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4:49 AM
@vzn (Einstein to Kaluza on combining GR and EM in 5D, from Zee's GR):
"February 27, 1925: More than 3 years later, Einstein wrote: "I am still of the opinion that your idea... is of great originality and merits the serious interest of academic colleagues... . I myself have so far struggled with this problem in vain. It often appears to me that the magnetic field of the earth is based upon an as yet unknown connection between gravitation and electromagnetism, but I cannot come out of the inconsistencies." To a present-day theoretical physicist such as myself, that last sentence sounds rathe
When is 0celot back, need to talk about Zee's KK chapter
 
 
5 hours later…
10:13 AM
Is 6000 in the order of 10,000 or 1000? Please answer.
 
 
1 hour later…
11:21 AM
@SwapnilDas 10000. The order of a value is a multiplicative thing, so to get the decimal order of a number you should find its logarithm to base 10. log10(6000) ~= 3.77815, rounding to an integer gives 4, so 6000 is of the order of 10000. A simpler way is to note that sqrt(10) ~= 3.16228, so values between 3162 to 31622 are of the order of 10000.
 
12:17 PM
A good reference point is $\pi\approx \sqrt{10}$
It’s hardly a perfect approximation but for estimation purposes it’s handy
 
12:44 PM
It's very handy, it's an approximation that's been popular since ancient times. IIRC, some old mathematicians, maybe Egyptians, suspected that pi was exactly sqrt(10), although that was disproved fairly early.
 
1:06 PM
as an application of that, one has $1+1/4+1/9+\cdots = \pi^2/6 \approx 10/6=5/3$
there's a short argument for why that last one ought to be true, let me find it
with the answer basically being "because 1/4+1/9+... is approximately 2/3"
(and you get an even better approximation if you use "1/9+1/16+... is approximately 2/5")
 
1:21 PM
@Semiclassical Nice! And I'm sure I've seen that proof before. OTOH, the ancient Egyptians, and even the Alexandrians didn't know about the connections between zeta(2n), powers of pi, and Bernoulli numbers. ;)
 
Yep
Which makes me wonder what a purely geometric argument would be
A purely geometric argument for $\pi<4$ is trivial, for instance. Just inscribe a circle inside of a square
 
I suppose you could use Archimedes' method of approximating pi with polygons. You don't need too many iterations to show pi < sqrt(10). Ninja'd
I've probably got code online somewhere that calculates pi that way. Give me a minute...
 
well, if one wants to have sqrt(10)=sqrt(5)*sqrt(2) show up explicitly
one probably needs to do something involving a pentagon
 
Here we go. It's old Python 2 code, using mpmath. There's also a bc version. forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?t=99359#p3243473
That algorithm is ok in double precision, but it soon suffers from rounding errors.
@Semiclassical Probably. It's a nice exercise to find sin & cos of multiples of 18° from the pentagon.
 
 
1 hour later…
2:51 PM
I feel so honoured
 
I cannot made from head to toe on just how on earth we can eat with our nose
 
@EmilioPisanty We are very excited in your work on [AUTOMATED_MESSAGE_FIELD_15].
5
 
@EmilioPisanty, I have a question...could I ask you?:-)
 
3:19 PM
Emilio, you're getting to be one of the big names in «Name».
 
> Don't ask about asking, just ask.
@PM2Ring no, it's even better, I'm getting to be one of the big names in " «Name» "
It's a good job I chose a research area with a bold-italic name
 
On a more serious note, is your research area even vaguely relevant to that alleged conference, apart from the opto connection?
 
@EmilioPisanty if photons had mass, would the speed of light still be the same for all observers?
 
@user8718165 no
 
If photons had mass, they'd travel slower than c.
 
3:28 PM
@EmilioPisanty so the reason why the speed of light is universally the same is that the mass of photons are 0?
 
If there were no massless particles, c would still be the space / time conversion ratio. We just wouldn't call it the speed of light.
 
@user8718165 that's a wonky interpretation and nobody I know would choose to describe things in that way, but yes, you can twist things into that form
you're inches away from making statements about counterfactual physics
i.e. your statement only makes sense if photons-with-nonzero-mass were a possibility
but that involves breaking the physics we know and inventing new rules
and once you that, then all bets are off
 
hi
 
if you're already in a physics-breaking mood, why stop at photons having zero mass, and not go on to break special relativity as a whole?
@PM2Ring well, they do have an "optical physics" session
ditto "quantum optics" and "condensed matter theory"
so it'd be pretty hard to fall outside of that umbrella
 
can i ask a question?
 
3:33 PM
@EmilioPisanty Oh, ok.
 
but thanks for prompting me - it turns out that the link to "https://scientificfederation.com/icson-2019/" actually points to http://scientificfederation.benchurl.com/c/l?u=8A3A3F4&e=E291E2&c=E8C3C&t=0&l=202E8051&email=B75QfDWw7vq3uKLvqvXk%2BM3VC%2FjP3B7l&seq=1
sneaky b*****ds
 
@user8718165 You should take a look at physics.stackexchange.com/questions/436315/… and some of the linked & related questions.
 
@PM2Ring yes it would be. However I wanted to know about what would happen to the speed of light. I hope its just a coincidence that the speed of light happens to be the same as that conversion factor...
 
@user8718165 what do you mean by "the speed of light"?
 
hello?
 
3:35 PM
specifically the speed at which this not-light-but-you're-still-calling-it-light propagates?
14 mins ago, by Emilio Pisanty
> Don't ask about asking, just ask.
 
@user8718165 It's not exactly a coincidence, because massless particles must travel at c.
 
According to definition of electricity,
 
movement of electrons is really what we call electricity
so my question is,
 
@PM2Ring mostly, I suspect the real topic of the conference is "people who gave us money"
 
3:38 PM
:D
 
@Akash.B not particularly. You can have media in which the charge carriers are not electrons.
 
okay so it collapsed my question
then what are?
 
If you want a good laugh, check out this spoof software conference. sigbovik.org/2019/proceedings.pdf
 
@PM2Ring it is close enough to my home base that I could actually check whether the event exists or whether it's an online-only scam
sounds like an interesting test
 
@EmilioPisanty Yeah, at least they got your address right.
 
3:40 PM
@EmilioPisanty you didn't give me an answer
 
@Akash.B you haven't asked a proper question
what are what?
the charge carriers in those media?
 
yeah
 
they can be electron holes, as in p-type doped semiconductors
or they can be positively charged atomic or molecular ions, moving in solution
or they can be negatively charged atomic or molecular ions, moving in solution
 
@PM2Ring I'll surely have a look at it and the other one linked by you. I couldn't find these answers earlier. I've just begun to learn the topic so I might not yet be able to get all the stuff written there. Thanks a lot for your effort and enlightening me.:-)
 
oh
another question
 
3:43 PM
you could also get fancy and make a device in which the charge transfer, at least over some section of the circuit, was carried by muons or positrons or anything else
the only requirements on charge carriers is that they be electrically charged and that they be able to move
 
does the space time stretches along with expansion of universe?
 
@EmilioPisanty no, not at all. I don't have any plans to disprove or challenge relativity. Just wanted to know what would happen though. Sorry if my question sounded silly
 
@Akash.B that's better left to someone with a better grasp of GR than me.
 
@EmilioPisanty who have a better grasp?
 
but I have no idea what you're actually asking, so you probably have some work ahead of you in clarifying your question.
@Akash.B other people who are not me.
 
3:47 PM
@PM2Ring Skimming through this, it's pretty great. I'm loving the huge latex watermark on the second paper
 
If they were here right now, they would already have responded.
 
@EmilioPisanty okay
 
@EmilioPisanty could you please tell me what do you mean by this?
 
@user8718165 it's not that it 'sounds silly', it's that it isn't well-posed.
@user8718165 that once you change the rules, you cannot use the same terminology and expect people to know exactly what you mean without being very explicit about how you're defining things
 
@EmilioPisanty how should I post what-ifs like this?
@EmilioPisanty the original speed of light...not my (photons having mass) speed of light...I meant that
 
3:49 PM
the term "the speed of light" describes a bunch of different things, which are tied together by the existing rules of physics. If you change the rules, then those things no longer coincide, and you need to be explicit about what it is you're referring to with that term.
 
@user8718165 My pleasure! Historically, the "strange" relativistic effects were discovered in connection to high speed electrons and light. Einstein & Minkowski's great insight was that the real cause is spacetime geometry, not electromagnetism. But it took even Einstein a while to get the hang of that idea. His breakthrough publication on this stuff was titled (in English) "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies".
 
@user8718165 then it's not an answerable question
> what would happen to the speed of light if physics were different?
 
