I'm a mathematical physicist who likes explaining stuff. I'm the Maxwell Fellow of Public Engagement at the School of Mathematics and the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh.
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2026-05-19T13:16:36+02:00 Event JSON
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Last Notes npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez BIOMIMETIC TECHNOLOGIES npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez Kings Day shows yet again that the least powerful Americans are the most courageous. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…j9f5 - the Choctaw don't own most of the land over which they have jurisdiction, and I can't quickly find out how much land they do own. So far they seem to be doing solar on a smaller scale: npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez As confirmed by a 2020 Supreme Court decision, 15% of Oklahoma is under jurisdiction of the Choctaw Nation. Now the Choctaw have used their power to prevent ICE from getting a big detention center! npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez The proton, 1836 times heavier than the electron, is made of two up quarks and a down, with two of their spins aligned and one pointing the other way. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez Beato isn't really saying AI will fail: despite the denialists who claim it's never good for anything, it's too useful for too many things to simply "fail". He's claiming something more interesting: for many purposes, big AI can be replaced by LLMs that you can run on your laptop. They already exist and you can download them for free. So the massive investment in data centers, expecting huge profits when we all start paying monthly fees to run LLMs, may soon be undercut by something cheaper. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez Manet's famous painting Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère never appealed to me. But now I realize its genius, and my spine tingles every time I see it. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez Another place I want to visit on my trip to New Mexico is called Aztec Ruins - named that before white folks realized the ancestral Puebloans were a very different civilization. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez Have you read There Is No Antimemetics Division? Would I like it? npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez In the northern hemisphere, the sun moves clockwise in the sky. This is why clocks, which were based on sundials, have hands that move clockwise. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…gvxt - I don't know what "sort the partials out to see what it looks like without them" means. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…gvxt @nprofile…920r - yes, you can call some of them overtones. But I'm not sure that's the full explanation of the pattern we're seeing here! It should be related to the continued fraction expansion of ln(3)/ln(5) - or in other words, which powers of 3 are close to powers of 5. I showed that's part of the story. But I don't know the full story. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez So far I've been trying to understand the complicated waves in the function npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez For starters, neither npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez Aha! 💡 npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez Now I think I see why the distance between crests of the big long waves in this graph is about 85.84! npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez More interestingly, the fact that 2/3 is a good rational approximation to ln(3)/ln(5) says that npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez The slow 'beats' in the absolute value of the zeta function npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez In the graph here, the sharp peaks seem to be spaced by a distance of npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez To get a better picture of the *slow* oscillations in npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez There are fascinating connections between the Riemann zeta function and music theory. I'll probably write a paper about this, but I can't resist talking about a little piece of the story. I will *not* explain what this has to do with music, since I want to tell that exciting story later on, and do a really good job of it. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…h6a3 - thanks, I'll check out this show in preparation for my own pilgrimage! npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…8qh7 @nprofile…xdkd - I used to read Gene Ward Smith on sci.math and such, but I never paid much attention to his tuning theory stuff. I feel terribly sorry that I didn't, since he died of COVID in 2021: npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez My god! What an amazing blog article! For the last few weeks I've been studying the work of Gene Ward Smith, who discovered a connection between muic theory and the Riemann zeta function. But it turns out @nprofile…xdkd has been thinking abou this for years... and what she has discovered is much richer and more beautiful than I had imagined. This changes everything! npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…uk82 - oh! I'm starting to read about this, and so far it seems like there were extensive trading networks in the Americas. I haven't read about anything particularly linking Puebloans to Mayans genetically. But I'll keep reading. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…ygne - was it easy to find everything when you got there? npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…uk82 - scarlet macaws in New Mexico? Or cacao? npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…f5pz - oh, interesting! I didn't know that about the thick-billed parrots. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…ju9m - this is amazing! Or rather: many of us don't learn enough about this in school, so we tend to underestimate these people. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…a638 - sounds cool. I went to White Sands once, but have no clear picture of what's between that and Chaco Canyon. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…8qh7 - the use of honey suggests they weren't insane. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez For more on parrots and scarlet macaws at Chaco Canyon: npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez For more on chocolate at Chaco Canyon: npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez Chaco Canyon should be called Choco Canyon, because researchers have found traces of *chocolate* in cups found at this site dating back to 1000 - 1125 AD. