Nick @internic@social.cleverlibre.org
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Theoretical physicist by training (PhD in quantum open systems/quantum information), University lecturer for a bit, and currently paying the bills as an engineer working in optical communication (implementation) and quantum communication (concepts), though still pursuing a little science on the side. I'm interested in physics and math, of course, but I enjoy learning about really any area of science, philosophy, and many other academic areas as well. My biggest other interest is hiking and generally being out in nature.
Joined Nov 2022
Nick
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World's largest #iceberg breaks free, heads toward #SouthernOcean
Recent satellite images reveal that the berg, weighing nearly a trillion metric tonnes, is now drifting quickly past the northern tip of the #Antarctic Peninsula, aided by strong winds and currents. At almost 4,000 square km (1,500 square miles), the Antarctic iceberg called #A23a is roughly three times the size of New York City. https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/worlds-largest-iceberg-breaks-free-heads-toward-southern-ocean-2023-11-24/
Nick
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#ClimateDiary I feel stupid - these fires, which have been burning for over a week now in #Brazil’s #Pantanal, the largest #wetlands on the planet, had somehow completely passed me by. The #Heatwave, #Drought and #Wildfires in Brazil are really alarming, yet seem hardly in (my) news. Is lack of coverage going to be another troubling dimension of advancing #ClimateEmergency? Or maybe always been the case. Or maybe just me missing things. Pondering all this.
Nick
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Let me (re)introduce myself! My name is Ionica. I am a professor of science communication in Leiden where I study and teach #SciComm.
I moved from social to mathstodon, looking for a smaller local community (and you have the best t-shirt). I did my PhD on number theory and most of the science communication I do is still related to mathematics.
My posts will be mostly in Dutch, but work-related things will be in English (hope that is okay)!
Nick
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“This paper is a work of #ethnography, where the authors sat and studied how people in medical settings did their work interacting with computers, and denoted all sorts of workarounds they'd take to #bypass #security rules that they judge are a #hindrance to their work.”
We need more of this.
https://cohost.org/mononcqc/post/3647311-paper-you-want-my-p
Nick
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Given that sharing the mobile screen on TV once worked perfectly without a hitch, having to install special apps trying to become my one-for-all dashboard, grant permissions like crazy, configure the living hell to accommodate shitty apps and agree to TOS of a surveillance capitalists wet dreams to basically pay rent for a feature I had already paid for, this is a prime example of #enshittification by #Google and #LG as explained by @pluralistic.
Nick
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Yes, I use strong #encryption.
Why, no, I don't have anything to #hide.
I also #mail my #correspondence in #opaque #envelopes, rather than on the backs of #postcards.
No, I don't have anything to hide there, either.
#Normalize encryption.
There is no such thing as "#lawful #access". Encryption is #math. There is no math that the "good guys" can do but which cannot be done by the "bad guys".
Anyone who suggests different is #lying, to #spy on you.
#Fight them.
Nick
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Time to re-up this op-ed I wrote a while back. Don't think any of them are better than any of them. All of them in the TESCREAL bundle are awful.
https://www.wired.com/story/effective-altruism-artificial-intelligence-sam-bankman-fried/
Nick
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If you want to talk about violence in the prison system, what we can do to reduce it, and how it is morally reprehensible for prosecutors to use that violence as a way to get Black people to confess to crimes that everyone knows that they did not commit? Then I'm with you. 👍🏿
But if you want to talk specifically about how we can keep Derek Chauvin safe? How we can keep the inhumane, brutal system for innocent Black folk, but protect him from it? Miss me with that. Talk to somebody else.
Nick
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CDC Advised To Weaken Infection Protections
> Aerosol researcher Jose-Luis Jimenez added, “The Cochrane Review is scientific garbage.” He continued, “There is high-quality evidence from many angles that shows that, of course, #N95 masks are better.”
> Jimenez, was also critical that #HICPAC is “ignoring the huge body of evidence coming out of the pandemic” that most respiratory viruses have airborne transmission. “They don't mention ventilation at all. They don't address all the measures that you can do to remove the virus from room air.”
> Each expert I spoke with is also concerned about #HICPAC and the CDC’s secrecy. Jimenez said that #NIOSH experts he’s spoken with agree with him but “are basically forbidden from talking to the press.” This is because “if they talked freely about the science, it will contradict the policies of the #CDC,” he added.
Nick
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Video and Transcript:
Williams, Damien P. “Why AI Research Needs Disabled and Marginalized Perspectives,” for the R. L. Rabb Science and Society Symposium on Embedding AI in Society, hosted by NC State. February, 2021.
https://afutureworththinkingabout.com/?p=5558
Nick
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My 9 year old had an ST Math level dealing with prime numbers, and he needed a little help. We talked about how exciting prime numbers (and discrete logarithms) are, and how important they are in computer security. That made my evening.
Nick
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Browsers based on Chromium like Brave and Chrome need to enable memory tagging themselves. They also don't enable strict site sandboxing or CFI yet.
Browsers based on Firefox lack a content sandbox on Android, not just site isolation. They're also missing CFI and memory tagging.
Nick
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Pixel 8 providing hardware memory tagging support is a massive security advance for GrapheneOS. This hardware feature only helps if the OS uses it like GrapheneOS, and the security it provides entirely depends on how it's used. We have a great implementation in hardened_malloc.
