iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

wow! it would be great to be able to export as vector graphics... i've been wrestling with something similar forever, and never end up with good results, eg. this attempt at showing z^2 on the complex plane

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

yes, and there's left-, right- and bi- versions of both of these. And a bunch of functorial stuff that works in both contexts (extensions, restrictions, etc etc).

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Reposted by Simon Burton

Count Binface @countbinface.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Any Clacton residents who want to nominate your friendly neighbourhood intergalactic space warrior, ping me a line!

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

The great thing about standardized naming schemes is there's so many to choose from, or you can make your own!

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

New paper today with Hussain Anwar: we started out trying to understand why magic state distillation works, and ended up re-inventing quantum physics.. and of course the mathematicians already did this stuff 150 years ago scirate.com/arxiv/2605.0...

pre-image of Klein's octahedral function

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

Algebra without letters: so quiet you can hear the wind in the leaves. From arxiv.org/abs/2605.03102

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

(3) post-truth trading: it's just a bet about what everyone else is going to trade. Nothing much to do with reality.

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

Nice! The other thing people talk about with these Artin braid groups is actions on free groups, which i'm now understanding as a mapping class group acting on pi_1 of a punctured surface (and the punctures trace out the braids) .. and this pi_1 is a free group (or close to..?)

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

gives the symmetric swap diagram

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

You get these from swapping "row major" to "column major" counting array entries, for example this one

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 07/03/2026

And just for fun going to p=5... looks like we get some kind of order (p-1) Sierpinsky triangle.

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 07/03/2026

Here is the p=3 version, counting prime factors equal to 3

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 07/03/2026

What does the Sierpiński triangle have to do with Pascal's triangle? Here's a pictorial answer; i'm just learning about this from Bowman's "Diagrammatic Algebra" book

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 07/03/2026

wow, the braided symmetric string diagram does have the Coxeter braid relation ABAB=BABA ! what is this magic

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

A string diagram for an element of the hyperoctahedral group has a symmetry property, from Bowmans book "Diagrammatic Algebra". This immediately suggests a braided version ... hmm..

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

I think you are interfacing to a hyperbolic surface code

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

Wherein philosophy is dragged, kicking and screaming, into the twentieth century.

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 21/12/2025

The word "nothing" is doing a lot of work here and I'm not sure it is up to the task.

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

People do make superpositions of some very large systems, (i think even a tardigrade?) so what are you saying ? Are you the ket-police now?

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

I think I am just about ready to make my own search engine.

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

Ruth Kastner has some things to say about field theories..

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

It must be so frustrating to have billions of dollars and still be a miserable a**hole.

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 27/09/2025

The principle of "two big ideas": one contains the other, or else they are not big ideas.

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

If people are going to continue to put the introduction to their paper in the abstract, then i'm going to put my paper's abstract in the title.

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

Any sufficiently complicated physics paper contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of an idea from algebraic geometry.

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 11/08/2025

Today's OEIS fishing expedition. The only question is how much RAM am i going to need to find the next number... Love these OEIS cliff-hangers! ARGGH

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 03/08/2025

It's *a* graphic framework. I've been using 3d string diagrams for this stuff... Here is a laxator for a monoidal functor, which is the blue string. The monoidal product is the sheet layers... etc etc

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 13/07/2025

it's mostly excel spreadsheets..

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 08/07/2025

Still trying to figure that out, will get back to you.

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 05/07/2025

If by "the completely standard way" you mean, as taught in undergraduate quantum mechanics, then yes. I can't remember the last time i saw the Born rule actually used in the wild. It tends to be only in discussions like this about the foundations of quantum.

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 05/07/2025

Behold! A one-qubit quantum computer:

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 04/07/2025

i don't know if it's really a "need", but here is one way to get probabilities: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_rule

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 04/07/2025

I think it's just as valid saying you get zero-worlds when you don't add anything to the Schrödinger equation. I happen to prefer this interpretation (the zero-worlds one) on my more transcendent days.

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 23/06/2025

no don't kill it. Yes we need it.

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

This is a total shame that it comes down to who you believe in. Fundamental physics should be much more participatory than this.

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 26/05/2025

Wowee, this new collection threads the needle nicely between philosophy and physics. Authors actually explaining their ideas instead of just academicsplaining. link.springer.com/collections/...

link.springer.com

Perspectivism and Quantum Mechanics

In recent years, perspectivism has emerged as a leading contender in the scientific realism debate. Highlighting that human access to reality is always ...

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Reposted by Simon Burton

Rochelle @uberwensch.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

What is entanglement? Itamar Pittowsky claimed that these results brought us right to the precipice of logical contradiction--but not over. Abner Shimoney described it as a piece of "experimental metaphysics." I'm a nobody, but I think entanglement is the most interesting thing ever discovered. 🧵⚛️

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 04/05/2025

James Dolan has a knack for describing higher mathematics using vivid language... not much of this has made it into written form, but there are a lot of old posts of his on google groups

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

love these OEIS flamewars.. might have to wait a few more years to see if there's any followup.

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

I'm suddenly feeling much better about wearing a dishrag on my head (see profile pic).

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 12/04/2025

new book alert... oh, these pictures look like fun

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 11/04/2025

There's a sharp distinction between amateur and professional crackpots.

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 11/04/2025

TIL: the geometric Langlands program is where love and perversion are united

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Simon Burton @fridaysimon.bsky.social · 04/04/2025

yes! if you scroll down here www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/wor... you can see a talk Vaughan Jones gave about this stuff, it's a great talk with a super reveal at the end

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