mathgenius

Nothing beats having a (good) teacher. Self-learning, no matter how smart you are, is pitifully slow without a teacher. Half an hour with a good teacher can save you weeks of table head-butting. (But obviously you can't rely only on the teacher.)

As for books, it's not a spectator sport: you gotta do it yourself. Read a sentence, then work it out yourself with pen & paper. You can't get it just from reading alone.

Finally: in mathematics there's many many roads to Rome! If something isn't working for you, try another way.

I don't want to buy books from Amazon anymore. I'm perfectly capable of "pirating" a copy myself and printing it. I want the real thing, not another cheap print out.

How about the Syrian civil war?

"global warming is said to have played a role in sparking the 2011 uprising. Severe drought plagued Syria from 2007-10, causing as many as 1.5 million people to migrate from the countryside into cities, exacerbating poverty and social unrest."

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/3/2/syrias-civil-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_Civil_War#Drought

Plenty of this going on right now in the world of cryptocurrency. And possibly for the same reason: who is to say what coin is good (will succeed) or not?

Such hilarity:

""" The Breitmans began Tezos, which is a software platform, four years ago in a bid to address some of the governance issues that have surrounded other cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin....

The ensuing dispute over control of the $232 million ... """

Here's a pro-tip: "I don't understand XYZ" this is the humble-brag of academia. And the more basic XYZ is, the more points you win. Try the following: "I don't understand 1+1=2." Sit back and enjoy your collaborators as they stare in wonderment at your sage lack of understanding.

Well, someone is educating the crypto-masses, and charging a reasonable fee for it.

Check out the scams going on in the twitter thread below. I am quite impressed by how convincing it looks; it's very likely that people are falling for it.

https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/964838207215955969

Pretty sure I had some kind of slack PTSD after my last two dev jobs.

"Join out project and get book your place in the whitelist! "

Sounds awesome.

I agree with this. It's not about "jealousy" towards your friends on fb. It's about feeding the attention-monkey. And the more you feed that monkey the more it wants.

Healthy brains spend time (much time) prior to attention, just being. I like to go on long walks and practice breathing. Dissolving mind and attention leads to great clarity, when the thoughts are needed.

Society as a whole does not seem to recognize the attention-burden, for example, more and more advertising and television images are showing up everywhere. It is not possible to just relax and be, while commuting or getting around town. People seem to assume that this is the way to live. It is not.

The most successful exchanges offer leverage: bitfinex, poloniex, bithumb (i think).

> physics knowledge is math

You make it sound like we know what mathematics is, or what knowledge is. We don't. Things are much more mysterious than that.

And as for your statement about physics, I don't care if you can write down an equation such as "f=ma" and manipulate it. You are not doing physics.

Wow 15 hours to australia, that thing is moving fast.

Probably most of that was in December, so: massive growth.

Yes I have montanari's book.

Is volume 4, fasicle 6 available for download, or do we need to buy the book itself?

I'm very interested in SAT solvers, as this has deep connections to statistical mechanics and condensed matter physics.

But ripple (xrp) does. It may only be a slim chance, but it is real. It could be the first currency (like the euro, yen, swiss franc, etc.) backed by a private company. But unlike the sovereign currencies, xrp is totally transparent. No cooking the books like the banks have been caught doing with the LIBOR rates.

> You can say the same about sums and multiplication

Yes indeed. In particular how multiplication distributes over addition. It is powerful technology.

> And what, anyway, is “meaning?”

I sure would like to hear what they had to say about this specific question.

> I mean, when you actually use integers, do you really picture them as equivalence classes of the Cartesian square of natural numbers?

Yes, accountants really do think of integers this way: these are assets and liabilities.

Computerphile did some videos on voevodsky and homotopy type theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5a5BYZwRx8

(watch those eyes! I like how they bug out when he gets really excited.)

This is from mathoverflow: https://mathoverflow.net/a/249936/39775

Very interesting! I had to look at some of your other comments to find out that MBL is "many-body localization" which i've heard of but know very little about.

Yes this looks like a good reference.

Yeah this quantum memory is a passive memory, as opposed to active error correction, which is perhaps more akin to the DRAM side of things. The active error correction is what google etc. are working on right now. It's not clear if passive quantum memories will ever be built, or as i said, if they even can be theoretically built.

I've just finished a PhD in this area, topological quantum memories.

Totally amazed at the level of this quantamagazine article. Superb stuff. They even manage to explain string-nets. I keep thinking that you could make an interesting iPhone game out of this.

Actually it's nice to read a bit of a summary of the field, including the history.

Here is another good article discussing the open problem of the existence of a quantum memory [1]. The story goes like this: your hard-drive stores bits of information in little magnets. That is magnetic order, which falls into the symmetry-breaking paradigm discussed in the article. When you turn the computer off, it remembers what's on your harddrive. Those magnets keep the bits protected, by virtue of the "magnetic order". Now here's the question: can we do the same thing with quantum bits? Even theoretically, is it possible? Is there some kind of "quantum ordered system" that will protect a qubit?

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1411.6643

try this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_quantum_Hall_effect

Cabin filling with smoke, everyone panicking...

And things like dropbox allow the OS to go in the other direction, towards being distributed.