and, who shouldn’t fight for equality?

So, no, you shouldn’t just ignore inequality—far from it, the difficult process of true and lasting reform requires extraordinary commitment. But we all should have the discipline to stop and determine what actually needs fixing, and not let ourselves get pushed into short-circuiting the basic mechanism by which the process works— and whatever else, not to screw around with the tools by which we diagnose success!

Joshua Rothman considers lookism—discrimination against people who are unattractive—and whether we should see it like other forms of discrimination, such as racism.

From these pages you can download all the original Sherlock Holmes stories for free.

Radical!

via: https://www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/the-future-of-withdrawal-studies

A new essay and some new stories about diet optimization.

MIT Open Scholarship is a completely revamped and significantly upgraded version of MIT’s institutional repository, also known as DSpace@MIT. For more than two decades, DSpace@MIT has served as the premier digital home for the Institute’s research, housing theses, working papers, technical reports, published articles, and more.

The new platform introduces a modernized, mobile-friendly user interface, improved search functionalities, and better capacity to show connections between researchers, organizations, and diverse scholarly outputs. Its new name reflects a broader commitment to the open sharing of knowledge, one that captures the true mission of the repository.

Huh. Glad they updated it, but the old name was cute. Ah, well.

A Computer Scientist on Why Diet Optimization Culture Is Destined to Fail

With so much uncertainty, Stigler thought it was inappropriate for the government to recommend what people should eat at all. He warned that these recommendations, with their appeals to scientific expertise, might be mistaken for rules. The United States was home to people with different preferences, practices, and beliefs, and a uniform recommendation couldn’t satisfy all of them. Indeed, recent fights over the food pyramid show that government recommendations of what to eat remain fraught.

via: https://www.argmin.net/p/dietary-shapes

Very cool calculator!

see: https://xkqr.org/qq/

But perhaps the universal desire of perfect aesthetics is a core part of why science is so alluring. Not everyone wants to be able to play 10 over 11 polyrhythms, but everyone wants to look hot. And since it’s so universal, the nerds want a way to stick it to the jocks and claim a masculine domain that hadn’t originally been theirs. The authority of science gives the nerds an institutional leg up in a world where all men want to stake their claim. Science-based training is to the gym as the analytics department is to professional sports teams.

The title is a good pun. :)

The question we should continually insist on asking ourselves, both as makers of tools and users of them, is how they can help us improve the flow of love. Do they connect us with each other, and reinforce our instincts to treat each other as moral ends? Do they help us convey our love out into the world through information and interfaces, or help us know when we are being offered any?

I get what he’s saying, and there’s some nice prose here, but to me it seems like a whole lot of jibber-jabber. AI is making even the smartest people in my blogroll a bit loopy.

Millenarianism or millenarism (from Latin millenarius ‘containing a thousand’ and -ism) is the belief held by a religious, social, or political group or movement in a coming fundamental transformation of society, after which “all things will be changed”. Millenarianism exists in various cultures and religions worldwide, with various interpretations of what constitutes a transformation.

via: https://www.marginalia.nu/log/a_138_systemdocker/

ISGCI is an encyclopaedia of graphclasses with an accompanying java application that helps you to research what’s known about particular graph classes.

Radical!

Structured cospans are a categorical method for turning closed systems into open ones. We show how structured cospans of Petri nets can be used to construct complex epidemiological models in a compositional way.

Very interesting, although it went over my head a bit.

It’s been an interesting few weeks for counterexamples. This post is basically my perspective of what has been going on in the world of formalization, AI tools and, in particular, counterexamples.

Crazy shit, dog.

This shit is gonna make me cry, man. I gotta fucking read this guy’s book.

see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IF1-15J2DWY

In this post we unveil the category of attributed C-sets. It is an upgrade to the category of C-sets that makes each element of a component set (e.g. each vertex or edge in a graph) have attributes, which may be elements of arbitrary sets/Julia types. In order to formalize attributed C-sets, we also take a tour of double category theory and profunctors.

Yeah, this article better matches what I’d expect from the Topos Institute crowd.

Graphs are made up of vertices and edges, but an important variation on this concept is based on “half-edges” or “darts.” We explain how half-edge graphs are implemented as C-sets in Catlab.jl and how they are used in topological graph theory to represent embeddings of graphs in surfaces.

I still don’t really understand what half-edges graphs are for, but I did understand the category theory.

prev: https://blog.algebraicjulia.org/post/2020/09/cset-graphs-1/

What is a scientific model? This post considers how mathematical logic and category theory can help us understand scientific models, and how AlgebraicJulia aims to build modeling frameworks based on this understanding.

A little awkwardly written, but important nonetheless.

see: https://topos.institute/blog/2021-11-04-categorical-systems-theory/

The idea of a C-set was introduced in an earlier post. In this post, we explain how C-sets are implemented as a data structure in the Julia programming language.

see: https://blog.algebraicjulia.org/post/2020/09/cset-graphs-1/

Through the course of this blog we will encounter a diverse cast of algebraic structures generalizing the concept of a graph. In this post we start at the very beginning, with how category theorists understand graphs, how graphs are an example of a general class of structures called “C-sets,” and how C-sets can be used as data structures in Julia through Catlab.jl.

I’m finally doing it. This post is not too bad now that I’ve picked up on a lot of the core ideas over the past few months.

via: https://github.com/AlgebraicJulia/ACSets.jl?tab=readme-ov-file#learning

Interesting stuff.