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…l7vu - thanks, that was a great listen. I'm planning to do a lot of study before visiting various sites this spring. This video was a good springboard toward digging deeper into these matters, because it situated Chaco in an interacting network of different cultures. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…t5a9 - I said it would be fun, but I don't know if I'll ever do it: I have too many project half-finished. Right now my main passion is the mathematics of tuning systems. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…t5a9 - thanks! I try to b careful, but I'm also indebted to a referee who found more typos. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…t5a9 - I'm not sure I learn very fast, but if I do it's probably by ignoring details until they seem to become necessary. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…t5a9 - Does a typical good, meaty first course on algebraic geometry give some intuition for the bigrading on the cohomology of a smooth complex variety? I don't know. I never took such a course, but I think there are lots of ways such a course could go. This stuff is in Griffiths and Harris, but that book says a lot more about complex manifolds than some intros to algebraic geometry. (That's why I like it: I'm really more of an analyst.) npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…xuq7 - I think that first section was really just a rapid attempt to convince people that there's more to algebraic geometry than a pile of slick abstract definitions. It may have scared as many students as it intrigued. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…rgsr - I didn't actually ever sleep through a class. I just never took a course on commutative algebra. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…xuq7 - nice! It looks like a rocket-fuel-propelled approach to algebraic geometry where he talks about zeta functions and cohomology theories on page 3 and then gets serious. 😆 npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…xuq7 - Oh great! I haven't ever looked at a book by Raskin, in fact I don't even know the name Raskin. But I've been thinking there should be an approach to algebraic geometry that goes like this. I only heard about this approach long after I suffered through the Hartshorne approach (listening to people talk about it, not actually studying it very hard). npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…xuq7 - Neat! I was just joking: I actually skipped commutative algebra entirely myself, too - I just zoned out whenever anyone tried to explain this stuff to me. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez If like me you slept through part of your algebra class and spent years later trying to catch up on algebraic geometry, this is the thread for you! npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…a3ey - it's a great read, though not all at once. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…jrcx - it looks like an error-ridden text. Throw it out and get a better book on number theory! npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…sz8l @nprofile…u3x7 - It's pretty obvious that having Terry Tao use their software is better than any advertisement that money could buy. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…az9a - I was explaining the situation to my followers around the world, many of whom don't know the intricacies of the US federal system. I don't think Trump cares about laws and the constitution, but there's a whole network of people who do care, so when he breaks the laws they get energized to push back, and this does have an effect. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…ezv6 - there's no link there. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…az9a - it would be illegal, indeed against the US Constitution, for Trump to attempt to take over the election process. In fact I recently added a remark about this to my original post, for people unfamiliar with the US system. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…5ahq - I'll check it out. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…5ahq - I'd never say radically improved democracy is impossible. We need not only an appealing new system, but a way to get there from here. I hope you've written, or will write, a detailed tactical manual on how to get there from here. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…5ahq - Lots of people are discussing those questions. But it's also important to avoid falling off the cliff right now. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez Trump now says the quiet part out loud: npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…9fju - sure thing! I've never been to the Calumet region. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez Ecologist Alison Anastasio visited a former US Steel South Works site in Chicago. She expected to find “all crap plants” — common invasive weeds. To her surprise she spotted little bluestem and three species of native milkweed. She had already decided she didn't want a career as an academic scientist. But she came up with the idea of forming a group to study this ecosystem: “a dream team of people I wanted to work with.” npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez Here's a tale of how nature triumphs in the end. Steel mills dumped molten slag in parts of Chicago and nearby areas. The slag hardened in layers up to 15 feet deep. These places became barren wastelands. Some were also dumping grounds for hot ash and cinders. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…3vpz - interesting enough. A bit more color variation on short distance scales might make the landscapes more realistic, especially the one at lower right which has large regions of dark orange (cloud shadows?). The clouds are simple blobs. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…lfhd @nprofile…t6k2 - I read the vaguely similar one Trading Places, about a British and a California professor who trade places. Fun study of stereotypes, probably dated now. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…t6k2 - My wife is reading Katabasis. She says it's too long (450 pages), and could have used editing to remove repetition. But she likes some of the ideas, e.g. how people in the Department of Analytic Magick at Cambridge need to compare Western and Chinese accounts of the geography of Hell to get a good understanding of the place. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez I thought they wouldn't release the Epstein files until hell freezes over... but in fact it only took frost quakes. Yes, FROST QUAKES, also called cryoseisms! It got so cold so fast in the US that freezing soil created earthquakes. They even cracked the wall in someone's house. