Ineffective Theory

It is well known that lions do not fare well in the Arctic.

A thread on epidemics “crowding out” other respiratory diseases.

I am increasingly of the view that expository (dare I say pedagogical?

Most people are in the majority.

A periodic reminder: links are included in these lists because they are worth reading (or worth skimming, or at least being aware of).

Here is a repository on Github.

SQLite adds (optional) type checking!

Here’s a recent comic from SMBC: But obviously we don’t need an infinite number of monkeys to eventually create the works of Shakespeare.

I admit this is pretty minor.

And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he has saved an entire world.

Bidirectional unicode features can be used (e.g. in rust) to produce code that apparently says one thing, but compiles to another.

Vitalik Buterin discusses finance, the political theory behind cryptoeconomics, and collusion.

It’s tempting to think that the sign problem is due to rapid oscillations of the integrand.

The correlation function, at temperature \(\beta^{-1}\), of an operator \(\mathcal O\) is defined to be $$ C(t) \equiv \langle \mathcal O(t) \mathcal O(0)\rangle = \mathop{\mathrm{Tr}} e^{-\beta H} e^{i H t} \mathcal O e^{-i H t} \mathcal O \text, $$ where

The obvious.

Click here.

When you hold a wedding, it’s likely to be influenced by weddings you’ve attended in the past.

From four years ago: However, the more conservative respondents were significantly more likely to believe the hazard messages than the more liberal ones.

Introducing the quantum mechanical bootstrap.

An extensive reading list on the economics of innovation.

I gave a set of two short lectures at Fermilab’s QCIPU summer school.

Betteridge’s law strikes again.

Certain big decisions are linked to questions of identity — in this case political identity.

Scott Alexander is posting book reviews from his book review contest (long delayed by, um, things).

[…] I was describing the materials of which our spurious aristocracy is composed.

The Economics Book is Steven Medema’s collection of 500 important accomplishments in economics, from 700 B.C.E. up through 2009.

Can the gender of a writer be reliably determined just by looking at the writing?

Two groups can be proper subgroups of each other.

Here is the third part of a vim tutorial, for advanced users.

The social mobility index is a ranking of U.S. colleges that you can find here.

A water treatment plant in Florida is attacked — attacker raises sodium hydroxide level in an apparent attempt to poison people.

This is yet another post on something I really should have learned long ago, but somehow never quite grasped.

In classical statistical mechanics, thermal expectation values are computed by averaging over some probability distribution.

This is a puzzle about computations in a (generally nonabelian) group \(G\).

A central motto of modern economics is that “incentives matter”.

Gil Kalai gives a primer on his argument against the existence of quantum computers.

The choice of opening is supposed to have a lingering effect throughout a game of chess.

Over-incarceration as a market failure.

Here are a few commonly repeated, casually believed statements (in or adjacent to physics), which are unambiguously false but extraordinarily useful.

The phrase “low-energy Hilbert space” is massively deceptive.

The Great Stagnation smells a lot like a purely psychological phenomenon — a matter of narrative rather than a matter of data.

Andrew Gelman argues that (in thus-and-such narrow context) experience is overrated.

Congress shall make no law respecting … the right of the people … to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

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I recently uploaded a paper to the arXiv on the partial removal of sign problems with perturbation theory.

At a conference a couple years ago, I was told this story of an argument that occured during a seminar.

How willing are scientists to change the direction of their research, in exchange for money?

(I’m writing a post introducing the sign problem, and it occured to me that there’s this little point about statistical physics that I’ve never seen written down explicitly.

A thread on statistical issues in historical persistence studies.