@EmilioPisanty I just meant how would the speed of light change if photons had mass?you answered me before...Well could you please tell me how could I improve questions like this to prevent ambiguity?
 
@user8718165 I don't think such questions are particularly meaningful. But if you don't want to ask ambiguous questions then don't use ambiguous terminology.
 
Would anyone be able to help with this question?
 
3:56 PM
@EmilioPisanty now I hope my reworded question (posted just before) is clearer than before...
 
@user8718165 If you read the questions & answers I linked, I think it will answer most of your questions about this, and help you formulate a clear question to address any remaining doubts.
 
@PM2Ring I was just asking how could I ask unambiguous questions? You and user@emilio pisanty already answered my query a while before. :-)
 
@EmilioPisanty Anyways thanks a lot for your time...
 
The problem is that the phrase "speed of light" is itself ambiguous, because it can refer to the space / time conversion factor, the speed of propagation of light in a vacuum, or the propagation speed of light in some medium. So when you ask something like your original question you need to take care to be specific about which of those different aspects you're addressing.
@JMac One of the most popular papers is the one about interpreting random paint spatters as Perl programs.
@MichaelHarding You should ask that in chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/54160/…
 
4:13 PM
@PM2Ring your every comment contains something informative.These points will help me understand the topic better and ask unambiguous questions.
 
Oh, good. :)
 
4:39 PM
I didn't realise that this OP was talking about sending (visible) light through a grid of tubes with 1 nm diameter, which I assume is pretty well impossible. I figured he was talking maybe micron diameter, which should be possible, but which will cause massive diffraction effects. Right?
 
5:05 PM
@ACuriousMind Hello, How you've don't integration by parts here, to do integration by parts, the function should be a product of 2 functions, but $$\int \left ( \frac{\partial L}{\partial q} \delta q + \frac{\partial L}{\partial \dot q} \delta \dot q \right)dt$$
it isn't product of 2 functions...
 
@AbhasKumarSinha You only do it on the second summand.
 
@ACuriousMind You mean only $$\frac{\partial L}{\partial \dot q} \delta \dot q$$?
 
But, so $$\int \left ( \frac{\partial L}{\partial v} \delta q \right)dt = 0$$
@ACuriousMind
My fault, gotcha
 
What's $v$, and why are you setting that term to 0?
 
5:10 PM
sorry
@ACuriousMind that was my mistake, sorry
got that
 
@Semiclassical
 
Fundamental theorem of theoretical physics:
 
$$\hbar = c = k_B = 1$$
that too
 
@ACuriousMind Is that correct $$\int \left ( \frac{\partial L}{\partial \dot q} \delta \dot q \right) \\ \int \left ( \frac{\partial L}{\partial \dot q} \frac{d}{dt} \delta q\right) \\ = \frac{\partial L}{\partial \dot q} \delta q - \int \left (\delta q \frac{d}{dt} \frac{\partial L}{\partial \dot q} \right)dt \\ = \int \left ( \frac{\partial L}{\partial \dot q} - \frac{d}{dt} \frac{\partial L}{\partial \dot q} \right)\delta q \space dt$$ Is that correct?
 
5:17 PM
@bolbteppa Honestly, I can't recall a single time I've seen someone use 3 for pi or e in engineering, unless they were doing a quick order of magnitude calculation. For the most part, changing numbers like that isn't where most of the approximation in engineering happens
 
@AbhasKumarSinha that's not the Euler-Lagrange equations though
 
@AbhasKumarSinha No, sorry
How did the first summand get back into the integral in the last line?
 
$\frac{\partial L}{\partial \dot{q}} \delta q \neq \int \frac{\partial L}{\partial \dot{q}} \delta q dt$
 
@ACuriousMind Woops, I didn't wanted the dot over the $\partial \dot q$
@bolbteppa You are correct
in the first term
 
Just work out $\delta S = \delta \int_{t_1}^{t_2} L(t,q,\dot{q})dt = ...$ and we can point out where you go wrong
Follow what Landau does
 
5:23 PM
Yes, I did exactly in the same way and got where my mistake is
 
but isn't that assumes $\delta q$ and $\delta \dot q$ to be very small values in order to use taylor expansion in (2.4)?
But, why assume them to be small?
@bolbteppa ?
 
