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9:00 PM
I don't know why people don't hate on Bill Gates more. Billions of dollars just sitting around?
 
@0celo7 right, but that's just the point - Bill Gates, some others and others as rich as him, support open access and have foundations supporting it.
 
Why can't we tax him 80 billion and do some good with it
 
@heather not a chance
 
@0celo7 he earned it, he can do with it what he pleases.
 
their business model depends on it
 
9:01 PM
@heather So you are advocating for a taxless society?
 
@0celo7 not at all.
 
Then your sentence does not make sense.
 
there's difference between taxing and complete money redistribution, which was it sounded like your comment was advocating.
 
oh, god, seriously, is this where the discussion is going?
 
@heather Is there a difference? You redistribute it to the government's coffers, and they do with as they see fit.
And you end up paying people like Blackwater and Halliburton.
 
9:03 PM
sorry, um, who are they?
 
@heather A mercenary group and a military contractor.
 
oh, they are some pretty shady people alright
 
i'd actually rather not argue about this. i'm still reading about scientific publishing.
 
@heather good choice
 
Capitalists should be overthrown of course
heather needs to learn Marxism
 
9:06 PM
@BalarkaSen Where did that come from?
 
Komrad Stalin
 
I was advocating for anarcho-capitalism
 
That's center-left. Extreme left or you are a traitor
I believe in totalitarian capitalism
 
@BalarkaSen it's more like center, straight down
don't care about anyone
@BalarkaSen oxymoron
 
GULAG
 
9:08 PM
what could be done @EmilioPisanty? It seems like it's kinda hopeless.
 
the world is hopeless
 
@heather I'm not currently on a hopeful stage of my relationship with academic publishing
 
oh.
 
be a postmodernist and accept the truth
 
2 days ago, by Emilio Pisanty
Remember this? http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/journal.html It's ten years old. How have things changed since then?
 
9:10 PM
just drink the Kool-Aid
nice and easy
 
I'd try it with some cocaine
 
so there's not even a path forward, nothing? It's just kind of throw your hands up and complain, and it has been for ten years!?
 
@heather well, not quite
 
@0celo7 kool aid is actually kind of scary
 
but I think Aaronson was even more right than it looked on the inertia bit
but there are some nontrivial advances
funding agencies requiring CC-BY access to publications arising from their grants
particularly on the side of the Wellcome Trust
 
9:12 PM
i read the Gates Foundation requires the same.
 
and a similar initiative from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
 
ironically, i read it in a Nature article.
 
@heather they're nowhere near the size of Wellcome as far as science funding goes
 
ah.
well, okay, another question: is there anything individuals can do?
 
though on the other hand I'm not sure the OSTP thing is likely to stand for long =(
@heather individual scientists can ensure that all of their research output is publicly available under CC-BY license, or as close to that as possible
 
9:14 PM
we are all individuals
 
individual readers can help make that happen by making it glaringly obvious to scientists that don't do that that (i) they're not doing it and (ii) it diminishes the impact of their papers
i.e. email them and ask for a copy and put in a pointed suggestion that this is awkward and time-consuming and that they should really just make them publicly available
 
how do I do that not-rudely?
 
@heather it's not that hard
just ask for a copy and say that you couldn't find it in the standard repos
 
oh, okay.
 
@heather "Give me the paper or I will remember this interaction. One day I will be your boss."
 
9:17 PM
+1
 
also, vote with your money: not a cent to Elsevier / Springer journals / T&F / etc
 
not planning on doing that.
 
there is also support in various ways to new models of publishing
quantum-journal.org, for example
 
how can I help with that?
 
@BalarkaSen I wonder if there are Green identities for Sobolev functions
that sounds like something that would be in Federer
 
9:18 PM
Hell if I know man
 
@heather it depends on the journal a bit
but generally
readership
views
diffusion
 
Is $Xg(Y, Z) + Yg(X, Z) = Zg(X, Y)$ for biinvariant $g(-, -)$ and $X, Y, Z$ left-invariant unit vector fields
 
visibility
the more examples of high-impact open-access journals and meta-journals there are, the better
but at present publishing in Quantum is a gamble
since you don't know how many people will read it
 
@BalarkaSen I don't know off the top of my head, why?
 
dC wants me to prove $\nabla_X Y = 1/2 [X, Y]$
on a Lie group with a biinvariant metric
 
9:21 PM
Oh, I always found that exercise to be really hard without a hint
 
okay.
what are other open access journals, other than Quantum?
 
also, if you are in the US, the next time anything important publishing-related comes up, you can let your representatives know that you care about this and that you think the existing situation is appalling
@heather well, there's a spectrum
so, there's things like New Journal of Physics and Physical Review X
which are the open-access branch of existing academic-society publishers
 
@0celo7 What's the hint
 
and they're still incredibly expensive
 
More importantly, do I want a hint?
 
