Hacker News Reader

Yeah, see this thread --- I assume these guys haven't heard of the other meaning neither

https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2013/06/torsors_and_enr...

Consider in particular that use of ‘distance’

>I think you can look at adjoint profunctors from the unit category and show that they consist of giving a consistent ‘distance’ to every object, which in a torsor will be represented.

vi_sextus_vion Introducing Boron Buckyballs: Theory that B80 cages can’t be made is disproved

Typo. No "al-" prefix

vi_sextus_vion Boron Buckyballs: B80 cages in the lab

This is conventional DFT which is O(N^3)

Original paper, not a single equation:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240129185108/https://www.owlne...

The N^3 is further reduced by high symmetry. Because structure relaxations are usually convergent, the 2007 DFT and MD calculations can be run on a regular laptop today, maybe even without a GPU!

The discrepancy has been exaggerated by the experimentalist, TFA quotes the original theorist. This is not the first time, and probably not the last time, that c&en has oversold an experimental result.

vi_sextus_vion Introducing Boron Buckyballs: Theory that B80 cages can’t be made is disproved

Some have noticed. My top example. "solidstate protein synthesis". Interest should asymptotically approach that in orgo since boron makes any cooking more fun,just like butter (garam bleng for the vegans, sorry)

https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/SG/en/technical-documents/techn...

Remarkably pleasant to work with, unlike the class of compounds which include

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

And

Merlin's TEA-TEB

Easter egg:

At least one town https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boron,_California

(Carbon has too many)

vi_sextus_vion Introducing Boron Buckyballs: Theory that B80 cages can’t be made is disproved

this boronic thing (negative ion, really) they _might have seen_ has 241 (valence) electrons..

You'd expect a nice 240 given the symmetry, not a prime number

Or maybe a less baity reason is those hints of B_80^- have captured H+ "nuclei", turning into almolecular atoms!

Not oxyboronic at all

vi_sextus_vion Introducing Boron Buckyballs: Theory that B80 cages can’t be made is disproved

>[theorists disagree] that the discrepancy is as significant as it appears.

It was predicted by decade old "theory" (with a single equation,and it seems that the original paper has no equations at all)

so OAI/DeepMind can quietly check if it's in the training or if they can extrapolate, yes

https://arxiv.org/abs/0803.2752

https://cen.acs.org/articles/85/i18/Boron-buckyball-predicte...

vi_sextus_vion Introducing Boron Buckyballs: Theory that B80 cages can’t be made is disproved

Not all.

It is only exciting for these theorists who predicted it. They can now hardly wait for a proper synthesis?

https://cen.acs.org/articles/85/i18/Boron-buckyball-predicte...

vi_sextus_vion Leap in DNA synthesis slashes time to build new genetic sequences

Nobel for Seeman and Guo!

vi_sextus_vion Dispatches from the possibly last days of human relevance

This crystallised a take.

Unsolved Erdosh problems were touted as a cheap way to generate new perspectives. outcome has been slightly disappointing. overlooked frameworks were all that has been needed so far. not new ones. Could change as LLMs are pointed at other kinds of inexplicables

vi_sextus_vion A 1955 Los Alamos computer experiment changed our understanding of chaos

Flowchart

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Reproduction-of-the-algo...

Reproduction of the algorithm used by Mary Tsingou to code the first numerical experiment. Note the date (5-20- 55) at the top right of the figure.

https://www.lanl.gov/media/publications/national-security-sc...

vi_sextus_vion I found ultra-pure quantum crystals in an abandoned mine in the Atacama desert

The animation is a good intro but takes many liberties.

It is more accurate to think of the spins as always interacting with one another.. at 0K temperature only singlets are allowed, increasing the temperature by just a bit, both singlets and triplets coexist, etc. even that is just a picture.

To start with an everyday analogy. if you know you have 51cents in your piggy bank, but not what the precise breakdown is. Then you must have at least one penny. But you don't know exactly how many pennies you have unless you take a look.

Unlike pennies though, the singlets and triplets cannot be distinguished from one another. One can only measure how many "excess" triplets there are, one cannot point to where these triplets are hiding. The measurement doesn't "cause" a collapse, after the measurement, you know there is some spin imbalance but it is still in some superposition

Anyways.. to fully get what I am going with this, you will have to play with the math on your own. I have, but it's hard to translate all that to English. I'm just trying to point out that the interesting part is not in "collapse" but rather the "failure to collapse"--- the failure to take the system out of superpositions. Because the spins are always interacting.

