miles7

I use Penrose diagrams all the time for my research and was hoping to see exactly this. I'm thinking of contacting the developers and participating in their survey...

There are way more than five phases of matter...

It is not a completely general problem. In the field I work in (computational physics) we very often reproduce results published by other research groups. It's very common in our field to see plots in a new paper overlaid with data from old papers showing where our results agree (where they disagree is not a reproducability issue but is instead due to our ability to do more accurate calculations).

Here is a paper where some colleagues of mine wrote a benchmark paper explicitly to check various methods against each other (with good agreement): https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.5.041...

Well, for just one example beyond self-driving cars there is now software that does document discovery extremely well, replacing a key job function of lower level lawyers and paralegals.

Here is a study that finds a number around half of all jobs being replaced: http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Futu...

Is is possible that although neural nets can overfit as this paper shows, practitioners just stop training early before this happens? And/or they use a validation set? Would that be enough to explain the good generalization despite the huge number of parameters

My impression is that, far from being proven correct, it's actually falling out of fashion. Some ideas originating in string theory, such as the AdS/CFT correspondence, are having a heyday though.

In addition to Dylan, Julia also allows multiple dispatch via generic functions.

I have found this approach to multiple dispatch leads to code that's much easier to reason about and maintain. My use case is a tensor library where the tensors have a single interface but various storage backend types, which 'interact' with each other. It doesn't make sense to define these interactions through methods belonging to only one class or the other.

Have you heard about recent proposals that spacetime may emerge from quantum information measures? https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150428-how-quantum-pairs-st...

In the article, entanglement is a precise mathematical notion that is like an information based metric measuring the distance of a quantum state tensor (wavefunction) from the manifold of rank 1 tensors.

Some

This assumes Fox is as biased in one direction as, say, NPR is in the other. But you can tell the quality of reporting from the content itself and the way it is presented. For example, while cable news channels will go to the same non-expert pundits for every story, NPR will actually call a different specific expert who is knowledgable to comment on each story.

Why are we holding computers to such higher standards than we hold ourselves? I wouldn't know what to do in the trolley situation either but I can still get a driver's license.

As long as the computer makes a decision where we can say "that was very reasonable, even if better decisions existed" then it seems ok to me.

In the context of physics, topological phases of matter often reveal themselves by causing certain quantities that are usually continuous to change in discrete steps instead. A key example is the electrical conductivity of certain quantum Hall effect systems, which jumps in discrete steps (is "quantized" in physics jargon) as an ever stronger magnetic field is applied to the system in a transverse direction.

The connection to the donut/bagel thing more familiar in topology is that topology also deals with integers: a manifold can have 0,1,2,3... holes in it, that sort of thing.

One key mathematical quantity that comes up in the works of Thouless and Haldane is the Chern number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chern_class

The reason the physics quantities jump is that the Chern numbers of certain electron bands change, and by definition a Chern number is an integer.

If you're asking about why there's an upper limit to the spin, this Quora thread had some good info (Simmons-Duffin is a top notch expert on field theory): https://www.quora.com/Why-are-there-no-spin-3-2-or-higher-fu... Short answer is that for too high a spin the theories become non-renormalizable and break down [i.e. require additional physics to enter] going to ever shorter length scales.

If you're asking why it goes in steps of 1/2 it's a group representation theory thing (guessing you probably already know about that).

Disappointing how many Republicans hold this view and simultaneously claim to be the party of Christianity. How does refusing to support people worse off than you square with this: "from one who takes away your cloak do not withhold your tunic either. Give to everyone who begs from you, and from one who takes away your goods do not demand them back. And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them."