I'm known there for a "smoke pot" system for controlling smoke, and doing the math on creating steam for bread.
As a mathematician, I'm best known for my "seven shuffles" card shuffling work with Persi Diaconis, the computer algebra system "Macaulay" (too much C code), and being the math consultant for "A Beautiful Mind".
I really shouldn't blog. I'm still trying to come up with an understandable proof of the Poincare Conjecture.
I love Hacker News
By the way, curious about your reference to Italy and wine in the above comment. I'm from Italy and thought you could be from there, or at least had an experience in Italy.
He got the idea of acrylic nails to make his (our) hands longer like Nash. I'd be out in the village drinking with friends, and they'd point out my hands, describing the story. No one bought it. Then I'd say I was a Barbra Streisand impersonator. That I could sell, there was probably one in every bar down the street.
I got my nails done at the same NJ salon that Edie Falco used for the Sopranos. The woman who had promised to do the work was on a Caribbean cruise, so she phoned in. She asked me if I was doing anything else on the film besides being Russell's hand double? I told her I was also his love double.
"Will you be needing an extension for that too?"
> I told her I was also his love double.
In stitches right now. Did you get to hang out with Russell Crowe, Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly? Must be fun being a celeb :D
EDIT: you are in the pen ceremony as well! Wow I need to rewatch this urgently, it's definitely one of my favorite movies and I'll be on the lookout for the cameo :)
EDIT: I was born in 1992, watched it in theaters when I was 9. Time flies.
So what was it? The article seems to end on a cliffhanger.
Art made an error entering a longitude by hand. It moved the spot 200 yards, so instead of pointing this out I updated the script (mistake #1). Day of filming, Art tells me they caught the mistake, and had overnighted a corrected slide just in time. The "wrong" slide matching the script in Russell's trailer was two hours away. There was no question in Akiva's mind that we should get it. We sent a driver.
Now, I knew Ron Howard would be asking me which slides were which, when we filmed the crucial scene. I asked Art so I could move slides as needed, and was told the head of Art had spent all day positioning them. I innocently found the head of Art to ask him to relay his permission.
Oops. In front of dozens of crew he eviscerated me, telling me I was assuming too great a role, I was just a consultant, I should learn my place. (My role had indeed expanded. There's too much to do on a film.)
After we each had a word with Akiva, I discovered that the soon-arriving "wrong" slide was already in perfect position for filming. I had needlessly prevailed in a confrontation I could have avoided (mistake #2).
During preproduction I had offered to Russell that if he ever wanted to use me in a joke, I was game. Russell had missed the festivities so far. Rehearsing at a map table, he feigned not knowing where one of the locations was. The room froze for what seemed an eternity; he didn't mind. I snuck up silently to point on the map. He bellowed "Fuck off! I'm acting!" and turned to match my grin.
No one laughed. Anyone surprised I hadn't already quit that day was sure I'd quit now. Russell had no idea. He came to me later, wondering why no one laughed, he thought that was funny. I told him, "I thought it was funny. Who cares what anyone else thinks!"
We then spent half a day filming in front of the now-arrived "wrong" transparency matching the script in Russell's trailer. It turned out that Russell had memorized the coordinates (I hadn't). Yikes.
Akiva and I gave each other a silent hi-five look over this. Right call, getting a driver. This could have gone badly. So many decisions on a film set are a game of chance.
I even patched things up with the head of Art. The cinematographer Roger Deakins discovered that if he pulled down the slides the wall made a great backlight. The crew could only restore the original slide pattern because I'd made a chart. There was a strong pattern to the slide colors; this would otherwise have lead to continuity gaffes that many viewers would have noticed. So it appeared at first that I was the heathen about to destroy this artwork, when I was the person in the room who saved it.
For the library scene late in the film, Nash is starting to make sense. I consulted with a few people actually thinking about the Riemann hypothesis. ("Working" on it is staring into the sun.) For those blackboards, they advised me to borrow from Pierre Deligne's work in characteristic p. I made sure that missing definitions prevented anyone from actually proving the boards were wrong. "Freeze-framing the DVD" was a stock phrase for us on the set, but in fact people mostly paid attention to the acting.
As a first year graduate student, I was struck by the similarities between covering spaces in my topology course and field extensions in my algebra course. Asking Barry Mazur in the hallway, he quite mystically intoned that everything is connected. That was the basis for the student approaching Nash in the library. Russell Crowe completely winged his long response at the table. I was seriously impressed.
Earlier, I got pilloried by some for the Harvard Lecture Hall scene where Nash is institutionalized. Hey, it comes with the territory. Nash associating spacetime with the quaternions? Brian Greene gave me such a great look when I tried this line on him that I knew we had to use it. It is crazy, and the scene required crazy. Nevertheless, complex quaternions can model geometries used in physics. The quaternions and octonions extend the complex numbers, one could look there to better understand the Riemann hypothesis. The quaternions are most famously used by game developers for efficient rotations, and one keeps seeing references (here on HN!) to the octonions as deeper. I was at a tech dinner party in Berkeley where various gamers including the founder of Second Life swarmed me to share a moment "Oh! The octonions!"
For the porch scene in question, where Nash is still pretty gorped, I had him playing with a visual notation for continued fractions. The Riemann zeta function doesn't even converge where one wants to understand its zeros. Continued fractions exhibit different convergence properties, somewhat like the light cast in a a park with trees. So I could imagine a gorped Nash obsessing on continued fractions.
And to add to the others, you should really blog about all this, or write a book.
Obviously you should use food rated argon if you want to be safe. It's just going to be more expensive and harder to source.
My sense is that I'd be better off avoiding all plastics (not feasible in this world) than waiting for food-grade argon. But yes, this is a decision each person should make.
Ah yes, the common problem all of us face in our daily lives.
“If you want to be safe” doesn’t really jive with “extremely limited risk.”
Of course it does. To put it bluntly, it is extremely likely that any bottle of industrial argon is actually food safe because it's produced in basically the same condition that food safe argon. The main impurity while producing argon is oxygen. The main difference between industrial and food safe argon will be how their container is handled but argon as an environment is not really suited to bacterial development.
If you don't feel okay taking this risk, you can buy food grade argon which, well, is guaranteed to be food safe.
Also, don't get me wrong, I'm specifically talking about argon there. I would never use industrial distilled water or ethanol with food for example. That would be risky. I have heard of people using industrial CO2 to carbonate beverage. That makes me uneasy because CO2 is a good solvent.
I've had a wine that, although initially intended as a cooking wine, tasted fantastic 4 weeks after opening it.
https://daily.sevenfifty.com/the-science-of-wine-oxidation/
https://www.winemag.com/2019/04/09/wine-oxidation/
https://www.winespectator.com/articles/why-is-wine-oxidation...
Argon might last for longer than one day, which is a plus! But I tend to finish the bottle within a day or two, so N2O works fine for me.
The beginning of the article asserts that oxidation is one of the primary causes of wine going bad, then completely dismisses vacuum systems, which remove most oxygen out of the bottle. Scientifically, this MUST be superior to simply replacing the cork (or screw cap in Australia).
I’ve found that if I open the bottle and pour two glasses and immediately seal and vacuum (most of) the air out, I can get about 2-4 days of the wine tasting good stored at room temperature, versus about 1 day simply replacing the lid.
I even drank a wine after 10 days that, while not great, was still drinkable. It was like a 2 day open bottle roughly.
Why must this be the case? This is a genuine question, not a pure objection.
Consider two oxygen levels, o_1 and o_2, where o_2 << o_1 due to vacuum removal. Consider a set of chemical reactions that occur between wine and the surrounding environment. Of oxygen, glass, trace chemicals, cosmic rays, astological auras, etc. Let ℜ be the set of chemical reations that affect phenomenological quality (flavour) (presumably negatively, as a just-opened bottle of wine is at the peak of quality and can only degrade).
Why must it be the case that o_2 is the limiting factor for all, or even some, of the elements of ℜ? What if another quantity (surface area, pressure, etc) limits the pace or extent of the reaction, and just as much degradation occurs with partial vacuuming (o_2) as without (o_1)?
Perhaps you or someone else is a wine chemist, professional or amateur, and can enlighten me. Until that point, there are more things in heaven and Earth, dear dhsysusbsjsi, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
In the end, though, I think most people discover that those pumps do help preserve the wine for significantly more time.
I went with the Eto for a few reasons. One was price (pays for itself after a few bottles of wine), but the main reason was that it's so much simpler with fewer moving parts and there are no cartridges to replace. And it works well. I recommend the stainless steel version. Happy customer.
As others have stated, losing more volatile aromas into the head space of the bottle is the larger consequence of these devices.
but you should be aware that these tanks are pressurized to 2500 psi (in the states), and that can get pretty dangerous.
use a new regulator with an overpressure release valve.
myth busters did a segment where they chopped the top valve off a tank - it shot all 100lbs of steel through a cinderblock wall.
"Yes, argon is heavier than air, but there's this thing called diffusion." What has diffusion to do with it? Nothing. Most diffusion effects in our life are negligible because of convection.
I had to check how much argon costs. It is indeed not very expensive. Why do you need medical grade? What "toxins" do you expect?
This is an overkill for 99% of the population. Does your wife ask "Did you argon the olive oil?" too?
It's easy though. Tell them what you're doing, and take their advice.
I cut the 10' hose in half, and promptly lost one of the halves. I set up the cut end so it was inches away from fitting into a bottle on the shelf, for dispensing.
