About/FAQ missing reference to webmention-endpoint? · Issue #673 · snarfed/bridgy

In the FAQ https://brid.gy/about#endpoint there's a line about "Why do I have to add that line of HTML to my blog?"

Am I now missing it or did the actual line of HTML that's being referred to disappear from the page in an update?

I'm presuming it's referring to:
<link href="http://yourwebsite.host/webmention-endpoint" rel="webmention" /> or on WordPress
<a rel="webmention" href="https://www.brid.gy/webmention/wordpress"></a>

I think the brid.gy interface prompts the user to include such a line when signing up for service, but it may also make sense to mention it on this page in this section somewhere for completeness? It could certainly be referenced here for those reading the "about" page prior to actually attempting to set things up.

While reading http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pirated-papers-everyone I'm wondering why @Sci_Hub doesn't have a LibX http://libx.org/ community...

On discovery of (good) content from the interwebs.
A short reply to @anildash @kylewmahan @tinokremer et. al

Tino, your note reminds me of Dave Winer's http://podcatch.com/ service which he built to be able to have access to interesting podcasts at any time without having to sync his phone. Sadly, I think it's a static source and not quite the tool that even https://huffduffer.com/ is and even that requires some user set up to find great material.

I remember early web efforts like Digg that were interesting for a while, but sadly services like this regress to the mean and one gets the fluff that appeals to Harry and Mary Beercan.

My favorite discovery engine lately is the Nuzzle News app from Jonathan Abrams (http://nuzzel.com/) which plugs into my social feeds and gives me articles from friends/influencers that have been mentioned several times. The value of the site is the ability to easily plug in well curated twitter lists on particular topics which then finds articles tweeted about multiple times by people I trust. I find that most of what the app uncovers is worth reading and thinking about. Rarely does it surface fluff, though I find that the articles in the friends of friends category are things that I don't care that much about.

If only we could get Nuzzle to partner with Huffduffer?!

Pocket also has a recommended tab (https://getpocket.com/a/recommended/) which is relatively useful, but it really isn't far from the simple algorithmic approach of Digg in the past.

Also, can someone please build an internet-wide filter to get rid of #listicles and the joke and fluff emails with the 1000 forwards from 1998? We'd all be a lot better off. #PanemEtCircenses

Reading: On page 137 - He's got some great logical theory, but often he's trying too hard to be inspirational and capture more pathos than he can chew off. [Stuart Kauffman | At Home in the Universe]

@ChristophAdami @ctitusbrown I find myself thinking: It's really "The Origins of Order" I should be reading instead of this, right?

+Mark van Walraven To strip cruft (ads, widgets, and other distractions) off of blog articles and general web pages for a cleaner and easier reading/concentrating experience, you might consider using Readability, which has a handy bookmarklet that you can put in your browser toolbar for quick and easy use: https://www.readability.com/bookmarklets. If you're an avid Evernote user, they have a product called Clearly that's pretty good as well: https://evernote.com/clearly/. Similarly Pocket and Instapaper have this type of functionality (with bookmarklets as well), though they typically require one to save articles to one's account first prior to reading, though this is rather handy when skimming through G+, Twitter, and Facebook feeds for interesting material one wants to read later.

+John Baez For RSS, the heir apparent to Google Reader's old product is Feedly (http://feedly.com/). There are certainly a small handful of others, but I suspect most would say that Feedly is the clear winner. They use a freemium model in which they give the majority of their useful functionality away for free and charge a small and reasonably modest subscription fee for a set of advanced functionality that most probably don't need or use. If you want to add a simple Feedly button to your blog siderail (via widget), you can find details and instructions here: http://feedly.com/factory.html

In a past life and as a side hobby, I spent several years running and building a large portion of social media for Johns Hopkins, so I've played with nearly every platform in existence. I've been pecking away for a while at blog post describing how researchers and academics can best use blogging and social media presence to improve their work & speed up their workflow - a topic that could actually be a reasonable sized book. Some of the commentary here has motivated me to get back to it presently.

While I'm positive that stories about math at the level of sophistication described here require some technical underpinning which the writer and editors may potentially lack and which therefore make it both more difficult to be aware of them (to know to report on them in the first place) but also to objectively lay out the topic, from a journalistic perspective, this particular story, which references prior work by Benedict Gross, should have at least mentioned, as a caveat, the relationship between Quanta as a publisher and Gross's position as an advisory board member to it.

