DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)

I'm a philomath (many interests; call it polymath-wanna-be) professional computer programmer in Silicon Valley, specializing in operating systems, languages/compilers, sometimes AI, usually non-traditional parallel software and hardware architectures.
Also:
#computer_science #unicode #unix #linux #bsd #unix_old_fart
#compilers
#operating_systems
#GOF_AI
#cognitive_science
#linguistics
#physics
#mathematics

Ex-springboard diver; scuba diver; free diver

Ars longa, vita brevis.

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npub1vlchukd4yknuculh52a5xzq98k4fcndnp4ptnl9jx7gr6j5nqsls06mzqq

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dougmerritt_at_mathstodon.xyz@momostr.pink

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relay.damus.io

nos.lol

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Published at

2026-06-18T11:36:00Z

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Last Notes

2026-06-06 18:51:03 UTC

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The more obvious an answer is, the more likely it is to be labelled as "silly", in the sense that the questioner presumably already knew that, so it indicates a lack of common sense in not taking that into account.
Conversely, John gives a much less obvious and much more insightful answer, which is more in the direction of something that a questioner would not already know.
@npub1nf4…nqe4

2026-04-06 18:50:43 UTC

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>> That's not my way of doing physics - I can afford to be less of an ambulance-chaser.
Sure, sure, I know that about you, but it's not like dark radiation was invented by this particular paper.
It's at least as old as 2008 (the 2024 date appears to be the last-edit date or even just a mistake):
"Dark Matter and Dark Radiation"
Lotty Ackerman, Matthew R. Buckley, Sean M. Carroll, and Marc Kamionkowski
2008
Physical Review D. 79 (2) 023519.
https://arxiv.org/abs/0810.5126
...with a survey paper at least as early as 2011:
"The Case for Dark Radiation"
Maria Archidiacono, Erminia Calabrese, Alessandro Melchiorri
https://arxiv.org/abs/1109.2767v1
Maybe today your taste is to not work on still-hypothetical physics, but you *used* to like at least some of that, when you were working on an alternative to String Theory.
Otherwise I wouldn't mention it to you.
I try to be very, very cautious about wasting your time.
> Of course here "almost conflict with each other" is a funny way of saying "almost nail it down precisely".
Indeed. :)

2026-04-06 04:39:02 UTC

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That sucks. I hadn't heard the news that WIMPs are completely out of fashion.

2026-04-05 18:35:36 UTC

RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@dougmerritt/116353281772100891
@npub1nf4…nqe4
Have you blogged about dark radiation? Since you're currently looking at particles, it occurred to me that you might have an opinion or even a brainstorm about this.
It's a wide open topic.
#note1ftm…fh7p

2026-04-05 17:29:43 UTC

Physical Review Letters:
"Impostor among Neutrinos: Dark Radiation Masquerading as Self-Interacting Neutrinos"
2 April 2026
Abstract
Multiple cosmological observations hint at neutrino self-interactions beyond the standard model, yet such interactions face severe constraints from terrestrial experiments. We resolve this tension by introducing a model where active neutrinos resonantly convert to self-interacting dark radiation after BBN but before CMB epoch. This exploits the fact that cosmological observables cannot distinguish between neutrinos and dark radiation with the same abundance and free-streaming properties. Our mechanism, based on a simple type-I seesaw framework along with a keV scale scalar mediator, achieves two objectives: (i) it produces strongly self-interacting dark radiation that imitates neutrino self-interactions favored by cosmological data, and (ii) it depletes the active neutrino energy density, relaxing cosmological neutrino mass bounds and easing the tension with neutrino oscillation data. The model naturally evades laboratory constraints through suppression of the neutrino-mediator coupling by the squared mass ratio of active and sterile neutrinos. We show that this scenario is favored over Λ⁢CDM by the combined Planck and DESI data, while being consistent with all other constraints. Our mechanism is testable in future laboratory probes of absolute neutrino mass and searches for sterile neutrinos.
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/jprg-jll6
Phys. Rev. Lett. 136, 131003 – Published 2 April, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/jprg-jll6

2026-04-05 00:02:28 UTC

The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House
https://www.dbreunig.com/2026/03/26/winchester-mystery-house.html

2026-03-30 18:18:09 UTC

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Yes, well, moving past John's point:
Easier said than done. Current things like Lean are lots better than the systems of years ago, but -- do you have any specific ideas?
I used to follow that area of technology, but I somewhat burned out on it. For now, Terry Tao et al is getting good mileage out of Lean.
I suppose there's some analogy with the period of shift from Peano axioms to ZFC and beyond.

