only question is how much RAM am i going to need to find the next number... Love these OEIS cliff-hangers! ARGGH

Behold! A one-qubit quantum computer:

no don't kill it. Yes we need it.

Wowee, this new collection threads the needle nicely between philosophy and physics. Authors actually explaining their ideas instead of just academicsplaining. link.springer.com/collections/...

Made a video about a good movie I watched the other day:

What is entanglement? Itamar Pittowsky claimed that these results brought us right to the precipice of logical contradiction--but not over. Abner Shimoney described it as a piece of "experimental metaphysics." I'm a nobody, but I think entanglement is the most interesting thing ever discovered. 🧵⚛️

James Dolan has a knack for describing higher mathematics using vivid language... not much of this has made it into written form, but there are a lot of old posts of his on google groups

love these OEIS flamewars.. might have to wait a few more years to see if there's any followup.

new book alert... oh, these pictures look like fun

TIL: the geometric Langlands program is where love and perversion are united

My favourite book on group theory just arrived in the mail! I had it shipped over from the US secondhand using biblio.

I love conference submission deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

we need more professional crackpots like this

Only a physicist would be so arrogant as to specify "the fifth root of unity". Here is one example:

I've been putting together a database of small quantum codes. If you'd like to contribute your parity check matrices, and any references, i'll add them qecdb.org/codes/ Thanks!

wup, the modular forms db now has finite groups !

Oh yeah, this guy gets it. Every subgroup of the cube reflection group. freethoughtblogs.com/atrivialknot...

Jacob Bernoulli was hardcore..

I've been really enjoying this biography of Coxeter, from 2006, just recently republished.

This is the miracle octad generator (MOG) of Conway and Curtis. It is a kind of treasure map for the S(5,8,24) Steiner system, 24 bit Golay code, the Mathieu group M_24, and much more... (1/?)

I'm glad we have Wall st to tell us if quantum computing is going to work or not.