Toots for j_bertolotti@mathstodon.xyz account

Written by j_bertolotti on 2025-01-31 at 14:12

I am suitably impressed by professors' offices at Oxford.

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Written by j_bertolotti on 2025-01-30 at 12:09

Here is where I admit I have no clue what a monad is in either Maths or Computer Science (I know what it is in Leibniz Philosophy, but I have the strong suspicion that is not going to help me much).

[#]IAdmitIgnorance

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Written by j_bertolotti on 2025-01-28 at 09:47

Every "Our healthcare/education system/food/etc. is the best in the world and everyone envy us" claim is invariably BS, and generally comes from never having looked at how things work elsewhere.

[#]rant #petpeeve

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Written by j_bertolotti on 2025-01-27 at 12:06

How is #DnDbeyond still down? ๐Ÿคฌ

[#]dnd

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Written by j_bertolotti on 2025-01-26 at 17:19

If someone is not willing to listen, why should I bother trying to explain something to them?

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Written by j_bertolotti on 2025-01-25 at 18:20

Feels like the right time to start planning for moving all international scientific conferences to somewhere outside the US.

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Written by j_bertolotti on 2025-01-25 at 12:08

Fiddling with #Pixelfed (I am not good at all at it) and experimentally posting something there to see how it works: @j_bertolotti@pixelfed.social

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Written by j_bertolotti on 2025-01-25 at 11:17

Today in "The world wasn't horribly fucked up enough, so we are going to make it worse for everyone."

https://www.ft.com/content/ace02a6f-3307-43f8-aac3-16b6646b60f6?accessToken=zwAGLHk505cokdOs4CpvMwdD-NOqwxa2ZGtg9g.MEYCIQDw7YFU6H012tBnWG7ypVBleWI3x9GVUMySZwCXOUZK8AIhAKYoG4A-s5Az4UyUekLIbwZlDNOYRFCRqTtmp-15zkJJ&sharetype=gift&token=c41ff6fe-4f5e-47af-9b6e-daa6699f6d33

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Written by j_bertolotti on 2025-01-23 at 15:56

Advice to the newcomers nobody asked for:

Before you start follow people, put something in your profile. Even better if you start with a introductory post explaining who you are. So the people you start following can know who you are and maybe follow you back (e.g. if they know you from other socials or in real life).

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Written by j_bertolotti on 2025-01-22 at 11:50

"Musk has a pathological need to be liked and he (correctly) assumed that the audience would cheer him" is a much more believable explanation than all the "it wasn't a real nazi salute" BS many journalists are spouting.

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Written by j_bertolotti on 2025-01-22 at 09:34

Always remember: reducing your personal carbon footprint is the morally correct thing to do, but it is also irrelevant compared to all the environmental damage done by big corporations (who highly prefer you to feel guilty about your actions than to be held accountable for theirs).

Comic by Safely Endangered (who I don't think is on the Fediverse).

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Written by j_bertolotti on 2025-01-20 at 14:58

Brief list of useful online tools for #LaTeX (#TeXLaTeX) users:

https://www.unicodeit.net to use Maths symbols on pages that do not support LaTeX (e.g. here)

https://www.tablesgenerator.com/latex_tables to generate tables without going mad

https://editor.codecogs.com to get an image of your equations you can copy-paste

https://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html to find what is the command for that less-used symbol you can never remember

https://www.doi2bib.org to get a well-formatted revtex bibliography from the doi of the paper

Do you have more to add? ๐Ÿ˜€

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Written by j_bertolotti on 2025-01-17 at 15:03

One of the dirty secrets of modern times is that we already have the technology for flying cars, but everybody with even the vaguest understanding of Physics or Engineering that has thought about it for more than 5 minutes has realized they are a VERY bad idea and left them to movies and videogames.

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Written by j_bertolotti on 2025-01-17 at 10:37

Will be at Oxford at the end of the month for a PhD viva.

Anyone there who wants to come to say hi and get a coffee? ๐Ÿ™‚

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Written by j_bertolotti on 2025-01-16 at 12:08

In the world of theoretical #Physics that fridge would consume 5 10โต eVยฒ and the ceiling would be just 10โท eVโปยน tall.

There is MUCH worse than kWh per day out there ๐Ÿ˜‰

https://xkcd.com/3038/

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Written by j_bertolotti on 2025-01-16 at 09:15

[#]PhysicsFactlet

It's a foggy day here in Albion, so let's talk about light (multiple) scattering!

Fog is composed of micrometre sized water droplet that can scatter light. This has two main effects: some of the light that was supposed to reach your eyes don't (because it is scattered away), and some of the light that was not supposed to reach you gets scattered into your eyes.

The denser is the fog and the further an object is from you, the more likely light is to be scattered away before it reaches your eyes. The amount of unscattered light (i.e. the one your eyes can use to form a sharp image) goes down exponentially (Lambert-Beer law), so an object in the fog gets dimmer pretty quickly. On the other hand there is a chance that light that was never meant to reach you is now scattered into your eyes, but since it arrives from a largely random direction, mixed up with a lot of other scattered light, your brain perceived it as a white blur on top of everything else. And since far away object were already dim, this white halo can easily overpower them, so you can't see them anymore.

[#]Physics #Optics #ITeachPhysics #EverydayPhysics

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Written by j_bertolotti on 2025-01-15 at 10:02

Made an account on #Pixelfed just to realise you can already see my posts from there, so I actually don't need one.

Isn't the interconnectivity of the Fediverse a marvel? ๐Ÿ˜ƒ

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Written by j_bertolotti on 2025-01-15 at 08:35

[#]PhysicsFactlet

Light propagates in a straight line (actually it is more complicated than that, but this is good enough for us here) and we see only the light that comes to our eyes. As a result you usually don't see the light going from its source to the objects it illuminates.

Unless it is misty, in which case light can scatter on the water droplets and you can "see" the light's path ("Tyndall effect").

[#]Physics #Optics #EverydayPhysics

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Written by j_bertolotti on 2025-01-14 at 09:57

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

(Goodhart's law)

The story goes as follows: someone made a test to check how capable LLMs were. They didn't do well.

But then new LLMs were created and trained specifically to pass the test, and lo and behold, they actually passed the test!

Now they are all self-congratulatory. Get ready to read some wild claims on how smart their new AI is and why you should give them all of your money.

https://arcprize.org/blog/oai-o3-pub-breakthrough

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Written by j_bertolotti on 2025-01-13 at 14:19

[#]PhysicsFactlet

Do you want an interpretation of quantum mechanics that doesn't really work that well in practice, but that would look fantastic for your Sci-Fi novel? I have for you "Many interacting words" (not to be confused with the similarly named "Many worlds interpretation").

In this interpretation the universe is 100% classical, but instead of being one universe there is a VERY large number of them, all classical and weakly interacting with each other. In particular each particle is classical, but is repelled by its "copies" in the other universes. This is able to replicate a lot of the most weird effects of quantum mechanics. For instance, classically a particle is not able to overcome a potential barrier if it doesn't have enough energy to do so, but in this interpretation the particle would be repelled by its copies, so it has a non-zero chance of getting enough of a kick to jump on the other side of the barrier, producing the phenomenon we usually call "quantum tunnelling".

Another effect replicated by this model is the "zero point energy" i.e. the fact that the lowest energy a particle can have is not zero, but a bit higher than that. In this interpretation this comes to be because the particle (which is classic) would like to sit at zero energy, but so do all of its "copies", and they repel, so none of them can really sit at zero energy.

If you want, in this interpretation the very fact we see quantum effects is evidence of parallel universes!

https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.4.041013

[#]Physics #QuantumMechanics

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