2026-03-29 20:27:59 UTC

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> formalization tends to impose consensus
I'm not sure people are getting your point. The way I see it, formalization tends to make people subconsciously think in terms of The One And Only Truth -- and thus consensus.
But we know that in mathematics, there are always other paths, and truths follow from axioms / axiom schemas, which themselves can vary.
Or perhaps I'm missing your point, too.

2026-03-23 16:31:28 UTC

It had to happen...it's becoming increasingly common to see:
> No LLMs were involved in the process of writing this blog post.
...at the start of blog entries and maybe articles, too.

2026-03-12 17:31:42 UTC

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> it's too useful for too many things to really "fail"
This is true, despite the fact that we're inundated by stronger claims ("this really is AGI already! Claude is conscious!") which are definitely false.
But also this middle-ground, that it's useful nonetheless, is lost on my many industry colleagues who have been fighting the good fight against the quacksters, but too vehemently to give any ground or quarter; they'll be the last to grant that there's any use.

2026-03-12 14:15:25 UTC

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Glad to hear it! Horror stories are what I recalled, too.

2026-03-12 05:42:01 UTC

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> The "top-down" management that Taylor and Francis seems to be implementing is running roughshod over the standard practices of the refereeing process in mathematics.
That right there is already inexcusable with no further explanation.

2026-03-10 18:30:56 UTC

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Assuming you're making light of a reality (and it *was* funny), my sympathies that you have to do a bone marrow biopsy. Good luck on *everything*!

2026-03-10 18:01:08 UTC

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> Some might have no working performance cores.
That is of course not typical for an ASIC. You're wanting to try something experimental with the fab process itself?
Or is it just so large that statistics kill it?

2026-03-10 17:57:23 UTC

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To be *slightly* less of a smartass, I searched on Kähler on your blog, since clearly you would have discussed this in the past. Sure enough:
https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/?s=K%C3%A4hler

2026-03-10 17:45:15 UTC

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> it has a god-given Kähler structure
Way to put your foot down and assert, "*THIS* part is true, I will fight to the death to defend it...we can chat about the rest. I mean, whatever. "
😆

2026-03-10 05:31:31 UTC

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We've liked it. It has a different feel to it.

2026-03-10 02:26:01 UTC

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Use of white phosphorus on civilians is horrific beyond words, and unquestionably constitutes a terrible war crime.
The loophole is always that the aggressors, like Israel here, claim that the use was on a military target, and civilians nearby were merely unfortunate.
I don't believe them, but proving it in the right jurisdiction is another matter.

2026-03-10 01:59:42 UTC

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What is the time difference? It seems like you're up early.
Keep us posted on your paper; so far so good. 🙂

2026-03-07 14:00:44 UTC

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I hadn't noticed that diaspora Iranians were cheering. Yes, they must want regime change and are not considering the war crimes on children.
I dislike thinking that they may be sociopaths, but admittedly I don't actually know.

2026-03-06 18:12:33 UTC

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You write well, but I get depressed by these subjects, so I typically don't engage much on them online.

2026-03-06 05:53:54 UTC

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This sounds like a crime against humanity -- which of course will end up unprosecuted, which is a travesty.

2026-03-05 01:47:23 UTC

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Oh, and "some of my best friends" do IT without CS. My wife's best friend's husband has a science BS and has a great career in network administration.
Similarly with many people I've worked with.

2026-03-05 01:45:06 UTC

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Yeah, certifications are a way of showing knowledge prior to having experience, so they can help people get jobs -- although in practice certification programs are predatory and prey on the unskilled.

2026-02-28 02:52:48 UTC

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@lcamtuf/116145915896015100
@npub1nf4…nqe4
Speaking of best approxmations, lcamtuf is fighting the good fight (education), arriving at Dirichlet’s approximation theorem plus a bit about Diophantine approximations:
"Approximation game: The number 22/7 and the pigeon flock of Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet."
https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/approximation-game
via
https://mathstodon.xyz/@npub1ysw…uzpe/116145915962464328
#note1rv8…e2rs

2026-02-25 01:24:19 UTC

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> This is why clocks, which were based on sundials, have hands that move clockwise...decided to break free of this colonial legacy
I sense an angular momentum CPT violation in progress; call the weak police!

