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1:13 AM
> A 24-year-old man was arrested for allegedly threatening firefighters in the area of St. Andrews Lane and Dillon Road on Friday morning. Police responded to a call from someone saying a man with an assault rifle threatened firefighters at 9:45 a.m. on Friday.
> Stephen Roch was later arrested after leaving the area in a vehicle. Louisville Police Chief David Hayes said several weapons were recovered when he was taken into custody, including the assault rifle he was reportedly carrying. He was booked into Boulder County jail on charges of menacing, obstructing government operations, obstructing a peace officer/firefighter, eluding, and third-degree criminal trespass.
Just because you're frustrated that firefighters won't let you back into your firebombed neighborhood while they're still securing it doesn't mean you get to threaten them with an AK-47 to try to get your way. What the hell is wrong with this country?
And he was carrying several weapons.
Menacing is a felony charge.
 
1:44 AM
@Mitch I was reading an article on Quanta, and tried to peek into the actual research papers, and understood nothing. Here is the article: Does Time Really Flow? New Clues Come From a Century-Old Approach to Math
I'm grateful to Quanta authors for trying to explain complex concept without the use of formulas to laypeople.
At least I can say I'm aware that something of this kind is being researched.
 
2:13 AM
> She Who Must Not Be Named is the author of the book series Harry Potter.
 
2:29 AM
Who?
 
2:50 AM
@CowperKettle I couldn't find any mention of 'mortal numbers' in the linked Quanta article. What article is that passage from?
 
@Mitch From "Indeterminism in physics and intuitionistic mathematics" (Nicolas Gisin, 2021) link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-021-03378-z
@Cerberus JK Rowling
JK Rowling had the audacity to express her opinion on something related to trans-sexuality or something, and a lot of people got angry. I did not read in depth.
 
@CowperKettle found it
Yeah... the Quanta article says Gisin came across 'intuitionist mathematics' last year The guy has missed a century of development in philosophy of mathematics -and- physics.
 
Ah! I never even heard about this kind of mathematics until 22:00 yesterday.
Probably along with some 6 or 7 billion people.
 
haha
 
There is a famous Russian video of a gathering of teachers in a cafe, and one teacher brought along a composition on history of Russia by a pupil. Never mind intuitionism, for many people, 50 years ago is "here be dragons". The pupil mixed up monarchy and communist times in such a way that fantasy authors would bite their fists in envy.
By the end of the reading of this composition, they are almost rolling on the floor of laughter.
 
3:01 AM
For philosophy of mathematics, there was always (for 2 thousand years) Platonism (= math is real, actually more real than our senses). Then in the 1880-1920's, there were three new schools, Logicism (= all math can be derived from purely logical principles), Formalism (don't worry about what's real, just push symbols around), and our little friend Intuitionism (math is just stuff in our heads).
These three aren't mutually exclusive but still people fell into one of these three camps.
Then Gödel showed that proof is not the same as truth, sort of killing off Logicism, Intuitionism made math harder to do, and Formalism was boring. So everyone is mostly Platonist day to day, but logicians study exactly what Logicism gets you and Intuitionism is one of those things you get when you restrict things a lot.
So sure, you can get some "non-standard" number systems, like a continuum (real numbers) but augmented by having around each individual real number a 'padding' of infinitesimals. This sounds like what Gisin is using.
In mathematics, the system of hyperreal numbers is a way of treating infinite and infinitesimal (infinitely small but non-zero) quantities. The hyperreals, or nonstandard reals, *R, are an extension of the real numbers R that contains numbers greater than anything of the form 1 + 1 + ⋯ + 1 {\displaystyle 1+1+\cdots +1} (for any finite number of terms).Such numbers are infinite, and their reciprocals are infinitesimals. The term "hyper-real" was introduced by Edwin Hewitt in 1948.The hyperreal numbers satisfy...
 
They are trying to explain the existence of the time arrow by using intuitionism
Emotionally, I like the version in which everything is strictly predetermined and can be theoretically calculated.
 
@CowperKettle That pupil will one day be the superintendent of education and have them all fired because of their old-fashioned ideas.
 
@Mitch The composition is so surreal that I think it was really invented, or half-invented. But it's very funny.
Someone should come up with English subtitles.
 
