The Real-Analysis Trolley Problem

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— Oceans (@ShipSystem) November 15, 2019

(Tip of the cap to Ian Agol.)

"Pessimism: It's Probably Not That Great"

Someone here in the airport is wearing a t-shirt with a logo and associated slogan: "Pessimism: It's probably not that great".

I approve!

Your Own Personal Peer-Reviewed-Journal

One living philosopher has a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to himself!

It would be hilarious if one of his own papers were rejected by the journal.

(At least it's open-access.)

Instant Thesis Topic for Philosophy

Just follow the tip in today's SMBC.

"I Could Go Without Smugness if I Chose To."

I choose not to.

Apology Cards Sorted by Discipline

Today's SMBC, which shows some apology cards sorted by discipline, is a big win! The psychology apology is the best one.

Peacocks and Philosophers

I really love SMBC's comparison of peacocks and philosophers in the context of doing something that is not evolutionarily advantageous.

A Terse Summary of My Feelings on Research-Project Supervision

Here is a terse summary of my philosophy on the projects that I supervise:

Question on assessment form: "Did the student complete the agreed upon work by the end of Hilary Term?"

My answer: "I don’t understand this question. Sorry. Projects end when you run out of time."


When it comes to publishing papers, this is qualified with things like "or you get bored or we decide it's time to work on something else", etc. But projects don't end. You run out of time, run out of money, get bored, decide to move on, need to get a job, etc. But there is always something else that one could do.

Philosophers Define Boredom

Well, it's 2014, and philosophers have finally managed to define "boredom". I think this might be worth an Ig Nobel. It certainly has the quality of first making me laugh and then making me think.

(Tip of the cap to Thomas Kroedel.)

Tales from the arXiv: Theories of Nothing and Everything

And here comes a philosophical entry...


Title: A Complete Theory of Everything (will be subjective)

Author: Marcus Hutter

Abstract: The progression of theories suggested for our world, from ego- to geo- to helio-centric models to universe and multiverse theories and beyond, shows one tendency: The size of the described worlds increases, with humans being expelled from their center to ever more remote and random locations. If pushed too far, a potential theory of everything (ToE) is actually more a theory of nothing (ToN). Indeed such theories have already been developed. I show that including observer localization into such theories is necessary and sufficient to avoid this problem. Ockham's razor is used to develop a quantitative recipe to identify ToEs and distinguish them from ToNs and theories in-between. This precisely shows what the problem is with some recently suggested universal ToEs. The suggested principle is extended to more practical (partial, approximate, probabilistic, parametric) world models (rather than ToEs). Finally, I provide a justification of Ockham's razor.


Comment: Subjective, indeed.

Deconstructing Mason?

Once again, somebody seems to be trying to put some sort of philosophical interpretation on one of my articles. To wit, consider the following description:

"Porter, Mason, et al. Communities in Networks. Notices of the AMS. 56/9, 2009. In consideration, Oxford University mathematician Porter, along with Jukka-Pekka Onnela, a Helsinki University physicist lately at Harvard, and from the University of North Carolina, mathematician Peter Mucha, might themselves be imagined as agents interlinked in local and global neural-like webs that they study. By this view, Mindkind’s historic learning process may just be reaching critical robustness in such exemplary works, together with many other articles posted herewith (e.g., Barrat, et al above). As the quote cites, statistical physics and complex systems science are realizing they engage the same phenomena in different ways so a merger is underway, still largely unbeknownst. But viola, a revolutionary new kind of materiality is being revealed. Both an independent, implicate network geometry and dynamics that involves such node/link, modular, weighted clusters becomes evident, which then explicates into universally repetitive, nested occurrence from biosphere to blogosphere, from protein webs to international scientific collaborations. In a natural genesis, such a vista could appear as a parent to child genetic code."

The following text is a quote from my article that is included below the blurb above:

Graphs can represent either man-made or natural constructs, such as the World Wide Web or neuronal synaptic networks in the brain. Agents in such networked systems are like particles in traditional statistical mechanics that we all know and (presumably) love, and the structure of interactions between agents reflects the microscopic rules that govern their behavior.


The text that really confounds me is the following: But viola, a revolutionary new kind of materiality is being revealed. Both an independent, implicate network geometry and dynamics that involves such node/link, modular, weighted clusters becomes evident, which then explicates into universally repetitive, nested occurrence from biosphere to blogosphere, from protein webs to international scientific collaborations. In a natural genesis, such a vista could appear as a parent to child genetic code.

Comment: What the fuck?


In case you're curious, here is link where I found this deconstruction.

The Philosophy of Viagra

When I first saw this call for papers on the philosophy of viagra, I thought it was a joke. And then, to my immense amusement, I realized that it was apparently not a joke. (I could make a derogatory joke about philosophers here, but I have both friends and colleagues who are philosophers, so I will resist the urge to do so. Also, there are at least as many derogatory jokes about mathematicians, so I'm not sure if I want to anger any philosophers at the moment.) I'm going to forward this website to AIR now...

Tip of the cap to Thomas Kroedel, a philosopher.