Robert Low
39.9K posts
Robert Low
@RobJLow
Ex maths lecturer. Classics under^H^H^H^H^Hpostgrad @ClassicsWarwick. Tweets about maths, classics and other random stuff. Now also @[email protected].
Katılım Ağustos 2016
398 Takip Edilen2.1K Takipçiler
@RobJLow @martinmbauer It isn't. Anscombe herself relates the anecdote, and she is the interlocutor in the story.
English
Did he really say that? In the 20th century?
Phil Hoyeck@PAHoyeck
Wittgenstein once asked why we took it for granted that the Sun turned around the Earth. He was told it was because it looks like the Sun is going around the Earth — to which he replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked like the Earth went around the Sun?"
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@Quasilocal @gregeganSF Now that cars exist, I see no point in walking.
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@gregeganSF Exactly, I can't even wrap my head around the original post tbh.
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Isn't this kind of like saying "would you still want to learn something if it was already written in a book?"
Saman Habibi Esfahani@Saman_Habibi_E
If AI becomes better than humans at doing Science and Math, would you still feel motivated to learn them? Would you still want to study things like Relativity or Geometry just to understand how the universe works, or would you be fine not knowing and letting AI handle it?
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@nchlsswft I didn't even realize there was a time when Teubners didn't necessarily have a critical apparatus! (Google tells me these were called editiones minores, so they clearly had a conscience about it.)
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But are you old enough to remember Teubner shaming? νῦν μοι χάνοι εὐρεῖα χθών.
Theo Nash@theo_nash
I’m old enough to remember a time when Loebs were looked down on as options for those who didn’t have enough Greek to use a proper critical edition.
@SketchesbyBoze She wants to be flowers, but some idiots keep making her into owls.
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Nothing prepares you for how delightfully strange the Mabinogion is. There is a woman made of flowers, a cauldron that can revive the dead, a giant claw that steals horses, an underworld of feasts & hunting. Anyone with an interest in the roots of fantasy fiction must read it.
Paul Krause@paul_jkrause
Reading Welsh legends on top of a mountain in the desert is exactly what the doctor ordered.
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@wmarybeard But it's so much easier to disagree with somebody if you just make up stuff and claim they said it.
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Wish people sounding off here wd read what I’d actually said. One guy says I hate eg Gladiator bc it’s too right wing (err??). I’ve always said I LOVED Glad 1. Others saying I want to silence conservative voices in classics. My recent Talking Classics argues exactly the reverse!
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@sivori Well, I've developed the grey beard but I fear my eyes are more bleary than glittering. :-(
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Robert Low retweetledi
We are deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Cleve Moler, co-founder of MathWorks and original author of MATLAB, on May 20, 2026.
A SIAM President and Fellow, Cleve was an icon and leader who helped shape generations and advance applied mathematics: mathworks.com/company/aboutu…
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@JDHamkins This duality is why I always avoided giving 'and' higher precedence than 'or' in propositional logic expressions (and deprecated the use of . and + in Boolean algebra).
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Please enjoy this essay I wrote some time ago on logical duality in propositional logic.
open.substack.com/pub/joeldavidh… #InfinitelyMore
Manhattan, NY 🇺🇸 English
Looks like we might be moving on from 'Helen of Troy wasn't black' discourse to 'Jesus wasn't black' discourse. Good. I need a bit of variety in my social media feeds.
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Theognis on Twitter/X:
Σιγᾶν δ’ οὐκ εθέλουσιν κακοὶ κακὰ λεσχάζοντες·
οἱ δ’ ἀγαθοὶ πάντων μέτρον ἴσασιν ἔχειν.
Ελληνικά
@AntigoneJournal The best thing about LinkedIn is that when I accidentally follow a link to it, it tells me I have to log in/create an account before proceeding. Saved again.
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Have never actually visited the site they call LinkedIn. Have accidentally clicked links that ended up going there. But genuinely it is entirely untrodden ground, happily gated by some popup nonsense. Keeps a spring in the step that.
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@theo_nash @victoriamoul Is suggest whore, but that's already taken...
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@victoriamoul The one that bothers me in English when I spend too long with Latin or Greek is the lack of a plural form of the relative pronoun.
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Although English is my native language and I still speak it all the time at home, now when I come to England the lack of the tu/vous distinction has started to seem strange to me. So by degrees does one foreignize!
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'There is no branch of math, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena in the real world.' -- Nikolai Lobachevsky
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Robert Low retweetledi
Farewell Michael Keating...
"Elegant my friend. Simply elegant."
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@PaulMcKenna4 I struggle enough with normal 15x15 cryptics - barred grid crosswords just make me feel like I'm lacking an entire brain :-(
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Eumolpus debuts in The Spectator today.
2753: Rapid sea spectator.com/article/2753-r…
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@brunellus And no doubt some of them will be lurking behind fraudulent pre-2023 dates 🤬. Trust nothing except a paper copy you've owned since before LLMs started contributing to the data pool. (And I write this as somebody very aware of their burgeoning utility in other disciplines.)
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PPS. Horrifying to think that mistakes published from 2023 onwards will increasingly be impossible to track down and explain. Fake academics are already boosting their “productivity” by polluting the scholarly record with guff that LLMs have farted out 😡 x.com/brunellus/stat…
Mark Thakkar@brunellus
Right, that’s it. We need bounty hunters to track down the fake academics who are publishing LLM-generated bullshit and “retire” them, by which I mean mercilessly expose them until they’re ostracized by genuine academics and ultimately kicked out of the jobs they don’t deserve.
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PSA: Titivillus was *not* associated with scribal error in the Middle Ages. This was dismissed as a chortlemuffin in 1958 by André Vernet, who blamed the entry on scribes in Franklin’s Dictionnaire historique des arts, métiers et professions (1905): archive.org/details/dictio… (1/5)
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@SJ_Murray @JimDMiller @mattbencole @zdeborova @giffmana What can I say? I hope you're wrong. ( But, fly in the ointment and all that.)
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@RobJLow @JimDMiller @mattbencole @zdeborova @giffmana I’m not so sure, given the 1000s weighing in. If fewer people were shrugging at citing stuff they don’t read, I’d be less worried about lots of people just faking it for fake success. 🤣
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Occasional errors and oversights are part of science. If we lost our driver’s license for a year every time we exceeded the speed limit by 10 km/h, daily life would become unworkable. Many countries instead use point systems, where trust can be rebuilt through good behavior.
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@SJ_Murray @JimDMiller @mattbencole @zdeborova @giffmana Oh, I think most people in most disciplines have reacted to being tarred with the 'everybody does it' brush with outrage. I suspect it's relatively few who really think that's fine. (But, this is the internet, so extreme opinions tend to be over-represented.)
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@RobJLow @JimDMiller @mattbencole @zdeborova @giffmana Right? It makes me wonder if the reason no one cares that they have hallucinated references is because they’ve had no idea what they’ve been citing for years.
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