Or maybe I just don't understand enough to explain it like Feynman.. heh.. but if you turn some of what Feynman has said in plain English into math, you would see that some of his stuff is also.. misleading

IBM must have some sims you can run on your PC, ask ChatGPT to solve and draw a small "Heisenberg model" that imports their libs. If you can take Taiwanese:

https://youtu.be/hHbUytvNLeE

vi_sextus_vion I found ultra-pure quantum crystals in an abandoned mine in the Atacama desert

>As of at least 2023, there is no academic consensus on the effect of resource abundance on economic development[4]

Interesting. Do Japanese, and now Dutch, planners think they are free of the resource blessing?

[4] Alssadek, Marwan; Benhin, James (2023). "Natural resource curse: A literature survey and comparative assessment of regional groupings of oil-rich countries".

>For instance, the oil sector frequently requires technical solutions to improve offshore oil drilling. This might create positive knowledge externalities to support other sectors. If these sectors trade with the oil boom sector in the economy, then learning-by-doing spill-overs in the overall economy are expected. In this scenario, the implications of the Dutch disease would not be evident, and natural resources may in fact be a blessing rather than a curse.

vi_sextus_vion I found ultra-pure quantum crystals in an abandoned mine in the Atacama desert

I am the submitter and I am sorry for leaving out, indeed, dismissing the core contribution of the Chilean anthropologists and geologists. The author wouldn't have approved of my editorialising.

I am only slightly relieved that HN have bubbled up a conversation about the self-reinforcing north-south divide in "cultural wealth" instead of making it even more exploitative than it was

Your friend's contribution to the cultural wealth of Chile is ironic. Maybe (some) Southies now have a better (non-fungible/modular) understanding of precision machining, gun-metallurgy or even biochemistry compared to their NorAm counterparts because of his actions.

vi_sextus_vion I found ultra-pure quantum crystals in an abandoned mine in the Atacama desert

At a quick glance, I did not see the term "collapsed" in wiki. It isn't a collapse. (The concept is still relevant[0]!)

What was drawn like a "defined spin" for pedagogy should only have been coloured different. The lone spins are always part of a longer-range quantum superposition, maybe better represented as blue blobs. The lowest "excitations" are (superpositions of) triplets, for example.

Btw I put quotes around excitations because you touched on a mysterious aspect of these systems called the "spin gap". TFA mentions it. They don't even know whether this spin gap exists! Indeed, the term "liquid" means there might not be a spin gap. (It'd be best to colour the singlet blobs orange-red and the triplet blobs red-orange)

[0] In your parlance, a "collapse" literally means dropping to a macroscopic ground state across a gap, but a liquid is already "arbitrarily" close to the ground state. "Collapsing into defined spins" will take the system _out_ of the ground state, so it can't happen spontaneously... Or so it's believed..

vi_sextus_vion Illusions of understanding in the sciences

Sorry was in a bit of brain fog

https://youtu.be/_Zxr9STGwbQ?t=3m39s

There's an upcoming book, mentioned in the blurb

vi_sextus_vion Illusions of understanding in the sciences

Exactly. The lede buried here is, as you say,

  accurate prediction is not better understanding

Which has a statistician counterintuition

  Less "accurate" model can lead to better prediction

Therefore (in my understanding)

  A better understanding encodes more info about how much more it can be improved, when compared to a less good understanding

Maybe understanding should be related to wisdom rather than intelligence? Like Socrates. AGW?

Explained by this wonderful series

vi_sextus_vion A molecule with half-Möbius topology

A (nontrivial) 4D STM is all they need. AIUI no new synthesis. But.. that's "just" rendering software "just" like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4D_scanning_transmission_elect...

(Not in the sense that "time" is involved but in the sense that what distinguishes 3D from 4D is almost only software . The same way you can see 4D "all at once" on your 2D screen,but 4tuples coords!= code)

But then again IBM have claimed quantum software=quantum hardware (see above).. they might or might not understand what is or is not needed?

vi_sextus_vion A molecule with half-Möbius topology

https://research.ibm.com/blog/half-mobius-molecule

describes the quantum-software-hardware co-design concept IBM is selling with that paper

It took my pea brain a while.. is this a joke or meant to teach something.. & I still don't get it.