2026-02-22 19:49:24 UTC

"CSLib: The Lean Computer Science Library"
4 Feb 2026
"We introduce CSLib, an open-source framework for proving computer-science-related theorems and writing formally verified code in the Lean proof assistant."
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.04846

2026-02-22 18:02:40 UTC

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> It may seem weird that sounds should robustly match with shapes, but I think it follows from physics
When I found out about the effect via linguistics, I too concluded it was likely due to physics.
This news about baby chicks makes that seem even more likely.

2026-02-12 21:16:26 UTC

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Interesting! I had read up on the history of the western calendars, but it's been decades, and I sure didn't remember that part.

2026-02-12 18:15:07 UTC

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> a year that was 18 × 20 = 360 years long
"years" should be "days"

2026-02-10 23:36:26 UTC

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Yes, great take on that.

2026-02-10 17:56:12 UTC

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You really ask the tough questions.
@npub1nf4…nqe4

2026-02-10 17:54:16 UTC

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That's all well and good, but how does one convert from Blue Sky dates to Mastodon dates? 😆

2026-02-10 17:36:16 UTC

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Ha, small world!
> he knows too much about sporadic finite simple groups
Stop me if I've told you before:
I find that a very tough subject, but in the 1980s I was friends with Arunas Rudvalis when he temporarily moved to my area, discoverer of the Rudvalis sporadic simple group (order 145,926,144,000 = 2^14 * 3^3 *5^3 * 7 * 12 * 29); he's a very very smart guy (long retired), I learned a lot about (non-group theory) math from him.
At one point I threw a party that he attended, and he was very excited: "do you have the latest Scientific American? I'm in it!"
I did have it (quite the coincidence that the party and the publication happened at the same time), and he showed everyone the article about the completion of classification (*), and the non-mathematician partiers had no idea what he had done but were all duly impressed. :)
On one of my visits with him, he said that, since his specialty was finished (he didn't care about the long wrap-up that followed), he was switching to...I think he called it "probability theory". I expressed surprise that he was moving to another area that surely was also almost done, but he said "no no, it's not; take *all* of mathematics and make the variables random ones -- that's the topic, so it will never be finished"
Just one example of him blowing my mind by enlarging my perspective.
(*) Daniel Gorenstein (1985), "The Enormous Theorem", Scientific American, December 1, 1985, vol. 253, no. 6, pp. 104–115.

2026-02-10 16:22:19 UTC

@npub1nf4…nqe4
As posted by our mathstodon sysadmin today:
"Music: a Mathematical Offering"
2006/2008
https://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/d.j.benson/pages/html/maths-music.html
via
mathstodon.xyz/@esoterica/116045269128018241
Web page shows chapter headings.

2026-02-09 18:15:10 UTC

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Gene used to post to Usenet, e.g.:
From: gsmith@ronzoni.berkeley.edu (Gene Ward Smith)
Newsgroups: sci.math,comp.music
Subject: Re: A Mathematical Theory of Music
Date: 20 Jul 90 03:53:40 GMT
In article <1269.26909383@gp.govt.nz> philip@gp.govt.nz (Philip
Dorrell) writes:
>>>All [...] intervals in music can be expressed in terms of integral powers of
>>>2, 3 and 5. Taking logarithms, this gives a 3-dimensional vector space with
>>>basis vectors log 2, log 3 and log 5.
What you should say is that music based on 2,3 and 5 forms a
subgroup (free of rank 3) of Q*, the multiplicative group of
positive rationals, and that the log map takes this in a natural
way to a lattice in R3. If we assume a mean-tone type system, the
kernal of the homomorphism from this rank 3 abelian group to the
rank 2 group which covers mean-tone systems is generated by
81/80, which is the well-known diatonic comma: the difference
(9/8)/(10/9) between the two just major tones of the just
diatonic scale.
>It seems that some approximation error always occurs somewhere, and this is in
>fact a consequence of my theory - according to it, every tune contains a 'proof'
>that 80 = 81. For example : suppose there existed some tune played on an exactly
>tuned scale that did not somewhere come up against the problem that an interval
>in the tune was out by a factor of 81/80 from what you wanted it to be -
>according to my theory, such a tune would not be a tune.
Your theory is wrong. Lots of music can be made on just the
diatonic major scale. Make everything triadic, and so long as the
minor supertonic (ie d minor over C major) is avoided, you are
home free.