@CowperKettle yes. total predetermination is very satisfying psychologically
but experimentally, some objects act purely probabilistically (as a distribution rather than as a point)
but using math to model distributions captures quote a lot, and though you can't predict single particles, you can predict the distribution. (or at a much larger scale you can predict things about an object made of many particles.
@CowperKettle Youtube has options to autotranslate the autosubtitles
... but it's not doing it for me.
 
3:20 AM
Maybe deep down below, all objects are deterministic, but it's on such a tiny scale that humanity will never be able to measure it.
 
@CowperKettle English subtitles are finally appearing but the make no sense.
 
@Mitch Because the old lady teacher does not pronounce it clearly
@Mitch Here is the text of the composition in Russian, you can use Google Translate on it: helpprison.ru/2017/09/15/…
> When Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was born, no one knew that he would be the leader of the communists, whom they remember today. He was a great man. Lenin went to school. Sometimes guys pestered him. It ended in a showdown in the schoolyard. Lenin did not like to fight, but he had to defend himself or defend his friends.
> In addition to school, Vladimir Ilyich went to work, since in those days money was needed to at least somehow feed himself. The counters in the store were almost empty. Bread and food was given on ration cards. And Vladimir Ilyich lived not like a rich citizen, but like all the people who surrounded him. He ran and handed out flyers. He stood in the street with a huge sheaf of newspapers, ran up to cars and sold these newspapers.
> I don’t know how Vladimir Ilyich became the leader. Probably he somehow showed himself in front of people. When he “ascended the throne,” he began to lead all people into the future of the communists. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin tried to make sure that there was more food on the shelves and that there was less unemployment. He succeeded, of course, but not for long. The crops in the villages did not always give a good harvest. Sometimes the harvest is simply ruined.
> Lenin was very fond of children. At parades, he took the child and carried him in his arms. People did not revive that their child was taken by the leader. When the Great October Revolution began, panic began in the country. Vladimir Ilyich could not restrain people. I had to calm them down by force. All guys over the age of sixteen were sent to war. Some people were afraid and hid.
> After a while they were found and sentenced to death. Because of the revolution, a hunger strike began in the country. Bread was practically not brought. There was no water anywhere. And if they did, they gave me a piece of bread and half a mug of water. Some of them could not even get to the car with food, because, seized by hunger, they lay on the floor and their minds (crossed out) died.
> It was hard for Vladimir Ilyich Lenin to look at everything that was happening. He could not give people more food just because the Germans were getting closer and closer to the villages.
> They burned crops, took food from old people and women by force. Then the Germans shot the people in the village and burned it. Lenin understood that the Germans were approaching Moscow. He sent more and more people to the war, while he himself sat in a guarded place and waited for news.
> The people in the country rebelled and began to smash the city. Lenin ordered the soldiers to calm the people down. The soldiers spared neither children nor women. When everything calmed down a little, Vladimir Ilyich wanted to know about the news in Moscow and the Moscow region. He drove out in his car with the guards. But he did not travel long. He was ambushed by the revolutionaries. It was then that Lenin was caught and put behind bars.
> Behind bars, Lenin read books by candlelight. In the margins, in the book, he wrote messages with milk. But the revolutionaries found out about his plans and took away the books. After several days, Soviet troops reached the place where Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was. They surrounded the revolutionaries and took them prisoner. Lenin was free. For the last time, Lenin sent all his troops to the German army.
> In this battle, the Soviet army finally defeated the enemy army. After this victory, perestroika began in the country. Now Lenin was not an enemy of the people, but a friend. They began to bring food, opened new factories, and new buildings began to appear.
This LOLed the teachers the most.
> One evening, as he usually does, Lenin wanted to get into his car and then drive home. As soon as Vladimir Ilyich opened the car door, a shot rang out. The bullet overtook Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and hit the carotid artery. Lenin died. At the place of the shot was only an old woman who could not see anything further than two meters. She was caught and shot.
> After Lenin's death, monuments dedicated to him were erected. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin himself was buried in Red Square in the Mausoleum, where he still lies. Lenin is carefully guarded. They are allowed to enter the Mausoleum to look at it. Now Lenin is almost entirely made up of prostheses.
> When light falls on him, it seems that he is glowing from within. I hope that in the future he will be buried as a person. After all, he is like a manikin there, and everyone is looking at him. He is also a human being, just like us. Let him be buried properly, not like a manikin. "
 
@CowperKettle It reads very authentically like a high school student who has a word limit on an essay and is just filling it up with stuff he is vaguely remembering from inside and outside of class about (he's not reading his textbook and was half asleep in class).
 
