Annoying textbook "feature"

I'm reading "Seven Sketches in Compositionality: An Invitation to Applied Category Theory" https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.05316.pdf

The intent of the authors is greatly appreciated because the applied part of CT is mostly targeted to the software crowd. As part of the non-SW crowd I rejoice when I see that in Chapter 2.3 the authors are going to introduce a Cost-category. Great!

Now, when I get to 2.3 none of the string diagram figures covered in 2.1 and 2.2. apply. Nada! WTF?! What was the point of introducing all these monoidal concepts and drawings if you are not going to use them later in the same fucking chapter?

Taxation without representation

Trumpland consists of hundreds and hundreds of tiny low-output locations that comprise the non-metropolitan hinterland of America, along with some suburban and exurban metro counties.



All of which suggests multiple problems. Most broadly, the stark political divide underscores the likelihood of the two parties talking entirely past each other on the most important issues of economic policy. Given the election map we revealed, the Trump administration will likely feel pressure to respond most to the desires and frustrations of the nation’s struggling hinterland, and discount the priorities and needs of the nation’s high-output economic base.


https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2016/11/29/another-clinton-trump-divide-high-output-america-vs-low-output-america/

The announced tariffs represent an effort to redistribute wealth from high-performing workers to low-performing trumpists. The Chinese are planning to reciprocate with tariffs of their own, specifically targeted at the "red" base.

CT-based Resource Theory

Bob Coecke, Tobias Fritz, and Robert W. Spekkens. “A mathematical theory of resources”. In: Inform. and Comput. 250 (2016), pp. 59–86. issn: 0890-5401. url: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ic.2016.02.008.

Про шашечки и ехать

Забавный диалог:

Q: Вам шашечки или ехать? Мне лично ехать...
J: Мне шашечки. Куда мы едем, я не знаю.
Q: Куда мы едем - я честно говоря тоже не знаю.

Это как если бы Лайка* звала знакомых собак в космос.

upd: * Ла́йка (1954 — 3 ноября 1957) — собака-космонавт, первое животное, выведенное на орбиту Земли. Была запущена в космос 3 ноября 1957 года в половине шестого утра по московскому времени на советском корабле «Спутник-2». На тот момент Лайке было около двух лет.

Возвращение Лайки на Землю конструкцией космического аппарата не предусматривалось.

Really good stuff

...the most basic questions about a resource theory: When are two resources equivalent under the free operations, in the sense that one can convert one to the other and vice-versa? What are the necessary and sufficient conditions on two resources such that the first can be converted to the second (possibly irreversibly) under the free operations? How can we find measures of the quality of a resource, that is, functions from the resources to the reals which are nonincreasing under the transformations allowed by the resource theory? ... Can a given resource conversion be made possible by the presence of a catalyst, i.e. a resource which must be present but is not consumed in the process?

We refer to this minimal framework as a theory of resource convertibility. The requisite mathematical formalism turns out to be that of a commutative (equivalently, Abelian or symmetric) preordered monoid.

First, consider the preorder. This is the order over resources that captures whether one resource can be converted to another or not. Recall that the first of the questions above called us to characterize the equivalence classes of resources under the free operations, and the second called us to find the partial order over these equivalence classes that is induced by the free operations. But this is nothing more than a call to find the preorder over the resources induced by the free relation of convertibility. Once the preorder is identified, one can define measures of the resource, or “resource monotones”, as any map from the resources to the reals which respects the preorder.

BFS. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ic.2016.02.008

Just a few days ago I wanted to write that I can simulate any system of interest with a preorder and a monoid :)

Fucking Moron (tm)

Imposing tariffs on Chinese goods - sixty billion dollars.
Dropping US market cap by a trillion dollars - priceless.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-21/asian-stocks-face-mixed-start-dollar-sinks-on-fed-markets-wrap