Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · 17d

Lol brings back memories.
I do still actually check it occasionally, but never even make eye contact with the crazies. Occasionally it reminds me of a paper I wanted to read though

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Reposted by Steve McCormick

Ayliean @ayliean.bsky.social · Aug 30

Okay, now I’ve found their “Bagpipe Practice Room” I think Scotrail might just be having us on!

A cupboard in a train vestibule labelled “Stay Out, Bagpipe Practice Room”

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · Aug 30

(I found a call due very soon promoting internationalisation to recruit someone from outside Europe with less than 2 years on the post-PhD clock but not sure I can come up with a candidate quick enough)

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · Aug 30

Anyone in the math GR / geometric analysis communiy know anyone who's in need of a postdoc around 1 year from now and would be interested in coming to the frozen wastelands of the north? (And has/will have a non-Euro PhD)

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · Aug 11

I asked ChatGPT if it knew who I am based off of our chats. The answer was (obviously) yes 😅

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Reposted by Steve McCormick

Upstate Bozo @stuntbirdarmy.bsky.social · Aug 9

If kids’ schools trained them for work based on what everyone thought the hot new technology was going to be, both my kids would have spent the past several years learning about the blockchain. This is why schools don’t attempt to do workplace training: life is pretty long.

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · Aug 10

A last little bit of swedish summer yesterday

Guitar and some beers, spotted some berries, and then made a little spiky friend

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Reposted by Steve McCormick

Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · Jul 31

For the math folks on here: NSF has suspended Terry Tao's grant. www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/...

NSF Award Search: Award # 2347850

Structure theory for measure-preserving systems, additive combinatorics, and correlations of multiplicative functions

www.nsf.gov

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · Aug 1

Some kind of joke related to observing/measuring the back of the poster?

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · Aug 1

A friend is currently advertising a PhD position in harmonic analysis (Melbourne + Chennai*): lashi-bandara.github.io/toc/supervis...

Pass it on if you know anyone who might be interested.

* Position is joint between Deakin University IIT-Madras, with 3 years in Melbourne and 1 year in Chennai

PhD Project - Kato Square Root Problem on Riemannian Spaces - Lashi Bandara

lashi-bandara.github.io

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Reposted by Steve McCormick

Al Yankovic @alyankovic.bsky.social · Jul 27

My last living musical hero is still my hero but unfortunately no longer living. RIP to the great, great Mr. Tom Lehrer.

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · Jun 16

I say "attempt" because admittedly, I still don't really understand it all too well but seems we can prove stuff about it.

We were however able to show that the quantity arises as the value of a reduced Hamiltonian for the Einstein equations, which I think is kind of neat

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · Jun 16

Recently, we (with Mattias Dahl and Klaus Kröncke) gave a definition of a new geometric "mass-like" invariant for asymptotically (locally) hyperbolic manifolds, which we've found satisfies some interesting properties.

This paper is our attempt to understand it a little better.

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · Jun 16

New paper day! 🥳
arxiv.org/abs/2506.11841

The Volume-Renormalized Mass from a Hamiltonian Perspective

We demonstrate that the volume-renormalized mass for asymptotically hyperbolic manifolds recently introduced by the authors can be deduced from a reduced Hamiltonian perspective. In order to do this, ...

arxiv.org

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · Jun 14

I'm told that when I was really little, I was running into the motion sensor to open the door of a store before arriving customers triggered it

When I was visibly upset for being too slow, a group stepped back and let the door close again so I could "open it" for them -- it was the band Wet Wet Wet

R.L. Stine Cold Steve Austin @bolt451.bsky.social · Jun 13

Right folks. Feeling rather down at the moment so bringing back an oldie

Please Quote this with your most minor celebrity interaction

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · Jun 14

Seems arXiv now uses AI to try to convince you that you're misclassifying your own paper's subject area 🙃

Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · May 24

[Disclaimer: Not any kind of expert, so I'm probably missing things but the gist is roughly right I think 😅 ]

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · May 24

The amusing thing is that there *is* an etymological connection here... And of course some variation of calling townspeople "burgers" exists in almost all European languages. It's where "bourgeois" comes from even. And connected to place names like Hamburg, Edinburgh, Strasbourg, etc. (I think)

Emma™ @cockremover.bsky.social · May 24

I completely forgot citizens are called burgers in the Netherlands

HoldenAccountable @gifsmooth.bsky.social · May 24

Are you fucking shitting me?

