"A Boltzmann brain is a hypothetical self-aware mind that arises by random thermal fluctuations in a chaotic universe, rather than through biological evolution."
Here's an interesting article (by David Wolpert, @rovelli.bsky.social and Jordan Scharnhorst)
www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/27...
Oppure:
Il ristorante ‘il Caso’ è stato chiuso a lungo.
Ora ha riaperto, ma è semivuoto.
Infatti tutti i sospetti colpevoli che passano davanti dicono ‘io non c’entro!’.
1969 – 2026 (and still actual)
…𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑓𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑎𝑙𝑙
𝑚𝑎𝑛𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑑, 𝐼 𝑠𝑒𝑒
𝐼𝑠 𝑖𝑛
𝑡ℎ𝑒 ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝒇𝒐𝒐𝒍𝒔…
…𝐶𝑜𝑛𝑓𝑢𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑤𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑏𝑒 𝑚𝑦 𝑒𝑝𝑖𝑡𝑎𝑝ℎ…
[King Crimson – Epitaph] (sung by the unforgettable Greg Lake)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXrp...
Ti insegneranno a non splendere. E tu splendi, invece.
Ma possibilmente senza accendermi gli abbaglianti in faccia.
Ma come ti vengono in mente queste "freddure"? 😉
06.01.2026 12:33 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
New Year’s resolution for 2026: make a new, detailed to-do list (since I have many leftovers from 2025).
Naturally, the first item on the list is: make a to-do list.
But I can’t proceed without completing the first step.
So I’ll spend 2026 doing absolutely nothing but dreaming about the list.
Just discovered Cristóbal Vila (@cristobalvila.bsky.social), an amazing 3D digital artist whose work blends geometry, design, and visual craft.
Explore more of his animations here: etereaestudios.com/works/ — well worth a look (and no ads or pop-ups!).
Nice... I'll cheat a bit with AI...
24.12.2025 10:56 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
What are the minimum and maximum areas of an equilateral triangle inscribed in a unit square?
(possibly use only simple algebra and geometry, no trigonometry, no calculus).
The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is at its minimum distance from earth.
Could be worth seeing it live on 20 Dec. 2025, starting at 04:00 UTC.
It won't come back again!
www.virtualtelescope.eu/webtv/
Robby the robot is a wonderful model to understand Genetic Algorithms, evolution, AI, information, memory, ... life (😳).
It made me think in a new different way since I discovered it in
@seanmcarroll.bsky.social "The Big Picture" and @melaniemitchell.bsky.social "Complexity".
youtu.be/V1isB2lJr7I
Peter Aidu playing Steve Reich's "Piano Phase"
This un-syncing through the “phasing-out” technique was later pushed to its limits by modern composers such as Steve Reich (Piano Phase).
Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKXy...
In Beethoven’s Sonata 13 (2nd movement, Scherzo), the un-syncing begins around 1:11, in the 2nd repetition of the 3rd section, when the right-hand line unexpectedly shifts forward by an ⅛ note. The idea is already ingeniously foreshadowed in the trio’s syncopation at 0:37.
08.12.2025 08:46 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 2 📌 0
In “Sync”, Steven Strogatz shows how systems evolve from randomness to synchrony.
In music, some composers went the other way: from sync to un-sync.
A phasing-like idea, long before minimalism, already present in Beethoven’s Sonatas.
Maybe art’s tendency to defy form.
What are multi-agent systems with reinforcement learning, and why does "diversity" help them develop "collective intelligence"?
This Cambridge PhD thesis by M.Bettini offers a clear and insightful overview.
(Open access - download from):
repository.cam.ac.uk/items/7d168345
Teaching electric current.
In the Drude model, electrons move like little balls, bouncing off ions at random.
With an applied electric field they drift, on average, and create a current.
Soundtrack: Pinball Wizard (The Who).
youtu.be/hHc7bR6y06M?...
Aristotele all'anagrafe comunale. L'impiegato non capisce...