9:24 PM
look up the Article Processing Charges, they're in the range of USD 1000 to 1500
 
so does new journal of physics (for example) indirectly support the main, non-open-access journals?
 
what I would like to see more of is meta-journals
 
so far I have... simply plugged in the formula for the Riemannian connection $\nabla$ :p
 
@heather NJP is part of the IOP portfolio
 
@BalarkaSen You want to use the Koszul formula here.
 
9:25 PM
if they get it to work consistently and profitably over a substantial length of time, the idea is that they'll push to have the same model throughout their stack
 
Also the last inline equation on page 80.
 
it's already possible to publish through "gold" open access on, say, J Phys B
and related journals
 
I'm literally fiddling with that equation
 
It's not conceptual, you just need to plug in formulas until you get it.
 
what's Koszul again
 
9:26 PM
@BalarkaSen Eq. 9 on 55
 
@EmilioPisanty so to support it is to encourage them to have all their journals be open access.
 
@heather that would help
but the APCs are not currently at a level I would consider sustainable
 
@0celo7 That's literally the equation on page 80 you told me/
didn't know it had a name
 
@BalarkaSen I said inline.
Also yes, it's there too.
 
so, for example, I have a paper that I would like to submit to NJP, but I don't have any grant money that would cover the APC
 
9:28 PM
(X, nabla Y Y) = (X, [X, Y])?
 
Yeah
 
Huh
 
it's (Y,[X,Y])
 
Sorry, right
 
@EmilioPisanty this sounds like an impressively complicated problem
 
9:32 PM
@heather oh, the solution is easy, we won't submit there
@heather btw here you go
 
oh, no, I mean the whole issue of publishing.
 
0
A: Meaning of "intensity" in the optical Kerr effect in optical quantum computation

Emilio PisantyAs far as the intensity of a single-photon goes, the relevant quantity is calculated as usual from the energy density as $I=uc$, where $c$ is the speed of light, and the energy density $$ u=\frac{\hbar\omega}{V} $$ is given by the photon energy $\hbar \omega$ (normally no bigger than a few eV) di...

@heather it is indeed
 
Maybe I need to approximate by smooth functions...
The boundary of my rectangle is not smooth though...
Maybe I can round off the corners
 
@0celo7 Did you understand why I asked you that question about X, Y, Z? If I use <[U, V], W> = <U, [V, W]> by biinvariance, that cancels two of those bracket terms
 
@EmilioPisanty great answer, thank you.
 
9:33 PM
and I would need the front expression in Koszul to be 0
 
@BalarkaSen yes, that's the kind of trick you use
 
@heather no worries
 
and then use the equation I gave you to turn the derivatives into brackets
 
okay, i have another semi-random question: why hasn't anyone sued a publishing company for their copyright on the basis of economic duress?
 
if you take care of signs that should be all that's required
 
9:35 PM
@heather why is it US Americans always think the only solution to problems is suing?
 
@heather What?
 
=P
seriously, though: because it's extraordinarily unlikely to work
 
lol, i don't generally, but it just seemed like something someone might do.
 
@EmilioPisanty Lawsuit rates are not higher in America than Europe, we just have a larger press corps.
 
@0celo7 mmmm hmmmm
 
9:35 PM
@EmilioPisanty why not?
 
@heather what's "economic duress"?
 
^
 
as far as the publisher is concerned, they're providing a service and you're opting to hire them for it
 
I love a good lawsuit but what does that mean
 
Minor terminology question. A physical state corresponds to an element of a projective Hilbert space: an equivalence class of vectors in a Hilbert space that differ by a constant multiple - in other words, a one-dimensional subspace of the Hilbert space. Wouldn't it be more natural to refer to these as "lines" in Hilbert space rather than "rays"? After all, gauging the global $U(1)$ symmetry results in the complex line bundle (not "ray bundle") of QED, and a projective space is often loosely referred to as "the set of lines [not rays] through the origin." — tparker 3 mins ago
 
that's actually a good quesiton
anyone knows the answer?
 
basically, you're forced to sign the contract because of the situation you're in.
 