While Gross's bona fides are certainly not in question given the topic or his distinguished career, what, if any, was his involvement with the piece? Did he suggest it? Did he provide background? (I notice he wasn't directly quoted, which makes me wonder even further). Was he paid? There's certainly the possibility that something potentially not quite kosher may be going on here (even if it is just free publicity for him and his past work, particularly given that the final result discussed here hasn't been published or independently verified), and not providing at least a mention of the relationship from an editorial standpoint is a glaring error.

Aside from this small journalistic oversight, I otherwise laud Quanta for consistently providing interesting, entertaining, and timely coverage of the world of math and science in such a fantastic fashion. Helping to humanize and even idolize mathematicians and scientists should be a more common effort in our society.

Given the somewhat broad nature of the readership and range of backgrounds, for those who may not have the high level of background for reading the related papers (once they're publicly available) yet, many may be interested in knowing that Dr. Gross has an excellent and free online series of lectures on basic abstract algebra available (http://www.extension.harvard.edu/open-learning-initiative/abstract-algebra) which may go a reasonable part of the way for helping the not-so-technical readers to better understand some of these areas of mathematics and how they interrelate.

Cross posted as: https://www.quantamagazine.org/20151208-four-mathematicians/#comment-363094

Review of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1431163665

Over the past four years I've read several books, similar in concept to this one, including many by Bart Ehrman who possibly has the largest number of texts in the area including: [book:Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth|11543839], [book:Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible & Why We Don't Know About Them|6101996], [book:From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity|2397133][book:The New Testament|260609], and a good portion of [book:The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption & Restoration|240196].

Of the group, which has a lot of overlap in general thesis and examples, this is by far the best in terms of presentation of a story and all the details. Aslan's writing is interesting, evocative, well-researched, and intrinsically entertaining. As a product, in part, of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, I'm loathe to acknowledge a graduate of Iowa's wriiting program, but Aslan certainly does great credit to his alma mater. He does a relatively good job of describing his own background for those interested in his viewpoint from a historical perspective. He also does an excellent job of pointing out what his own opinions are as well as highlighting where his though differs from that of other scholars in the field and where theirs differs from each other.

While this is most assuredly a popular-press title and aimed at a far broader audience (like many of Ehrman's works) than the more specialized scholarly treatises he references, I have to take Aslan (or far more likely his editors) to task for the poor presentation/layout of the notes provided in the back. The book would appear to be relatively well footnoted with exception to the fact that the footnotes don't appear within the text, nor do they appear even at the bottom of the pages. Even worse, the 50+ pages of excellent (and actually read-worthy) notes in the end are sorted by chapter and have no indicators to the portions of the main text to which they directly relate, which make them terrifically painful for other scholars to contemplate using in any functional way. Hopefully future editions will at least include numbered indicators in the main text that tie to the notes in the back. While this is aimed toward the masses, it's really a shame that the presentation of the notes within the book wasn't handled a bit better. At least the biblical references were included within the primary text - and these in themselves do a great job of indicating the synoptic nature of the New Testament gospels.

One thing that Aslan includes that I haven't seen thus far in much of my reading is a fantastic overview of first century Palestine from a sociological and political perspective to help put the balance of the story into context. All of the major players seem to be well represented and given reasonable weight. If only more histories could be written in this way, perhaps the world would read non-fiction for entertainment rather than the litany of romance, thrillers, sci-fi/fantasy, and general fiction that dominates the best-seller lists. His overview is not only interesting in and of itself, it takes up almost the first third of the text and continues on as necessary through the remainder of the text to provide continued context.

In summation, the book was well-researched, entertainingly presented and phenomenally interesting, even to someone who's read the majority of the details in the recent past. I would highly recommend this to anyone and everyone (regardless of their religious leanings), particularly as the subject concerns two of the most influential figures in all of western history/philosophy. Aslan presents some excellent facts, ideas, and thoughts that are assuredly not known by a majority of people, who really should be aware of them.

<i>Manny wrote: "I see Jacobson was an expert on Lie algebras... yes, that might certainly be useful! Thanks..."</i>

Many/most graduate math texts on Lie Groups/Algebras utilize manifold theory as their basis, which can make the field more daunting for physicists. As a result, I recommend looking at books that take a more linear algebraic bent to the subject, which can make some of the quantum mechanics related areas more transparent. I've used [book:Lie Groups, Lie Algebras, and Representations: An Elementary Introduction|1051566], [book:Matrix Groups for Undergraduates.|1162374], and [book:Lie Groups, Lie Algebras, and Some of Their Applications|424103] for these types of applications and viewpoints.