2026-02-08 23:09:28 UTC

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I knew the word "theobromine" but not its derivation; interesting!
@npub1zm0…qduz

2026-02-08 22:51:18 UTC

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Indeed, there are many modern chocolate worshippers!
@npub1nf4…nqe4

2026-02-08 22:50:06 UTC

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Well, yeah! 😆

2026-02-08 22:45:06 UTC

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> From the ancient Maya texts, particularly the Popol Vuh, we learn that cacao was considered a divine gift from the gods. It was believed that the cacao tree was created by the gods to provide sustenance for humanity. The mythology surrounding cacao emphasizes its sacred nature, as it was often consumed in rituals and ceremonies designed to honor the deities. The Maya viewed cacao as a connector between the earthly and spiritual realms, making its cultivation and consumption a vital aspect of their culture.
> Chocolate played a multifaceted role in Maya society, influencing everything from social status to religious practices. It was primarily consumed as a frothy, bitter drink called "xocolatl," often flavored with spices, honey, or chili.
https://www.mexicohistorico.com/paginas/The-Maya-Use-of-Chocolate--A-Sacred-Drink.html
"Chili" I recalled but not honey. For the Mayans that is.

2026-01-22 01:51:33 UTC

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Nice that it brings back memories for you.
My dad wasn't very musical, but he did mention that "Lili Marleen" was popular with both the allies and the axis during WWII, (confirmed -- it wasn't just my dad saying so) which is weird. Marlene Dietrich sang the version that the allies heard (including my dad, who bombed Nazi Germany). It was used in the famous film "Judgement in Nuremberg".
It's a pleasant song.
Marlene Dietrich 1944 English version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBi5j7yPwd0
Original 1939 German version sung by Lale Andersen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjXC4N1HXf0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lili_Marleen

2026-01-22 01:29:32 UTC

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Similarly, cartoonist Tad Dorgan is credited with coining or popularizing all these:
dumbbell (stupid person)
for crying out loud (expletive)
cat's meow (superlative)
cat's pajamas (superlative)
cheaters (eyeglasses)
"yes, we have no bananas" (nonsense that was turned into a popular song)
no: "hot dog" for sausage (ATTRIBUTION INCORRECT)
no: 23 skiddoo (I read this elsewhere but it's not listed by wikipedia)
...and some others that I didn't note because I didn't recognize them; they may not have survived past the first half of the twentieth century even if formerly popular.
He worked at The San Francisco Chronicle and The New York Journal as a sports journalist and cartoonist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tad_Dorgan#Slang

2026-01-21 16:00:45 UTC

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My impression is that, if you're in a country that historically was managed by the Brit's empire, then you may optionally put dairy products in tea, otherwise it is strictly forbidden.

2026-01-12 03:50:50 UTC

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So Clifford was saying that the motion of matter is exclusively due to the wave-like motion of "hills"/curves in space.
Pretty early for that sort of talk.

2026-01-10 00:00:24 UTC

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It's a good thing that Poincare is famous in his own right rather than going down in history as a completely forgotten unknown, although not a household name like Einstein.

2026-01-09 20:06:17 UTC

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Yes, Einstein's work is typically discussed as if he was working complete ab initio, as if like Athena sprung fully formed from the brow of Zeus, without mention of precursor work, but of course Einstein, although brilliant, was not working in a vacuum. His work was enabled by multiple other mathematicians and physicists.
Without prompting my memory, the first obvious such is Minkowski.
We all stand on the shoulders of other humans (giants or not :)

2026-01-09 00:19:12 UTC

RE: https://wandering.shop/@cstross/115861935194088492
@npub1nf4…nqe4
Life in Edinburgh....

