The comments pointed out that anthropologist did not know that boiling was possible before the invention of pottery. Another comment pointed out that science teachers knew that it was possible because that was something they would do in class.
Final comment was about how people ReDiscover things in different fields - - like the trapezoidal rule for integration being discovered by someone studying glucose.
This is just yet another example of how bringing expertise from a different area can help.
It is conjectured that in higher dimensions, the densest packing is always non-lattice. The rationale being that there is just not enough symmetry in such spaces.
See also https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/201702/rnoti-p102.pdf
For other dimensions, this is an open question; it seems unlikely to be true in general. For some dimensions the densest known irregular packing is denser than the densest known regular packing.
I thought that was one of the important results from the paper, the most efficient packing for all dimensions is symmetrical again and this increase was significant enough it seems unlikely that existing non-symmetrical methods will be able to beat it.
There are three choices, really:
You can give a quick explanation in terms they understand, which makes your job sound easy and makes them wonder how anybody gets paid to do it.
You can explain what you do and why it's important in terms they understand, but it'll take so long they'll get bored and wish they hadn't asked.
Or you can give a quick explanation using jargon that they don't understand, which will leave them bored but impressed, which is the best of the bad options.
I always opt for excruciating detail because it's what I enjoy the most.
Sounds like none of the people you answered, in excruciating detail, cared to warn other people about what would happen if they asked you.
You can give someone a simple explanation of quantum chromodynamics and have them walk away feeling like they learned something, but only by glossing over or misrepresenting critical details. You’d basically just be lying to them.
Only in the end to reveal the belt is truely conceptualized and does not formally exist. The belt is an accurate visual representation and teaching tool, but the actual mechanics emerge from data latches and the timing of releasing the data, etc.
I thought it was helpful.
Also, it’s hilarious to get comments like this voted down by non-experts who assume this must be an outsider’s uninformed point of view.
I have a physics degree and I studied the origins and history of quantum mechanics. Its “founding fathers” all admitted that it’s a bunch of guesswork and that the models we have are arbitrary and lack something essential needed for proper understanding.
The math that describes it is known precisely. Specific implications of this are known. There's no information transfer, there's no time delay, etc.
And yet lay people keep incorrectly thinking it can be used for communication. Because lay-audience descriptions by experts keep using words that imply causality and information transfer.
This is not a failure of the experts to understand what's going on. It's a failure to translate that understanding to ordinary language. Because ordinary language is not suited for it.
> Its “founding fathers” all admitted that it’s a bunch of guesswork and that the models we have are arbitrary and lack something essential needed for proper understanding.
We don't have a model of why it works / if there's a more comprehensible layer of reality below it. But it's characterized well enough that we can make practical useful things with it.
So, what's a horse? Well, you look at it: it’s this big animal, standing on four legs, with muscles rippling under its skin, breathing steam into the cold air. And already — that’s amazing. Because somehow, inside that animal, grass gets turned into motion. Just grass! It eats plants, and then it runs like the wind.
Now, let’s dig deeper. You see those legs? Bones and tendons and muscles working like pulleys and levers — a beautiful system of mechanical engineering, except it evolved all by itself, over millions of years. The hoof? That’s a toe — it’s walking on its fingernail, basically — modified for speed and power.
And what about the brain? That horse is aware. It makes decisions. It gets scared, or curious. It remembers. It can learn. Inside that head is a network of neurons, just like yours, firing electricity and sending chemical messages. But it doesn’t talk. So we don’t know exactly what it thinks — but we know it does think, in its own horselike way.
The skin and hair? Cells growing in patterns, each one following instructions written in a long molecule called DNA. And where’d that come from? From the horse’s parents — and theirs, all the way back to a small, many-toed creature millions of years ago.
So the horse — it’s not just a horse. It’s a machine, a chemical plant, a thinking animal, a product of evolution, and a living example of how life organizes matter into something astonishing. And what’s really amazing is, we’re just scratching the surface. There’s still so much we don’t know. And that is the fun of it!
The quip you're referring to was meant to be inspirational. It doesn't pass even the slightest logical scrutiny when taken at its literal meaning. Please. (Apologies if this was just a reference without any further rhetorical intent though.)
It's like claiming that hashes are unique fingerprints. No, they aren't, they mathematically cannot be. Or like claiming how movie or video game trailers should be "perfectly representative" - once again, by definition, they cannot be. It's trivial to see this.
"I teach computers what sounds different aminals make."
What is the problem with this?
Most jobs, when simplified, sound like "anybody can do it". I think it's generally understood among adults who have been in the workforce that, no, in fact anybody cannot do it.