Lenin would be very amused to read that he was "captured by the revolutionaries".
 
yeah I thought that was weird.
 
3:31 AM
There's a video where young people are asked in the street who Lenin was. Some schoolboy said "Leader of the protelariat. Pro.. tel.. ariat. I don't know".
A girl said "some kind of president".
 
Knowing things is a sign of education, but, really, do you actually need to know what happened, what that guy's name was, is it anything more than a trivia question?
 
Yes, it's all disposable knowledge
 
that is to say, knowing the word 'proletariat', is that going to help you make a decision at the ballot box, or how to fire a weapon?
@CowperKettle maybe I'm too harsh... knowing those little tidbits is just a byproduct of needing to know many little facts that -are- useful.
 
I don't know how to fire a weapon.
I only fired air-operated rifles
A long time ago in a shooting gallery.
In "Homage to Catalonia", Orwell describes how they were given rifles and sent to the front, and he was the only one in the squad who actually knew how to operate a rifle.
 
Like all physicians have to learn a lot of very practical things about every subfield of medicine, but 99% of it they'll never use in their specialty they end up practicing (eg dermatologists couldn't care less about surgery)
@CowperKettle The British education system works!
@CowperKettle I think on the republican side, most fighters were non-professional (and on the Nationalist side it was (mostly) the trained Spanish army.
I think
I just get the feeling that was the case.
 
3:39 AM
In Soviet schools pupils had to dismantle a Kalashnikov and put it together again.
In Russia, we boys were a bit envious of that.
Because they removed Primary Military Training from the school curriculum.
 
@CowperKettle It's a good life skill to have, just like using jumper cables to start a car with a dead battery or baking bread
 
And put another subject instead, where they teach you how to escape a fire and perform a delivery in a pinch.
The same old Soviet army man who used to teach Military Training now was teaching this new subject.
But he was totally unaware how to perform a delivery, so the school invided a woman from a hospital, and she came and described it to us.
He was retained by the school because he also doubled up as a sports teacher and a night guard, and lived in the school building.
So during the new subject lessons, he used to tell us stories from his life instead, being not very versed in the newly invented subject. He told us how he was sent to Czechoslovakia to fight fascists in 1968.
 
@CowperKettle at a summer camp here it was common to have activities - arts and crafts, woodworking, archery, and riflery. But it was just shooting practice of the simplest rifles and we didn't go so far as to take apart the things like they do in the movies.
@CowperKettle as in deliver a baby? That's kind of a lot to ask of a teenager. But I guess it's super informative to be taught that. Like also CPR.
 
@Mitch Yes. She described how to cut the cord, and use vodka if there is no medical spirit handy.
And how to use scissors if the birth canal is too tight.
And make a cut to make it larger.
Episiotomy.
@Mitch The thing I hated most was jumping from one bar to the other in a set of bars placed high above ground. For some reason it was considered part of "pre-military" training.
And this was retained as an exercise. Scary.
 
@CowperKettle ow
 
3:53 AM
> In the United States, as of 2012, it was performed in 12% of vaginal births.
 
@CowperKettle That is a -great- skill to have. But also not for everyone. and also I would think pretty dangerous.
@CowperKettle it used to be a lot more common than that
> The other day I bought a thesaurus, but when I got home and opened it, all the pages were blank… I have no words to describe how angry I am.
 
4:39 AM
> I asked a cute German girl her phone number. Apparently it is 999-999-9999.
It's horrible that there is still no cure for work.
 
 
3 hours later…
7:21 AM
Word of the day: gessoed board
 
8:01 AM
Etymology of the day: tweezers (mid 17th century: extended form of obsolete tweeze ‘case of surgical instruments’, shortening of etweese, anglicized plural of etui.)
This was unexpected.
A transformation from "container" to "an implement for picking up and manipulating something".
 
 
1 hour later…
9:27 AM
 
 
2 hours later…
11:23 AM
-7°C
 
 
3 hours later…
2:20 PM
> 800 mcg folinic acid and 1000 mg betaine were administered twice a day from immediately after the baseline blood draw for a period of 3 mo.
I wonder: does it mean that 800 mcg were administered each time, summing up to 1600/day, or does it mean that it was divided into two parts of 400 mcg, given twice daily to sum up to 800 mcg/day.
 
2:43 PM
@CowperKettle The former. 1600 mcg total of folinic acid per day.
 