What do you mean
 
if we don't assume $\delta q$ to be small, then we can't do taylor expansion here
so, why he assumed that to be small?
$$\int \left ( \frac{\partial L}{\partial q} \delta q + \frac{\partial L}{\partial \dot q} \delta \dot q \right)dt = 0.\tag{2.4b}$$
 
If they are not small you can't assume the linear approximation is a good enough approximation
 
5:30 PM
@AbhasKumarSinha The formal idea behind this is called the calculus of variations and has nothing to do with Taylor expansion.
 
@ACuriousMind never heard before...
I asked someone who knew that I didn't knew that calculus of variations, so did made me understand using Taylor expansion :P,
@ACuriousMind Calculus of Variations should work for large values of $\delta q$ too?
 
@AbhasKumarSinha Indeed, it doesn't say anything about the "value of $\delta q$"
 
@ACuriousMind So, what's the use of Calculus of Variations in Nutshell?
 
If $\delta q$ is large you need to use higher orders in your Taylor expansion to approximate the behavior of $\delta S$ accurately, the goal here is to expand $S$ around the $q(t)$ which minimizes $S(q)$ and analyze what conditions the minimum of $S$ implies on $q(t)$, to do this we want to vary $S(q)$ with $\delta q$ small in order to ensure our analysis of $\delta S$ only involves the behavior of $S$ around it's minimum, if $\delta q$ is large we need to Taylor expand $L$ to higher orders
but then we complicate things and add more information about $S$ than just it's behavior around the minimum
 
@AbhasKumarSinha It's just the rigorous formulation of what the physicists handwaves with the Taylor expansion.
 
5:35 PM
@PM2Ring "Vegetarian or vegetarian option available"?
heh
 
Note sometimes you do need to go to higher orders in the calculus of variations i.e. to Taylor expand $L$ beyond first order, e.g. to determine whether you are actually working with a max or min (note we're really just dealing with extrema of $S$ but we assume they are minima in mechanics in the beginning)
 
But in order to stay with the handwave: We can say that $\delta q$ is infinitesimally small because having a local extremum is a local condition - it doesn't matter how the functional behaves far from the point we're examining, all that matters is that it doesn't take values higher (or lower) than that maximum (or minimum) immediately close to it
 
You absolutely do use Taylor expansions in this subject and it's not hand-waving it's rigorous
 
The more complicated it seems, the more interesting it becomes...
 
@EmilioPisanty I giggled (& I've been vegetarian for several decades). :)
 
5:38 PM
I guess you're really using Banach space Taylor expansions though :p
 
@bolbteppa I'm just an innocient guy, taylor expansions for me $$f(x+h) = f(x)+ f'(x)h+ \dots$$
 
I prefer Banana space, but that's just me.
 
@bolbteppa I was just about to ask you what the infinite-dimensional Banach space of functionals is you want to do this rigorous expansion in :P
 
So, can I conclude that no matter how big is $\delta q$ wrt. $q$ I should trust calculus of variations and just take the first order to series?
 
Also, I spent 7 years living half an hour north of en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Banana
 
5:42 PM
The norms people usually use are usually called something like 'first order of proximity' or 'second order of proximity' etc... and basically put a norm on the function and it's derivatives
 
Oh okay
 
You can ignore all of that and just Taylor expand $L(t,q,\dot{q})$
 
@bolbteppa That's what I did
Thanks everyone here :) It's night here in India, so I'm going to sleep :)
 
What is the Taylor expansion of $f(x,y)$ (not just $f(x)$)
 
0
Q: What is the meaing of 'greyed out' questions?

user45664'greyed out' or faded questions seemed to appear for me about a month ago. I do not remember seeing them before that. What is the meaning of this? Who does it? How is it done? What is its purpose? I looked at the edit history an could not find anything. There is one related answer "A greyed...

 
5:53 PM
@AbhasKumarSinha Sleep well! But frankly, if you only started learning integration a few days ago, and are still getting used to integration by parts, it's probably a bit early to start worrying about the calculus of variations. It's normally considered a pretty advanced topic in calculus.
 
Right, learning Newtonian mechanics and picking up a math methods book with calculus of variations and intro Lagrangian mechanics in it as side reading is probably better
 
There should be a comedy video on the calculus of variations. They could call it "Weekend at Bernoulli's".
 
