Any Clacton residents who want to nominate your friendly neighbourhood intergalactic space warrior, ping me a line!

The great thing about standardized naming schemes is there's so many to choose from, or you can make your own!

New paper today with Hussain Anwar: we started out trying to understand why magic state distillation works, and ended up re-inventing quantum physics.. and of course the mathematicians already did this stuff 150 years ago scirate.com/arxiv/2605.0...

Algebra without letters: so quiet you can hear the wind in the leaves. From arxiv.org/abs/2605.03102

What does the Sierpiński triangle have to do with Pascal's triangle? Here's a pictorial answer; i'm just learning about this from Bowman's "Diagrammatic Algebra" book

A string diagram for an element of the hyperoctahedral group has a symmetry property, from Bowmans book "Diagrammatic Algebra". This immediately suggests a braided version ... hmm..

Wherein philosophy is dragged, kicking and screaming, into the twentieth century.

Kevin Mitchell@wiringthebrain.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Paper accepted! 😊 "Reframing the Free Will Debate: The Universe is Not Deterministic" will appear in Synthese. Final version available here: arxiv.org/abs/2503.19672 - with Henry Potter and George Ellis

I think I am just about ready to make my own search engine.

Ruth Kastner has some things to say about field theories..

It must be so frustrating to have billions of dollars and still be a miserable a**hole.

The principle of "two big ideas": one contains the other, or else they are not big ideas.

If people are going to continue to put the introduction to their paper in the abstract, then i'm going to put my paper's abstract in the title.

Any sufficiently complicated physics paper contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of an idea from algebraic geometry.

Today's OEIS fishing expedition. The only question is how much RAM am i going to need to find the next number... Love these OEIS cliff-hangers! ARGGH

Behold! A one-qubit quantum computer:

no don't kill it. Yes we need it.

Wowee, this new collection threads the needle nicely between philosophy and physics. Authors actually explaining their ideas instead of just academicsplaining. link.springer.com/collections/...

Made a video about a good movie I watched the other day:

Great Filmmaking: The Servant (1963)

YouTube video by ponysmasher

youtu.be

What is entanglement? Itamar Pittowsky claimed that these results brought us right to the precipice of logical contradiction--but not over. Abner Shimoney described it as a piece of "experimental metaphysics." I'm a nobody, but I think entanglement is the most interesting thing ever discovered. 🧵⚛️

James Dolan has a knack for describing higher mathematics using vivid language... not much of this has made it into written form, but there are a lot of old posts of his on google groups

love these OEIS flamewars.. might have to wait a few more years to see if there's any followup.

new book alert... oh, these pictures look like fun

TIL: the geometric Langlands program is where love and perversion are united

My favourite book on group theory just arrived in the mail! I had it shipped over from the US secondhand using biblio.

I love conference submission deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

we need more professional crackpots like this

Only a physicist would be so arrogant as to specify "the fifth root of unity". Here is one example:

I've been putting together a database of small quantum codes. If you'd like to contribute your parity check matrices, and any references, i'll add them qecdb.org/codes/ Thanks!

wup, the modular forms db now has finite groups !

Oh yeah, this guy gets it. Every subgroup of the cube reflection group. freethoughtblogs.com/atrivialknot...