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · May 24

Can any physicist explain this idea of boundedness of the Euclidean Einstein-Hilbert action in the context of this paper? (Purely from a GR/geometric perspective, no path integrals)

arxiv.org/abs/2505.13600

Constraints are not enough

The Euclidean Einstein-Hilbert action is well-known to be unbounded below and thus to raise many questions regarding the definition of the gravitational path integral. A variety of works since the lat...

arxiv.org

Reposted by Steve McCormick

Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · May 11

Not only is this true, there are 33 whole-ass mentions of this in the script and each one is freaking hilarious

whills.nu/4/sw4.html#h...

She hands him a dish, and he grunts an embarrassed reply.
BERU (CONT'D)
Luke, you've hardly touched
your dinner. Have some bum-bum
extract. It's very mild.
OWEN
(to Luke)
The force of the Bogan is strong,
and if you don't feel you can
make it, you probably won't.
LUKE
I've never even been past this
planet...and I never thought I'd
be going alone.
Suddenly I feel very small --
and well...desperate.

LUKE
Because a terrible thing happened.
During one of his lessons a young
PADAWAN-JEDI, a boy named Darklighter,
came to know the evil half of the
force, and fell victim to the spell
of the dreaded Bogan. He ran away
from his instructor and taught the
evil ways of the Bogan Force to a
clan of Sith pirates, who then
spread untold misery throughout
the systems. They became the per-
sonal bodyguards of the Emperor.
The Jedi were hunted down by these
deadly Sith knights. With every
Jedi death, contact with the Ashla
grows weaker, and the force of the
Bogan grows more powerful.

LUKE
No, no, there's a debris chute.
It's the Bogan force making you
feel that way. Don't give up
hope...fight it!
HAN
It's no use, it's no use.
The giant hinge bolts on the blast-shield door begin to pop
as the force of the Sith knights grows stronger. Luke fires
off a rapid series of shots and half-drags Han to the small
grate in the wall.
LUKE
Well, we're going anyway. Think
of good things. Drive the Bogan
from your mind.

18. INT. REBEL SPACEFIGHTER - COCKPIT CORRIDOR
Deak Starkiller cuts down several troops who make a fren-
zied, suicidal charge with laser swords.
TROOPS
The Bogan! The Bogan!
They are no match for the incredibly agile young Jedi. For
an eerie moment, all is deathly quiet as a huge darker figure
appears in the sub-hallway. The remaining stormtroopers bow
low toward the doorway. An awesome, seven-foot BLACK KNIGHT
OF THE SITH makes his way into the blinding light of the cock-
pit area. This is LORD DARTH VADER, right hand to the MASTER
OF THE SITH. His sinister face is partially obscured by his
flowing black robes and grotesque breath mask, which are in
sharp contrast to the fascist white armored suits of the
Imperial stormtroopers. The troops instinctively back away
from the imposing warrior.

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · May 9

Just got some art done by Alexandr Elichev for my latest homebrew Frosthaven class and wanted to share it somewhere :)

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · May 2

How normal is it to write words correctly, but write the letters in the wrong order?

Sometimes when I write fast, I fill in the letters the wrong way. Eg. When writing "Letter" in the middle of a sentence I might write the "ett" then the "L" in front of them and then the "er"

... it feels weird

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · Apr 29

Yeh, it's not even the AI that's the problem -- I actually *do* even think that we aren't that far from being able to generate tools to help prove things.

But they seem to think that essentially papermilling is a goal...

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · Apr 28

How can you look at a shift to quantity over quality seen in other fields, and think "math really needs to do this too"

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Steve McCormick @quasilocal.com · Apr 28

Well this can fuck right off

www.theregister.com/2025/04/27/d...

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