#GrapheneOS #privacy #security #MemoryTagging #MTE #Pixel8 #Pixel8Pro
Nick
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“The first thing I would say is that we’ve now lived in the deregulated system for 40 years. What we ended up with was a system that failed to achieve the things that the deregulators said it would. We now have a system that is less competitive than it was even during regulation. The top four airlines collectively have a larger market share now than the top four airlines did in 1977. This system of markets and competition has led to massive consolidation and concentration”https://hls.harvard.edu/today/airline-deregulation-may-be-why-flying-is-such-a-miserable-part-of-holiday-travel/
Nick
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@pjohanneson @pluralistic There was one still a real classic one in place at Colter Bay Visitor Center in Grand Teton National Park when we passed through in early October. It was the first I've seen in ages.
They used to be so important when I was a kid on vacation with my parents, travelling in a truck camper. We would find one every few days to call home, alternating between my maternal grandparents and paternal grandmother, with each of them subsequently relaying the details to the other.
Nick
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@crispius @DenOfEarth @manu @pluralistic As a kid I would call a 1-800 number to get an open line. Once I got the random person I called to hang up, I stayed on the line. The line would remain open and once I got the dial tone I could call to get a ride home from the library. I'm pretty sure I learned this from a random txt file off a BBS or maybe Gopher server I accessed in the library.
Nick
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#Astrobiology community: How do you view the positives and negatives of future privately-funded astrobiology missions? Do you expect greater flexibility in terms of community demands, instrumentation? Faster response times? Planetary protection risks? Unclear data handling? etc.
@MichaelPorter Oh, and one bonus aside: This Noether's theorem business comes in handy for ruling out other speculative ideas.
You may recall years ago there were these people claiming to have created a "reactionless drive" they were calling the "EM drive". The idea was that it used a closed microwave cavity as a means of propulsion, supposedly generating a differential EM pressure against the front and back walls of the cavity. If it worked, it would be an example of a "reactionless drive", i.e. a propulsion system that produces thrust in empty space without shooting out any propellant. The thing is, this violates conservation of momentum; normally you propel something by exchanging momentum with another body, either something you're pushing against or propellant you're expelling. So, generally speaking, a reactionless drive could only work by overturning one of the most fundamental physical principles.
Anyway, these people had a whole "explanation" of how this supposedly worked involving a "virtual particle plasma" or some such phrase, i.e. trying to invoke QFT. But, as you now know, Noether's theorem tells us that quantum electrodynamics has to obey conservation of momentum every bit as much as classical physics, so no amount of quantum weirdness with virtual particles can possible make such a device work, and we know this without ever having to unravel their supposed explanation and where it goes wrong (as long as they agree it's based on the known laws of physics).
Nick
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@kat - since she never got tenure, Sabine has decided to make a living doing science popularization. Selling books doesn't get you much money unless you get a big following and stay in the limelight. So, people who try to earn a living explaining science feel immense pressure to talk about fashionable subjects. I maintain my purity by being a retired math professor with no need to earn a cent!
@MichaelPorter To answer the last part of your question about the reality of particles or lack there-of: particles are real in the sense that we can detect them, i.e your detector goes click or flashes or makes a track in discrete localized units that we call a particle detection. But you're correct that the sort of abstract, metaphysical notion of a particle existing in and of itself is more questionable.
In some cases what we think is a fundamental particle turns out to exhibit signs of internal structure and turns out to be a composite particle made up of bound fundamental particles (and like you said this can involve many Bosons and potentially lots of virtual particles). Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) (which is relevant to the proton situation) is actually an example of a non-perturbative QFT; the coupling constant is *not* small, so you can't use perturbation theory at all. I'm honestly not very knowledgeable about that, so I don't think I can easily lend much insight.
Alternatively, sometimes something that looks like a fundamental particle is actually a quasi-particle, i.e. a disturbance in some underlying medium that must be present, rather than something fundamental thing that can exist anywhere. Holes in semiconductors are the classic example of this, and Dirac even floated the idea of positrons being a sort of hole in the "Dirac sea" of filled energy states, though we don't need such a notion with modern QFT.
Finally, it turns out that while all inertial observers will agree on the number of particles in a given situation (so far as it's well-defined in the state in question), non-inertial observers will not agree. So the same underlying state of the quantum field may be described by different observes as comprising a different number of particles. The most basic example is the Unruh effect, in which an accelerated observer sees thermal radiation where an inertial observer sees just the vacuum. But then the equivalence principle in Einstein's General Theory of Relativity says that gravitation is (locally) equivalent to being in an accelerated frame of reference, which means that this Unruh effect should also arise due to gravity, and this is exactly what Hawking found was the case, where black holes emit thermal radiation ("Hawking radiation") due to these effects.
Again, though, we're wandering to areas I don't know so well. I'm not sure how comprehensible that discussion was, but maybe it helps a little. (3/2 😉 )
- Pronouns
- he/him/his
Theoretical physicist by training (PhD in quantum open systems/quantum information), University lecturer for a bit, and currently paying the bills as an engineer working in optical communication (implementation) and quantum communication (concepts), though still pursuing a little science on the side. I'm interested in physics and math, of course, but I enjoy learning about really any area of science, philosophy, and many other academic areas as well. My biggest other interest is hiking and generally being out in nature.
Joined Nov 2022