Is the punch line "this is the first paper to name the concept Hueckel-orbitals", even planting their flag on Wikipedia to piss on a dead man?

That's a deep dismissal of Leo Gross

On the other hand, from these guys. I first learnt about Dyson orbitals, which are exactly the long-ranged blobs seen under the scanning tunneljng microscope! That was obvious in retrospect (for someone who has familiarity), so luckily all of us didn't get an urge to name the atom-sized unentangled NPC blobs you sometimes dont see in the STM after some grad student.

I am glad trivial--- for the sense of trivial that Leo Gross might think is different--- orbitals are named after nobody at all. and aptly has not one Wikipedia mention.

Punchline: https://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/Not-Gross_Orbital

vi_sextus_vion The Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)

Also.. submitted 31 Mar 2017 17:14:39 UTC

vi_sextus_vion Bear spray is exploding in the trash near Yellowstone National Park

Related: don't heat (fresh) peppers in your microwave.

(EDITED: thanks!)

More societal awareness of rare-in-nature combos of capsaicin, pressure,heat, please!

vi_sextus_vion What can singing mice say about human speech?

Duet: https://youtu.be/d8o75smN6w8?t=1m18s

From the same guy, Arkarup Banerjee, postdoc to tenured

vi_sextus_vion The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis

Venetian Republic wasn't big on lead piping. not what you'd expect for an Italian entity..

vi_sextus_vion New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome

"Nasty, British, and Small," screams the Hanging Yards of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_(TV_series)

vi_sextus_vion New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome

Pedantry:

Tolkien's "Middle-Earth" is itself a "folksy mistranslation"

Closer translation-- "Middle-Yard"

Old English word eardgeard =Earth-Yard

/ ˈæ͜ɑrdˌjæ͜ɑrd / "ardyard" /

https://www.theundergroundmap.com/article.html?id=104937

https://english.nsms.ox.ac.uk/oecoursepack/wanderer/notes/no...

vi_sextus_vion Maladaptive Frugality

(EDITED)

Otoh, have a few friends in tech (and high finance) who need to be told "dude, we'd be better off if you worked less hard"

(Sorry.. I grew up deprived of data teaching me that "Schlep quickly compounds into Interesting Times")

vi_sextus_vion Withnail's Coat and I

Pictures are 1953 and WWI Scots Guards frocks

https://bid.candtauctions.co.uk/lot-details/index/catalog/11...

https://www.greatwarforum.org/topic/91425-scots-guards-unifo...

that "Scottish romanticism" all but evaporated by the turn of the century, so the "typo"?

Actual 1800s SG uniform

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/uniformi-militari--84443180375...

For comparison, the "timeless" Grenadier Guards frock

https://thelanesarmoury.co.uk/shop.php?code=21282

Bonus: Caspar David Friedrich (another appropriation :)

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/152982/an-intro...

vi_sextus_vion Nonlinearity Affects a Pendulum

My bad.

I should have encouraged more curiosity by pointing out that these functions actually have additive as well as multiplicative identities

https://msp.org/pjm/1955/5-2/pjm-v5-n2-p02-p.pdf

(Might even be relevant to the pendulum, see the comment below on the Arithmetic-Geometric Mean ;)

vi_sextus_vion Nonlinearity Affects a Pendulum

Hmmm I thought the closed form solutions are Jacobi elliptics?

https://cococubed.com/code_pages/pendulum.shtml

vi_sextus_vion North American Millets Alliance

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

For Japanese, ancient china concept = vaguely healthy

Moreso if it meshes well with the quasi-scientific fad of "whole foods"

There's still stuff made (semi-)exclusively from millet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibi_dango_(millet_dumpling)

vi_sextus_vion Physicists revive 1990s laser concept to propose a next-generation atomic clock

Most intriguing:

The permutation symmetry of the atoms gives the col- lective parts of the master equation an SU(3) group structure, and this allows the default exponential scaling of the Liouville state space, 32^N , to be reduced to a polynomial scaling, N^4 [51].