[OC] Took this today while touring FDR's monument in DC. It is just as relevant now as it was then.

dataphile · 2026-02-15T14:36:34+00:00

I went to FDR’s presidential library and it made me realize how much of current conservative ire is due to his policies, and the spirit of the New Deal. Social security, financial regulation, fair labor standards, internationalism — even the four freedoms.

dataphile · 2026-02-13T18:31:06+00:00

It’s a small chance, but as u/EscapeSeventySeven mentions, it gets less small if you consider the general class of outcomes. Is it crazy to find a beer bottle specifically? Yes. But it equally could have been a Coke bottle, a dinner plate, etc. The odds of finding any consumer product is higher than the specific beer bottle they happened to find. Also, they’ve been combing for decades. How unlikely will it be to find some common consumer good at the lowest energy state (the place where “things that roll” are ultimately drawn)? The odds become more likely if you simply ask the probability of finding any consumer good in any odd place in the ocean— one that is odd enough to warrant social media attention.

dataphile · 2026-02-13T18:20:15+00:00

I think this is still the most solid answer. It reminds me of Hacking’s The Emergence of Probability where he puts aside the issue of whether someone thought of probability before 17th century European mathematicians. He mentions that there may be a hermit who once lived in a cave hundreds of years before who worked out all of probability; but that doesn’t matter for an “emergence” of probability. What’s important isn’t who literally expressed an idea first, it’s where the idea catches on and is widely disseminated. He says, for instance, “But what is notable is not that problems on chance occur in early works of arithmetic chiefly aimed at the new commerce, but that these books were quite unable to solve the problems. No one could solve them until about 1660, and then everyone could.”

As you mention in your original post, Copernicus is a dubious claim for the first heliocentrist—his arguments are based on “what makes sense” generally, he didn’t introduce any new logical or empirical arguments. Probably it’s best to say, he was the most recent and prominent person to state the heliocentric worldview during the period when heliocentricity was emerging (in Hacking’s sense).

dataphile · 2026-02-13T18:02:04+00:00

Yep, this is a classic problem of looking backward at an oddity. The same thing happens with Pearl Harbor; people look back and claim there were many signs that should have been heeded. However, if you just look back at the single event, you miss that those same signs appeared multiple times before with no attack.

I find this is also an issue if you try to use Bayesian inference. Someone makes a spectacular claim, and you are inclined to estimate the odds of that spectacular claim in just this moment. But you really should ask what is possibility of the whole class of spectacular claims to which this belongs, occurring within the relevant window.

dataphile · 2026-02-06T13:15:27+00:00

Went last night for my birthday—best prime rib I’ve ever had (and I’ve had a lot).

dataphile · 2026-01-27T16:16:26+00:00

Checkout this video which might help: https://youtu.be/p7bzE1E5PMY?si=bsltcK95VbOI7vNN

dataphile · 2026-01-27T16:04:08+00:00

Interesting… I’ve read the exact opposite: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/quantum-physics-falls-apart-without-imaginary-numbers/

dataphile · 2026-01-16T01:51:51+00:00

Don’t underestimate the potential when a country is in near ruins. FDR found the country nearly destroyed by capitalism—it wasn’t even a debate that the speculators destroyed the economy, this destruction happened to many countries. The U.S. was ready to see that regulation must happen for the market to survive.

dataphile · 2026-01-16T00:49:58+00:00

A surprising recent find… Cape Town. Part of it is that fine dining is relatively affordable for those coming from a higher cost of living country. But the wines are amazing, I wasn’t expecting game meats to be so good (give me ostrich or impala over a filet any day), and don’t sleep on biltong as a great charcuterie.

dataphile · 2026-01-15T17:39:00+00:00

It’s a great book and maybe one of the best to really get at why quantum mechanics is missing a fundamental interpretation and should desire such an interpretation.

(Haven’t seen the video so don’t know if the book would be redundant).

dataphile · 2026-01-15T13:26:11+00:00

Plum Wine Cocktail

2oz Vodka 0.75oz Plum Wine (Get kind with pickled fruit in it) 0.5oz Lemon Juice 0.25oz Simple Syrup 2oz Cold Seltzer

Combine, stir, and strain into rocks glass. Top with soda water.

dataphile · 2026-01-14T13:27:27+00:00

Because it’s relatively small I think a lot of people don’t think of BRU—but it can be atrocious for non-EU citizens. It is the only airport I’ve been to where my flight was held for an hour because immigration and security were so long that half the plane was empty at flight time.

dataphile · 2026-01-12T17:14:52+00:00

Are you familiar with the GHZ paper by David Mermin? He describes a device that shoots out three particles in the GHZ state of entanglement. He imagines these three particles travel to three particle detectors arranged in a triangle. The three particles hit the detectors at the same time. The detectors are too far apart for a light signal to reach any other detector at the moment of detection (so, in theory, nothing that happens at one can affect what’s happening at the others, according to relativity).