Si narra che un giorno Aristotele andò all’anagrafe 🏛️ per un certificato.
Imp.: Nome?
A.: Ἀριστοτέλης (Aristotele)
Imp.: Luogo di nascita?
A.: Stagira
Imp.: Anno?
A.: 384 a.C.
Imp.: Avanti… COSA??? 🤯
“L’io, io!… il più lurido di tutti i pronomi!… I pronomi! Sono i pidocchi del pensiero. Quando il pensiero ha i pidocchi, si gratta come tutti quelli che hanno i pidocchi… e nelle unghie, allora… ci ritrova i pronomi: i pronomi di persona.”
[Carlo Emilio Gadda] (h/t #SergioSchneider)
Una vista dell'arcipelago St. Kilda. (fonte: Google maps + AI).
In un capitolo del suo "A spasso con il cane Luna" (lettura consigliatissima) @gVallortigara ci racconta dell'arcipelago St. Kilda "un luogo ai confini del mondo".
Come ha scritto Borges ("le rovine circolari" ) "Quel cerchio è un tempio che gli antichi incendi divorarono..."
Isn't it "surprising"? (another graphical solution to Kepler's equation)...
... So, planets moves as they do as if they were swung by a gigantic cosmic wave 😳...?!
Credits: Newton's Principia,
Marc Frantz: Some Graphical Solutions of the Kepler Problem scispace.com/pdf/some-gra...
The Physics of fresh eggs
Credit:
www.instagram.com/waystocooke/ waystocooke (Sydnee Cooke)
www.instagram.com/waystocooke/...
Why does the buttered toast (almost) always land butter-side down?
Is it Murphy’s Law?
Is it the universe making fun of you?
No, it's just the laws physics, babe!
Robert Matthews (winner of the Ig Nobel Prize for physics in 1996) took the problem seriously...
youtu.be/zwIfBSbNQCs?...
«È sparito anche il vuoto» è una splendida (ma poco nota) poesia di #EugenioMontale. È stata usata come epigrafe dal fisico #GuidoTonelli in “L’eleganza del vuoto”. Dagli antichi filosofi, alla teoria quantistica dei campi.
Lettura di @assenteistamancato 🔊
youtu.be/fyYYVW9yjGI
Abbado died from cancer on January 2014 at the age of 80, around 3½ years after conducting Mahler’s 9th in Lucerne.
Mahler himself died 1911 about a year after completing that same Symphony.
Both seemed to sense death approaching—and sought to prepare for it.
In August 2010, Claudio Abbado conducted Mahler’s 9th in Lucerne. After the final note, the audience held its breath: 2'24" of a haunting and spooky silence—perhaps the longest ever after a live concert. Listen from 5:20 to 7:44 and enjoy the silence!😳
youtu.be/81AFdWXLNCU?...
TIL: Dysmorphophobia.
How ugly do you think you are?
(Tip: avoid mirrors or selfies for the next few days...)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_dy...
The two blue and the red particles have opposite charges. Starting from the vertices of an equilateral triangle they move under Coulomb forces: blue-blue repulsion, red-blue attraction…
The resulting motion is beautifully unpredictable.
More on youtu.be/nqAcMm2o-kk
New paper: "Large Language Models and Emergence: A Complex Systems Perspective" (D. Krakauer, J. Krakauer, M. Mitchell).
We look at claims of "emergent capabilities" & "emergent intelligence" in LLMs from the perspective of what emergence means in complexity science.
arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11135
UNA VITA ESEMPLARE
Non fumava, non beveva... morì-gerato
#μstorie #unafraseunrigoappena #GianfrancoUber #sfera314
Two apparently bored little putti in a painting by Raffaello (Sistine Madonna)
Today I noticed two new students sitting at the back of the classroom.
They didn’t seem very much captivated by my linear algebra lesson… (but… who knows?)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sistine...
#raffaello #boredlittleangels
