@soaproot@sfba.social avatar

soaproot

@soaproot@sfba.social

Also known.as: Jim Kingdon. Interested in: formal mathematics, software development, dance (especially country-western and Morris, but many kinds), plants.

🏳️‍🌈 gay

Pronoun: he
San Francisco, CA, USA

DMs welcome.

I'm on Bookwyrm at @soaproot (disclaimer: I'm a pretty light user there).

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. For a complete list of posts, browse on the original instance.

molly0xfff , to random
@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io avatar

Fighting bots is fighting humans.

One advantage to working on freely-licensed projects for over a decade is that I was forced to grapple with this decision far before mass scraping for AI training.

soaproot ,
@soaproot@sfba.social avatar

@molly0xfff Even if we generalize option 2 to "Make everything private and only allow X access to our content" the hard part is still X. Paying subscribers? People with an invite from an existing member? People I have met at an in person meetup? All of these are viable in their own context but none are simple and all of them restrict the author's reach.

futurebird , to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

I decided to find out if any progress had been made on the science behind why some ants are attracted to electrical fields. After filtering out exterminators (it's so demoralizing to search for information on creatures you love and find nothing but people who know nothing about them boasting about how they will kill them all) I found what looked like a blog. But, who the heck is "James Brown"? Never heard of the dude. Maybe he could be my new friend if he likes ants enough to blog about them!

soaproot ,
@soaproot@sfba.social avatar

@futurebird @alexwild Agree this is a lousy situation. I'll offer a slightly optimistic and perhaps even polyanish reaction: what do we need to build which routes around this? I'm not sure what it is either, except that the Fediverse (most of what I've seen so far anyway) appears to be some flavor of step in the right direction.

parismarx , to random
@parismarx@mastodon.online avatar

This is cool: Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand are building out a distributed storage network with eight sites built on Māori land to give “iwi and hapū the power to control and make decisions over their own data.”

https://waateanews.com/2024/06/04/world-first-data-storage-infrastructure-solution-built-by-iwi-maori-for-iwi-maori/

soaproot ,
@soaproot@sfba.social avatar

@parismarx Definitely cool. I wonder if running one or more Fediverse nodes is in their future.

tao , to random
@tao@mathstodon.xyz avatar

There has been a remarkable breakthrough towards the Riemann hypothesis (though still very far from fully resolving this conjecture) by Guth and Maynard making the first substantial improvement to a classical 1940 bound of Ingham regarding the zeroes of the Riemann zeta function (and more generally, controlling the large values of various Dirichlet series): https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.20552

Let 𝑁(σ,𝑇) denote the number of zeroes of the Riemann zeta function with real part at least σ and imaginary part at most 𝑇 in magnitude. The Riemann hypothesis tells us that 𝑁(σ,𝑇) vanishes for any σ>1/2. We of course can't prove this unconditionally. But as the next best thing, we can prove zero density estimates, which are non-trivial upper bounds on 𝑁(σ,𝑇). It turns out that the value σ=3/4 is a key value. In 1940, Ingham obtained the bound (N(3/4,T) \ll T^{3/5+o(1)}). Over the next eighty years, the only improvement to this bound has been small refinements to the 𝑜(1) error. This has limited us from doing many things in analytic number theory: for instance, to get a good prime number theorem in almost all short intervals of the form ((x,x+x^\theta)), we have long been limited to the range (\theta>1/6), with the main obstacle being the lack of improvement to the Ingham bound. (1/3)

soaproot ,
@soaproot@sfba.social avatar

@tao @highergeometer Ooh nice. Not sure I'm going to attempt full alt text but the key feature of this diagram for me was that the Guth–Maynard curve is below the Ingham curve for sigma from 0.7 to 1.0 and below the Huxley curve for sigma less than 0.8. Even without understanding all of the Maynard talk it was clear that sigma between 0.7 and 0.8 is the focus of this result.

soaproot ,
@soaproot@sfba.social avatar

@tao @highergeometer So the Vinogradov-Korobov zero-free region is the dark blue at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_zeta_function#/media/File%3AZero-free_region_for_the_Riemann_zeta-function.svg ? Has someone made a diagram which shows this and other zero free regions? (Anything off the critical line with T < 10^12 or so is zero free if we can believe the "computer search by Platt and Trudgian" cited in Wikipedia, for example)

futurebird , to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

What is the best explanation you’ve heard for 1 not being a prime number? For me it’s “because it breaks everything in my programs since the loops won’t terminate” but that’s obtuse. “Because the God of math decrees it so!” is compelling, but shallow.

