I spent last week relatively offline in Mexico, which became an interesting experiment in how the internet shapes perception: During the vacation, alarm about coronavirus in the United States escalated, but I didn’t really know because nothing in my offline environment reflected that sentiment. Since returning to the US and resuming my normal internet intake, it feels like my panic instinct missed a formative period in its development. As of now, I’m still less concerned about coronavirus than others seem to be, and while I feel a vague need, if not a civic duty, to step my worry up, I’m mainly just thankful to care less about something than I’m supposed to, for once. Regardless of how I feel, though, the coronavirus discourse is providing an interesting lesson in how these two different layers of reality can handle certain information so differently, and either amplify or suppress it: Usually the internet seems to overamplify things, but right now it seems to be properly amplifying something (although there’s nothing to check that against).
What I’m missing is the identity of an academic. An academic is an intellectual, a truth-seeker and truth-teller, a lifelong learner. Whereas I only do those things, if I feel like it. An identity gives you permission to do all the above. External permission, such as being allowed in a laboratory if that’s where your interests are pursued. But it’s also about allowing yourself to engage in intellectual pursuits. Or even: being afraid that without the external pressure of people expecting (predicting) novel intellectual output from you, you would not create any.
Numberphile’s coverage of The Four Color Map Theorem.
The Four Color Map Theorem (or colour!?) was a long-standing problem until it was cracked in 1976 using a "new" method... computers!
A little bit of extra footage from this: https://youtu.be/laMkuPrad3s
This video features Dr James Grime - http://jamesgrime.com
More Grime videos: http://bit.ly/grimevideos
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Videos by Brady Haran
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Numberphile’s walkthrough of the counterexample of Hedetniemi’s conjecture.
A counterexample to Hedetniemi's conjecture - featuring Erica Klarreich.
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Read Erica Klarreich's Quanta article on this subject: https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematician-disproves-hedetniemis-graph-theory-conjecture-20190617/
And visit her website: http://www.ericaklarreich.com/
Yaroslav Shitov's breakthrough paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.02167
Thanks to Stephen Hedetniemi for providing us with photos and pages from his original dissertation.
Some more graph theory on Numberphile...
Four Color Maps: https://youtu.be/NgbK43jB4rQ
An Unsolved Problem: https://youtu.be/niaeV_NHh-o
Planar Graphs: https://youtu.be/xBkTIp6ajAg
Perfect Graphs: https://youtu.be/C4Zr4cOVm9g
Friends and Strangers: https://youtu.be/xdiL-ADRTxQ
River Crossings: https://youtu.be/ZCVAGb1ee8A
Numberphile is supported by the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI): http://bit.ly/MSRINumberphile
We are also supported by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science. https://www.simonsfoundation.org/outreach/science-sandbox/
And support from Math For America - https://www.mathforamerica.org/
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Mochizuki had created so many new mathematical tools and brought together so many disparate strands of mathematics that his paper was populated with vocabulary that nobody could understand. It was totally novel, and totally mystifying. “You don’t get to say you’ve proved something if you haven’t explained it,” she says. “A proof is a social construct. If the community doesn’t understand it, you haven’t done your job.”
Brandon’s draft of “What We Talk About When We Talk About Composition”
[Continuations generalize] the asynchronous value concept. If we plug in `R = Void` then we just get an [asynchronous] value, but if we use a non-`Void` `R` value[,] we will get a type that kind of mixes together aspects of synchronous computation and asynchronous computation
I think my limit for open-loop writing is about 14k words. For the book on temporality I’m working on now, I’ll probably serialize it online in some form before trying to put it together as a book. All in all, it was a wonderful outpouring of deep reserves of creativity and knowledge, the likes of which I haven’t seen online in a long time. Twitter is where all the history-making, universe-denting social media action really is. It is as close to a pure ideas-commons/digital public as we’ll ever get. Email today is now less a communications medium than a communications compile target.
(Did you know you could play video games in the morning before work? I certainly didn’t. But you can.) I still struggle with instinct, the motivation to do the most, the feeling that I’m not a good reader if I’m not cycling through new books every few days. I want to keep slowing down, and keep giving words the time they deserve.
ISSUE SIX features fiction by Christopher Higgs, Jennifer Kronovet, Kyle Minor, Mark Jude Poirier, and Maura Stanton; creative nonfiction by Priscilla Becker, Jehanne Dubrow, and Emily O’Neill; film writing by J.M. Tyree; poetry by Diannely Antigua, Sandra Beasley, Molly Bendall, Jericho Brown, Heat
US healthcare is a joke. Let's make it funny. Out of Pocket is a weekly comedic deep-dive and analysis into the rabbithole that is our healthcare system. Existing healthcare research is dry and boring, and raises questions like: Why are 75% of all healthcare conversations defining what a “digital therapeutic” is?