2026-01-08 06:55:04 UTC

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I'm not so sure about adding anything multi-paradigm to the list, but I see that that point can be argued.
I see the motivation for all of them, in any case.
Except that I haven't really looked much at Python, and not at all at Elixer, unlike all those other languages (several of which I've even implemented 🙂 ), so I don't have an opinion otherwise.
@npub1gnu…0jmx

2026-01-08 05:51:41 UTC

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True, and there are various arguments for and against each of those (and for any language, of course).
But note that you are sort of underscoring his point. C++ began as "C With Classes", a mix of C and Smalltalk (and then added a truly vast amount of avoidable complexity on top of that).
Haskell and OCaml are similarly mixes of Standard ML and other ideas.
I agree that entirely separate paradigms were introduced by SQL, Lisp (not Scheme), Prolog, and APL (not J) historically. So those fit in the list.
And it's fair to bend the rules and use Scheme as an improvement over Common Lisp, and to use J, a good modernization of APL.
I think Amen was aiming at fairly pure examples of foundational paradigms, not "best language to use", but any discussion of these things can quickly get complicated.
@npub1gnu…0jmx

2025-12-26 17:17:05 UTC

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Yes, I don't disagree -- but students of a field always find ways of viewing terminology in a way that makes it seem completely arbitrary, even though their teacher sees that it was motivated.

2025-12-26 16:46:48 UTC

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The circle of fifths helps clarify the topic. In fact for most western music it is essential to master thinking in terms of it (despite the "contradiction" that, descending in the other direction, it's the circle of fourths).
None of this is illogical, not one little bit. The *terminology* of course derives from historical accident.

2025-12-21 22:37:50 UTC

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Hmm. Well, why *did* that recipe use the word "chip" at all?
There's something unexplained here.

2025-12-20 16:52:19 UTC

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> wildfire
So, a long term repeating issue, not one-off.

2025-12-16 17:13:39 UTC

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"We have always been at war with Glasgow."

2025-12-16 16:59:13 UTC

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RE: https://wandering.shop/@cstross/115725135370824735
@npub1nf4…nqe4
If it's not one thing, it's another.
If it's not Edinburgh weapons of mass destruction, it's Edinburgh Deep Government helicopters:
https://mathstodon.xyz/@npub1dnd…hzjs/115725136248568177

2025-12-15 20:59:55 UTC

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A cynic would say that every country has such a term, but I see that's not the kind of answer you're looking for.
@npub15fr…ltmz

2025-12-15 18:55:48 UTC

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Oh, and at the start it says that the video contains her ideas for such an approach.
Links include her paper:
⁠Could ∞-Category Theory Be Taught To Undergraduates? (paper): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.07855

2025-12-15 18:53:19 UTC

@npub1nf4…nqe4
This conceivably could be of interest to you, although it's 8 months old so you also may have heard of it already:
"Emily Riehl Makes Infinity Categories Elementary"
"Emily Riehl, one of the world’s leading category theorists, shares her vision for making infinity category theory something undergrads can actually learn.
"In this talk, she breaks down how rethinking the foundations of math could change the way it’s taught and understood—and why it might redefine what math even is."
In the channel of Curt Jaimungal, who somehow manages to get a lot of high-profile interviewees.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTwvecBthpQ

2025-12-14 21:29:21 UTC

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People keep reinventing that notion, but it can't be true: black holes have a pretty well defined position and center in 3 dimensions, because it obviously is a 3-dimensional object despite having a past and future, while the universe (and the Big Bang) has no center in 3 dimensions; it is 4-dimensional.
@npub1nf4…nqe4

2025-12-14 20:35:36 UTC

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The fundamental particles all being on the Compton line is verrrrrrry suspicious.

2025-12-11 11:11:50 UTC

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Sounds like you know more about all that than I. I take it there's evidence Orwell knew about Zamyatin's "We"?
[@ramin_hal9001](https://fe.disroot.org/users/ramin_hal9001 ) @npub1urw…lh52

2025-12-11 10:25:06 UTC

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Our actual reality not falling apart sufficiently or fast enough for some people, they must start imagining the joining of some of the darkest of warnings famously in novels over history.
Just kidding. 🙂
Well...maybe I'm not kidding, because things look pretty bad, but I hold no ill will, how's that.
I always thought Brave New World was the scariest in mainstream literature (not counting e.g. science fiction), because it is structured so as to seem paradisical to most of its inhabitants / possible critics, and yet certain aspects are strongly dystopian.

2025-12-10 21:03:02 UTC

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Every instrument has a soul -- when played that way.
Perhaps the musician and the instrument share one soul, when they are in accord.

2025-12-10 18:04:21 UTC

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Sauron followers.

2025-12-08 15:10:07 UTC

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I feel like this is why spin 1/2 particles must anticommute; I'm not way off base there, am I?