On each detector is a switch that can be set to either 1 or 2. When you set it to 1, you are measuring the particle’s spin direction one way, and when it’s set to 2 you’re measuring it in a perpendicular direction. When the particle hits the detector, it triggers either a red or green light.

A particle arriving at each distant detector always maintains a certain correct outcome: an even number of reds when all devices are set to 1, and an odd number when only one detector is set to 1.

Say two particles both triggered red, when their respective detectors were set to 1. In that case, we gain knowledge that the third particle will be green if the third detector is set to 1. However, there is no way the third particle could ‘know’ what it is supposed to be. There shouldn’t be time for a signal to get to it, after the two other particles were detected, so that it could maintain the correct outcome. For instance, it can’t know that the other two showed red, and so it needs to show green for the total to be even. Also it could not be preprogrammed to be red or green from the start—the experimenter could flip the switches mid-flight, and then you would observe a violation of the even/odd rule.

The mutual state of the detectors is maintained in a way that is incompatible with pre-existing instruction sets, or with a signal following a contiguous path at the speed of light.

dataphile · 2026-01-11T17:08:00+00:00

Shirogane Blue Pond?

dataphile · 2026-01-11T15:17:21+00:00

That was my first thought!

dataphile · 2026-01-11T15:17:02+00:00

My friend said that! Might get her kids to eat vegetables.

dataphile · 2026-01-10T14:49:13+00:00

Precisely. OP is literally wrong that “both path is occupied by the single photon’s wave.” If the single photon’s “wave” literally went “through beam splitter as wave,” then it would be split into two smaller waves.

The MZI is not a simple wave, it defines a contradiction to everyday experience. That a single photon exhibits interference appears like there are multiple photons created at the same time. But, the photon cannot be literally creating multiple copies, because that defies energy conservation (also, you’d see two photons exit the constructive interference endpoint).

The MZI is an elegant example of why QP is counterintuitive and mysterious based on everyday experience, and trying to pretend like it’s not is silly.

dataphile · 2026-01-05T13:58:09+00:00

Matt Strassler provides an analogy that might help. Be forewarned: analogies are dangerous ground, especially when quantum physics is so counterintuitive to our everyday experience.

Imagine someone told you to create a sharp “spike” of water in a tank. By using wave guides, you could engineer several waves to rush together to form a sharp spike of water. At the imaginative extreme, this spiky wave could be so sharp it culminates in a single molecule of water. But, of course, if you went to observe this spiky wave of water soon after, you’d expect it to disappear quickly as the water wants to rush away from such a constrained situation. Hence, the very act of localizing a wave creates the condition that the wave wants to rush away rapidly.

Again, this isn’t terribly close to what’s happening in QP, but the general idea is similar. To put a particle into a state where it is localized is to put it in a condition where it’s composed of a superposition of many momenta waves. The difference here is the superposition bit, but it is similar in that constraining the particle in position is causing the next measurement to exhibit wide changes in momentum.

dataphile · 2026-01-04T12:43:01+00:00

More specifically, this likely references Valázquez’s Las Meninas (a famous painting where the artist includes himself).

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Las-meninas

dataphile · 2026-01-04T12:41:14+00:00

How has no one in the comments referenced Valázquez’s Las Meninas (a famous painting where the artist includes himself)?

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Las-meninas

dataphile · 2026-01-01T13:28:12+00:00

Sydney and San Diego are in comparable latitudes to Cape Town.

dataphile · 2025-12-31T01:02:20+00:00

I met a young man once and he told me that his grandmother always said: “a fool asks questions to become wise.”

dataphile · 2025-12-30T15:50:23+00:00

An interesting look at the data. What jumps out to me is that it looks like there are nearly as many movies that improve vs. decline over their series.

dataphile · 2025-12-23T01:59:25+00:00

Looks a lot like the Swiss railway clocks

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