A somewhat ungenerous characterization of the attitude may be something like the Rocket Scientist vs Brain Surgeon sketch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I
But we should also acknowledge that there's an entire culture built around valuing people and their time relative to one's perception of their "importance", that this culture can influence one's earning potential and acquisition of material possessions, and that many people do care about things like "seeming important" or moving upwards in this hierarchy as a result.
The first option (explaining things simply) might make your job sound easy to a very small minority of extremely uneducated, under-stimulated people, who also have unaddressed insecurities around their own intelligence. But that’s not most humans.
Moderately-to-very intelligent people appreciate how difficult (and useful) it is to explain complex things simply. Hell, most “dumb” people understand, recognize, and appreciate this ability. Honestly, I think not appreciating simple explanations indicates both low mathematical/logical and social/emotional intelligence. Which makes explaining things simply a useful filter for, well… people that I wouldn’t get along with anyway.
With all that said, I prefer to first explain my job in an “explain like I’m 5” style and, if the other party indicates interest, add detail and jargon, taking into account related concepts that may already be familiar to them. If you take them into account, they won’t get bored when you go into detail.
This isn't going to be most humans you encounter if you're in the HN demographic, but that's a bubble. It does describe most people in the world.
For me, it's quite the opposite: such a choice demonstrates that they their prior is that I'm sufficiently smart and knowledgable to be likely able to understand this explanation - which I rather consider to be a praise. :-)
To me, it rather tells: "I consider you to be likely to be sufficiently smart and knowledgable to understand this topic if you put in some effort: do you want to learn some cool stuff which otherwise would demand a lot of literature research to learn? And since I already hinted that I consider you to be smart and knowledgable: would you like to teach me some cool, complicated stuff, too?"
This is always the right answer. It is the only answer that respects the listener and contains a seed to further conversation.
"I'm a mathematician, I study how shapes fit together, which surprisingly, is being used for new methods of secure communication by so and so university, but I just love the math"
There is another:
Give away as little information as you can about it.
Don’t say or agree that it’s secret or that you can’t talk about it- just be tight-lipped, and don’t divulge.
If you do it right, you will seem mysterious.
If you do it wrong, they probably won’t talk to you much again.
Win-win.
(not sure about convex shapes)
Convex shapes, well, annoyingly it's too broad. It has way more applications than sphere packings but it's hard to pick a good example. It's like trying to explain you design screwdrivers to someone who doesn't know what a screw is.
You ask me what it is I do. Well, actually, you know,
I'm partly a liaison man, and partly P.R.O.
Essentially, I integrate the current export drive.
And basically I'm viable from ten o'clock till five.
I have yet to figure out a way to tell people what my business is in a way that is even slightly accessible. Everything about it is so esoteric and multiple steps removed from regular life. It's not necessarily complex, it just contains a ton of details that the average person has no familiar contact with, and don't really have everyday analogues.
> I have yet to figure out a way to tell people what my business is in a way that is even slightly accessible.
You ... just did? In a remarkable short, concise, and very accessible way. I can ask as many follow up questions as I want and we might even have an engaging conversation. Sounds interesting!
I also obfuscated it a bit by giving the most general name just for privacy reasons since not many people do it. But rest assured it is a "Retro Encabulator" type machine, and as you add details it just becomes more and more alien.
This is not at all what I do, but its similar esoteric-ness to "I make differential gear sets for calibrating ion trap interferometry systems". A collection of words where every one of them the average person struggles to place.
Really if we're at a party that's more than enough unless I want to ask you more and you want to talk more about it. If you were a lawyer I'd probably ask what area of law that I probably stop and talk about something else. So I agree with others that you said was a very good distillation of what you do to the level that most people probably care about
EDIT: groped -> grouped
Here's some work on low-latency neural compression that you might find interesting: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.03312
Sounds like the technique is for high-dimensional ellipsoids. It relies on putting them on a grid, shrinking, then expanding according to some rules. Evidently this can produce efficient packing arrangements.
I don't think there's any shocking result ("record") for literal sphere packing. I actually encountered this in research when dynamically constructing a codebook for an error-correcting code. The problem reduces to sphere packing in N-dim space. With less efficient, naive approaches, I was able to get results that were good enough and it didn't seem to matter for what I was doing. But it's cool that someone is working on it.
A better title would have been something like: "Shrink-and-grow technique for efficiently packing n-dimensional spheres"
I think something like "Hypertopological Constriction-Expansion Dynamics in Quasistatic R^n-Ball Conglomeration" would be even more apt.
Those numbers sound wild. For various comms systems does this mean several orders of magnitude bandwidth improvement or power reduction?
So it's only helpful for naturally high dimensional objects. Digital objects do not have a natural dimension (byte length), so you can choose a small dimension.
Someone can take this challenge to provide a more secure and reliable communication systems hopefully with more energy efficiency, very much an exciting research direction.
tomrod•5h ago