Tony Vladusich

I'm a computational neuroscientist & software engineer. Colors, photos, brains, nature, science, software & chess, preferably all at the same time!

Publications: https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?user=IrVz6ewAAAAJ&hl=en
Gamut relativity: https://gamutrelativity.wordpress.com/2013/09/06/introduction-to-gamut-relativity/

Public Key

npub18zuk6xjrxkqls45rrvm8mzezvcx6tacsqq0664v6569dg409m2rsvrxdht

NIP-05 Address

tonyvladusich_at_mathstodon.xyz@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsr3wtdrfpntq0c26p3kdna3v3xvrd97ugqq8ad2kd2dzk52hja4pcprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmnt24szwu

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relay.momostr.pink

Author Public Key

npub18zuk6xjrxkqls45rrvm8mzezvcx6tacsqq0664v6569dg409m2rsvrxdht

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Last Notes

2025-06-06 21:36:53 UTC

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Yeah, it is.
But I can't help but feel for all of the innocent people who have (and will be) caught up in the cross fire of all this chicanery, idiocy, hyper-narcissism and fascism.
It makes me very sad.

2025-05-06 01:01:48 UTC

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Well said, John!
Does the academic funding system have issues? Shit yes.
Is the answer privatisation? Fuck no!

2025-05-04 07:52:36 UTC

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"meta-methamatical" 🤣, indeed, I think a lot of meth was involved!

2025-05-04 06:38:54 UTC

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Well, in that case, John, you are not gonna like these rings! Each pair in left and right are physically identical.
Parenthetically my research suggests that this weirdness is related to natural perception of metallic surfaces.
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/114/448/176/714/016/620/original/06d11e035d71f3df.jpeg

2025-05-04 06:23:12 UTC

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I’m curious why you say they’re weird rings? I mean I agree they are super weird, but my experience with these things is that people verbalise the weirdness in very different ways. What is your way? How do they differ in appearance?

2025-05-04 06:20:51 UTC

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🤣 Fixed, thanks! Yup, communication is hard enough already without typos.

2025-03-31 22:46:19 UTC

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Yeah the sleep walking metaphor is an apt one. I invoke it a lot these days in order to remind myself and others that we have agency and should always try to define our own path through life.

2025-03-31 20:46:53 UTC

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As a non-US citizen, thanks for documenting the emergence of dictatorship in your country, and pointing folks towards actions they can take.
What is going on saddens many of us non-US citizens beyond words but we are effectively powerless to act. It’s nice to know there’s folks like you fighting in our behalf.

2025-03-28 22:39:23 UTC

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Ok, that looks pretty fucking wild!

2025-03-17 02:32:30 UTC

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Welcome to Nazi America, land of the oppressed, home of the coward.

2025-03-15 09:18:50 UTC

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Your fridge is broken, dude. 🤣

2025-03-06 21:55:27 UTC

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It's a trap, John!
The demonstration below does not use the same sRGB coordinates as Perano, but close enough to make the point that, properly speaking, "colour" (correctly spelled with a "u" 🤣) is most definitely a perceptual construct, not a physical one.
It is, of course, a cartoon version of the famous "dress" phenomenon, depicting how it is possible to perceive the same sRGB triplet as a cloth material that is either blue or white, depending on the surrounding context (source: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q19362881).
There is no harm in disregarding the distinction ... until there is: which is to say that folks who construct theories of "colour perception" have generally been hopelessly seduced by the conflation of physics and perception.
I've written extensively about the problem and how we might collectively avoid such traps. But the trap is absurdly seductive!
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/114/117/671/288/145/477/original/4514240712be2eb5.png

2025-03-06 21:33:38 UTC

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“The color he got is sRGB(148,177,255). And according to the experts who sip latte all day and make up names for colors, this color is called ‘Perano’.”
🤣

2025-02-26 02:00:00 UTC

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So AI is what you’d like to be working on?

2025-02-20 09:26:24 UTC

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So no Ringworld?! Noooooooo

2025-02-19 20:11:01 UTC

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“ If somebody wanted someone to *really* clearly explain what's going on, they would pay me. I'd be happy to do it!
But maybe they don't want this. Maybe the mystique of quantum computers is part of what sells the technology to investors.”
💯

2025-02-16 09:58:55 UTC

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Haha, the former, I shan’t stoop so low as to frequent the latter!

2025-02-16 07:48:49 UTC

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That webpage is a fucking abomination.

2025-02-16 04:58:19 UTC

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I guess black holes are an area of physics where quantum mechanics and general relativity are both needed to gain a deep understanding of what’s really happening?