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Blacklisted username, offensive answer detected, potentially bad keyword in answer, toxic answer detected (248): Asking a question "to", "from", or "of"?‭ by HMgovermant‭ on english.SE
 
3:25 PM
@Robusto THank you!
It was warm today, so a lot of bicyclists
This one with a dirty trunk bag
I have the same type of bag, it's quite nice and very voluminous.
 
4:24 PM
> "What we have developed is a test that can not only indicate the presence of depression but it can also indicate therapeutic response with a single biomarker, and that is something that has not existed to date" medicalxpress.com/news/…
The Holy Grail of affective psychiatry.
 
4:50 PM
Wikipedia weirdness of the day: Pittsburg toilet en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_toilet
 
5:31 PM
 
@CowperKettle Is that a joke? More people today means more deaths, right?
 
@Robusto I think it just means that there is more Wikipedia articles about people who lived more recently
Because the population is bigger, the amount of written evidence is more extensive, etc.
 
@CowperKettle Again, because more people (at least that we know about).
Jinx, I thinx.
Here's Mitch. He'll save us!
 
haha no
you're on your own
 
Turns out Kurt Godel was suffering from depression and afraid of poisoning. I never went beyond the first paragraph, and heard about him only the fact that he created a famous theorem misused by pseudoscientists.
I mean the first paragraph on Wikipedia.
 
5:42 PM
but really I came here to say what you both already said... 'with wikipedia pages' there are a lot more for recently dying people than people a thousand years ago who are all presumably dead
@CowperKettle the paranoia and food aversion were only in the very last years of his life, well after his many contributions to logic.
 
Yes, I also think so
At the end of life, many people get a bit deranged.
 
Isn't it some kind of theorem that mathematicians don't do great work after age 40?
 
Neurogenesis in the hippocampus declines with age.
 
Just one more way Nature has of slowing you down.
 
It's like the story about Bertrand Russell. In all the short paragraph bios of him they invariably mention he had halitosis, which was something 1) he mentioned once in his autobiography as having been told he had bad breath once by some woman. 2) everybody has it at least once.
@Robusto A theorem that has been shown by experience to be untrue (in the mathematical sense) by the existence of Euler and Weierstrass and Hilbert.
 
5:47 PM
People love stories about deranged geniuses. Or genii.
 
OMG and Poincare.
 
Touché!
But those are merely outliers, aren't they?
 
@CowperKettle I've seen some papers about 'mathematicians and mental health' and it turned out that contrary to popular belief mathematicians have roughly the same proportion of mental health problems as the general public...
except for logicians (much higher problems)
 
There is a theory that Titanic really sunk not because of the iceberg, but because it was overloaded with all the time travel tourists.
 
Nov 4 '20 at 20:11, by Robusto
@FaheemMitha Outliers can also force us to reexamine our premises. For example, if we hypothesize that there are no human beings who are three meters tall, and then we find one who is 2.9 meters tall, even though we prove the hypothesis we might suppose that there could possibly be humans who are 3 meters tall.
@CowperKettle Which proves the earth is flat how, exactly?
 
5:49 PM
Cantor (nutballs), Post (sever depression), Curry (depression)... uh... some others I can't remember?
 
James Watson's son has schizophrenia. But schizohprenia is quite common, at 0.5% of population.
 
@Robusto That's what my aside 'true (in the mathematical sense)' was supposed to address. even if something is a rare exception, it is a still an exception and therefore you cannot make a universal statement.
@CowperKettle I think it is a lot more. Just lots more people are able to compensate and just not freak out about the other voices in their head.
 
Goldner et al. [8] pooled data from 18 international studies and estimated the global prevalence rate of schizophrenia at 0.34%. journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/…
 
@CowperKettle Hm... I wonder if that is from questionnaires or from an RCT?
 
There are wildly different figures in different sources, from 0.25% to 1%.
For instance, any doctor's favorite UpToDate website gives a prevalence of "approaching 1%" uptodate.com/contents/….
Russian doctors who adhere to evidence-based medicine love UpToDate.
 
5:56 PM
@CowperKettle That makes it sounds like "consider a random doctor...on that doc's rating page it also mentions that 1% of their patients have schizophrenia"
@CowperKettle I hear UpToDate is more reliable than WebMD
(I can only see WebMD and they have useful stuff but also some ... to put it diplomatically... non-science based material)
I've seen articles suggesting aromatherapy and acupuncture as treatments.
 
