Syzygies

56 ms·

541.
by Syzygies 6y ago
Akiva Goldsman's instruction to me was to have Nash make gradual progress on the Riemann hypothesis, after he emerged from hospitalization. This isn't historically correct, but the film is a fictionalized account. That's chal
542.
by Syzygies 6y ago
I've probably lived there six months, in pieces. I love the islands off Sicily.
543.
by Syzygies 6y ago
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/03/11/a-beautiful-ha...
544.
by Syzygies 6y ago
Yes. I was Russell Crowe's hand double. If it wasn't his head showing it was me. He got the idea of acrylic nails to make his (our) hands longer like Nash. I'd be out in the village drinking with friends, and they'd poin
545.
by Syzygies 6y ago
Given a free choice, I chose the heavier argon. I'd seen it in use in an SF wine store where one could try fifty wines. (An obsessive friend showed me this store. I have better follow-through.) It is said that CO2 can carbonate your wi
546.
by Syzygies 6y ago
Thank you? The place I pontificate the most, where I understand my audience, is the Komodo Kamado forum (the best ceramic BBQ made, by Art Linkletter's grandson who I've come to know): https://komodokamadoforum.com&#x2F
547.
by Syzygies 6y ago
My receipt from 2017 says I also bought a RAD64003037 Regulator Flow Gauge with 10' hose. $120. It's easy though. Tell them what you're doing, and take their advice. I cut the 10' hose in half, and promptly lost one of t
548.
by Syzygies 6y ago
Go to Airgas and buy a 40# argon tank meant for welding. Thirty seconds will displace the air in a nearly empty wine bottle threefold. The tank will last years. One stops worrying about bottle boundaries. One buys magnums. ("A difficul
549.
by Syzygies 6y ago
I liked the first exercise, then I had to use the mouse to dismiss my success dialog! I thought the whole point of vim was ... (That's up there with Haskell package management depending on "global variables" in a fixed settin
550.
by Syzygies 6y ago
This "Fatality Rate" compares successful summits and returns to those who die trying. Worded this way, it's a tricky number to pin down. You could be with a group that never planned to choose you as part of the smaller summit
551.
by Syzygies 6y ago
I met Charles Houston, leader of the first two American expeditions on K2. He approached me to have me explain the mathematics of card shuffling, and I traded an hour listening to him explain the medicine of altitude sickness (which helped
552.
by Syzygies 6y ago
Huh. I always thought it was "rain like a cow pissing on a flat rock."
553.
by Syzygies 6y ago
Long ago I mail-ordered a few boxes of exotic bananas from Seaside Banana Gardens. A mudslide took them out of business. Apparently, they're back on a smaller scale. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-07-
554.
by Syzygies 6y ago
Agreed. I used to loathe the experience of trying to Google an Amazon alternative, and the first fifty links would be Amazon affiliates. I'd pay Google a subscription to simply block all affiliate links. I'd call these changes in
555.
by Syzygies 6y ago
> “Bayer dithering” uses a Bayer matrix as the threshold map. They are named after Bryce Bayer, inventor of the Bayer filter, which is in use to this day in digital cameras. My Dad! I can hear him talking about this...
556.
by Syzygies 6y ago
I know pretty much everyone else who has worked as a math consultant on a Hollywood movie. I worked more hours than everyone else combined. Fine with me, you couldn't tear me away. Ron Howard hired Apollo 15 astronaut Dave Scott to con
557.
by Syzygies 6y ago
As math consultant to "A Beautiful Mind", I started when perhaps a dozen people were working pre-production. I enjoyed how the catering improved as the production grew. I also learned to take in the best spirit being the butt of j
558.
by Syzygies 6y ago
For anyone interested in neural nets Backgammon makes a fascinating example. Essentially, AI computes the value of each position. Like a dome roof, the entire height could be off by a fraction of a percent, but all that matters is the rela
559.
by Syzygies 6y ago
"Fonts" appears frequently in this piece, without noting that the design actually changes at different scales. This is more than hinting. When I walk into a hardware store planning to appropriate some part for a different purpose
560.
by Syzygies 6y ago
So an entire blog post on a game he hasn't tried yet? That's in the spirit of cooking blog posts where the author has cooked the dish once. I'm reminded of most proposals to defang Lisp of its parentheses.
561.
by Syzygies 6y ago
When I was a young child my father took me to work (Kodak research labs, where he devised the Bayer filter for digital cameras) one evening in the 1960's for a family night. I played Spacewar! on the original hardware.
562.
by Syzygies 6y ago
I wrote headlines as my first task on a campus newspaper before most readers here were born. Headline writers are the dishwashers of journalism.
563.
by Syzygies 6y ago
https://mathscinet.ams.org/mathscinet/help/about.html "MathSciNet® is an electronic publication offering access to a carefully maintained and easily searchable database of reviews, abstracts and bibliographic
564.
by Syzygies 6y ago
Bryce Bayer was my father. Hopefully I have a few more decades before I'm "debayered".
565.
by Syzygies 6y ago
XXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXX XX a Soviet upper-stage space vehicle.
566.
by Syzygies 6y ago
A monad walks into a bar...
567.
by Syzygies 6y ago
Exactly what I came to post. This is an important model for numbers. Traditionally one distinguishes between rational, algebraic, and transcendental numbers; e is transcendental. This tree is related to continued fraction expansions. Any nu
568.
by Syzygies 6y ago
The last time I saw John Conway, he was giving a talk on games at a donor dinner for MSRI. I was there because I'd worked a math movie. John needed a volunteer to play against him, one of those stick games on a sheet of paper. He'
569.
by Syzygies 6y ago
Two term rewriting algorithms of central importance in their domains: Gröbner bases for systems of polynomials in many variables, and the Schreier–Sims algorithm for computing with permutations.
570.
by Syzygies 6y ago
Conservation of genius. Nice paper. Two columns. Why? In the 1980's computer science conferences like STOC and FOCS would hand out telephone-book sized proceedings, and it took two columns to squeeze it all in. Not relevant now, but th

More ›