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Cake day: July 18th, 2023

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  • It (along with Stokes’ theorem (they’re actually the same theorem in different dimensions)) helps yield Maxwell’s equations; specifically, if you want to change the flux of the electric field through a surface (right hand side), you need to change the amount of charge it contains (the source of the divergence on the left hand side). In other words, if you have the same charge contained by a surface, it will have the same flux going through it, which means you can change the surface however you wish and the math will still be the same. Physicists use this to reduce some complex problems into problems on a sphere or a box—objects with nice, easily calculable symmetries.







  • Personally, I want FDA approval to mean it is as provably safe and effective as possible. They said they wanted more evidence before approval, and I think that’s okay. Good, even.

    The way the US treats recreational drug use and self-medication is horrific, but it’s not really the domain of the FDA.

    I would rather have not-yet-FDA-approved legal-for-personal-use mdma than what we have now or an unproven drug approved by the FDA.




  • It depends on how much you compress the jpeg. If it gets compressed down to 4 pixels, it cannot be seen as infringement. Technically, the word cloud is lossy compression too: it has all of the information of the text, but none of the structure. I think it depends largely on how well you can reconstruct the original from the data. A word cloud, for instance, cannot be used to reconstruct the original. Nor can a compressed jpeg, ofc; that’s the definition of lossy. But most of the information is still there, so a casual observer can quickly glean the gist of the image. There is a line somewhere between finding the average color of a work (compression down to one pixel) and jpeg compression levels.

    Is the line where the main idea of the work becomes obscured? Surely not, since a summary hardly infringes on the copyright of a book. I don’t know where this line should be drawn (personally, I feel very Stallman-esque about copyright: IP is not a coherent concept), but if we want to put rules on these things, we need to well-define them, which requires venturing into the domain of information theory (what percentage of the entropy in the original is part of the redistributed work, for example), but I don’t know how realistic that is in the context of law.