Guidelines issued by the Russian Healthcare Ministry are poisoned to a different degree with snake oil "super-nano-drugs" produced by Russian firms, hence doctors scorn them and turn to Western sources.
 
but the WebMD artciles often say something on the order of "or you can try lemon verbena (not scientifically shown to have any effect whatesoever)"
@CowperKettle super nano drugs? You had me at just plain old nano drugs
 
@Mitch Lemon adverbena is much better.
 
2 weeks ago, Russia registered some drug against covid, called "MIR 19".
There is no published research on it.
Yet it "works against all strains".
 
7:00 PM
@CowperKettle Sounds uncannily like "snake oil" ...
Snake oil is a term used to describe deceptive marketing, health care fraud, or a scam. Similarly, "snake oil salesman" is a common expression used to describe someone who sells, promotes, or is a general proponent of some valueless or fraudulent cure, remedy, or solution. The term comes from the "snake oil" that used to be sold as a cure-all elixir for many kinds of physiological problems. Many 19th-century United States and 18th-century European entrepreneurs advertised and sold mineral oil (often mixed with various active and inactive household herbs, spices, drugs, and compounds, but containing...
 
"Works equally well against all strains" would be a true claim, though.
 
7:31 PM
@DjinTonic "Has cured all disease in everybody who survived the medicine"
 
7:56 PM
@Robusto 25
Oh, it was only an AK-15 not an AK-47. Thank goodness.
> A man named Stephen Roch, 24, is accused of threatening firefighters with an AR 15 during the Marshall Fire. Affidavit says 2,000 rounds were found in his vehicle. "If you want me out, you'll need to take me out and I have an AR 15," he's accused of saying when told to leave.
> Roch was booked on felony menacing. Police also wrote in report they found a 9 mm handgun in his vehicle along with loose ammunition. AR 15 was loaded and the safety was off, according to affidavit.
 
@tchrist I assume he didn't mean dinner and a movie.
 
@DjinTonic What's the sniperese word for Nope?
A felony menacing conviction really throws a wet blanket on a smouldering gun-owner's ability to ever legally possess firearms again.
 
@tchrist Mathematicians are a strange breed.
 
I'm for every household having a musket (at most). Say 9ne shot per 60 sec. Rather than 60 shots per sec.
 
Mar 23 '21 at 3:53, by Robusto
@tchrist I want someone to tell me where in the Second Amendment it says any idiot has a right to have an assault rifle.
Mar 23 '21 at 3:55, by Robusto
When the Founders ratified the Constitution, a rifle was something that took half a minute to load and fire a single shot. They never dreamed one malignant idiot could shoot ten people in less than ten seconds, or that one idiot in a hotel room in Las Vegas could kill 59 people and wound nearly 500 more in the space of a few minutes.
@DjinTonic Welcome to EL&U chat.
 
8:12 PM
TY
 
@tchrist Was there a purpose to his defiance, or was he just against any representative of any imagined affront to his self-sovereignty?
 
 
1 hour later…
9:23 PM
@CowperKettle A very small number of people always get angry. They can be ignored.
 
9:34 PM
@CowperKettle AFAIK she really makes it easy to be angry at her though
@Cerberus AAAAAA
I don't care much, but if I'm not mistaken she's the sort to retcon characters to be gay or something, which is not that annoying, but then goes on to say "trans people don't exist", something like that, and progressives are a bit all-or-nothing about it, so she comes off as a hypocrite to them
I'm sure she treats the criticism like my character in Skyrim. When you're that rich and famous (hence powerful) the more people get angry at you the more amusing it becomes
 
@M.A.R. That would seem highly unlikely, for her to say that.
But angry people probably don't care about what she really said, and especially not about the exact context.
Luckily, I don't care either.
 
9:49 PM
My chief complaint about Rowling is that I found her books unreadable.
 
@Cerberus This is less than easy to do when they're threatening you with a military assault rifle.
 
I don't think she was threatened with a rifle...
 
I read Rob's post then yours an hour later, and merged these.
You weren't replying to Rob after all.
 
In fact, the first word in his statement is "@Cowperkettle" ... ^_^
 
What's the difference?
 
9:55 PM
Two different discussions.
 
Cowperkettle, Robusto, it's all the same to me.
 
Now you're just trying to be cute.
 
Is it working?
 
Not yet.
I'll let you know.
 
OK, thanks!!
 
10:00 PM
👍
 

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