untoxicness | 1 year ago | on: Time is an illusion, and these physicists say they know how it works [video]
untoxicness's comments
untoxicness | 2 years ago | on: LaTeX and Neovim for technical note-taking
> The excellent VimTeX plugin is the reason to use Vim over another LaTeX editor.
I agree that the plugin is best-in-class. Whenever I write LaTeX in Vim without the plugin installed I feel incredibly handicapped. (Also the documentation of the plugin is fantastic.)
untoxicness | 2 years ago | on: Bioluminescent petunias now available for U.S. market
Reminds me of the "lumiroses" from Margaret Atwood's dystopian MaddAddam trilogy. Although the roses are not integral to the books, the general theme of the series is taking bioengineering one step too far.
untoxicness | 3 years ago | on: Multi-Account Containers
What kind of features are not covered by the current implementation of profiles? <https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...>
untoxicness | 3 years ago | on: Reimagining Matrices (2012)
This is correct as long as you restrict your point of view only to sets. Even in pure mathematics one is usually interested in sets with additional structures. For instance, even though one speaks of the "set of real numbers" one usually implies that there is extra structure. In particular one usually requires that this set has operations "addition" and "multiplication" that make this set a ring. Then zero is the neutral element of addition and the annihilator of multiplication, so very special indeed!
untoxicness | 4 years ago | on: How I Experience Web Today
Indeed. We can only hope this is an intentional self-referential joke.
untoxicness | 4 years ago | on: How to compare two PDF documents
#! /bin/bash
pdf_one="$1"
pdf_two="$2"
text_one=$(mktemp)
text_two=$(mktemp)
pdftotext "$pdf_one" "$text_one"
pdftotext "$pdf_two" "$text_two"
diff "$text_one" "$text_two"untoxicness | 4 years ago | on: Thunderbird 91.0
> Ability to change order of accounts in UI
I was always perplexed when I had to change the ordering of my accounts and still had to do it manually by editing the configuration after all these years. A big improvement for sure!
untoxicness | 4 years ago | on: Physicists observationally confirm Hawking’s black hole theorem for first time
While I agree that the article should have mentioned black hole evaporation, I would like to point out that "dA/dt > 0" is commonly referred to as "Hawking's area theorem" as a quick online search can verify and Stephen Hawking certainly did publish on this topic.
untoxicness | 4 years ago | on: Slimeworld: Epstein jailers off the hook after striking deal
There are other forms of coercion than bribery.
untoxicness | 4 years ago | on: Julian Barbour’s ideas about time and the universe have roamed free of academia
You are right, there is no difference.
As a matter of fact, many physicists work with a signature of (+,-,-,-) to describe the spacetime of our universe.
untoxicness | 4 years ago | on: Julian Barbour’s ideas about time and the universe have roamed free of academia
Another book by Greg Egan exploring different metrics of spacetime is Dichronauts.
In Orthogonal the metric signature explored is (+,+,+,+).
In Dicronauts the metric signature explored is (-,-,+,+).
(We live in a universe with metric signature (-,+,+,+).)
untoxicness | 5 years ago | on: Taking on Google
> The website is protected with Google Recaptcha
Which website?
The Plausible register page uses hCaptcha (https://plausible.io/register).
untoxicness | 5 years ago | on: The Revolution in Classic Tetris
> I too stumbled upon Classic Tetris through the Youtube algorithm.
To me this aspect was the most fascinating point about this article. I cannot shake the feeling that the algorithm "decided" for many individuals how to spend large amounts of their time.
untoxicness | 5 years ago | on: The Uncensored Guide to ‘Oumuamua, Aliens, and That Harvard Astronomer
"That Harvard Astronomer" is Avi Loeb.
Loeb was recently a guest on the Lex Fridman podcast where he talked about Oumuamua amongst other things. [0] I found his view on the subject fascinating and his perspective on science refreshing.
untoxicness | 5 years ago | on: Awk: `Begin { ` Part 1
Brian Kernighan talked about his love of awk on the Lex Fridman podcast [0].
untoxicness | 5 years ago | on: Mailchimp outlines right to ban users for “inaccurate” content
This feels different from censorship on Twitter and Facebook to me. I guess the business model of Mailchimp is more transparent and I can appreciate that a company may choose who to do business with.
untoxicness | 5 years ago | on: Manim: Animation engine for explanatory math videos
Grant Sanderson, the creator of Manim, talked about Manim on the Lex Fridman podcast[0]. He emphasized that he is no software engineer and did not plan on making Manim publicly available when he started.
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One idea is that the metric (geometry, gravity) could be a field just as matter is a field and people tried to apply the standard rules of (perturbative) QFT to gravity but failed. This is because the theory of gravity is unrenormalizable [0]. An interesting avenue in saving this line of thought is asymptotic safety where the idea is that gravity coupled to the standard model could actually be renormalizable in a certain sense [1].
In any case general relativity and quantum theory have so far been irreconcilable and there is now consensus on how to bridge the gap between those two theories. It is exactly because of this that most physicists will think of gravity and the other forces to be of a different nature.
When people say that gravity is not a force they mean that there is no known particle which acts as the intermediary of said force. For all the other forces we have a theory that explains the exertion of force via a particle.
Your first point states that "general relativity is just a model". Many physicists believe that it is more than a model but a true description of what the world really is like. I understand your urge to label theories as models, but ultimately the question is whether or not there is some level of ground truth that can be accessed in the form of mathematical theories.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renormalization#Renormalizabil... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptotic_safety_in_quantum_g...