robryk @robryk@qoto.org
I enjoy things around information theory (and data compression), complexity theory (and cryptography), read hard scifi, currently work on weird ML (we'll see how it goes), am somewhat literal minded and have approximate knowledge of random things. I like when statements have truth values, and when things can be described simply (which is not exactly the same as shortly) and yet have interesting properties.
I live in the largest city of Switzerland (and yet have cow and sheep pastures and a swimmable lake within a few hundred meters of my place :)). I speak Polish, English, German, and can understand simple Swiss German and French.
If in doubt, please err on the side of being direct with me. I very much appreciate when people tell me that I'm being inaccurate. I think that satisfying people's curiosity is the most important thing I could be doing (and usually enjoy doing it). I am normally terse in my writing and would appreciate requests to verbosify.
I appreciate it if my grammar or style is corrected (in any of the languages I use here).
Joined Nov 2020
curses
Let the Polish air force lethargy and delaying and pretend actions befall the people whose decisions cause it twice over.
TIL that fraction of deuterium in hydrogen in e.g. water depends on location and source of water (lake, ocean, precipitation): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_isotope_biogeochemistry
@whitequark would your headmate perhaps be willing and able to give a pointer to a reasonable point to start reading about this?
Like, why does transferrin exist? Why isn't all iron transport done with ferritin? (There's probably some extremely obvious reason, but I'm not a biochemist sadly.)
It feels really weird that we have proteins that transport something small (like oxygen or iron, below 100 daltons heavy) that can transport something like four of the things in question at a time and weigh _tens of kilodaltons_. And they're still more efficient than direct dissolution.
ph~
In other news, it's likely that we know the proximal reason for my recent poor sleep.
Amusing differences in prescriptions: apparently >30mg of Fe2+ per dose requires prescription in Poland. According to pharmawiki something with 100mg/dose is in category D in Switzerland.
@_thegeoff who specifically might find it interesting
Consider a pot with a convex bottom (i.e. it will stand on its midpoint) with sufficiently large radius of curvature to make it stable when filled to any level. When you put such a pot on an electric hotplate and get it boiling, it starts rocking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vB_szsLa3zk
I have a hypothesis on what's going on (the pot rocks away from the area where the boiling is more intense due to density difference, contact with hotplate increases rate of heating, so there's more heating on the side that's currently lower and thus any rocking gets amplified). Sadly, I don't have the pot anymore and didn't thing at that time of any experiments that could falsify this hypothesis.
We have a practical case of #Unicode encoding of country flags causing problems.
To recap, flags are encoded as sequences of codepoints corresponding to letters in the country's ISO code (so, Polish flag is <flag-p> <flag-l>). There is no heed paid to their mutability over time.
The Syrian flag will at some point start being rendered differently. Then, all the previous statements about Assad's government that used the flag will start rendering as if they were about the rebels.
I'm sad at Unicode's failures to fully and immutably encode the meaning of whoever wrote the text (see Han unification for counterexample to "fully").
@_thegeoff btw I've realized that heterodynic(sp?) interferometry is a thing, but haven't managed to dig up how it works exactly (in particular, what's the nonlinear mixer that can accept light and can emit RF, or how does it work without that).
robryk
boosted
robryk
boosted
Never thought about it this way before.
"We teach algorithms so that students learn to think about invariants and properties when writing code."
From "Fantastic Learning Resources" by matklad: https://matklad.github.io/2023/08/06/fantastic-learning-resources.html
Another example of "my post doesn't make it someplace": https://qoto.org/@robryk/113482933819338562
Notably:
1. I did try submitting the post twice, first time I got a toast with "500", so I retried.
2. The post appeared on the target instance after I submitted the self-reply underneath.
and two other potentially related things (which bother me, resp., less and not at all, but might be clues):
- when I press "load more" on _top_ of my feed, some very old posts get loaded (when I instead reload the UI, top of my feed actually contains newest posts),
- amusingly, the "@robryk" link in the left pane (see screenshot) opens a 404 page in the right pane (instead of my profile page).
@freemo [qoto issues]
In the last weeks I see cases when:
- my reply doesn't seem to be propagated to the instance of the person I'm replying to (e.g. https://qoto.org/@robryk/113466284303691885, https://qoto.org/@robryk/113466431766455928, and https://qoto.org/@robryk/113438196768975142),
- a reply made to me doesn't cause a notification to appear (IIRC https://mastodon.social/@_thegeoff/113437771508645893 had that issue).
I don't know if both issues started at the same time. At least in one case of my replies not making their way to the other instance (https://qoto.org/@robryk/113438196768975142) my posts made their way to that instance both before and after, so I would be even more surprised than by default if a relevant blocking relationship existed.
TIL that there's a detective Monk movie released last year.
I'm amused by the various ways (incl. an impatient one) one can read a "when will you too become Swiss?" letter subject.
A study claims to compare giving people same molar amounts of potassium chloride and potassium citrate... (They obviously didn't do that, because potassium citrate has 3 potassium atoms while chloride has 1, so (a) it would make no sense to do that (b) they would need to be exceedingly lucky to so happen to find a potassium dose ratio other than 1:1 that gives indistinguishable effects. They most like mean "moles of potassium" without saying that.)
I just saw a different version of righty-tighty-lefty-loosey: left-liberates-right-restricts.
I enjoy things around information theory (and data compression), complexity theory (and cryptography), read hard scifi, currently work on weird ML (we'll see how it goes), am somewhat literal minded and have approximate knowledge of random things. I like when statements have truth values, and when things can be described simply (which is not exactly the same as shortly) and yet have interesting properties.
I live in the largest city of Switzerland (and yet have cow and sheep pastures and a swimmable lake within a few hundred meters of my place :)). I speak Polish, English, German, and can understand simple Swiss German and French.
If in doubt, please err on the side of being direct with me. I very much appreciate when people tell me that I'm being inaccurate. I think that satisfying people's curiosity is the most important thing I could be doing (and usually enjoy doing it). I am normally terse in my writing and would appreciate requests to verbosify.
I appreciate it if my grammar or style is corrected (in any of the languages I use here).
Joined Nov 2020
