“Now we just use this 11 dimensional matrix, which we will just call squiggly q, take the derivative of both sides, multiply by i^nth root of i, and as you can see from the Kristoffel Symbols, the universe is trapezoidal.”
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I love the way you describe things! My little bit of QM in undergrad was also “not quite understand” on the math. I am not sure if I could have ever developed a “feel” for it had I done more math, but I certainly didn’t have the patience then.
Non-commutative Hilbert-space operators…
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An environmental sciences professor who heads up his university’s River Dynamics Lab assured us that we are not going to be swept away in a massive flood.
There was a massive landslide in BC this week that blocked the Chilcotin River. There is already a 10km long lake behind the blockage. There were fears that the blockage would give way suddenly releasing a devastating flood along the Fraser River which ultimately flows to Vancouver.
The professor contends there will not be such a sudden breach of the blockage because of its composition. Instead the water will continue to rise until it flows over the blockage and will erode it more gradually from the top down.
Hope he’s right for the sake of the towns downriver.
More details below.
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The fact that the indigenous people named the area after these events seems comforting.
“In Tsilhqot’in, the area of the dam is called Nagwentled, which translates to “landslides across river.”
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This reminds me a lot of what my brother used to do (he did a Ph. D in theoretical physics).
I used to joke with him that the high-level math they did was mostly scribbles on a blackboard (99.9% of which he never used again).
Stuff like that is important for the high-energy reactions that you see in particle physics, and to a smaller extent plasma physics (and off-shoot of this is the development of nuclear fusion).
Its a bit of a sunk cost if you do not go into serious research or life-long academia.
There is a lovely 1940 essay called “A Mathematician’s Apology”, that defends pure mathematics as a high form of art, written by a great but declining mathematician, gh hardy, who knew he had lost the creative spark.
Somewhat laughably, he picked number theory and relativity for his examples for uselessly pure branches of math.
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Yes.
The water has started going over the blockage and a channel has been created. Main damage will be from the debris it carries downstream.
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Wtf? Generic yellow food dye makes skin transparent to red light? How did we miss that? And how is it “untested” on humans? Why aren’t there already 8 million tiktoks and youtubes?
Is it like one one billionth transparent or something?
My wife’s response was “BS. You eat enough Doritos and yet I can still see you.” 
From the article:
The procedure has not yet been tested on humans and researchers will need to show it is safe to use, particularly if the dye is injected beneath the skin.
If it could be used to help nurses, phlebotomists and others put in IV’s, my wife would be so grateful. She has never, ever gotten an IV or other injectable or blood draw on a single poke. When she had to have the contrast die for xrays when she had a kidney stone I think she was poked over 16 times by 4 or 5 people before they finally got it in.
When she went in for our last child’s birth, she was going to have an epidural and I told them we would wait for the anesthesiologist. The 2 nurses were sure they could do it. They were very insistent and we finally gave in to them but I told them they only got one try. If they weren’t able to get it in, we would wait for the Dr. They tried and failed. The Dr. was a little surprised they didn’t already have the IV in when he arrived. I explained and he was totally understanding. First try for him he managed to get it in but then blew out the vein because the tube was too big. He went with a smaller one and got it right in. Good thing she has been so healthy and not needed much of that. I have to get my blood drawn regularly and rarely if ever have to have a 2nd poke.
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Weaselette is the same way. It’s heartbreaking sitting there with her while she (rarely) gets blood drawn. Usually takes them several tries.
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I just saw infrared vein viewers on teh interwebz!!
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I’ve seen those as well. Wish they were more available. But one of those things where the enhancement is only really beneficial for a small portion of the population so unless it gets real cheap on its own, they don’t spend the money.
Of course, when it does get more generally available then that particular skill drops off quite a bit.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year. The 2024 Ig Nobel prizes have been awarded:
Physiology: (Multiple people) or discovering that many mammals are capable of breathing through their anus.
Probability: František Bartoš, Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, Alexandra Sarafoglou, Henrik Godmann, and many colleagues, for showing, both in theory and by 350,757 experiments, that when you flip a coin, it tends to land on the same side as it started.
Peace: B.F. Skinner, for experiments to see the feasibility of housing live pigeons inside missiles to guide the flight paths of the missiles.
Botany: Jacob White and Felipe Yamashita, for finding evidence that some real plants imitate the shapes of neighboring artificial plastic plants.
Anatomy: (Multiple people) for studying whether the hair on the heads of most people in the northern hemisphere swirls in the same direction (clockwise or counter-clockwise?) as hair on the heads of most people in the southern hemisphere.
Medicine: Lieven A. Schenk, Tahmine Fadai, and Christian Büchel, for demonstrating that fake medicine that causes painful side-effects can be more effective than fake medicine that does not cause painful side-effects.
Physics: James C. Liao, for demonstrating and explaining the swimming abilities of a dead trout.
Chemistry: Tess Heeremans, Antoine Deblais, Daniel Bonn, and Sander Woutersen, for using chromatography to separate drunk and sober worms.
Demography: Saul Justin Newman, for detective work to discover that many of the people famous for having the longest lives lived in places that had lousy birth-and-death recordkeeping.
Biology: Fordyce Ely and William E. Petersen, for exploding a paper bag next to a cat that’s standing on the back of a cow, to explore how and when cows spew their milk.
CNN has a story:
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I think the coin result is pretty cool, and possibly useful over a lifetime.
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Some football game a coupke years ago aaron rodgers called heads and the ref screwed something up so went to reflip hut held rodgers to the heads call. Rodgers wanted to change it based on something that had changed - perhaps it was this
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We have a new world’s largest prime number: 2^136,279,841-1
It has over 41 million digits
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