@AbhasKumarSinha these videos introduce Lagrangian mechanics in a very nice slow good way with all the details worked out, some comedy on the side too iirc :p
 
6:10 PM
@bolbteppa lol
tfw you realize a calculation you made, while valid on its own terms, could have incorporated something further
but you don't remember enough of the algorithm you used to easily see how to incorporate that :/
(I think it's plausible that the pictures I end up with aren't affected, but I don't know for sure now ... :/)
 
 
1 hour later…
7:39 PM
how does migrating from other sites work, does the destination site have to approve the migration?
 
@JMac Electrical Engineering and Mathematics have a permanent migration path to us, meaning any user with close votes can vote to migrate a question to us from there. From other sites, only their moderators can migrate questions here. We don't approve migrations, but if we close the question here, the migration is marked as "rejected".
 
@ACuriousMind That explains this physics.stackexchange.com/questions/471372/…
 
@JMac And now you see a "migration rejected" banner there ;)
 
thanks lol
 
I don't suppose there's much that can be done about this guy promoting his non-mainstream theory via comments.
And if educated people cannot come together to talk about feasible alternatives when they are correcting absolutist statements made by you, then its not going to be a constructive place in the end with nobody learning anything. — Gareth Meredith 1 hour ago
 
7:51 PM
@PM2Ring Flag. Comments are not for promoting alternative theories.
 
@ACuriousMind Ok. Do I use a custom flag?
 
@PM2Ring damn, now I really want to know what was in the comment thread above that
 
Love your work. ;)
 
@PM2Ring Yes (FWIW, at least one other user had already flagged the thread with exactly such a custom flag)
 
@EmilioPisanty He still has a couple of comments on the question, & you can get the gist of his "gravity polarization" theory in his quora post. rotationcurves.quora.com/Rotation-Curve-Phenomenon
 
7:57 PM
@PM2Ring eh, close enough
I was going to beg for a screenshot of Rob's response
 
@EmilioPisanty Rob chose not to respond.
Wisely so, in my opinion.
 
Rob was his usual civil, professional self.
 
including a proper
huh
@PM2Ring so who is "you" in that comment?
PM2Ring?
 
I wouldn't have posted my comment on the question if I'd seen the stuff on Rob's answer first.
 
some other third party?
 
8:02 PM
SE chat really needs a "stop replaying GIF" button on these one-boxed GIFs :P
 
@EmilioPisanty Gareth is addressing Rob, who made a simple refutation, but refused to be baited into an argument.
 
I mean, the cat is cute, but after the 100th time it get's kinda irritating
 
@ACuriousMind I think what you mean to say is "it is starting to wear down my defenses"
 
@ACuriousMind There's a Firefox userscript that can freeze & unfreeze GIFs. It may or may not work on current versions. ;)
 
@EmilioPisanty But it won't even stop if I give it what it wants!
 
8:04 PM
@ACuriousMind ok, fair enough
 
On xkcd, some people have annoying animated avatars that are so distracting I can't read pages that they post to unless I freeze the page.
 
@ACuriousMind here, have a cat-related picture to drive the gif off the active page
reading
 
Ah, found the Firefox config to set GIFs to only playing once
 
> Para subir a mi nueva casa tenía que pasar por un montón de gatos y yo tenía mucho miedo irracional a los gatos y me sentía muy nerviosos y traté de asustarlos pero siempre estaba allí y pedí ayuda a la Virgen y ella hizo que perdiera el miedo poco a poco y ahora hasta me gustan y les doy leche y cariño.
 
@EmilioPisanty that's all Greek to me
 
8:08 PM
> To climb up the steps to my new house I needed to pass by a bunch of cats and I had a lot of irrational fear to cats and I felt very afraids and I tried to scare them away but they were always there and I asked the Virgin for help and she made me lose the fear bit by bit and now I even like them and I give them milk and love
CC @DanielSank
punctuation as in the original, of course
 
The lady with the soul patch is the Virgin Mary then, I assume? :P
 
@ACuriousMind yes
what's a soul patch
huh
 
@EmilioPisanty The type of beard she seems to wear :P
 
yeah, it does kind of look like one
 
I initially thought it was dirt on my screen...
 
8:28 PM
Here's Andrea Motis, a jazz singer / trumpeter / saxophonist from Barcelona, singing Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, in Catalan.
As a counterpoint to the cartoon posted by Emilio.
 
