What theoretical physics needs, I’ve long believed, is to violate some assumption that is shared in common by both classical physics and quantum mechanics. Everyone nowadays seems to understand that something different is needed, but I suspect the “radical” new theories I’ve heard of aren’t radical enough.

So in this post I’m going to suggest a class of physical theory that seems to me to be radical enough (or if, you prefer, weird enough) to shake things up.

So when you see a no-go theorem that’s being given a very broad interpretation, you may do well to ask whether there is, after all, a way to get around the theorem, by achieving what the theorem is informally understood to preclude without doing what the theorem formally precludes.

Everyone knows what an email address is, right?

Decide if each email address is valid or not. I used the email-addresses library to verify against the relevant RFCs. Enjoy.

Learned a lot of cursed email stuff.

The images on this page are created using the standard iterative series of the Mandelbrot, that is, iterate the function zn+1 = zn2 + z0 where z0 is each point in the image plane (complex plane). However, instead of recording the behavior of the series at each point z0 we now consider only those points that escape to infinity and we create a density plot of the terms in the series. The result then is a 2D density plot of the trajectories that escape to infinity. The following shows the buddhabrot for that part of the complex plane that is interesting.

Beautiful illustrations.

i have written a few short guides and notes about ways you can help contribute to media preservation by doing it your damn self. most of the guides lean very technical, but i try to give appropriate explanations and links to the tools and documentation where i can.

In 1987, Steven Weinberg wrote a cute little paper entitled “Anthropic Bound on the Cosmological Constant”. I say cute little paper because it feels minor in comparison to, say, electroweak unification theory that won him the Nobel Prize. Weinberg was foundational in establishing the standard model of particle physics, and represented an enormous leap in understanding how this universe works. But his little 1987 paper, though more obscure, may tell us something about how the multiverse works, and can even be thought of as evidence for the existence of an enormous number of other universes.

O’Dowd’s recent videos on multiverse theory have been super enlightening. Weinberg presents a surprisingly convincing argument for a multiverse using anthropic reasoning. Pretty cracked.

The inscribed square/rectangle problem, solved using Möbius strips and Klein bottles.

Excellent intuition-building for topology. I jumped out of my chair when I recognized the Möbius strip construction :P.

via: ~azurylite

Nice proposal for quickly writing undirected graphs in text.

A survey of 8th and 10th graders shows a sharp drop in the percent of boys who believe that women should have the same opportunities as men

Chilling spoken word.

The sentiment behind this project is good, but parts of it seem insane:

Avoid using idioms and jargons. These can exclude people who don’t have particular specialized knowledge, and many idioms don’t translate from country to country. Additionally, these sometimes have origins in negative stereotypes.

Jargon is a crucial part of technical communication. Yes, jargon can cause friction when a person is getting inducted into a field, but our goal should not be to remove all friction from our work. And no idioms whatsoever? That’s just nonsense. But perhaps I’m just over-reacting to “my words being taken away.”

I’m Alice, a technical AI safety writer. I write the ML Safety Newsletter and my personal writing is on LessWrong. I have a background in technical ML, but pivoted to communications because I think this is where I can do the most good.

Don’t get distracted.

A deep dive into Tumblr’s MOGAI community, and the transmedicalist (or “truscum”) movement that sought to bring it down. Looking beyond validation, and on to… something new.

I now understand this part of the community much better. I still yearn for a practical reference text on queer identity and theory; probably need to be the change I want to see in the world.