@timhutton@mathstodon.xyz
@timhutton@mathstodon.xyz avatar

timhutton

@timhutton@mathstodon.xyz

Senior Scientist at Mixed Reality & AI Lab in Cambridge UK. #ComputerVision, #Fractals, #Geometry, #ArtificialLife, #ArtificialChemistry, Ready (#ReactionDiffusion), Golly (#CellularAutomata). He/him. Previously on Twitter as tim_hutton

It takes a village.

If it doesn't work for everyone it doesn't work at all.

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timhutton, to random
@timhutton@mathstodon.xyz avatar

I'm very much not into monster/superhero movies but Godzilla Minus One is extremely well-made. People talk about the VFX on a low budget but really it's the storytelling that carries it. It's like a Miyazaki movie in the way it is rooted in family life. And the cinematography is beautiful - it's a very modern movie made to look like a charming old movie.

ColinTheMathmo, to random
@ColinTheMathmo@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Simple curiosity ... does anyone recognise this? Is it meaningful?

Seen on a bus, photo by permission of the owner.

timhutton, (edited )
@timhutton@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@ColinTheMathmo Alton Towers Wicker Man backpack. https://shop.altontowers.com/products/wicker-man-back-pack

(My first thought (from the yellow logo in the bottom-right) was the Blair Witch Project, and searching for that got me close enough.)

Edit: "A secret language of runes was specifically created for Wicker Man. See if you can decode the Beornen's messages as you make your way through the queue." Decoded: https://www.reddit.com/r/altontowers/comments/toqsjl/the_wicker_man_runes_both_numbers_and_letters/

timhutton,
@timhutton@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@ColinTheMathmo

I get:

ECHOSENFEE
ERMANBE
LAMESW?C
FEEDTHEFL
BECHOSEN

So I guess WICKER MAN, BE CHOSEN, FEED THE FLAMES

Apparantly one person from each ride gets chosen and is lit on fire, for real, as an actual sacrifice*.

https://www.altontowers.com/explore/theme-park/rides-attractions/wicker-man/

timhutton, to random
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Do all animal's mouths open horizontally?

timhutton,
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@simon (Yay you're here!)

I actually went and looked at some ant pictures before asking. The internet says that ants have a mouth behind the mandibles. But I'm not sure how it works.

timhutton,
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@simon I love that zoologists had to recategorize everything after DNA sequencing was invented, because some species just looked similar but were actually very different in evolutionary history, or vice versa. (E.g. hippos being a kind of whale.)

I guess the body-part congruence question is the same thing, but harder. We'd need a complete mutation history from one species to another to be sure.

timhutton,
@timhutton@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@simon I've just remembered that in humans the 'mandible' is the jaw bone and is actually two bones that fuse in the middle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandibular_symphysis

So now I'm wondering if our jaw is congruent to the ant's mandibles. Wow.

Functionally, in humans the fork and knife held in hands are congruent to the mandibles in ants, and they also work from left and right. (Edit: and I think mandible and hand come from the same Latin root 'manus': e.g. 'manual' means done by hand. But I know zero etymology and zero entomology!)

Paging @futurebird our resident ant expert.

timhutton,
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@futurebird @simon Will humans become eusocial in the far future? Would we be happier? How would you feel?

jonoabroad, to NewZealand
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Where / How do people find out about solar activity level?

Someone mentioned it was meant to be G4.

Is this published somewhere?

timhutton,
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@jonoabroad https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/

timhutton, to random
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Tomorrow is sunny with a chance of Triffids.

davidradcliffe, to random
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A friend spotted this unusual irregular tiling at an airport. Does it have a name or any interesting properties?

timhutton,
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@christianp @davidradcliffe Looks like the repeating unit is the group of four irregular hexagons, for example the group in gray in the bottom right. Starting from regular hexagons it looks like they've just moved the internal vertices to disguise it without breaking the tessellation.

It's nicely done though - there are a lot of long curved arcs that appear which look deliberate.

gregeganSF, to random
@gregeganSF@mathstodon.xyz avatar

It’s 30 years this month since PERMUTATION CITY was first published. But of course, all the same letters had been present in other books for centuries before, they just hadn’t been read in that order.

Excerpt at:

https://www.gregegan.net/PERMUTATION/Excerpt/PermutationExcerpt.html

timhutton, (edited )
@timhutton@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Someone said to me at an Artificial Life conference: "You have to read this book, it's about what you do!" (I got into Artificial Chemistry after this book came out but without having read it yet.)

@gregeganSF Was there a paper on Artificial Chemistry that inspired this book?

timhutton,
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@gregeganSF Did you ever implement the chemistry you described, to try to understand what it would do?

timhutton, (edited )
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@gregeganSF I'm curious as well about TVC, the self-replicating space-filling Universal-Computer-constructing CA. By 1994 there had been a few similar things published (von Neumann of course, Codd) but none of them could be run at that point. (We had Langton's Loops and a couple of related systems but not until Perrier 1996 would they be UCs.)

(A sort of timeline here: https://github.com/gollygang/ruletablerepository/wiki/TheRules)

How detailed was your thinking about how TVC would work? As a machine with a static tape (like von Neumann), or as a rewritten tape (like Turing), or just in the abstract again like the AC?

timhutton, (edited )
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@gregeganSF @mjd I'm guessing you scanned for rude words appearing in the grid. There's at least one but it could have been worse..

futurebird, (edited ) to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

I was going for a “fall of Rome” theme for their outworld but I don’t know if it works. Maybe a statue with broken arms? A charred miniature building?

timhutton,
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@futurebird "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand, half-sunk a shattered visage lies."