2025-02-16 04:51:42 UTC

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Oh, where can I read more about that experiment?

2025-02-16 03:04:47 UTC

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Are there any compelling lines of experimental or theoretical evidence to conclude that "Gravity ... is probably quantum-mechanical in nature"?

2025-02-16 01:50:12 UTC

@npub1nf4…nqe4
I have another question about your book. On p 379 you write the following:
"Einstein's explanation of gravity says, first of all, that gravity is not really a force! In other words, the natural state of motion is free fall, and it takes a force to create a deviation from free fall. To put it dramatically but quite correctly, there is not really a force of gravity pulling us down as we stand on the floor; instead, the electromagnetic repulsion of the molecules on the floor are pushing our feet up! (It is amusing to get into the habit of feeling things this way.) Geometrically speaking, free fall traces out a path in spacetime that is as straight as possible at every step of the way, a so-called 'geodesic'.• It is only the curvature of spacetime that makes these geodesics look different from straight lines in Minkowski spacetime. For this reason, the very notion of a 'gravitational field', as some sort of force field á la Newton, is misleading and not really appropriate to general relativity. There is only the metric, which, as we now show, determines the notion of a geodesic via the Levi-Civita connection."
Given that gravity "is not a force", then why have physicists put so much effort into attempting to quantise gravity? If the above is correct, surely the attempt to define the graviton in terms of a quantum field theory must prove fruitless?

2025-02-11 20:38:24 UTC

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Ah, I can relate to him then! 🤣
The book is wonderful, btw. I just started reading it and I'm really looking forward to developing a deeper understanding of some of the ideas at the heart of modern physics / field theory.
Thanks for writing a text that is accessible to non-experts!
I think many of these ideas are germane to my interests in computational vision.
Applying field theoretic ideas to understand the computational operations of the brain will, I strongly suspect, turn into a fruitful avenue of research over the next century.
It's remarkable to me that there has been almost no decent work done along these lines so far.

2025-02-11 08:32:46 UTC

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I just read this quote while reading your book Gauge Fields, Knots & Gravity, and I thought immediately of what you said above 🤣:
And it is a noteworthy fact that ignorant men have long been in advance of the learned about vectors.
Ignorant people, like Faraday, naturally think in vectors. They know nothing of their formal manipu-
lation, but if they think about vectors, they think of them as vectors, that is, directed magnitudes. No
ignorant man could or would think about the three components of a vector separately, and disconnected
from one another. That is a device of learned mathematicians, to enable them to evade vectors. The
device is often useful, especially for calculating purposes, but for general purposes of reasoning the
manipulation of scalar components instead of the vector itself is entirely wrong.
-Oliver Heaviside

2025-02-03 03:11:40 UTC

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What exactly do you mean by works here? That the theory is self consistent or not obviously contradicted by known theoretical results or experimental data! Or something else?

2025-02-03 02:44:18 UTC

Huge if correct. Would love to hear what @npub1nf4…nqe4 and other experts make of it!
https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevX.13.041040

2025-01-30 01:56:52 UTC

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LMAO, I couldn’t tell if this was the fascist or anti-fascist playbook!
Sounds like pointless BS to me, either way; that is to say, much of modern life.

2025-01-28 20:19:02 UTC

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That’s a brilliant introduction to those topics, John!
You are a true treasure.

2025-01-28 07:45:50 UTC

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-> of course taking a limit where the particle "disappears" doesn't sound so good
I don't feeling so bad about the "solidity" of computational neuroscience etc when I hears things like this ... 😉

2025-01-27 06:33:12 UTC

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Egan’s Orthogonal series broke my brain (the third book being called The Arrows of Time hence my OT remark.)

2025-01-18 22:11:30 UTC

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I have a couple of questions about your blog post.
Firstly, where can I learn more about magnetic diffusion, or more generally, vector valued diffusion?
I'm very interested in this idea but I can't find a good intuition for the diffusion of a vector valued function in the plane. For example, when the field diffuses out to points where the field was previously zero, is the diffusion somehow the vector average of the inducing non-zero vectors?
I've searched Wikipedia but can't find a nice, basic explanation for how vector-valued diffusion might work.
Secondly, and more trivially, I got confused by the seemingly twice defined quantity in your post shown in the screenshots below. They seem like the same quantity but with two different names?
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/113/851/644/447/507/495/original/43f91e30d118ae8e.png
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/113/851/644/494/254/173/original/4b55551d4f9b5c72.png

2025-01-18 21:32:39 UTC

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The plant has been cuckolded!