Greg Egan

An epic (10,000-word) account of the history of Alzheimer’s research, written with what seems to me as a layperson like admirable balance and clarity.

This article is interesting, even if the correct headline would be “Physicists create a quantum system with some degrees of freedom that behave the same way as some degrees of freedom of a hypothetical wormhole in a certain kind of hypothetical universe”

I loved the first Don DeLillo book I read (“White Noise”, now a movie), but then I read “Ratner’s Star” which I loathed so much than I never read another DeLillo book again. This was probably an over-reaction, so … anyone have DeLillo recommendations for a reader who hated RS?

[6/6] So no same-coloured points can be exactly a distance of 1 apart. Here’s a great intro by @MrHonner to the “Hadwiger-Nelson problem”: how many colours are needed to ensure that no two points on the plane a unit distance apart share the same colour?

It’s a great article, but when you first mentioned it I thought “Hmm, wasn’t there something more recent in Quanta on exactly this topic?” And there was. So the plot has thickened since 2013!

[1/2] Make a Fibonacci-like sequence with an equal probability of choosing either sign in the recurrence: f_{n+2} = f_n ± f_{n+1} This is explored in a great paper by Viswanath (thanks to @_onionesque). [link] Here’s the distribution of the nth root of |f_n|