The ultimate way/trick to remember the positions
$$[M_{\mu \nu},M_{\rho \sigma}] = i (M_{\mu} \, ^{ \nu} \eta^{\rho \sigma } + M_{\mu} \, ^{\nu} \eta^{\rho \sigma} - M_{\nu} \, ^{\mu} \eta^{\rho \sigma} - M_{\nu} \, ^{\mu} \eta^{\rho \sigma}) $$
$$= i (M_{\mu \sigma} \, ^{\nu} \eta^{\rho \sigma}_{\nu \rho} - M_{\mu \rho} \, ^{\nu} \eta^{\rho \sigma}_{\nu \sigma} - M_{\nu \sigma} \, ^{\mu} \eta^{\rho \sigma}_{\mu \rho} + M_{\nu \rho} \, ^{\mu} \eta^{\rho \sigma}_{\mu \sigma})
$$
$$= i (M_{\mu \sigma} \eta_{\nu \rho} - M_{\mu \rho} \eta_{\nu \sigma} - M_{\nu \sigma} \eta_{\mu \rho} + M_{\nu
 
8:54 PM
Basically, how do you remember what signs do you choose in $[M_{\mu \nu},P_{\rho}] = \pm 2 i P_{[\mu} \eta_{\nu] \rho}$ or $[M_{\mu \nu},M_{\rho \sigma}] = \pm 4 i M_{[\mu | [\rho} \eta_{\nu] | \sigma]}$? What if you forgot the order and wrote e.g. the first one as $[M_{\mu \nu},P_{\rho}] = \pm 2 i \eta_{\rho [\mu} P_{\nu]}$? Also the sign changes when the $i$'s are not there :\
Maybe there's some way to remember e.g. the $01,0$ (and similarly $01,01$) choice is supposed to reduce to blargh...
 
@bolbteppa The indices in your equalities do not obey any of the standard laws for indices (mismatched positions, indices occurring twice in upper/lower positions without being summed over, symbols suddenly developing more indices than they had on the l.h.s). It's not clear what the trick is supposed to be.
 
Or do the signs change with/without the $i$'s even
 
Sign conventions are the most terrible thing ever and I always try to not get caught in situations where they matter :P
 
Something so simple causes so much pain :'(
Also maybe the sign changes depending on the choice of metric signature?
 
It changes depending on the moon phase and the amount of caffeine in the author's veins
2
 
9:31 PM
You can fix the sign of $[J_{\mu \nu},J_{\rho \sigma}] = \pm 4 i J_{[\mu | [\rho} \eta_{\sigma]| \nu]}$ for a given metric depending by wanting e.g. $[J_x,J_y] = [J_{23},J_{31}] = i J_z = i J_{12} = \pm 4 i J_{[2|[3} \eta_{1]|3]} = \mp i J_{21} \eta_{33} = \mp i J_z \eta_{33}$ but this takes like more than 0.1 seconds of thought :(
If you wrote it the other way around ($[J,J] = \pm 4 i \eta J$) the sign might change so you'd need to do this again I think :\
It doesn't, hmm
Does it
 
10:08 PM
So $J_{[\mu | [ \rho |} \eta_{\nu] | \sigma]} = \eta_{[\mu | [ \rho |} J_{\nu] | \sigma]}$ and $J_{[\mu | [ \rho |} \eta_{\sigma] | \nu]} = - \eta_{[\mu | [ \rho |} J_{\nu] | \sigma]}$ so it seems safest to actually check $[J_x,J_y] = i J_z$ to fix the $\pm$ :(
 
@PM2Ring I commend the subtitlist for the almost-there use of the interpunct in Al·leluia
but the spacing isn't quite there either
 
So basically, using $[J_x,J_y] = i J_z$ i.e. $[J_{23},J_{31}] = i J_{12}$ and $[J_z,P_x] = i P_y$ i.e. $[J_{12},P_1] = i P_2$ and the above formulas it doesn't matter how you write them as long as these last two identities hold and they are easy to see in this shorthand notation and you don't have to worry about the metric, finally
 
10:24 PM
@EmilioPisanty I'll take your word for it. My knowledge of Catalan is pretty minimal, but I like the way it sounds. I know a bit of linguistics, and have some knowledge of the family of Romance languages, but the I only one I ever studied in depth is French, but that was in high school, several decades ago. When I was a kid, we had a Catalan family as near neighbours, and one of the girls was a close friend of one of my sisters.
 
@EmilioPisanty Every time I read about the history of punctuation it blows my mind that apparently almost all ancient civilizations didn't consider it necessary
 
I've been a fan of Andrea Motis, and quite a few of the other kids from the Sant Andreu school, for a few years.
 
