Notices by Richard Penner (arpie4math@mathstodon.xyz)

"Skinship" (スキンシップ) is a Japanese word coined to describe affectionate touching between family members and romantic partners.

I propose that this term was invented because humans have a limbic system (or whatever neuroscientists call it today) that Japanese culture normally goes miles out of its way to ignore.

#スキンシップ #Japan #Japanese #LimbicSystem

Serial mistranslation, is there anything it can't do?

- In the #Odyssey, #Nausicaa is a Phaeacian princess who, prompted by Athena, acts with courage and hospitality to the shipwrecked and naked Odysseus.

- In #Victorian England, Nausicaa is elevated to a chaste, compassionate, domestic, dutiful, modest, and nurturing paragon of virtues. Unlike the dangerous beauty of Helen of Troy, Nausicaa is seen as a reliable supporting character for some male protagonist.

- Bernard #Evslin’s "Gods, Demigods and Demons" (1975) leans into this, but must have fallen asleep at some point. Nausicaa is portrayed as an eccentric, free-spirited Phaeacian princess who rejects traditional suitors to live a life devoted to nature, music, and imagination. Nausicaa gets 3 pages. Zeus only 1.

- Hayao #Miyazaki's "Nausciäa of the Valley of the Wind" is a fearless, nature-communing warrior for peace and co-existence, in part because of Bernard Evslin work misleading Miyazaki into thinking Nausicaa was widely recognized and known for her love of nature.

Cantor's claim is that the infinity of the set real numbers, |ℝ|, is larger than the infinity of the set of counting numbers, |ℕ|. If Cantor is wrong, then there must be a function 𝑓:ℕ⟶ℝ such that the set of real numbers, ℝ, is exactly the same as the image of all natural numbers under function 𝑓, 𝑓(ℕ) = { 𝑓(1), 𝑓(2), 𝑓(3), ... }. If Cantor is right, then there is no such function, 𝑓 where 𝑓(ℕ) = ℝ.

Cantor's diagonal argument is, at its heart, a proof that a set of size 2^n is strictly larger than n, is true for all n when n is the size of a set, and this works for infinite sets. If n is 3, we have A = {1, 2, 3}, B={000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111}, and if 𝑓(1) = 𝑎𝑏𝑐, 𝑓(2) =𝑟𝑠𝑡, 𝑓(3) = 𝑥𝑦𝑧, the symbol D = 𝑎𝑠𝑧 might or might not be in 𝑓(A), but D̅ = 𝑎̅𝑠̅𝑧̅ cannot be. We know 𝑓(1) ≠ D̅ since 𝑎 ≠ 𝑎̅; we know 𝑓(2) ≠ D̅ since 𝑠 ≠ 𝑠̅; we know 𝑓(3) ≠ D̅ since 𝑧 ≠ 𝑧̅, so we know 𝑓(A) failed to include all the elements of B. The diagonal argument is not a procedure or task to be carried out, but logical reasoning about operating 𝑓 on the whole of A at once, even when A is an infinite set, like ℕ.

ℕ and ℝ are already concrete. ℝ^ℕ, the set of all injective functions from ℕ into ℝ, is already concrete. So 𝑓 is an element of ℝ^ℕ and 𝑓(ℕ) ≠ ℝ, because none of the injective functions from ℕ into ℝ is also an surjective function from ℕ onto every element of ℝ. That's pretty much the definition of "larger."

Since D̅ differs from 𝑓(𝑛) at the 𝑛th position, D̅ cannot be an element of 𝑓(ℕ) because there is no 𝑛 such that 𝑓(𝑛) = D̅.

Effectively, Cantor's diagonal argument is the proposition that describes a concrete 𝑔:ℝ^ℕ⟶ℝ such that for all 𝑓 in ℝ^ℕ, 𝑔(𝑓) = D̅, is in ℝ but not in 𝑓(ℕ).

#Cantor #DiagonalArgument

This was a rough one.