Here's a photo: https://komodokamadoforum.com/topic/8968-funky-old-cow/?tab=...
After the obligatory lecture on medical grade argon versus what I was buying (no difference besides a title), the guy tried seven times to talk me up from a 20# tank (which they don't always have) to a 40# tank (smallest standard size, same price to refill). I kept telling him I wanted to stay married. Then the tank ended up in the "middle shed" with the chamber vacuum sealer. When I went for a refill I reminded him of this hilarious conversation, and upgraded to a 40# tank that's still going strong.
I displace air from primary fermenters using CO2 and have had good success ... I would be open-minded to switching to argon but wonder if there is a reason ...
But note that re: safety, if you need an inert gas, CO2 is usually your safest option. Why? Unlike other inert gases, you have a decent chance of detecting CO2 intoxication. For most people, excess CO2 is very unpleasant, giving you a chance (NOT a guarantee!) to recognize the hazard and escape. Meanwhile, if your body is short of oxygen because an inert gas leak has reduced O2 concentrations in the room you are in, there's a very good chance that won't notice and at some point will just pass out suddenly and die. Our bodies just don't have the ability to detect a lack of oxygen directly; we evolved to detect an excess of CO2 instead.
Now, I don't want to fear monger: you can certainly handle nitrogen and argon safely with some care and common sense. I myself used to work with liquid helium in large enough quantities to need an O2 alarm. But all things being equal, I'd use CO2.
People with COPD need not apply.
CO2 intoxication is unpleasant for us because the baroreceptors in our arteries can detect when the partial pressure of CO2 is too high. This is the feeling you get when you hold your breath. You have somewhere between four and ten minutes of oxygen supply in your blood, but it becomes unpleasant within the first minute because CO2 is building up instead of being exhaled.
People with COPD always have an abundance of CO2 in the bloodstream because their alveoli don't exchange gases correctly. They likely wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
Just saying. Your argument is sound and generally true, but it's true not for everyone.
Important safety difference. You'd still need to be careful, but unless you're lying on the floor...
(Carbonating to 1 atm does not produce much fizz — it only produces any at all because the CO2 offgasses as the drink warms, but bubbles and the taste of carbonation are different phenomena.)
One of the tricks to CO2 canisters is that CO2 liquefies around 6 atm at room temperature, so a canister of CO2 will maintain that pressure until the liquid CO2 is depleted. Dry ice produces about 1 atm of vapor pressure (obviously) which matches the vapor pressure you get when displacing air.
Carbonation (in the sense of making the wine fizzy) will not happen unless pressure is used to drive the CO2 into the wine. You need a supersaturated CO2 solution to get fizzies.
Simply, I put a bottle under the SodaStream nozzle and give a few puffs of CO2 to be confident that it's displaced most of the air.
I do this with normal drinking wine sometimes, but more often things like vermouth that I don't open daily.
Argon is a bit less soluble in wine. But both are used by professionals.
It is said that CO2 can carbonate your wine. If you haven't experienced this, you're fine. I know no reason to actively prefer CO2 to argon, if one is making a free choice.
1atm of (normal air) displaced by 1atm of CO2 is not going to lead to any carbonation ...
That would be desirable for champagne but most likely not for wine.
One stops worrying about bottle boundaries. One buys magnums. ("A difficult size, too much for one but not enough for two.") There is a faint mellowing effect by the next day, but nothing like the effect of oxygen.
We sometimes deliberately skip argon. In Italy you know you're tight when friends serve yesterday's wine. Those wines need the abuse. Most wines don't handle the abuse of an open day well.
Scale matters. There are $300 units made of cheap plastic aimed at wine "connoisseurs". The cartridge is the same size I'd carry mountain biking, to fill one inner tube on an emergency basis. That's supposed to last 50 bottles? How stupid does the manufacturer think I am?
Yes, argon is heavier than air, but there's this thing called diffusion. There's argon in the air around us; if argon cleanly separated from air and formed a bottom layer, we'd all suffocate when we lay on the floor. Obviously, we don't. Put it together.
I'm reminded of Thomas Keller's Bouchon Bakery cookbook taking heat for proposing 350 ml of water for bread steam, poured onto 30 lbs of thermal mass such as an aluminum disk in a cake pan. That also generates enough steam to displace the volume of an oven threefold. A commercial bread oven depends on serious steam for the first few minutes; this is a home approximation. People liked the idea of spritzing 10 ml of water from a plant spritzer, and were offended Keller did the science. They were just genuflecting.
One can wait months to obtain medical grade argon. It's the same process, only tested to confirm the fact that the process doesn't introduce toxins.
My wife is a practical engineer; she indulges every exploration like this. Some take. This one took. A standard after-dinner question is "Did you argon the wine?"