2025-12-07 13:27:53 UTC

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Fleshing that out a touch:
People who moved from twitter to places like hereabouts when they did, triggered by events, presumably have a set of traits that are less common in people who stayed on twitter.
(I know there are people who had already been here for years, but I don't know their traits, and I think the refugees are the larger population here anyway)
The traits in question *might* predispose certain attitudes towards AI.
It's food for thought; I don't immediately see a good way to test the idea, though, so....thought is good 🙂 .

2025-12-07 11:10:50 UTC

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Yes, I had read what Terry said. Most of the public seems to polarize to be either strong for or against LLM, but Terry just grabbed the bull by the horns and uses it so carefully but forcefully that it bends to his will, unlike many of the hyper-enthusiastic crowd who are nowhere near so careful.
The lessons in that are obvious -- but you're that kind of person, too, so I'm preaching to the choir here.

2025-12-07 10:49:22 UTC

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Agreed on all of the above, although apropos of nothing but that you said the word "language":
"verbing weirds language" -- Calvin and Hobbes

2025-12-07 10:45:58 UTC

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> However, the Axiom team didn't notice this.
Or more likely, they were more interested in claims that assisted getting $64 million than they were in carefully accurate statements. 🙄

2025-12-06 22:48:03 UTC

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Yes, I remember, and yes, it's certainly different.
The current era's new ways has both positives and negatives, as usual, but I'm a lifelong fan of technology.

2025-12-06 17:59:36 UTC

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We all managed to get by, and to share, before the internet, so this would merely be returning to our past practices -- although it would be devastating to everything otherwise, since all is based on the internet these days.
But BBSes still exist, and there are still people with modems to communicate over phone lines.
> => I would only write things that can be shouted in a crowded pub or restaurant. 📢
Great!!!

2025-12-05 15:40:47 UTC

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Tom is correct.
OTOH someone said that a conditional, "if", is being added to CSS, which brings it closer. If they add looping with something like "while", then it becomes a programming language, albeit a problematic one.

2025-12-05 14:29:59 UTC

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And there are many choices of a coordinate system, including coordinate-free.
Practical applications typically emphasize a particular choice because it has been found to be useful in that context, but that doesn't mean that it's the only choice, and in pure math it is often useful to dismiss them altogether.
Bridging pure math and applied math for practical applications can be complex and confusing, but it's good to remember that they *are* different domains.

2025-12-05 14:22:08 UTC

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There are many common distributions of noise, including this one, and they are all of technical interest. In signal processing I usually see them addressed in terms of Fourier Analysis, but of course that's just the start.

2025-11-30 01:58:46 UTC

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It appears to include material that you doubtless previously studied; which parts of it prompted your purchase?

2025-11-25 22:55:39 UTC

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I'm aware that you have a strong background in multiple ways, but I think this is the first time I've heard someone say they really should already know algebraic geometry much better.
I mean, I was under the impression that one needed to specialize in algebraic geometry to know it well.
Oh, well, I'm just in the company of talent here, between you and John, so why am I surprised.
Edit: in no way am I comparing the two of you; I should have worded that more carefully.
@npub1nf4…nqe4

2025-11-23 10:14:23 UTC

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I listened to them yesterday. Beautiful. I'm not an expert on Bach but I liked them. Meanwhile my music theory friends haven't gotten back to me about them, but hey, Bach is Bach.

2025-11-23 02:49:59 UTC

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2001 - Anders Hejlsberg invents C#. C# is a relatively verbose, garbage collected, class based, statically typed, single dispatch, object oriented language with single implementation inheritance and multiple interface inheritance. Microsoft loudly heralds C#'s novelty.
2003 - A drunken Martin Odersky sees a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup ad featuring somebody's peanut butter getting on somebody else's chocolate and has an idea. He creates Scala, a language that unifies constructs from both object oriented and functional languages. This pisses off both groups and each promptly declares jihad.
Footnotes
[1] Fortunately for computer science the supply of curly braces and angle brackets remains high.
[2] Catch as catch can - Verity Stob
https://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html
6/6