🦗 Animal #1085 🐙
I figured it out in 12 guesses!
🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
🔥 1 | Avg. Guesses: 6.3

https://metazooa.com
#metazooa

Challenging logic puzzle that penalizes you when you guess with insufficient information:

https://cluesbysam.com

Is the 1977 two-part episode of "The Six Million Dollar Man" called "Death Probe" based on the failed Soviet Venera mission in 1972? Then, in an example of life imitating art (or physics being physics) that failed probe also returned to Earth in May 2025, largely intact due to its engineering to survive descent to the surface of Venus.

Many other details differ.

#TheSixMillionDollarMan #Venus #Venera #DeathProbe

> Chinese: wǒ bú huì shuō zhōnɡ wén.
> Japanese: nihongo ga dekimasen.
> German: Ich spreche nicht Deutsch.
> Spanish: No hablo español.

— A curated list of examples of the liar's paradox adjacent sentence "I do not speak [this language]" by mathematician Joel David Hamkins

Chinese is SVO much like English, so wǒ, huì shuō, zhōnɡ wén are meant to stand for I, speak, Chinese with (不,bú) being the negation of “no/not.”

Indeed, 「我不會說中文。」is the output of Google Translate when you ask for a translation of “I do not speak Chinese.” Personally, I find 中文 easier to write than to communicate orally in isolation. Because Chinese is properly written with a brush, it is not the shape of the letters but the high-dimensional space of brush movements that connects the printed, semi-cursive, and full-cursive forms, so stroke order is vitally important.

Chinese is a pitched language which means the rising and falling of the tone of each syllable is vital to spoken communication. Mandarin here has four main syllabic pitches: high, falling, rising, and falling and then rising. Thus the markers on the vowels are pitch marks, not stress accents.

But there are a lot of different characters. So there are same-tone homophones like 財 (fortune, wealth, assets) and 才 (talents). The right side of the first character resembles the second — not a coincidence, but also not a reliable predictor of pronunciation.

Due to cultural norms, 我愛你。(wǒ ài nǐ, I love you), while a perfectly grammatical sentence is culturally unacceptable to speak aloud to someone in public. Thus in Chinese it is possible to speak something perfectly but also completely wrong. ⇒⇐

Therefore, Chinese does not exist. □

Q.E.D. #Math #Paradox #Chinese

Q: What's the difference between NUL and NULL?

A: About 56 zero bits on many architectures. On a PDP-10, 27 zero bits.

Q: 27!?

@clacke So I have been informed.

https://translate.google.com/?sl=de&tl=en&text=ein%20Penner&op=translate

@clacke The song was a banger but the singing was flat?

@clacke Thanks for not reacting to my actual name. :)

Nothing is so twee as an American who has learned a new British word.

@thomasfuchs The Austrian government seems to have dropped the ball when it comes to promoting their culinary richness. There is a paucity of Viennese style restaurants.

@thomasfuchs Japanese Tonkatsu (豚カツ) has entered the chat.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonkatsu

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katsu-sando

> Isen (a tonkatsu restaurant in Ueno, circa 1935) was famous for its tender cutlet made with carefully pounded meat which could be cut with chopsticks.

With chopsticks!

@slothrop @nightjar

Ultraschall-Hautstraffungsgerät?

Perhaps the chain of semantic missteps and mistranslations went as follows:

私密紧致(机/器/刀) → (private regions (en_US)/privates (en_UK))+(tight/firm)+((ultrasound) scalpel/machine) → privacy (oops!) + (tissue/skin) firming machine → online privacy + firming machine → Datenschutzstraffungmaschine ?

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hochintensiver_fokussierter_Ultraschall

Congrats to @pluralistic for coining the word #enshitification (See footnotes 2 and 3) — as something that is named is more easily discussed, weighed, and planned about than a concept that exists only as vague concern. And the government of #Norway has thoughts and words on it and thinks they can help make it stop. 100 page PDF

https://storage02.forbrukerradet.no/media/2026/02/breaking-free-pathways-to-a-fair-technological-future.pdf

@nixCraft Bug: It still compiles if you change https to http despite the many risks of insecure web sites.

@thomasfuchs

Photorealistic is a moving target.

https://computeranimationhistory-cgi.jimdofree.com/

@godpod I thought you were going to define "betas" as a pre-production trial release to shake out the bugs.