Syzygies

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27460887

> In the mid-seventies at Swarthmore College, we were mired in punched card Fortran programming on a single IBM 1130. ... Late one Saturday night, I made a misguided visit to the computer center while high, smelled sweat and fear, and spun to leave. Too late, a woman's voice: "Dave! I told Professor Pryor he needed you!" ... So busted! Then I heard this voice “See these square brackets? See where you initialize this index?” He was spectacularly grateful.

> One cannot overstate the rend in the universe that an APL terminal presented, catapulting me decades into the future.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbed-bit_signaling

So I adhere to the Schützenberger view of automata theory, that the way to explain a semester's finite automata theory to a math major in twenty minutes is via rational power series on noncommuting variables. Change the semiring from true/false to probabilities and one gets hidden Markov chain theory.

So how do nondeterministic transition systems fit into this picture? I'm guessing that the connection should blow my mind with a new way to see power series?

The Zojirushi makes respectable rice with minimal effort, as in we're about to walk the dog but we need to set up rice for dinner.

The Musui Kamado is a dramatic upgrade over an Instant Pot for every use except pressure cooking, for which we prefer a stovetop Fissler pressure cooker. Carefully following directions, it makes better rice than the Zojirushi. We use it whenever we want a feedback loop for fixed temperature, not unattended flame, such as cooking beans or stews. For tacos, I have to remember to transfer the cooked nixtamal corn for fresh masa, in time for my wife to start beans.

The Kamado-san double-lid donabe rice cooker takes the most care, and makes in my opinion the best rice, with a controllable bit of scorch as desired.

At home, out of expediency we use the Zojirushi to make our rice. I find myself avoiding meals that involve rice, out of boredom. In my work apartment, I haven't touched the Zojirushi or Musui Kamado for rice since adopting the Kamado-san donabe, and I look forward to rice.

If all sushi bar rice tastes the same to you, stick to the Zojirushi. If only food at the limits of your abilities captivates you, get a Kamado-san donabe. The Musui Kamado is the most versatile compromise. There's no novel physics here; its edge over both a Zojirushi and an Instant Pot can be explained by its precision-machined cast iron pot, of a better quality than Le Creuset or Staub (I have all three).

https://www.vermicular.us/shop/musui-kamado

https://toirokitchen.com/collections/unique-style-iga-yaki-d...

Of course, you could challenge its effectiveness, too. London ended its cholera epidemic by no longer drinking sewer water. We still don't vent our buildings properly.

One plant I've researched for my puppy is Morning Glory. First, one needs to clarify leaves? flowers? seeds? And there are many varieties of vine called "Morning Glory", both annual and perennial.

Those of us of a certain age learned in high school to recite the specific varieties of annual morning glories whose seeds contained lysergic acid amide, offering the shortest path to synthesizing lysergic acid diethylamide, aka LSD. I recall Heavenly Blue and Pearly Gates. Other varieties are of less interest.

(I was banned from my high school chem lab, but not for LSD. A friend's brother researched short-acting hallucinogens too obscure to make illegal, and picked a relatively safe synthesis for us. He forgot to mention it would coat the lab in a white precipitate.)

That would be the morning glory described in the sketchy entry here. Yes, err on the side of caution, if convenient. If one has spent twenty years cultivating a shade wall of perennial morning glory, and the puppy chews the occasional leaf without swallowing, there's no cause to rip it all out.

In the real world, many of us would take the time to fix a splinter in a well-traveled floor. I love that your appreciation for robust protocol includes a mechanism for moving the digital world in that direction.

I found myself daydreaming how blogs would work if the author turned their brilliant attention to the process of blogging itself. They would solve such a problem, to encourage collaboration.

I was therefore stunned to see a "Fix Typo" link at the bottom. Perhaps this has become widespread, but I'd never noticed it before, and the logic of having this author provide such a link amazed me.

Part of what we do in comments is appreciate various aspects of a work. I was appreciating this aspect of this work.

The 1964 Alaska "Good Friday" earthquake is the second most powerful earthquake in recorded history, estimated to have been stronger than the 1700 Cascadia earthquake.

In 1970 I wandered the ruins of the original city of Valdez. They relocated up the hill. The next morning, sleeping in our homebuilt camper van, there was a rolling 5.9 earthquake right under us. Yikes.

