In the last two Friday Notes posts [one and two] I mentioned spending March and April in getting stuff done mode (a change from my lazy retirement) but, other than a picture of my new couch, haven’t written much about it.
In part because I keep boundaries between online and Real Life™; in part because much of it is trivial (except to me); and in part because I didn’t have room in those Notes posts. (I am a man of many parts.)
However, one new thing is the opposite of trivial.
Just for fun, here are a bunch of meme images I’ve made recently. Most of them were for the Notes section of Substack (its version of tweets). They’re all just my version of interesting memes I’ve seen or good lines that I thought deserved a nice image. Enjoy…
Be a Tauist!
I’ve found it extremely difficult to focus this past week. Most of the blame is on Substack Notes, a part of Substack that’s very similar to Twitter or a Facebook feed. I never had Twitter, dumped Facebook ages ago, and barely know what Instagram, Snapchat, et cetera are.
I have no immunity to a doomscrolling feed of interesting micro-posts. Reading them is bad enough. The urge to jump in join the fun is all but irresistible. But days are passing with little to show for them: no books read, no posts worked on, no software projects advanced.
Now it’s Tau Day, and I can’t let that pass postless.
It’s been a few minutes since my last post. Lately, the effort of writing hasn’t seemed worth the almost non-existent return. I find I’ve lost faith in humanity, and the phrase that seems most resonant is: “Really, when you come right down to it, what’s the point of it all?” I think, at least in our case, the Fermi Paradox seems resolved.
Perhaps more crucially, this damned dark cloud over me seems all I can write about. Everything else seems ephemeral. If we can’t solve our most basic human problems (education, race, gender, poverty, pollution) then the rest of it really is fiddling while Rome burns.
It makes me angry. Humanity can do better than this. I think.
I posted a while back about the wonders of Fourier Curves, and I’ve posted many times about Euler’s Formula and other graphical wonders of the complex plane. Recently, a Numberphile video introduced me to another graphical wonder: Euler Spirals. They’re one of those very simple ideas that results in almost infinite variety (because of chaos).
As it turned out, the video (videos, actually) led to a number of fun diversions that have kept me occupied recently. (Numberphile has inspired more than a few projects over the years. Cool ideas I just had to try for myself.)
This all has to do with virtual turtles.
Venus emerging from the sea.
I’ve been thinking about emergence. That things emerge seems clear, but a question involves the precise nature of exactly what emerges. The more I think about it, the more I think it may amount to word slicing. Things do emerge. Whether or not we call them truly “new” seems definitional.
There is a common distinction made between weak and strong emergence (alternately epistemological and ontological emergence, respectively). Some reject the distinction, and I find myself leaning that way. I think — at least under physicalism — there really is only weak (epistemological) emergence.
But I also think it amounts to strong (ontological) emergence.
Happy Tau Day! It’s funny. I feels like I’ve written a lot of posts about pi plus few about it’s bigger sibling, tau. Yet the reality is that I’ve only ever written one Tau Day post, and that was back in 2014. (As far as celebrating Pi Day, I’ve only written three posts in eight years: 2015, 2016, & 2019.)
What I’m probably remembering is mentioning pi a lot here (which is vaguely ironic in that I won’t eat pie — mostly I don’t like cooked fruit, but there’s always been something about pie that didn’t appeal — something about baking blackbirds in a crust or something).
It’s true that I am fascinated by the number.
Happy Pi Day! Order some pizza and use pi to make sure you get the most pie possible! I made a handy chart that may change how you order pizza.
Or not. It’s something I heard about early in the year that caused a minor tweet storm (I’m not on the Twitter, so never saw nothing, which I’m fine with). It centered around how it was often better to order two smaller pizzas than one large one (depending on pricing and assuming your goal is the most pizza possible per peso).
Since pi is involved in this pizza pie probe, I thought it would make a fun topic for Pi Day (not to mention March Mathness).
Well, it’s Pi Day once again (although this date becomes more and more inaccurate as the century proceeds). So, once again, I’ll opine that Tau Day is cooler. (see: Happy Tau Day!)
Last year, for extra-special Pi Day, I wrote a post that pretty much says all I have to say about Pi. (see: Here Today; Pi Tomorrow) That post was actually published the day before. I used the actual day to kick off last Spring’s series on Special Relativity.
What remains to be said? Not much, really, but I’ve never let that stop me before, so why start now?
I seem to be doing a lot of reblogging lately (a lot for me, anyway). But I’m on kind of a math kick right now, and this ties in nicely with all that.
You’ve probably seen it somewhere on your facebook feed, likely shared by a particularly wide-eyed friend: pi found hidden in the hydrogen atom!
From the headlines, this sounds like some sort of kabbalistic nonsense, like finding the golden ratio in random pictures.
Read the actual articles, and the story is a bit more reasonable. The last two I linked above seem to be decent takes on it, they’re just saddled with ridiculous headlines. As usual, I blame the editors. This time, they’ve obscured an interesting point about the link between physics and mathematics.
So what does “pi found hidden in the hydrogen atom” actually mean?
It doesn’t mean that there’s some deep importance to the number pi in nature, beyond its relevance in mathematics in general. The reason that pi is showing up here isn’t especially deep.
It isn’t trivial either, though. I’ve seen a few people…
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