Simon Burton

It must be so frustrating to have billions of dollars and still be a miserable a**hole.

The principle of "two big ideas": one contains the other, or else they are not big ideas.

If people are going to continue to put the introduction to their paper in the abstract, then i'm going to put my paper's abstract in the title.

Any sufficiently complicated physics paper contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of an idea from algebraic geometry.

Today's OEIS fishing expedition. The only question is how much RAM am i going to need to find the next number... Love these OEIS cliff-hangers! ARGGH

It's *a* graphic framework. I've been using 3d string diagrams for this stuff... Here is a laxator for a monoidal functor, which is the blue string. The monoidal product is the sheet layers... etc etc

it's mostly excel spreadsheets..

Still trying to figure that out, will get back to you.

If by "the completely standard way" you mean, as taught in undergraduate quantum mechanics, then yes. I can't remember the last time i saw the Born rule actually used in the wild. It tends to be only in discussions like this about the foundations of quantum.

Behold! A one-qubit quantum computer:

i don't know if it's really a "need", but here is one way to get probabilities: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_rule

I think it's just as valid saying you get zero-worlds when you don't add anything to the Schrödinger equation. I happen to prefer this interpretation (the zero-worlds one) on my more transcendent days.

from: canyon23.net/math/tc.pdf

no don't kill it. Yes we need it.

Directors cut!

This is a total shame that it comes down to who you believe in. Fundamental physics should be much more participatory than this.

Wowee, this new collection threads the needle nicely between philosophy and physics. Authors actually explaining their ideas instead of just academicsplaining. link.springer.com/collections/...

YouTube video by ponysmasher Great Filmmaking: The Servant (1963)

Made a video about a good movie I watched the other day:

What is entanglement? Itamar Pittowsky claimed that these results brought us right to the precipice of logical contradiction--but not over. Abner Shimoney described it as a piece of "experimental metaphysics." I'm a nobody, but I think entanglement is the most interesting thing ever discovered.

🧵⚛️

James Dolan has a knack for describing higher mathematics using vivid language... not much of this has made it into written form, but there are a lot of old posts of his on google groups

love these OEIS flamewars.. might have to wait a few more years to see if there's any followup.

I'm suddenly feeling much better about wearing a dishrag on my head (see profile pic).

new book alert... oh, these pictures look like fun

There's a sharp distinction between amateur and professional crackpots.

TIL: the geometric Langlands program is where love and perversion are united

yes! if you scroll down here www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/wor... you can see a talk Vaughan Jones gave about this stuff, it's a great talk with a super reveal at the end

It's full of gritty hard-core group theory and representation theory, but he religiously follows every bit of theory with an illustrative example. Awesome.

My favourite book on group theory just arrived in the mail! I had it shipped over from the US secondhand using biblio.

Do you mean like how codetables.de has detailed instructions for every code? So far I try to put a hint into the "family" attribute. But there's also a lot of codes that have a "cyclic=True" attribute. It's a bit chaotic, i admit...

I love conference submission deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.