2025-11-23 02:49:43 UTC

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1995 - Yukihiro "Mad Matz" Matsumoto creates Ruby to avert some vaguely unspecified apocalypse that will leave Australia a desert run by mohawked warriors and Tina Turner. The language is later renamed Ruby on Rails by its real inventor, David Heinemeier Hansson. [The bit about Matsumoto inventing a language called Ruby never happened and better be removed in the next revision of this article - DHH].
1995 - Brendan Eich reads up on every mistake ever made in designing a programming language, invents a few more, and creates LiveScript. Later, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of Java the language is renamed JavaScript. Later still, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of skin diseases the language is renamed ECMAScript.
1996 - James Gosling invents Java. Java is a relatively verbose, garbage collected, class based, statically typed, single dispatch, object oriented language with single implementation inheritance and multiple interface inheritance. Sun loudly heralds Java's novelty.
5/6

2025-11-23 02:48:48 UTC

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1986 - Brad Cox and Tom Love create Objective-C, announcing "this language has all the memory safety of C combined with all the blazing speed of Smalltalk." Modern historians suspect the two were dyslexic.
1987 - Larry Wall falls asleep and hits Larry Wall's forehead on the keyboard. Upon waking Larry Wall decides that the string of characters on Larry Wall's monitor isn't random but an example program in a programming language that God wants His prophet, Larry Wall, to design. Perl is born.
1990 - A committee formed by Simon Peyton-Jones, Paul Hudak, Philip Wadler, Ashton Kutcher, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals creates Haskell, a pure, non-strict, functional language. Haskell gets some resistance due to the complexity of using monads to control side effects. Wadler tries to appease critics by explaining that "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?"
1991 - Dutch programmer Guido van Rossum travels to Argentina for a mysterious operation. He returns with a large cranial scar, invents Python, is declared Dictator for Life by legions of followers, and announces to the world that "There Is Only One Way to Do It." Poland becomes nervous.
1995 - At a neighborhood Italian restaurant Rasmus Lerdorf realizes that his plate of spaghetti is an excellent model for understanding the World Wide Web and that web applications should mimic their medium. On the back of his napkin he designs Programmable Hyperlinked Pasta (PHP). PHP documentation remains on that napkin to this day.
4/6

2025-11-23 02:47:45 UTC

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1973 - Robin Milner creates ML, a language based on the M&M type theory. ML begets SML which has a formally specified semantics. When asked for a formal semantics of the formal semantics Milner's head explodes. Other well known languages in the ML family include OCaml, F#, and Visual Basic.
1980 - Alan Kay creates Smalltalk and invents the term "object oriented." When asked what that means he replies, "Smalltalk programs are just objects." When asked what objects are made of he replies, "objects." When asked again he says "look, it's all objects all the way down. Until you reach turtles."
1983 - In honor of Ada Lovelace's ability to create programs that never ran, Jean Ichbiah and the US Department of Defense create the Ada programming language. In spite of the lack of evidence that any significant Ada program is ever completed historians believe Ada to be a successful public works project that keeps several thousand roving defense contractors out of gangs.
1983 - Bjarne Stroustrup bolts everything he's ever heard of onto C to create C++. The resulting language is so complex that programs must be sent to the future to be compiled by the Skynet artificial intelligence. Build times suffer. Skynet's motives for performing the service remain unclear but spokespeople from the future say "there is nothing to be concerned about, baby," in an Austrian accented monotones. There is some speculation that Skynet is nothing more than a pretentious buffer overrun.
3/6

2025-11-23 02:44:15 UTC

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1958 - John McCarthy and Paul Graham invent LISP. Due to high costs caused by a post-war depletion of the strategic parentheses reserve LISP never becomes popular[1]. In spite of its lack of popularity, LISP (now "Lisp" or sometimes "Arc") remains an influential language in "key algorithmic techniques such as recursion and condescension"[2].
1959 - After losing a bet with L. Ron Hubbard, Grace Hopper and several other sadists invent the Capitalization Of Boilerplate Oriented Language (COBOL) . Years later, in a misguided and sexist retaliation against Adm. Hopper's COBOL work, Ruby conferences frequently feature misogynistic material.
1964 - John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists.
1965 - Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964.
1970 - Guy Steele and Gerald Sussman create Scheme. Their work leads to a series of "Lambda the Ultimate" papers culminating in "Lambda the Ultimate Kitchen Utensil." This paper becomes the basis for a long running, but ultimately unsuccessful run of late night infomercials. Lambdas are relegated to relative obscurity until Java makes them popular by not having them.
1970 - Niklaus Wirth creates Pascal, a procedural language. Critics immediately denounce Pascal because it uses "x := x + y" syntax instead of the more familiar C-like "x = x + y". This criticism happens in spite of the fact that C has not yet been invented.
1972 - Dennis Ritchie invents a powerful gun that shoots both forward and backward simultaneously. Not satisfied with the number of deaths and permanent maimings from that invention he invents C and Unix.
2/6

2025-10-24 21:43:25 UTC

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There are in fact browser-from-scratch projects, but the general problem is that backward compatibility issues are huge, and always have been, and just get worse each year.

