{"id":3493,"date":"2017-10-08T12:01:23","date_gmt":"2017-10-08T17:01:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=3493"},"modified":"2019-01-28T15:13:30","modified_gmt":"2019-01-28T21:13:30","slug":"coming-to-nerd-central","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=3493","title":{"rendered":"Coming to Nerd Central"},"content":{"rendered":"

While I’m generally on sabbatical in Tel Aviv this year, I’ll be in the Bay Area from Saturday Oct. 14 through Wednesday Oct. 18, where I look forward to seeing many friends new and old.  On Wednesday evening, I’ll be giving a public talk in Berkeley, through the Simons Institute’s “Theoretically Speaking” series, entitled Black Holes, Firewalls, and the Limits of Quantum Computers<\/a>.  I hope to see at least a few of you there!  (I do<\/em> have readers in the Bay Area, don’t I?)<\/p>\n

But there’s more: on Saturday Oct. 14, I’m thinking of having a first-ever Shtetl-Optimized<\/em> meetup, somewhere near the Berkeley campus.  Which will also be a Slate Star Codex<\/em><\/a> meetup, because Scott Alexander will be there too.  We haven’t figured out many details yet, except that it will definitively involve getting fruit smoothies from one of the places I remember as a grad student.  Possible discussion topics include what the math, CS, and physics research communities could be doing better; how to advance Enlightenment values in an age of recrudescent totalitarianism; and (if we’re feeling really<\/em> ambitious) the interpretation of quantum mechanics.  If you’re interested, shoot me an email, let me know if there are times that don’t work; then other Scott and I will figure out a plan and make an announcement.<\/p>\n

On an unrelated note, some people might enjoy my answer to a MathOverflow question<\/a> about why one should’ve expected number theory to be so rife with ridiculously easy-to-state yet hard-to-prove conjectures, like Fermat’s Last Theorem and the Goldbach Conjecture.  As I’ve discussed on this blog before, I’ve been deeply impressed with MathOverflow since the beginning, but never more so than today, when a decision to close the question as “off-topic” was rightfully overruled.  If there’s any idea that unites all theoretical computer scientists, I’d say it’s the idea that what makes a given kind of mathematics “easy” or “hard” is, itself, a proper subject for mathematical inquiry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While I’m generally on sabbatical in Tel Aviv this year, I’ll be in the Bay Area from Saturday Oct. 14 through Wednesday Oct. 18, where I look forward to seeing many friends new and old.  On Wednesday evening, I’ll be giving a public talk in Berkeley, through the Simons Institute’s “Theoretically Speaking” series, entitled Black […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10,31,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventures-in-meatspace","category-announcements","category-nerd-interest"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3493"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4113,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3493\/revisions\/4113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}