Ian Stark

Immense planning and technical precision was required for this absolutely preposterous (but real) view: I captured my friend @BlackGryph0n transiting the sun during a skydive. This might be the first photo of it's kind in existence. See a video of this moment in the reply 👇

@john_ritzema It was the risk of losing their seats at election that led local MPs to require all those tunnels, wasn't it? Government proposed to run HS2 through people's view, objectors threatened the ballot box. It does sound like we already have the system you describe, and it failed.

@fountainbridge @LivingStreetsEd @thecockburn @livingstreets Not my take at all: this design is specifically for those not in cars. Waiting at that crossing, on foot or bike, I can watch the approaching traffic while keeping an eye on the signal. Cycling up to it there's a sensor that even pushes the button for me before I get there.

Imagine if traffic lights for vehicles were designed like this? You can't actually see if the lights are green until you're right in front of them. Presumably pedestrian crossing designed by and for DRIVERS convenience. @LivingStreetsEd @thecockburn @livingstreets

@fountainbridge @scottish_water Reminder that "wildflower meadows", lovely as they are, aren't a stable natural phenomenon but always arise from human intervention and are pretty much as managed as a window-box. Hope they get it fixed, though. I do like window-boxes.

@fountainbridge @scottish_water FOMBL report it was in the topsoil used by @scottish_water facebook.com/groups/5370082…

Hey @scottish_water , think you've been sold a bunch of weed seeds rather than "wild flower meadow" seeds. This just looks like a wasteland. Bruntsfield Links storm sewer tank.

I'll be showing Miegakure publicly for the first time in a while at this year's SIGGRAPH Real-Time Live! session! It'll be a good opportunity to restart talking about the game—especially since it's my kind of audience: appreciative of works at the intersection of art & science

I wonder who put this sign here? Oh well, I’m sure it’s not important.

@ChristleTaylor @hammer_mt @realpheirce @Austen Thanks! I think it also captures no-cloning quite well — you can steal a magic coin, but you can't copy it without losing the magic.

Waitttt… how did I not know that “quantum teleportation” is an actual thing that scientists have been working on, and that it’s actually kinda working right now?

@hammer_mt @realpheirce @Austen Not useless, I think, just maddening in that it seems so close to superpowers yet somehow dives off in a different direction. But that's reality for you.

@ianstk @realpheirce @Austen Interesting thanks. So it's basically useless unless we find a way to bias the coin toss, so to speak.

@hammer_mt @realpheirce @Austen True, but for that you could share a list of bits in advance. Actual entanglement has much more weirdness like being able to mess with coins so that yours is now linked to another you never even knew about.

@ianstk @realpheirce @Austen A more useful example: heads I explore solar system X, if heads I explore solar system Y. Now you know which solar system I'm going to search and you can launch for the other one without waiting for light to reach me. Useful for von Neumann probes.

@hammer_mt @realpheirce @Austen If I toss my coin really early, I know it before you do...

@ianstk @realpheirce @Austen If heads I'll launch the nukes, if tails I won't. Now you know if I launched the nukes or not.

@hammer_mt @realpheirce @Austen Nope. And if anyone watching this is moving fast, "already" may be ambiguous. Plus, if you think about it too much then the errors in the analogy show up, and with luck a proper physicist will show up to clarify.

@ianstk @realpheirce @Austen Can you tell which coins have already been tossed?

@hammer_mt @realpheirce @Austen I toss my coin, the result (previously uncertain) is now heads. Minutes later you, a light-year away, toss your coin and find out I just threw heads. How fast did that information get from me to you? It's not really communication, but it is spooky and it is at a distance.

@ianstk @realpheirce @Austen Ok so you have no control over what the result of the coin toss is, and can't know what the result will be before you toss, so there's no way to interpret meaning faster than light?

@hammer_mt @realpheirce @Austen Maybe think of the entanglement as two coins, where the first time you toss them they are certain to come up the same, even if widely separated. Still 50/50 heads/tails, just linked for one toss. Magic, but no use for communication. (N.B. Analogy v. inexact.)

@realpheirce @Austen Can you explain why no information can be sent? If we entangled two photons together, and agreed one state would mean "yes" and another would mean "no", and then went 1,000,000 miles apart and you flipped the switch, I'd know it was a yes before light arrived... right?

@mattstark256 Coo. Can I build me one of these? en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_…

made a game about building water-powered contraptions, might upload to itch.io at some point #gamedev

@PlayStationUK @playViewfinder Or, as they call it in Scotland, an egg.

Huge congrats to the Viewfinder team. If you need proof of its authenticity here is a screenshot of a Scotch egg in the game. 🥲 FYI the photographic puzzler is on sale for £13.99 right now: store.playstation.com/en-gb/concept/…

@georgbacker @BAFTAGames @playViewfinder The team were fantastic, really great to see everyone enjoying the event. Well done all round :-)

@ianstk @BAFTAGames @playViewfinder Yes! Very delicious! Sadly one got one of those 😂

Cannot express how happy and grateful we are. We won two @BAFTAGames awards for @playViewfinder. Thanks to everyone who supported us and voted for us, it was such an incredible night ❤️🏆❤️🏆

@SystemFOmega @kamatsu8 @rg9119 I'm fairly sure that's the domain-theorist's equivalent of taking your shoes off to count above ten. We've all been there.

@ianstk @kamatsu8 @rg9119 I’ve always been happy with omega cpos, but still had the sense that I was therefore a philistine

What's the specific reason that using a Scott Domain (or omega-algebraic cpo) works for a semantics with recursive domain equations and using a plain old pointed cpo doesn't? I'm trying to justify why we need Scott Domains in my lecture notes and I realised I don't actually know

@kamatsu8 @rg9119 Powerdomains? I still think some of this may be historical in trying to cut down to “computationally reasonable” domains seeking full abstraction. Ask Gordon Plotkin? His office isn't far from yours, but I realise that is not sufficient information to find the man himself...

@rg9119 @ianstk this is explaining compact elements and algebraicity, which I already understand, but it still fails to justify why this is necessary beyond "we will need this in the rest of the book". What I want is a motivation for why my students should learn this.