> A representative of RELX Group, the official name of Elsevier since 2015, told me that it and other publishers “serve the research community by doing things that they need that they either cannot, or do not do on their own, and charge a fair price for that service”
 
@AccidentalFourierTransform Pretty sure it's because it excludes the 0, and therefore is a "ray" emanating from the origin
 
@0celo7 I'm a dummy. Your formula actually isn't needed; <X, Y> etc are all constant because X and Y are left invariant
 
9:38 PM
@ACuriousMind hmm good point
 
so the derivatives are all zero
 
Sure, it's not consistent with calling the projective space a set of lines, but when has physics terminology ever been consistent with standard math usage? :P
 
I thought that it might be because the concept was introduced by someone from, say, France, and it was a literal translation
 
I do get <nabla_Y X, Z> = 1/2 <[Y, X], Z> for all Z
 
for example, I could (theoretically) argue economic duress because my job depends on getting published in certain journals, and those journals force the people that hold my job to basically force me to get published in certain journals (in other words, what you just told me is true in terms of publishing) @EmilioPisanty
 
9:38 PM
@heather I dunno, I'd be pretty chuffed if someone tried that
 
@BalarkaSen so divide by Z
 
yeh
 
@EmilioPisanty why would you be pleased?
 
@heather because it would make for some glorious press + PR battle
 
@AccidentalFourierTransform The actual historical origin of that terminology would be a nice question for History of Science and Mathematics
Are you going to post there or shall I?
 
9:40 PM
@EmilioPisanty well, couldn't you argue that's what's happening with publishing today? i.e., you could initiate that sort of suit semi-legitimately, and even if you don't win, you get tons of press.
 
@heather I don't see how any of those fit this situation.
 
@ACuriousMind please do
 
and if you do win the scientist(s) get back their copyrights.
 
@heather yeah, so like I said, I'd be pretty chuffed if someone tried that
 
@0celo7 point 4, see my comment above:
> for example, I could (theoretically) argue economic duress because my job depends on getting published in certain journals, and those journals force the people that hold my job to basically force me to get published in certain journals (in other words, what you just told me is true in terms of publishing)
@EmilioPisanty so...then why has nobody done it?
 
9:42 PM
@heather The scientists themselves are not paying. They are using grant money.
 
@heather I think the main problem with the argument is that the publishers don't go to scientists and say "Hey, give us that to publish it".
 
@heather well, suing is expensive
 
Unless I am horribly misunderstanding the publishing process.
 
@ACuriousMind no, but it seems they practically force them to come to them to get it published...
 
@heather More like their bosses and colleagues force them.
 
9:43 PM
@heather btw if you do read Mercedes's thesis, lemme know how you find it
 
@EmilioPisanty i'm downloading it now.
i'm actually not sure i have room for it =P
 
insert rambling about GDP
 
@0celo7 but the bosses are forced because they must continue purchasing journals to keep up the copyright, and they want their employees to publish in journals they own, and journals that are considered high-impact factor, which is a term basically created by the journals.
 
@heather yeah, but the question is whether you could get that to stick in a US court
plus two rounds of appeals
 
9:46 PM
@EmilioPisanty who knows? with a good lawyer, lots of things can.
i'm just illustrating an example scenario.
 
against a multi-billion-dollar corporation that sees your lawsuit (plus any press it can generate) as an existential threat
 
they probably have hit men too
 
and is happy to give a blank check to the legal team facing you
 
@heather And then consider how good the lawyers are the publishers can pay from all that sweet subscription money :P
 
you could fall into an ion beam or something
 
9:48 PM
... which doesn't necessarily make them win, but it does make it that much more expensive for you to fight
 
I wonder what the corporate murder rate is, seriously
There seems to be too much money floating around
People are totally willing to kill over it
 
well, i guess i can see why no one has done it, then.
 
I mean, Emilio is right that this would be very interesting to watch as a PR spectacle, but I wouldn't wanna be the poor sod actually suing them...
 
just a random thought.
@ACuriousMind now, what you really need is a rich guy deciding to do this for the heck of it.
 
