contingo

The infomap "Broadband is still foreign to much of the U.S." shows high speed internet largely confined to urban areas, as the article discusses. But large swathes of North Dakota are deep green. What's the reason for that?

It's refreshing to hear generated piano music that isn't either strictly metrical or entirely freeform, but with patches where you do get a somewhat natural sense of rubato and sensitive dynamic shaping. It's sort of convincingly improvisatory. The constantly shifting harmonic idiom is disorienting in a not very pleasant way – the worst kind of Chopin + Ligeti mashup – especially when you raise the temperature. It would be interesting to use period/style-specific training sets.

To my ears the 5:00 clip does have a larger structure, there are clearly extended passages of building up to and ebbing away from large climaxes, where you get a real sense of sustained intensification, but of course if you follow the detail everything is built up from lots of fleeting and unrelated ideas.

I did have bad experiences with bad lecturers as an undergrad (hello, here is a handout, now I will project the handout on a screen, now I will read what's on the screen without any elaboration, goodbye), but they were the exception. Obviously this depends hugely on the exact institution in question. And yes, many are now increasingly functioning as blandly corporate battery student farms...

> Yep, and if you're not on that track, the access isn't there.

Actually I'd also be interested in such a scheme, now that I'm exploring ideas far away from my original research area. Although if you have a bona fide interest to discuss something technical and specific with an academic who has the relevant expertise, I've found they can be pretty approachable, even if you email them out of the blue to ask for a chat... but I do have the right sort of background to do that I suppose.

> First of all we have access to less than half of this organism only. What about root mutations?

The study specifically examined the issue of mutations arising in the cell line from zygote to terminal branches, since that is where reproduction takes place and we are most interested in mutations that are passed from one generation to the next. If stem cells at the root tips show more mutations, so what? The authors established (pending peer-review) a surprisingly low rate for this particular sequence, that's sufficiently interesting in itself.

> And second, we have accces only to the 'bad half' in our search for mutations...

"Sixteen of the 17 SNVs identified in the Napoleon Oak occurred in introns or non-coding sequences that are probably neutral... These results... demonstrate [the mutations'] gradual, nested appearance and fixation in developmentally connected branches during the growth of the oak tree. Thus, while the exact ontogeny of the Napoleon Oak may be difficult to reconstruct, our SNV analysis generated nested set of lineages supported by derived mutations"

They sampled across many independent cell lineages and across noncoding regions, and they are looking specifically at mutation rates in the cell line that leads to gamete formation. The kind of mutational "auto-cleaning" you describe is mostly just your unsubstantiated thinking about growth-related phenomena that are actually explained by a host of non-mutational factors; in any case undersampling due to rare deleterious mutation self-pruning would not have a confounding effect on the results here.

>There is not need here of a genetic mechanism to protect cells from mutations.

Just because trees can tolerate certain kinds of pathogen and insect-induced tumors doesn't mean they are entirely without need of protecting genome sequence integrity. Plants like other organisms do have sophisticated mechanisms to repair and maintain DNA, this becomes especially important in the stem cell lines leading to reproduction. The study shows these mechanisms in this oak are particularly efficient.

> Of course someone who gets paid to teach would highly stress learning tidbits slowly and excruciatingly. That's their economic incentive...

Well, I can see that's a factor, but not necessarily an overriding one. As someone who's taught at uni myself (not pure maths) we are not usually that cynical or fond of serving up "detritus". It's not as if we lack for valuable and interesting stuff to teach if we go through foundations too quickly, and we aren't paid just for teaching. Anyway, I think most do benefit from a quite painstakingly incrementalist approach to maths; me taking that too far and sometimes getting stuck is a personal failing.

(I recall a quote by a colleague of the group theorist Simon Norton, who famously suffered a career collapse/hiatus after a series of brilliant results, something along the lines of him having opened a doorway into a wondrous realm of new mathematics, but ending up stuck there, at the doorway, obsessed by the details of the doorframe.)

If I was teaching a linear algebra course, I'm not going to say "by the way you can skip this subject entirely because it will just fall out of your working backwards through Wiles' proof of FLT". For those of us without a once-in-a-generation mind I think the traditional approach is the right one. I was only trying to say, I personally sometimes get stuck and it will be interesting to try the opposite approach.

> Frankly, professors would be more useful to me, if I could purchase their time by the hour

If you go to a good uni, at least by postgrad level you do have that kind of access, and, if you get along, you retain it for free after you leave.

> “To this day, that’s to a large extent how I learn,” he said. “I never really learned the basic things like linear algebra, actually — I only assimilated it through learning some other stuff.”

This was interesting to me. My math profs always admonished us to ensure foundations are completely watertight before advancing to the next thing in tiny increments. I've absorbed this to the point where I perhaps get stuck filling in inconsequential gaps at roughly the same level, kitting out base camp as fully as possible but postponing the ascent.

I have no dreams of becoming a professional mathematician, but maybe I'd have quicker insights and more creative ideas if I tried this approach too, tackling something impossible and working backwards.