2025-05-31 18:23:45 UTC

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> Hint: imagine redrawing them so that a zero budget is the x axis.
Graphs that don't start at zero was one of the things in the classic "How to Lie with Statistics", which I believe is still a must-read, not just for scientists, not just for STEM people, but for everyone.

2025-05-30 21:17:28 UTC

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> as someone who understands systems intuitively (I was once called a "Systems Architecture Idiot Savant" by a competitor)
I know you already know this, but it's worth repeating that you have an excellent professional reputation, to the best of my knowledge.

2025-05-29 18:05:31 UTC

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> I should write that up
Please do!!

2025-05-11 15:32:38 UTC

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Ha! Oh, go ahead and be a troublemaker; why not, I say.
Ok, now I fear that Quincke rotation physics violations will create a black hole* that consumes us all; pretty scary!
* a *rotating* black hole, naturally. Kerr probably predicted this.

2025-04-14 01:22:31 UTC

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Working for Paul Baclace at Autodesk, at one point I did support work for Xanadu in Scheme (also protein folding). I didn't get to know them but that was nonetheless interesting. Then they laid off that whole division.
But I digress. Again. :)

2025-04-12 00:19:17 UTC

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I haven't thought about any of this for ages, but doing a bit of reading, it appears that decision trees *are* (or can be) universal approximators, but *only* on their training set. Unlike many neural nets, they don't generalize very well (or at all) beyond their training set.
Yet generalization is almost always what we need. We want to train these things on set A and then test them on set B. If the test is also on set A, it's sort of cheating; it can just memorize set A.
That makes them one-to-one with simple lookup tables, albeit ideally compressed versions, which obviously suffer an exponential explosion with the size of the input.
There apparently is also an application of the No Free Lunch "theorem" here, although I'm still somewhat vague on it.
However, the NFLT to me is obviously the same as the non-existence of universal compressors. For any algorithm that reversibly compresses set A, there exists a set B that that algorithm will make larger instead of smaller.
That's a theorem somewhere; not sure what its formal name is.

2025-04-03 02:57:44 UTC

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Right. Well, surely *someone* will show how the universe is indeed built on pure math, not the anthropic principle or some such.

2025-04-03 01:07:19 UTC

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And only a day late!

2025-03-12 02:23:37 UTC

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> but none of the new moons were found in the rings.
The old thinking was that rings are created by the Roche limit, so there would never be any semi-permanent moons within the rings -- they would break up relatively quickly.
But maybe that model is out of date?

2025-02-26 02:10:30 UTC

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For which the freshmen were naturally deeply grateful.

2025-02-16 21:09:12 UTC

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Well, does Threads have a bridge?

2025-02-11 03:01:18 UTC

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FWIW I spent quite a while admiring the Winged Victory of Samothrace -- more than I did with the Mona Lisa (although I did more than glance at that).
(I had an idiosyncratic attachment to the Winged Victory ahead of time.)
But although it's sad that people ignore some things, I suppose it's a positive that people are admiring any art at all, as opposed to the people who aren't ever tempted by art museums.

2025-02-07 02:53:09 UTC

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Oh no. From your previous comments I had foolishly thought you had managed permanent residence status somehow.
Good luck with all of that.
By the way, people said TWEETs when it was twitter.
Now that it's X, people XCRETE.

2025-02-06 18:12:08 UTC

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> One way to visualize 4d shapes is the method of slices
Visualize the 3d shape, and then say "FOUR!" very loudly.

2025-02-03 17:16:48 UTC

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This should be considered one of a zillion things that make condensed matter physics opaquely complicated, right?

2025-01-28 15:12:55 UTC

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I see it on Anna's mirror of sci-hub indexed by doi, for those who wish to know such things.
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.ns.43.120193.001233

2025-01-28 07:43:55 UTC

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I didn't mean to limit it to *just* Matt, although I look forward to his comment -- and thanks for yours.
Yeah I had a feeling that renormalization was regarded differently these days; it seems simpler than it used to, for one thing.