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mikhailfranco

1,611 karma · joined October 2, 2007

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mikhailfranco··on From Chirality to the Standard Model
The process and presentation are also noteworthy.

The web page has a dynamic explanation based on sophistication of the reader.

The physics problem was cast as a question exploring consistent mathematical algebras, symmetries and relations.

AI was used to search a large space of possible solutions under physical constraints. AI results are cross-checked using several different methods. All AI notebooks and results are published for others to check independently.

mikhailfranco··on From Chirality to the Standard Model
The actual paper is here:

https://emad-ii.github.io/chirality-standard-model/paper.pdf

mikhailfranco··on After Math
The blog post was not written by Terry Tao :)
mikhailfranco··on The World Is Going Grayscale
Similar argument expanded to all product design:

Why Nothing Looks Cool Anymore | Design Theory

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgjXjPP_p3s

mikhailfranco··on The weekend is 100 years old
Saudi Arabia changed the weekend from Thursday-Friday to Friday-Saturday about 10 years ago. The existing week only had 3 days' overlap with western businesses, and the smaller Gulf states had already changed.

The weekend discussion had been percolating quietly inside the Shura Council (royal advisors) for several years, but when the King decided, it was only announced with about 10 days advance notice!

Now UAE has now moved to Saturday-Sunday weekend, but practically it is 2.5 days, starting at noon prayers on Friday.

mikhailfranco··on Lake Mead hits historic low water level as Colorado River struggles
Lake Mead (1,040ft) is 5ft above 70% power impairment (1,035ft).

But if you look at the last 2 years, this date is typically the minimum for the year. So it seems unlikely to hit zombie power pool this year.

https://mead.uslakes.info/Level/

Now we have a Super El Nino starting, which should bring higher than usual rainfall to the Colorado Basin in the fall and winter. So, in principle, next year might not be as bad as this year, and power pool limits are postponed for 2 or more years out.

mikhailfranco··on Ask HN: Is Ask HN Shrinking?
Multi-year web traffic statistics for HN?
mikhailfranco··on Why etymologies matter: How tracing words can illuminate history (2024)
English people learning Chinese are told that goodbye is zài jiàn ('again see'), only to find that most Chinese informally say bái bái ('bye-bye').
mikhailfranco··on Working from home? That will be extra. Renters rage over new fee
I think the basis of this is the same as WFH, which has not been mentioned in the article or the comments: insurance, mostly on probabilities of fire and injury.
mikhailfranco··on Europe's fires are just the start
Their infamous editorial Drowning in oil (4 March 1999) bottom-ticked the oil price.
mikhailfranco··on Europe's fires are just the start
Counter argument from Matt Ridley:

Why the flames of Britain's wildfires have been fanned by the Green agenda as much as the weather

https://www.dailymail.com/debate/article-16017973/Britains-w...

mikhailfranco··on Aschenbrenner's hedge fund forced to unwind all public stock positions
Good inside analysis from Martin Shkreli:

Martin Shkreli Breaks Down the Collapse of Situational Awareness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJdgh9eEZvw

mikhailfranco··on How real are real numbers? (2004)
Also Nicolas Gisin on Curt's podcast:

Nicolas Gisin: Time, Superdeterminism, & Quantum Gravity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcHzgy0I6gk

mikhailfranco··on How real are real numbers? (2004)
We should also mention Nicolas Gisin.

One of his mantras is Time is real; Real numbers are not. He conceives of real numbers resulting from processes (approximations, relaxations, computable calculations) that unfold over time. So there is a Heisenbergish uncertainty principle of observable precision and elapsed time.

Selected papers:

Indeterminism in Physics, Classical Chaos and Bohmian Mechanics. Are Real Numbers Really Real?

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.06824

Real Numbers are the Hidden Variables of Classical Mechanics

https://philarchive.org/rec/GISRNA

Time Really Passes, Science Can’t Deny That

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.01497v1

Popular articles:

Real numbers don’t cut it in the real world, this physicist argues

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/real-numbers-physics-fre...

mikhailfranco··on How real are real numbers? (2004)
All integers are happy; each real is unhappy in its own way.
mikhailfranco··on Would you choose £50k over the chance of £1M?
Lotteries are pay-to-play and always have a negative expected return (like the fairground). Participation (like second marriages), is always the triumph of hope over experience and rationality. People are just willingly paying a tax to have a hopeful thought, or in the fairground, to have a fun experience (allegedly).