@heather write Bill Gates a letter
or bootstrap yourself to billionairehood
 
9:50 PM
Capitalists don't care about the proletariat
 
naive children
 
@heather I think no one except the person claiming to be forced to sign the contract can actually sue for such things
 
learn Marxism-Leninism and revolt
 
Hm, maybe we can get Simons to do it :P
 
9:51 PM
@ACuriousMind a rich person "sponsoring" a scientist.
 
im a scientist
can I have one of those please
 
@ACuriousMind It would be a class action lawsuit
 
well, that's what them Breakthrough Prizes are doing aren't they
 
I know all about those from Better Call Saul
 
Milner and Zuckerberg giving fat money to good mathematicians
eg Jacob Lurie
 
9:54 PM
@BalarkaSen yeah, I want to see some Zuckerberg money funding a lawsuit that stands up and sticks it to the Man
 
@BalarkaSen NOOOOOOO
 
hmm, there's not even a space to attach a petition.
 
The Laplacian on a manifold is not even a divergence form operator
 
@0celo7 If you have a significant grant it likely has a line item for publishing cost. If you don't have a grant you or your department or the school may have to pony up.
 
9:57 PM
@0celo7 rekt
 
And while the majority of papers are published by professors in the former catagory there are a non-trivial number published by those in the latter.
 
@heather that would need to come all the way from Bill
 
@BalarkaSen All of regularity theory goes out of the window because of that
Back to the drawing board.
 
ah, well. it was a stupid idea anyway.
back to the thesis =)
 
learn marxism instead of coming up with all these neosocialist simplicism damnit
 
9:59 PM
@BalarkaSen And then what?
 
REVOLT
 
@BalarkaSen I think one can cheat a little. I'm trying to solve $\Delta u=f$. In coordinates that's $$\frac{1}{\sqrt g}\partial_i(g^{ij}\partial_j u)=f.$$ Buuuuut if I write that as $$\partial_i(g^{ij}\partial_j u)=\sqrt g f,$$ I think it can work...
 
@ACuriousMind Basically, keep trying to make a big revolution. Change the material dialectical dynamic of the world
 
@BalarkaSen Not that I'm completely opposed to the idea, but revolutions have a pretty bad historical record at actually making things better :P
 
^ That.
 
10:01 PM
Well, Lenin did a great job man
It worked
 
@BalarkaSen Plan: 1. Use functional analytic techniques on global Sobolev spaces to get a weak solution. 2. Make sure the weak solution satisfies weak boundary conditions. 3. Cut up the function into local pieces that lie in local Sobolev spaces. 4. Make sure this cutting gives nice boundary conditions. 5. Show that the local Sobolev spaces can be taken to be Euclidean ones. 6. Apply Euclidean regularity theory. 7. Patch together solutions while maintaining the boundary conditions.
Alternative Plan: 1. Read Vol 1 of Hormander. 2. Read Vol 2 of Hormander. 3. Read Vol 3 of Hormander. 4. Read the classic papers by Atiyah, Grubb, and Seeley.
Neither plan seems reasonable.
 
@ACuriousMind Surely you realize I'm speaking in an ironic tone
 
i'm on the abstract of the thesis and i'm already reading another paper to get some background.
 
@BalarkaSen I had hoped so, but it is pretty hard to tell, honestly.
 
I am mostly joking. I don't actually believe in revolution as a plan of making the power dynamic between the various classes and economies better; I think of it as a want of a historical change. Personally I'm mostly opposed to the idea.
 
10:05 PM
I got so absorbed in this that 6 hours disappeared
Not sure if that's a good or bad thing
 
USSR was a flop, Red China was a flop, etc etc
 
> Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article.
 
huh, i just got a ping about a flag - i'm not above 10k on any one site, so how did that happen?
 
It's probably cumulative rep.
 
@heather Chat sums up your reputation across all sites
 
10:07 PM
oh, yep, then I qualify.
cool.
 
@AccidentalFourierTransform You might mention it's called Poe's law
 
that's never happened before, though, and i've been above 10k across sites a while now.
 
In the grand scheme of things, chat flags are actually pretty rare
 
@BalarkaSen Does Milnor have Meyers' theorem?
 
10:08 PM
@AccidentalFourierTransform I can so relate to that
 
@AccidentalFourierTransform You should've scribbled "Poe's law" on the ball and replace it by "AFT's law" in the last image
 
@0celo7 Not sure; I'll have to check
 
I dont know how to edit images
 
@BalarkaSen It's one of the best theorems
 
but I'm so lazy I don't want to open the .pdf
 
10:09 PM
@ACuriousMind does it actually?
 
