Steve McCormick

Steve McCormick

@quasilocal.com

Sweden-based, Germany-adjacent, Scottish-Australian Mathematician. Mathematician who pretends to be a physicist sometimes (convincing nobody). Maker of dubious memes, and exploring my new home near the arctic circle (Luleå).

1.6K followers154 following289 posts

Steve McCormick reposted

Okay, now I’ve found their “Bagpipe Practice Room” I think Scotrail might just be having us on!

Ayliean@ayliean.bsky.social

“Whisky Distillery” On a train?! How? @geofftech.bsky.social

Anyone in the math GR / geometric analysis communiy know anyone who's in need of a postdoc around 1 year from now and would be interested in coming to the frozen wastelands of the north? (And has/will have a non-Euro PhD)

(I found a call due very soon promoting internationalisation to recruit someone from outside Europe with less than 2 years on the post-PhD clock but not sure I can come up with a candidate quick enough)

Steve McCormick reposted

If kids’ schools trained them for work based on what everyone thought the hot new technology was going to be, both my kids would have spent the past several years learning about the blockchain. This is why schools don’t attempt to do workplace training: life is pretty long.

Recently, we (with Mattias Dahl and Klaus Kröncke) gave a definition of a new geometric "mass-like" invariant for asymptotically (locally) hyperbolic manifolds, which we've found satisfies some interesting properties. This paper is our attempt to understand it a little better.

I say "attempt" because admittedly, I still don't really understand it all too well but seems we can prove stuff about it. We were however able to show that the quantity arises as the value of a reduced Hamiltonian for the Einstein equations, which I think is kind of neat

I'm told that when I was really little, I was running into the motion sensor to open the door of a store before arriving customers triggered it When I was visibly upset for being too slow, a group stepped back and let the door close again so I could "open it" for them -- it was the band Wet Wet Wet

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The amusing thing is that there *is* an etymological connection here... And of course some variation of calling townspeople "burgers" exists in almost all European languages. It's where "bourgeois" comes from even. And connected to place names like Hamburg, Edinburgh, Strasbourg, etc. (I think)

Emma™@cockremover.bsky.social

I completely forgot citizens are called burgers in the Netherlands

How normal is it to write words correctly, but write the letters in the wrong order? Sometimes when I write fast, I fill in the letters the wrong way. Eg. When writing "Letter" in the middle of a sentence I might write the "ett" then the "L" in front of them and then the "er" ... it feels weird

Steve McCormick reposted

I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance. I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return.

I apologise for nothing

Andy Vitek@avitek.bsky.social

Mr god damn Brightside. I don't even think it's a bad song but I've been to way too many house parties over the years full of drunk millennials screaming the chorus at top of their lungs. It's just ruined forever.

The other day in a lecture I was using an outstretched arm like a traffic cop to indicate vectors in different directions and then after something like i+2j+k I ended up saying "whoops, nearly did an Elon Musk impersonation" moment 🙃

(To be clear, this was not remotely planned and there was a mild panic when I realised what I was just about to do in front of a room full of students with smartphones)

Steve McCormick reposted

I received a heartbreaking email today: A paper in a special issue I’m editing is being retracted because one of its authors is afraid of losing their job and their legal status in the U.S. if they publish a scientific study on evolution. Yes, on evolution, nature's engine of diversity.

Victory! They folded and have properly credited people in the latest proof :D

Steve McCormick@quasilocal.com

Has anyone ever had an accepted article "un-accepted" after disagreeing with "style" changes introduced in the proof stage? I'm once again in a back-and-forth where I won't allow a journal to reference work of 2-3 alphabetically listed authors as "Aaronson et al."

Cosmologists, I have questions about comoving observers that I can't quite figure out how to formulate... But I'm gonna try here in the hopes someone can help me understand a little better... I'm thinking about the Milne model because it's something geometric and familiar. (1/N)

Each statement here is more of a question than a comment. Comoving observers are those whose velocity vectors are unit normals to the Milne foliation of hyperboloids. That is, the homothetic vector field in Minkowski corresponding to scaling. We can use them as the right vector field to ...

associate to energy in place of a timelike Killing field, if we want to "subtract" the expansion And then the real thing that I'm confused by, is that if we have a kind of "obvious" rescaling time translation vector field. Is there an analogue for linear translations to measure a rescaled momentum?

Has anyone ever had an accepted article "un-accepted" after disagreeing with "style" changes introduced in the proof stage? I'm once again in a back-and-forth where I won't allow a journal to reference work of 2-3 alphabetically listed authors as "Aaronson et al."

It's about time the world stops being so reliant on US technologies...

Matias Koivurova@mkoivurova.bsky.social

I thought this nonsense was going to be apply only across the Atlantic, but now it has spread here too?? (The Finnish text says "Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)")