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…fh5j - oh well! npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…t6k2 @nprofile…z2n3 @nprofile…s7d2 - just to be clear, where @nprofile…z2n3 quoted me as writing ω2 and ωω, I actually wrote ω^2 (ω squared) and ω^ω (ω to the ω). I was trying to say that PRA is powerful enough to prove that the Ackermann function is total because it can handle recurious up to ω^ω, but proving the Ackermann function is total only requires recursion up to ω^2. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez Fractions built from the numbers 2, 3 and 5 play a big role in music theory! Here I list those as close to 1 as possible for a given complexity. First we get a bunch of famous ones like the major third: npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…g0zc @nprofile…gu9p @nprofile…ck2y - If Gödel really did get angry and threw out Chaitin, this could be one of the first examples of scientists getting disgusted by people trying to connect Gödel's theorem and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. By now it's a routine occurrence. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…r9vg - I guess they'll have to see by talking to each other! npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez We need all the humor we can get, these days: npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…zyzh - I even heard that some people listed their MathOverflow (or was it StackOverflow) reputation scores on their CVs. Blech. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…zyzh - Interesting. For some kinds of math questions there's a right answer, e.g. true-or-false questions (which can be very powerful in mathematics). For these it can be really helpful for beginners to know what's the right answer. For other questions, more open-ended, there's nothing at all like a unique right answer. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…zyzh - nothing in MathOverflow says a question has a single answer. Many questions there have lots. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…wncd - great! I have been very busy and distracted but I ***do*** want to return to this project and finish it off. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…fh5j - I find MathOverflow extremely useful myself, because it attracts lots of experts who can help me with problems I'm stuck on. However, I suspect you're right that "gamifying" the process of asking and answering questions by giving people points and publicly displaying their "reputation" scores could be off-putting to lots of women (and also certain kinds of men). npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez Not very urgent compared to some things, but okay: npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…g0zc - Interesting! So if you say a young man is luckless and feckless, that's a nice euphemism for something that rhymes. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…g0zc - opposite of feckless? npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…g0zc - "This shepherd's pie is f***ing good!" npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…g0zc - the shepherd's pie is f***ing good! npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…4qpt - the symmetry brings out the beauty. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…jrcx - @nprofile…t6k2 would have opinions on this, though he may be tired of talking about it. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…a3ey - I guess this is early enough that he's not saying it with the somewhat exasperated tone of a modern mathematician? npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…j4wh - really??? Can't AI solve that problem? npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez "There's a danger that our technology could fail if it fails!" npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…a3ey - noble of you! npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…a3ey - I too promise to no longer publish more than 7 papers per year. 😆 npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…2sx2 - they've got lots of nice posts here. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…2sx2 - there are some very nice experts on constructive mathematics here on Mathstodon, e.g. @nprofile…t6k2 and @nprofile…ldyp. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…2sx2 - there are mathematicians who question all the things you're questioning, and they write papers about that. However, it pays to learn the standard rules. This doesn't mean "believing" in them, indeed one great thing about math is that checking the validity of a proof never requires belief. It pays to learn the standard rules because if you don't, you're cut off from an enormous body of centuries of work. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…e2fl - now I get to check out #SolarPunkSunday! npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…6fwm - what a great story! I could enjoy a whole novel about beavers on the San Pedro, written in a similar style, with maps. But I'll be frequenting your blog now, for other tales. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…nekg - that would definitely be disturbing if I were out camping. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…80ng - will do! npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…ccq6 - indeed, that's how I often feel these days. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…x8fk - we see animals called bobcats in our back yard in Southern California, but these are actually lynxes... so I'm a big fan of the lynx. Hurrah for the Iberian lynx! npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez Some good news in a time of darkness: the European wildcat, Felis sylvestris, is making a comeback! This thoughtful-looking example was photographed in a mountainous region of the Czech republic. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…659g - is that on the California coast south of Big Sur? That's where I've seen such rocks. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…r0xq - I'm afraid so! npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…r0xq - I hope they had a big party at the Department of Humanities at MIT. Yes, they have just one department for all "humanities". npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…r0xq - Okay, I can't figure out how to see after the 4th on my laptop. Let's just say it's not optimally designed. npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6m John Carlos Baez @nprofile…qlgd - Was Lior Pachter a grad student at UCR for a while?
