loopy

Word of the day: SCURRYFUNGE -- to rush around cleaning when company is on their way over. Example use: "If it weren’t for the occasional scurryfunge, my house would never get cleaned."

Word of the day: CHARETTE -- an intense period of activity immediately before a deadline.

I love you,
Not only for what you are,
But for what I am
When I am with you.

I love you,
Not only for what
You have made of yourself,
But for what
You are making of me.

I love you
For the part of me
That you bring out;
I love you
For putting your hand
Into my heaped-up heart
And passing over
All the foolish, weak things
That you can't help
Dimly seeing there,
And for drawing out
Into the light
All the beautiful belongings
That no one else had looked
Quite far enough to find.

I love you because you
Are helping me to make
Of the lumber of my life
Not a tavern
But a temple;
Out of the works
Of my every day
Not a reproach
But a song.

I love you
Because you have done
More than any creed
Could have done
To make me good,
And more than any fate
To make me happy.

You have done it
Without a touch,
Without a word,
Without a sign.
You have done it
By being yourself.

The use and understanding of matter in its condensed (liquid or solid) state have gone hand in hand with the advances of civilization and technology since the first use of primitive tools. So important has the control of condensed matter been to man that historical ages---the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age---have often been named after the material dominating the technology of the time.

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”

Berliner Sprüche: Wat du heute kannst besorjen, jeht ooch morjen.

"On a scale from 1 to awesome, how awesome is this?" (Stephen Colbert to Neil deGrasse Tyson in the Pluto video.)

People found guilty of not using punctuation deserve the longest sentence possible.

Tu neredzi video.

"[...] the low-energy Hilbert space for n Fibonacci particles with trivial total topological charge has a dimension given by the (n-1)th Fibonacci number. Consequently, the asymptotic dimension per particle, usually called the quantum dimension, is the golden ratio φ = (1+sqrt(5))/2. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Fibonacci anyons is that they allow for universal topological quantum computation in which a single gate---a counterclockwise exchange of two Fibonacci anyons---is sufficient to approximate any unitary transformation to within desired accuracy (up to an inconsequential overall phase)."

"[...] a 128-bit number can be factored in a fully fault-tolerant manner using Shor's algorithm with ≈10^3 Fibonacci anyons. In contrast, performing the same computation with Ising anyons [also non-Abelian but non-universal] would entail much greater overhead since the algorithm requires π/8 phase gates that would need to be performed nontopologically and then distilled [...]. For a π/8 phase gate with 99 % fidelity, the scheme [...] requires ≈10^9 Ising anyons to factor a 128-bit number."

Andris Beerzinsh does not pass the Turing test.

If I remember correctly, I have a good memory.

There's a fine line between a timeless wisdom and a banality, but I think Sam Harris is on the right side of it. Words to live by: Tu neredzi video.

Handwaving is my favourite type of proof.

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

Idling always has been my strong point. I take no credit to myself in the matter -- it is a gift. Few possess it. There are plenty of lazy people and plenty of slow-coaches, but a genuine idler is a rarity. He is not a man who slouches about with his hands in this pockets. On the contrary, his most startling characteristic is that he is always intensely busy.
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do. There is no fun in doing nothing when you have nothing to do. Wasting time is merely and occupation then, and a most exhausting one.

Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod.

A mathematician named his dog Cauchy, because it left a residue at every simple pole.

How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard...