@mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz

Matt McIrvin @mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz · May 07, 2026

Replying to @mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz

@cpi@mastodon.social Ha ha, the other post I made that same day involved one of Jeffrey Epstein's buddies. Truly history continues to provide ironic glosses on everything: https://mmcirvin.dreamwidth.org/400313.html

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Matt McIrvin @mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz · May 07, 2026

Replying to @cpi@mastodon.social

@cpi@mastodon.social By the way, though I never bothered deleting my old LiveJournal, the still-(somewhat)-active version of it is the clone on Dreamwidth: https://mmcirvin.dreamwidth.org/400616.html It seems to get less traction from search engines, though.

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Matt McIrvin @mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz · May 06, 2026

Replying to @cpi@mastodon.social

@cpi@mastodon.social holy cow, that "Metaphaser" poster might be the most 1970s thing I have ever seen. Yeah, the Quasar robot hoax is one of those "the more things change, the more they stay the same" things... sketchy tech companies are STILL promising robot servants for the home any day now and promoting them with rigged demos.

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Matt McIrvin @mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz · Apr 05, 2026

Replying to @ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social

@ZachWeinersmith Zeno was writing centuries before Galileo went in depth on the idea of relativity of motion, so I'm inclined to cut him some slack here. Of course, reading this in a post-20th-century world I'm so reminded of the various supposed paradoxes of *Einstein's* concept of relative motion, and what it does to distance and time intervals, that it's hard not to read that in. This reminds me a lot of the "barn and the pole" paradox in special relativity.

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Matt McIrvin @mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz · Mar 28, 2026

Replying to @DavidPenington@aus.social

@DavidPenington@aus.social @asakiyume@wandering.shop @rgammans@dice.camp @janeishly@beige.party I was just barely too young to really have contact with the punch cards/batch processing model of computing, but it was definitely still hanging around at the time I started. It's of a piece with the way I was too young to be taught to use a slide rule in school, but only just barely: affordable scientific calculators appeared while I was learning arithmetic.

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Matt McIrvin @mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz · Dec 05, 2025

Replying to @asakiyume@wandering.shop

@asakiyume@wandering.shop @rgammans@dice.camp @janeishly@beige.party My first interactions with a computer were over one of those. 300 baud acoustic dial-up, on a briefcase-sized portable terminal that my father would take home from work in the mid to late 1970s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_700

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Matt McIrvin @mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz · Oct 26, 2025

Replying to @mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz

@altomare@oldbytes.space (Best guess--it was my dad, and he was showing me some piece of internal General Electric training material that had plagiarized it.)

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Matt McIrvin @mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz · Oct 26, 2025

Replying to @altomare@oldbytes.space

@altomare@oldbytes.space I 100% remember seeing this diagram somewhere Back In The Day. I don't think I was looking in that DEC manual, I think someone showed it to me.

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Matt McIrvin @mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz · Jun 06, 2025

Replying to @nyovaya@transfem.social

@nyovaya@transfem.social @vantablack@cyberpunk.lol there's always this undercurrent of "*I* decide what is healthy and natural".

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Matt McIrvin @mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz · Jun 04, 2025

Replying to @vantablack@cyberpunk.lol

@vantablack@cyberpunk.lol Knee-replacement surgery has a higher regret rate than gender-affirming surgery, and that's a surgery I've gotten that was completely uncontroversial.

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Matt McIrvin @mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz · May 22, 2025

Replying to @brucelawson@social.vivaldi.net

@brucelawson@social.vivaldi.net Female toplessness is actually legal in large chunks of the US (it's a patchwork of local laws and rulings) but frequently the police aren't really aware of the legal situation, so I wouldn't recommend trying unless you're attempting to make a point by getting arrested.

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Matt McIrvin @mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz · May 04, 2024

Replying to @mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz

@astrid@fedi.astrid.tech @lily@glaceon.social @andrewt@mathstodon.xyz (IIRC, Renaissance people imagined they were seeing the golden ratio in all sorts of classical architecture, but they were wrong)

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Matt McIrvin @mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz · May 04, 2024

Replying to @mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz

@andrewt@mathstodon.xyz @astrid@fedi.astrid.tech @lily@glaceon.social ...but I'm tempted to write some Ligeti-like thing full of dissonant howling called "Here Is Your Golden Ratio"

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Matt McIrvin @mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz · May 04, 2024

Replying to @andrewt@mathstodon.xyz

@andrewt@mathstodon.xyz @astrid@fedi.astrid.tech @lily@glaceon.social It actually might be interesting to use the golden ratio as an intentionally dissonant interval, like the tritone but more so. (I guess it's about 833 cents, a third of the way between a minor and major sixth?) But it's probably no more interesting than any other kind of dissonance. There's an infinite supply of intervals derived from it that are just as dissonant.

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Matt McIrvin @mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz · May 04, 2024

Replying to @sgf@mastodon.xyz

@sgf@mastodon.xyz @astrid@fedi.astrid.tech @lily@glaceon.social @andrewt@mathstodon.xyz Oh, wow, I never heard of *that* angle! Yeah, there's all kinds of interesting mathematics in music but it's not that.

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Matt McIrvin @mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz · May 04, 2024

Replying to @astrid@fedi.astrid.tech

@astrid@fedi.astrid.tech @lily@glaceon.social @andrewt@mathstodon.xyz And the funniest thing is that this bullshit has been going on for literally hundreds of years, to the point that it becomes a bullshit tradition you can refer back to.

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Matt McIrvin @mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz · Apr 14, 2024

Replying to @sjolsen@tech.lgbt

@sjolsen the one on the right is "this is one of my own posts that I'm particularly proud of and might want to refer to later"

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Matt McIrvin @mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz · Nov 03, 2023

Replying to @sc_griffith@mathstodon.xyz

@sc_griffith@mathstodon.xyz and it makes you speak ancient Sumerian, right? This is Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

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