@AccidentalFourierTransform +---
@EmilioPisanty It does, actually
 
@ACuriousMind I swear to god
 
so if you have 100 rep on 100 sites
 
Use $-+++$
 
who the hell even uses +---
 
10:09 PM
@BalarkaSen I do
 
@0celo7 I wasn't advocating any signature, but using that as a reminder that AFT very well knows how to edit that into images
@EmilioPisanty Congrats, now you know how to b a 10k user on chat :P
(yes, it's a terrible system)
 
@BalarkaSen If $(M,g)$ is complete and $\mathrm{Ric}\ge (n-1)k>0$, then $M$ is compact, has finite fundamental group, and has diameter $\le \pi/\sqrt{k}$.
 
@Emilio I mean like why m8
@0celo7 Oh wow that's a nice theorem
 
@BalarkaSen oh, I'll use any signature I need to if it will annoy people who get annoyed at other people's signatures
I'm happy to use ---+ if it'll annoy people, too
 
@BalarkaSen I think Milnor has an amazing proof using the loop space
 
10:11 PM
$---+$ 4evah
 
There are a few proofs of this
 
@0celo7 I'll check it out tomorrow as the first thing I do
 
@BalarkaSen It's the nicest example of a "global theorem"
Granted, completeness is a global hypothesis, but curvature is 100% local.
 
yeah
 
10:13 PM
Completeness is of course necessary...
 
> public outreach opportunity
lolz
you mean "PR stunt"
 
Now I learn what ze Killing field is
 
@AccidentalFourierTransform 'night
 
@BalarkaSen that's something that physicists know very well
 
10:18 PM
Indeed?
 
@BalarkaSen killing fields in GR correspond to physical symmetries
And they determine conserved quantities
 
@AccidentalFourierTransform I've asked it
 
"Energy is not conserved" because there is generally no timelike killing field
 
@ACuriousMind how come there isn't a place called Killing in Germany
?
 
So I just read the definition; just fields such that the 1-parameter group of diffeomorphism given by them on a neighborhood of any point is a 1-parameter group of isometries
 
10:21 PM
I mean, there's already a person
 
That sounds fair
 
and it would make such a nice conclusion to the standard sequence
 
@BalarkaSen yep
 
@0celo7 I see, interesting
 
@BalarkaSen Exercise (very hard): The vector space of killing vectors is finite dimensional on a compact manifold.
Also true for noncompact, but you need to turn the isometry group into a Lie group for that
There's a more or less elementary proof for compact ones
 
10:23 PM
@EmilioPisanty I have absolutely no idea where the name comes from, and "Killing" doesn't mean anything in modern German, so really, no idea. Googling its etymology is impossible, all I get are "killing in the name", "Kill Bill" and similar English results...
 
> In mathematics, a Killing vector field (often just Killing field)), named after Wilhelm Killing
Wilhelm Karl Joseph Killing (10 May 1847 – 11 February 1923) was a German mathematician who made important contributions to the theories of Lie algebras, Lie groups, and non-Euclidean geometry. Killing studied at the University of Münster and later wrote his dissertation under Karl Weierstrass and Ernst Kummer at Berlin in 1872. He taught in gymnasia (secondary schools) from 1868 to 1872. He became a professor at the seminary college Collegium Hosianum in Braunsberg (now Braniewo). He took holy orders in order to take his teaching position. He became rector of the college and chair of the town...
 
I know it's named after Wilhelm Killing, but I don't know where his name comes from
 
@ACuriousMind yeah, well, name etymologies are always way more challenging
 
In order to answer whether or not it's a feasible name for a place, one would have to know what it means, no?
 
@ACuriousMind would it?
What does Fucking mean in German?
 
10:25 PM
@0celo7 Woo, interesting. Bookmarked.
 
@EmilioPisanty Apparently, it's an evolution of ~ "Focko-ing(en)", where Focko was the name of the guy who founded the city, and -ing(en) is a common suffix for places. Which...explains nothing, I admit.
 
@ACuriousMind see
?
toldja
 
Actually, "Killingen" sounds like a very possible German village
Ha, it exists!
 
-ingen is no fun
 
Well, but -ing is just a shortened -ingen :P
Anyway, Killingen is a part of a part of Ellwangen
No information about the origin of that name there, either
 
11:27 PM
@ACuriousMind I've been told to play PoE next month when the expansion comes out
Is that a fair suggestion?
 

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