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BenoitP

> [...] A Hidden Dimension in Natural Language

Mmmh

> [...] We show that in many data sequences — from texts in different languages to melodies and genomes

Hum, ehrm

> [...] natural languages are poorly approximated by Markov processes.

Alright, alright

> [...] This model class captures the essence of probabilistic context-free grammars

Ok, ok

> [...] and cosmological inflation

Wat.

Out of nowhere, Creation of the Univerve.

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I'm always baffled by the ability to draw parallels. Did a colleague take at peek at the screen and said, hey I have the same equations?

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Worth noting the authors, Henry Lin and Max Tegmark, are both astrophysicists. Among other things.

Not to nitpick, Max Tegmark is a cosmologist. I only recently learned the difference when I called a cosmologist friend an astrophysicist. Cosmology deals with the big stuff, almost philosophically, like: "where did the universe come from" and "what is the fate of the universe", while astrophysics deals with the nature of the things within, like: "how do stars form" and "what happens when black holes collide".

Max is deeply invested in modeling, analysis and prediction software, and I suspect did the bulk of the work in the paper.

Henry Lin is a student who is focused on astrophysics. He gave an interesting TED talk (http://www.ted.com/speakers/henry_lin) a few years back about studying distant galaxy clusters.

Henry is energetic and almost viscerally inspired by the beauty of science and mathematics, such a wonderful quality! His voice is definitely in the prose of the paper.

> Did a colleague take at peek at the screen and said, hey I have the same equations?

This would an interesting thing to try - a computer system that would scan all the papers for math and find parallels. I think we already have something like term indexing for deductive systems?

This is theoretically very possible, and I know that at least a few people (http://ccimi.maths.cam.ac.uk/projects/create-semantic-search...) are working on it.

Very yummy, thanks!

One of the goals of OEIS is to discover when the same integer sequence arises in different mathematical contexts, and to confirm whether it's really the same sequence, which then gives the opportunity to prove why it's the same.

That might be a bit of a narrower domain, but it seems to work out pretty well!

https://oeis.org/

One of the common threads I've noticed between the best researchers I know is their uncanny ability to draw these parallels between the most obscure domains.

Heh! For some reason, that reminded me of this famous conversation:

"...and that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana-shaped."

"This new learning amazes me, Sir Bedevere. Explain again how sheep's bladders may be employed to prevent earthquakes."

Max Tegmark is a cosmologist who writes ~5 serious papers and then one "out there" paper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Tegmark

Maybe this whole article has been generated by one of their models..

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