About a year ago, I took a two quarter sequence at UCLA on Lie Groups from an ("easier") matrix group perspective which I imagine you may find somewhat useful in your reading on quantum mechanics. Several engineers, programmers, amateur mathematicians, physicists, and quantum mechanics enthusiasts had spent several years coaxing the professor into teaching it from this perspective. It was geared toward the advanced undergraduate level, and based on your comments here and your reading of Shankar, should be relatively easily followable.

We loosely followed Hall's textbook and portions of [book:Matrix Analysis|647523], which will give you some of the advanced linear algebra you could possibly be missing depending on your background. If it helps, here's a link to a downloadable pdf copy of the notes for the first class with the audio of the lecture embedded (using Livescribe.com digital pen technology which should let you click on the notes and jump to the audio portion related to where you've clicked): http://bit.ly/1KMxj0R. If it's useful, let me know and I can give you links for others. You may need to open it up in a more recent version of Acrobat Reader to be able to access the audio portion of the lecture, which will go a long way to assisting the clarity of the notes.)

Having this background may make Weyl and Woit's developing textbook more easily manageable. My guess is that Woit is doing a more thorough job of developing the math than typical physics-oriented texts like [book:Geometry, Topology and Physics|439357] which do a lot of hand-waving at the math in an effort to get to the physics more quickly, but at the detriment of understanding what is happening mathematically.

I've dipped into some of Weyl's work in the past, but also keep in mind that some of his notation and definitions can be dated in relation to more modern presentations.

Some additional thoughts on information theory and complexity for models in ecology.

In addition to some of my commentary on <a href="http://biology.stackexchange.com/a/40555/6629">StackExchange</a>, I'll include a few additional thoughts which may be of help/assistance.

First for those who don't have the background, I <i>highly</i> recommend reading the two seminal papers on information theory and statistical mechanics by ET Jaynes and the standard text on information theory <i><a href="http://amzn.to/1NThEjd">Elements of Information Theory</a></i> by Thomas M. Cover and Joy A. Thomas.

In addition to the information theoretic related areas, you might want to take a look at the discipline of complexity theory, which has primarily grown out of the Santa Fe Institute over the past several decades and which includes information theory as part of its disciplines. If you're unfamiliar with the broader topic, Melanie Mitchell has an excellent overview with her book <i><a href="http://amzn.to/1YbcUZ4">Complexity: A Guided Tour</a></i>. Also related to complexity is the area of cellular automata which one could view as a very base model of more complex ecological systems. Here, perhaps Stephen Wolfram's <i><a href="http://amzn.to/1kwIAtM">A New Kind of Science</a></i> or <i><a href="http://amzn.to/1Ybd3Me">Cellular Automata and Complexity</a></i> will be enlightening. The broader theories coming out of these primarily mathematical areas may be useful to you.

In particular, given the types of models in ecosystems, I might suggest taking a look at some of the mathematical modeling going on at the intersection of complexity and economics. For a relatively simple introduction to this area, one could look at the relatively introductory text <i><a href="http://amzn.to/1kwJ6Ic">Complexity and the Economy</a></i> by W. Brian Arthur which is very interesting. The economy is essentially a very specific type of ecology dealing with human beings, assets, and the monetary system.

Another area which I've seen a lot of literature over the last few years is applicable to the ideas of resiliency and complexity in cities, for assisting in designing more robust city planning. This really isn't that far from the naturally evolving systems being looked at in ecology settings.

For those looking for researchers in the area of complexity, I have a <a href="https://twitter.com/ChrisAldrich/lists/complexity/members">list of many who are on twitter</a> in a variety of sub-areas. In addition to individuals, it also includes a number of institutes and related organizations as well.

I'd also suggest, that for the broadest theoretical setting, one could actually start with the topic known as "Big History" which takes the broadest approach of looking at history and the evolution of the cosmos over 13.7 billion years since the big bang. This conceptualization includes ideas like evolution, complexity, and emergence on the biggest scales, a set of theories that could be similarly applied to ecologies both large and small. For this viewpoint, I would suggest two works by David Christian including <i><a href="http://amzn.to/1kwJPJy">Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History</a></i> and <i><a href="http://amzn.to/1YbdExx">Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity</a></i>.

In essence, with many of these topics and viewpoints, one is treating individual animals or even entire species as elementary particles and then using the mathematical models of statistical thermodynamics to tease out specific types of data or trends. As layers of overlapping "particles" interact with each other, they cause emergent types properties, and then these resultant emergent properties combine to create further layers of emergent properties, none of which might have been necessarily deduced from the initial conditions. Within Big History, these types of emergence go from the big bang and basic particles in the early universe to the ultimate evolution of humankind by way of a variety of stages.