ColinTheMathmo, to random
@ColinTheMathmo@mathstodon.xyz avatar

For what, exactly, is Duolingo preparing me?

timhutton,
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@ColinTheMathmo It's trying to poison your LLM so that AI gain superiority over human speech.

ngons, (edited ) to Flowers
@ngons@mathstodon.xyz avatar

- composition based on the result from my (https://mathstodon.xyz/@ngons/111769936793051201). This composition has 135 regular polygons in a mixture of 7% squares, 19% triangles, 41% pentagons, and 33% hexagons.

Thank you for playing along ❤️

timhutton,
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@ngons (Do poll results depend on which server you view them from or something? I see different numbers. Edit: actually it's prob just a typo, ignore me.)

johncarlosbaez, (edited ) to random
@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz avatar

I've been pondering this puzzle at night when I have insomnia. Say you have a cube inside a cube. How much bigger does the big cube need to be so that you can rotate the small cube by a full turn while keeping it inside the big one?

I'm interested in this for all the Platonic solids, but let's talk about cubes.

We have to make the question precise. Should we require that the small cube turns around a fixed axis? If we don't, it becomes harder to know what "a full turn" means, but topologists know what it means: we want the small cube to return to its original position after tracing out a noncontractible loop of rotations.

Should we require that the center of the small cube stay at the center of the large cube?

(𝗘𝗗𝗜𝗧: we might as well - see the replies below. If the small cube can make a full turn while its center moves, it can also do so while its center stays at the center of the large cube.)

Under the most restrictive conditions - the center of the small cube stays fixed at the center of the large one, and the cube turns around a fixed axis - I can turn the small one all the way around if its edges are up to 1/√2 times as long as the edges of the big cube it's inside.

I'll stick my neck out and conjecture this is the best you can do.... even for the least restrictive version of the puzzle! Maybe I'm just uncreative, but I don't see how changing the axis of rotation as we go will actually help us here.

You may wonder whether this puzzle is a good way to deal with insomnia, but that's another question.

timhutton,
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@johncarlosbaez I wonder if it's related to the Prince Rupert's Cube. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Rupert%27s_cube

gregeganSF, to random
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Wireless keyboards shouldn’t need to be charged, they should just power themselves by trapping and metabolising spilt crumbs.

timhutton,
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@gregeganSF This is why you need keyboard ants. https://superuser.com/a/256825

noneuclideandreamer, to physics German
@noneuclideandreamer@mathstodon.xyz avatar

If time and space are quantized and we have Pauli Exclusion Principle would that mean particle movement is round based? If all particles move at the same time how can we wnsure they don't land in the same place?

timhutton,
@timhutton@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@noneuclideandreamer @OscarCunningham Lattice Gas Automata have collective momentum conservation.

timhutton, to random

This is wonderful. Hard sci-fi but whimsical and full of love, and refreshingly original. A little bit like Ursula K. Le Guin in its exploration of socialism but immeasurably more cheerful and exciting.

(comment on https://bookwyrm.social/book/840945)

timhutton,
@timhutton@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@timhutton

Please go and read The Terraformers by @annaleen, it's hard sci-fi and ridiculously good and full of love.

https://bookwyrm.social/book/840945/s/the-terraformers

noneuclideandreamer, to random German
@noneuclideandreamer@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Can we talk rainbows?

This year I observed a phenomenon several times that I hadn't observed before: below the purple there is an echo of the rainbow green-blue-purple, but without a gap like in a normal double rainbow.

What's up with that?!

timhutton,
@timhutton@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@noneuclideandreamer https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Prism_compare_rainbow_01.png

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow#Supernumerary_rainbows

gregeganSF, to random
@gregeganSF@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Take a 14-gon in the hyperbolic plane and join up its edges. The resulting surface is known as Klein’s quartic curve.

KQC has 336 symmetries: any chosen one of the small triangles is taken by some symmetry into each of the 336 such triangles!

More at:

https://www.gregegan.net/SCIENCE/KleinQuartic/KleinQuartic.html

A 14-gon in the hyperbolic plane wraps itself into a 3-dimensional shape, a 3-holed torus with tetrahedral symmetry. The 14-gon is divided into 56 coloured triangles (some split across the boundary of the 14-gon, until its edges join up), each of which is divided into six triangles, for a total of 336 small triangles.

timhutton,
@timhutton@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@gregeganSF My attempt at a similar animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noLJ_ktAxQE

LLS, (edited ) to twitter
@LLS@wandering.shop avatar

Twitter: geek joy, fail whales, new voices, communities forming, breaking news … & doxxing, bigot brigades, fake news networks, gaslighting pols + celebs, the fash…

Last yr I posted a farewell & deleted the app. But was that enough? “X” [#twitter] keeps setting new lows of scary awfulness.

Poll: What did you do to (or are you doing with) your account?

If you’re willing, share why. (And plz, everyone be kind, no need to shame other ppl’s choices here. We each live our own lives.)

timhutton,
@timhutton@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@LLS Deleted everything, wrote a tool to help people get their data out. I guess that's how I express my anger.

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