I mean, I can sort of understand how you can write Chinese or Egyptian without punctuation marks, but why the Greek and Romans took so long to use it puzzles me completely
 
@ACuriousMind what?
In other news, though
A mandatory meeting involving a free lunch was just canceled. I have mixed feelings.
Onebox, do your magic
 
@EmilioPisanty Oh, I just read "(Word-separating spaces did not appear until some time between A.D. 600 and 800.) " in that Wiki article you linked and went off on a tangent...
 
10:29 PM
@ACuriousMind whoa
 
There's plenty of Latin inscriptions which use no word separation at all
 
ACM, you may have noticed that many Indians use non-standard punctuation. Which kind of makes sense, considering punctuation is pretty minimal in the Indian writing systems. And in those systems you're often forced to join adjacent words together.
 
@PM2Ring I never thought about that, but it makes sense
It's like Germans sprinkling commas randomly over English sentences because there always seem to be too few ;)
(Recurring blocker in a colleague's calendar: "This is the time, I am not in the office")
 
These writing systems are syllable-based, with most syllables consisting of a consonant or consonant cluster, followed by a vowel or diphthong. If a word ends in a consonant & the next begins with a vowel, you must join them together. And when the pronunciation of adjacent syllables affect each other (as it does in many languages), that affect is reflected in the spelling.
If we followed that rule in English, "dogs" would be spelled "dogz".
 
@PM2Ring That's why I said I can understand it in in e.g. Chinese. If you're writing in a syllabary, then you already have "units of speech" represented by the syllables. But I don't really get why languages with alphabets such as Greek or Latin didn't seem to consider separating words necessary for so long.
 
10:42 PM
It's a pretty obvious thing to do, in retrospect. But it took people a long time to realise that. ;) But it makes it a pain for an outsider learning the language, since you need to know a lot of vocabulary just to figure out where the word breaks probably are. :) I guess another factor is that literacy wasn't common, and these minor details didn't bother the scholars who could read & write.
 
Maybe an in-group factor? "Look at these peasants, they don't even know where words start and end"
 
There's a theory that in languages that are written right to left a majority of scribes were left-handed, because right-handers would be prone to smudge their writing, presuming they were writing with ink.
Left-handers don't mix well in an army where everybody else is using their swords in the right hand. So the left-handers get conscripted into admin. ;)
 
@PM2Ring Makes sense, left-handers would mess up any formation regardless of the weapon used. In fact, seems a so convenient just-so story that I'm wary of trusting it.
Trying to organize the mess that is history into something that makes sense is sometimes too tempting ;)
 
@ACuriousMind Sounds plausible. For several centuries, it was actually forbidden to produce translations of the Bible in the "vulgar" languages, like English. The congregation were expected to listen incomprehendingly to the priest read the scriptures in Latin & Greek. And then listen to the sermon in the local vernacular.
 
@PM2Ring ... not unlike German ...
 
10:53 PM
@EmilioPisanty ßßßßßß
2
(German hiss)
 
🤷🏻‍♂️
Don't blame me
 
@EmilioPisanty That renders as a feminine figure with a female symbol next to it for me.
 
@ACuriousMind Agreed. There ought to be a reasonable explanation. But humans have a big track record of doing sub-optimal stuff, and taking ages to break out of the loop. :)
In other news, it looks like Ben got hit with a revenge downvote. physics.stackexchange.com/a/471390/123208
 
11:10 PM
@PM2Ring Don't concern yourself with single votes, it's just fruitless speculation. The system and moderators have tools to combat serial voting, and a single vote cast in bad faith doesn't do all too much harm.
 
@ACuriousMind Sure. And Ben's a big boy who's more than capable of defending himself.
 
11:26 PM
@ACuriousMind that sounds enormously dubious
In particular, that sounds like you cannot distinguish between the make and female symbols
It also sounds like you've yet to learn to use a unicode identifier
 
OTOH, I do like to have an idea of which members are doing stuff that's not in keeping with the stack exchange spirit. I don't intend to stalk them, or get caught up in their games, or develop some kind of vigilante attitude. But when I do see consistent patterns of bad behaviour I like to have my facts straight before I go around making accusations.
And I felt it was appropriate to bring that guy to the mods' attention because I've been noticing his non-mainstream tendencies for a while now & it just went overboard today.
Anyway, I'll shut up about that stuff now.
 

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