I was floored to see the "fix typo" link at the bottom. Submitted. I now wonder if the typo was on purpose.

Are people asserting that an ear removed from a cadaver, hooked up to the best available scientific equipment, measures as a perfect biologically derived low pass filter? Or that we even partially understand how neurons work, when there may be quantum effects to be uncovered a century from now?

Intellectual history is a graveyard of models confused with reality.

I've heard the resonable assertion that the most gifted audio engineers in the world cannot distinguish 192 kHz sample rates from a raw line feed, but some can distinguish 96 kHz. I certainly can't. I used to build audio equipment. There were legendary "golden ears" that people would drive hours to meet, for design feedback. Whatever they heard was reproducible blind with other "golden ears".

How does this square with the logical assertion that there's a sharp cutoff to our biological ability to hear frequencies? Those tests don't account for our ability to sense the presence/absence of overtones.

Now, computers may want better resolution, not to "listen" so much as to better transform in novel ways. Just as "DogTV" recolorizes for its audience, a computer could make the inaudible audible in novel ways. Reconstructing better 3D sound stages. Accurately reconstructing a singer's facial expressions via AI video, rather than simply splatting out something plausible. The whole point of computers are to extend our reach, coevolving in every conceivable way.

It involved dragging.

I loved the 2am conversations that resulted. My idea was that dragging need not respect real-world physics. Dragging should feel like a great tab of acid. And everyone was into this, everyone had ideas.

With two or more photos or a stereo image (new iPhone?) one could triangulate to infer a flattened page, and produce images that look like they came from cut pages in a flatbed scanner. Now just pay someone well in Ethiopia to carefully turn pages without damage.

As any researcher can attest, our digital libraries now hold a century of scanned work of questionable quality. AI could infer scans indistinguishable from an outline font format original on an 8K monitor.

I once helped consult on the 1980's font wars, turning old formats and digital scans into Postscript and TrueType fonts. This was hard then, but will soon be understood as the "correct" way to scan text, when software catches up.

For the scientific literature, we need a ChatGPT equivalent to reconstruct LaTeX source that can reproduce each page. (We really need a successor to LaTeX that isn't such an arcane language, and can author fixed and flowable text with equal ease.)

When my college frets that ChatGPT writes better than our B students, there are various reactions. So I had to see. I signed up for ChatGTP-3.5 and asked it "How can artificial intelligence revolutionise science?"

Huh. It didn't simply plagiarize The Economist. It gave a better answer I found easier to read.

We still breathe sewer air. There weren't enough pandemic deaths to motivate us to fix this.

Proper ventilation gets CO2 levels down below 500ppm, at which point all respiratory illness transmission rates approach zero. CO2 is a proxy for how well our exhales are clearing the room before other people inhale.

What makes fixing this expensive is that one doesn't want to trade energy use for clean air. Modern heat exchange technologies require more space than old building support without modification.

There has been much written about this. Here is one article:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/09/coronavir...

In one instance, I did meet a family member who was inexplicably rich. He reasoned, "Heck, even I can understand AOL!" and went all in, early enough.

I'd be rich if I'd taken the money I spent on storerooms for empty computer boxes, and put it all on Apple. Alas, the success of Microsoft in those days had convinced me I don't have a gift for such picks. The world isn't rational.

I can access though my university, but I'm limited to 100 pages per download, requiring 11 logins. Here, I just needed Acrobat to crop for an iPad, and to remove the four instances of "This page intentionally left blank".

"Inspired by her interdisciplinary studies in history, anthropology, and sociology at Columbia, Conway sought, as an engineer, not only to ride a wave of innovation in computing but to spark maximal diffusion of her open-ended method for better VLSI chips by empowering more researchers to advance the field."

Lynn Conway gave the most amazing talk I'd seen up to that point in my life, in the 1980's at Columbia. (Whitfield Diffie would be the other.) She opened with graphs of how birds in England had learned to poke the foil on milk deliveries, and drink the cream. She generalized this to describing how she deliberately used her training in anthropology to accelerate the spread of her new approach to VSLI chip design.

I had no idea she was trans, though the only way it could matter would be as another data point for how being at odds with the conventional world so often boosts creative thinking. And I've encouraged many students since, "To be a revolutionary, first embrace that you want to be a revolutionary."