National lotteries are generally trustworthy, but the mechanism for you to get a real ticket might not be (street hawkers, fake web sites).

mikhailfranco··on Would you choose £50k over the chance of £1M?
The problem is believing the fairness of the toss.

The odds with a fair toss are obviously stacked to prefer taking the gamble, hence inducing all credulous rationalists to take the bet.

It is rare for anyone to give away £50k, and even rarer to give away £1m. There is no realistic scenario where such a bet would be offered ... Almost all of us have been to the fairground (yes, the analysis is very different when you have to pay to play).

Most people instinctively reason that the actual probability of a win is close to 0: exactly zero in a one shot game, but perhaps some epsilon in a repeated trial in the fairground, so as to advertise a verified previous winner.

[I am willing to bet that fairground stalls give a giant cuddly toy to an employee to walk around the ground, or perhaps throw a game to an employee in front of a crowd of onlookers, to suggest that there is an epsilon of hope, even when there is none in reality].

Everyone's prior instincts should be conditioned to take the smaller 'sure' reward, since that requires strictly fewer trustworthy steps to success (one payout, compared to both a non-zero toss and a payout).

The irony is that in a thought experiment, no game is actually played, so the expected return is always what the wise fair-goer assumed - precisely zero.

mikhailfranco··on So you want to learn physics (second edition, 2021)
How many are available on Safari? ($43/month)
mikhailfranco··on Pi squared is nearly 10
and the Earth's orbital diameter is 10^3 light seconds

so the Earth's orbital velocity is 10^-4 c

mikhailfranco··on Have you restarted your computer this week?
Windows 11 seems to feign forgetting your PIN password to force a restart.
mikhailfranco··on YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos
A long-form critique of Suno by a musician/producer:

Suno, AI Music, and the Bad Future | Adam Neely

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8dcFhF0Dlk

A detailed philosophical discussion of his point=of-view:

AI Music is Not Music - Adam Neely | Alex O'Connor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sbv0iX_EyLM

mikhailfranco··on New York passes pied-a-terre tax
Consumption taxes and sin taxes.

Consumption tax is sales/VAT tax excluding some necessities and capital goods. Yes, there are some awkward edge cases: in the UK the exclusions were food and children's clothes, which leads to battles over prepared cold food (e.g. sandwich), takeaway and restaurant dining.

Sin taxes are obviously things society might want to discourage, mainly for health reasons, like alcohol and smoking, but also gambling and externalities, like pollution. Some might stretch that to all carbon emissions to moderate climate change.

Don't tax things you want: working / income and investment / capital gains.

Inheritance tax is doubly wrong because the wealth is already taxed, and death is unavoidable (but emigration is possible, which might help in some countries).

mikhailfranco··on The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)
Also The Shock of the New with Robert Hughes.
mikhailfranco··on Astronomers Find a Third Galaxy Missing Its Dark Matter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_galaxy
mikhailfranco··on Tony Hoare has died
Obituary at The Telegraph:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2026/03/23/sir-tony-h...

mikhailfranco··on CERN accepts $1B in private cash towards Future Circular Collider
Typo?

I like the idea of a noun collider. Then we could smash apples and oranges.

mikhailfranco··on Drawings of the elements of CMS detector, in the style of Leonardo da Vinci
Maybe they're original, found buried in some obscure monastery in the mountains of Umbria.

Perhaps Leonardo invented the LHC!

mikhailfranco··on Sir Mark Tully has died
Here is the BBC's own commentary on their much respected Indian correspondent:

Sir Mark Tully, the BBC's 'voice of India', dies aged 90

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4nnp4d064do

mikhailfranco··on Design Thinking Books (2024)
Yes - notice, observe, focus, consider, judge, refine ... repeat ...

- Photography, not to take better photos, but to see the world more continuously and deeply.

- Architecture, not to build anything, but to be more aware of urban context, visual design, practical use and emotional response in the built environment.

- Music, not to read a score or play an instrument, but to really hear the structure of music, appreciate melody, pattern, balance, pace, production, individual virtuosity and harmonious combination.

mikhailfranco··on The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)
It's not too difficult to know or calculate inches in a mile:

    12 * 3 * 1760 = 12 * 5280 = 63,360
A few Americans may know how many cubic inches in a US gallon:

    231 
But I don't believe anyone (apart from rainman/prodigy circus performers) can do this in their head:

    63360^3 / 231 = 1,101,117,147,428.571
Estimate yes; calculate no.
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