“it can only be divided by 1 distinct number” is contrived.

1 “feels” prime— it has the fewest factors. (Primeness being about NOT having factors) ruling it out for having too few? eh.

“it’s the zero of multiplication” is better… thoughts?

soaproot ,
@soaproot@sfba.social avatar

@futurebird There are better answers on this thread for why to pick one definition or another, but as for how to neatly state the definition which includes two and excludes one: "a prime is a natural number which has exactly two distinct factors"

loren , to random
@loren@flipping.rocks avatar

Saw a Would Duck. Please do not ask what they’d do

soaproot ,
@soaproot@sfba.social avatar

@loren A would duck would duck as much wood as a would duck could duck, if a would duck would duck wood.

elizabethtasker , (edited ) to random
@elizabethtasker@mastodon.online avatar

OK, OK... so IMPORTANT QUESTION. Can we say "globally" when discussing the entire surface of a celestial body such as Phobos? That Martian moon baby isn't remotely spherical. It's a potato.

soaproot ,
@soaproot@sfba.social avatar

@elizabethtasker @rieder Important to science or important to the Internet? I have a bit of a suspicion that for better or worse the word spudally has more outreach potential than an in depth description of what is to be found on those moons.

elizabethtasker , to random
@elizabethtasker@mastodon.online avatar

Just read a comment on the bird site saying that the British Constitution was just tea n' vibes.

There's real truth sometimes still coming out of that site.

soaproot ,
@soaproot@sfba.social avatar

@elizabethtasker It was.... interesting..... in 2019 to see this tested (including the involvement of the Supreme Court, a newish body). But despite all the complications and legal ins and outs, I'm not sure the result disproves the "tea and vibes" take.

soaproot ,
@soaproot@sfba.social avatar

@Gaywallet Given how much trouble the currently widespread non native Barbary sheep are causing for Bighorn populations, just as well this didn't get any further.

elizabethtasker , to random
@elizabethtasker@mastodon.online avatar

Email sent to our administration, regarding travel reimbursement for a trip in which I had to spend the night in Delhi due to a missed flight connection, but still paid the hotel fee for the night in Ahmadabad:

"I definitely spent the night in India, and paid a hotel fee for that night. Given we reimburse at a standard rate, do the details matter?"

Logical? Yes.

Are the details the life blood of academic travel reimbursement and I've just questioned the ethos of a whole culture: Also, yes

soaproot ,
@soaproot@sfba.social avatar

@elizabethtasker Heh. They probably haven't encountered this corner case in months. Ya gotta let them have some fun.

soaproot ,
@soaproot@sfba.social avatar

@Gaywallet I browsed through this cookbook once (don't remember whether we still have it) but I couldn't tell what was camp and what was just the way food was in the US before Julia Child and a bunch of other things happened. Don't really remember specifics but I'm thinking of jello salads and stuff like that.

soaproot ,
@soaproot@sfba.social avatar

@Gaywallet As usual, Cory Doctorow writes beautifully and insightfully (go read the article, it isn't just a litany of what is bad, it is about how it is bad and why it is bad). Hard to pick just one pull quote but I'll go with "the potential anti-enshittification coalition is massive".

soaproot ,
@soaproot@sfba.social avatar

@Gaywallet This particular link wasn't opening for me. But what I have heard elsewhere is that there are indeed known to be a number of parts of the X chromosome which affect the immune system, in ways we are still in the process of figuring out.

jewishreader , to random
@jewishreader@sfba.social avatar

This is a disgrace. The Trader Joe's CEO will be hearing from me. And I will try not to shop there for the foreseeable future (which sucks, because I love Trader Joe's).

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-26/trader-joe-s-follows-spacex-in-arguing-nlrb-is-unconstitutional

soaproot ,
@soaproot@sfba.social avatar

@jewishreader Trader Joe's has been antiunion from the start. Still, the constitutionality argument is an additional step.

soaproot ,
@soaproot@sfba.social avatar

@jewishreader Since I posted about that, I found out about this from Trader Joe's United: https://actionnetwork.org/forms/stand-with-trader-joes-united-sign-on-in-solidarity/ . "We haven’t asked customers to boycott Trader Joe’s, but as their union-busting attempts increase, we need to know how many customers will stand with us"

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