I started to write something to better organize synchronizing my Homebrew installation across multiple machines, then thought someone must have done this well already. Sure enough,

https://pumpingco.de/blog/brewfile/

A fantastic, clean way to reinstall or synchronize Homebrew setups, using the command line. I'm surprised that Applite doesn't accept a brewfile to ease migration.

In my case I depend on Bash, Tailscale, and Ruby as installed by Homebrew, so a clean reinstallation is delicate. I have scripts to make sure I don't screw this up:

1 brew bundle dump.sh 2 uninstall homebrew.sh 3 install homebrew.sh 4 renew bash.sh 5 renew tailscale.sh 6 renew ruby.sh 7 renew brew bundle.sh choose-shell.sh

A full sheet pan cart, like used in bakeries. Eight full sheet pans, lined with silpat nonstick sheets. A 1500 watt wall heater, a home brewing temperature controller, and a crawl space fan controller that looks like it belongs in a stereo stack. Build a plywood box around the whole thing. I had to swap in a less sensitive thermal cutoff to keep the heater from shutting off. Now we can process 60 lbs of tomatoes at a go.

There was a lot to figure out, no equations to help guess scale. I should really document this on a web site, the plans out there are very sketchy and wouldn't accommodate our scale.

As math consultant to "A Beautiful Mind" I waited six hours so Russell Crowe could ask me where to look when he declared that Jennifer Connelly's solution to the blackboard problem was wrong. He cared about details. Then Jennifer asked me if I was making her look like a yahoo. I explained that in testing a professor had given her answer.

Various people get wigged out that the young student in the late library scene was spouting math that was well known. Um, ever been a student? I'd made this same observation to Barry Mazur in the hallway as a student, and he just grinned, "It's all connected!" Meanwhile, no one addressed my partial proof of the Riemann Hypothesis that Nash had left on a board.

In the Harvard Lecture Hall scene, Nash compared space-time to the quaternions. Um, he was about to be institutionalized? I knew I had to use this line after the look Brian Greene gave me when I tried it on him. Still, it bothers critics.

Ron Howard found it helpful to think of the math as an actor. That was great direction for me.

https://www.ranchogordo.com/

Yes, Masienda rocks, and making one's own masa from homemade nixtamal is extraordinary. Many of us learned the idea of using an Indian wet grinder from "Oaxaca: Home Cooking from the Heart of Mexico", where Bricia Lopez recommends the Premier Small Wonder Table Top Wet Grinder that I have used for years. It takes 40 minutes of scraping every now and then, adding water to yield a too-wet masa one dries with a bit of masa harina.

A dramatic improvement comes by instead using a chocolate refiner based on the same unit, with custom hardware. My favorite hardware store puzzle: Who else has my problem? Home chocolate makers are famously particular.

https://www.melangers.com/products/premier-chocolate-refiner...

Masienda sells a tabletop "Molinito" masa grinder. I've eaten tortillas at a restaurant that uses this grinder, and I was not impressed. It could be that they chose a coarser texture to impress on their customers that this was artisan food! However, the original method of hand grinding masa took time. An Indian wet grinder more closely replicates this process than any "one and done" mill.

https://mechanicalkeyboards.com/shop/index.php?l=product_det...

https://1upkeyboards.com/shop/controllers/fc660c-controller/

I too have a closet full of mechanical keyboards, somehow indulging the obsession while failing to see the point. A Topre switch is so much better, it allowed me to focus on my layout then get back to work.

MaxiFi Planner is the best consumer tool I know; my advisor also uses it. A puzzle that's too hard for it, making me want to script scraping its reports: Should I choose an annuity for part of my TIAA-CREF retirement savings? Even if one understands that the answer is generally no, there's always a number that flips the decision. TIAA annuities pay more than market, but enough more? There's an annuity paradox that programs like MaxiFi Planner reveal: Even a poorly priced annuity lets one plan to spend more. On the other hand we want to optimize our daughter's inheritance.

Economists optimize varying notions of "utility". The above is a game, scoring what one gets to spend adapting to market conditions, taking into account the inheritance as one's year of death varies. This is beyond any planning software I've seen, yet it's exactly the game I will instead play out badly by hand.