I’m not usually one to joke about opaque scientific terminology — there’s usually a good reason for it, and it’s not written for the lay public anyway — but I can’t resist this:
Pattern runs on matter: The free monad monad as a module over the cofree comonad comonad
I got the link from Anatoly Vorobei, who adds: “нет, я не знаю, что это значит, и не собираюсь разбираться, если честно. Просто забавно” [No, I don’t know what it means, and I’m not about to try to figure it out, to be honest. It’s just funny]. But if you want to crack your brains on it, the paper is open access. (Oh, and the comment thread at Avva is very funny, if you read Russian.)
Pattern runs on matter
Long since known to the Kusaasi, who cite it in the equivalent form
Ku’om zɔtnɛ bian’ar zug.
“Water runs on mud.”
Dogon cosmology, nothing. What is Sirius compared to a monad?
“Monad” is in fact borrowed from the Kusaal mu’ar (mo’ar in the older orthography) “lake, large river.” Hatters may well find that this elucidates what has often been thought of as a somewhat esoteric term.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monadology
It might be improved by a few hyphens – depending on what you think of as an improvement, of course.
cofree comonad bo bonad bo nana fanna fo monad fee fi mo-momonad
or something like that
That is the original Old Irish version!
In the modern tongue, of course, it’s gomhonadh.
Or, in the revised spelling, gubh.
Comhónadh in Classical Gaelic. The word was originally borrowed from Brythonic: cf Welsh cyfunedd “unity.” The expected *comhóineadh (from an unattested Old Irish *comóined) is not found in literary sources, but underlies some modern Scottish Gaelic dialect forms.
At first glance I thought it was a new coffee extraction technique.
A while ago, Quanta magazine had an article featuring an actual human (!) doing research on Category Theory, with some claim of practical applications (!), to human language no less. I am still very skeptical, but I appreciate their effort.
Mathematicians’ terminology for co-this and co-that can drive you batty. I know what they mean and why it’s handy to have terminology for related theories with all morphisms* reversed. But it can sound like word salad. Free once had a meaning of something like “unconstrained by any nontrivial relations,” which isn’t too bad, but it’s way too concrete for category theory. And categorical cofree objects are just a step worse.**
* Morphism ain’t necessarily great terminology either.
** And categorically a classical direct limit actually turns out to be a kind of colimit. Who made that decision?
Or, as my amigos brasileiros are wont to say, uma bagunça total.
Happens I know one of the authors, and think this is a nice paper. The applications can be quite real economically and the subject is being worse than decimated by ppl leaving it for higher-paid applications, hopefully not entropy pools..
YMMV but may I suggest
https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/Hegelian+taco
PS this brings to mind the Tall-Wraith monoid
https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/Tall-Wraith+monoid
known in cobordism circles as the Nazgul), \cf G Wraith of sometime presence in these Hatted Halls.
Not “Commutative” RinG Wraith?
The etymological assertion in the paper’s first sentence matches standard references, but does anyone know how solid the derivation of Latin “materia” from “mater” is? Some references have notably hedging language (“traditionally derived from” or “according to X & Y”), which may be a signal of skepticism about that story without having an affirmative rival story to offer. Saying “oh but it looks like maybe the same thing happened in Armenian” (but by implication nowhere else) doesn’t really seal the deal for me.
@ DE, indeed (IIUC)
De Vaan lists materia/materies as one of the derivatives of the headword mater without any further commentary or discussion, so apparently he sees no problem in this derivation.
Appreciators of monad punchlines may already be familiar with “A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors. What’s the problem?” from the humorous “A Brief, Incomplete and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages: https://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html
“It is a syntax error to write FORTRAN while not wearing a blue tie.”
Lacking a blue tie, but possessing a paisley cummerbund, he determined that bagunća, a grand confusion, may have originated from the French, bagagem, luggage. Why the Franco-lusophone suitcases came to such a disorganized state is for wiser heads to ignore.
I await the rebuttal paper: “America runs on Dunkin’: Coffee Come-on Ad, Common Ad”.
(Serious aside: am I alone in finding three of the four examples in the paper’s first sentence to be suspicious?)
Whatever else, “run on” actually means something quite different in each case. For example, an operating system is a program, whereas (one would hope) a voting scheme is not a voter. It seems to me that the abstraction of a common structure from all four examples is a naive reification of entirely contingent features of English idiom and also mistakes metaphor for literal meaning.
To take my Kusaal example: water actually does run on mud (the reference is to the bed of a river), and this would be quite as good (or bad) as an illustration of their theme as a program running on an operating system.
Of course, the mathematics may well be beautiful and have practical applications, even if the purported ordinary-language illustrations don’t stand up to examination.
It is certainly true that you can’t have an arrangement if you have nothing to actually arrange; I presume that the significance of these findings lies somewhat deeper?
(It need not: the Pigeonhole Principle comes to mind as an example of an apparent statement of the Bleedin Obvious which actually has numerous subtle implications. Important things aren’t necessarily abstruse.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeonhole_principle
In b4 covfefe.
i seem to have had a comment eaten, presumably by a comonadic antagonist
with all due respect, I’ve just now chanced upon this
https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/adjoint+modality
link: It concerns notions of unity/duality of opposites, which
are of serious interest in \eg cultural anthropology or
W Blake fan fiction,.
i seem to have had a comment eaten
It’s not in moderation or spam.
ah well. a pattern that will run on matter no more.
(on the other hand, do antipatterns run on antimatter, or vice versa?)
Recently seen: it is a little-known fact, that if the smoke is red, it means the election of an antipope.
They’ve chosen an American ffs.
We should have had a pool going on how many comments it would take for “covfefe” to manifest. I would bet on a lower number than turned out to be the case.
@Stu: Come on, let Peru have the credit! (He’s a naturalized Peruvian citizen, so South America gets two in a row.)
He’s a naturalized Peruvian citizen
Since 2015. The WiPe says: “sovereign of the Vatican City State since 8 May 2025, where he became the first United States citizen, Peruvian citizen, or North American to be elected pope”. One implication of “or North American” seems to be that no Canadian has yet ascended the throne.
They move really fast at the WiPe. There is no longer a “Robert F. Prevost” article (assuming there had been one). Entering that name in the search field, you get “redirected” to “Pope Leo XIV”.
@Stu, even on the most expansive reading of “North America” it’s not like there’s a predecessor from Belize or someplace like that …
Yeah, he’s spent so much time in South America he speaks English with an accent — no purchase for Yankee ballyhoo.
He publicly pointed out that the morally-handicapped J D Vance’s comments on ordo amoris were bollocks (to use a technical theological term.) He does not seem too keen on the god-emperor and his toadies.
I think he may be a part of the Deep State, but we won’t know for certain until President Krasnov says he’s been “nasty.”
And with “Prevost” as a family name, he almost certainly has French-Canadian ancestry. I assume he must speak English, Spanish and Italian, but I wonder whether he acquired any Quechua while in Peru?
Well. First a Jesuit Pope, and now an American one. We definitely do live in interesting times.
Is “morally-handicapped” a new euphemism for “dangerous sociopath”?
he’s spent so much time in South America he speaks English with an accent
# Prevost speaks English, Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese, and can read Latin and German. #
He might be a regular on this blog ! Incognito behind one of those single-letter nicks.
With regard to theological knowledge, though, it would more likely be DE, JWB or rozele.
That the new fellow has spent part of his life in Chicago (Illinois) but another part in Chiclayo (Peru) seems guaranteed to lead to occasional journalistic confusion. Glancing at a map showing where current Quechua-speakers are located within Peru, it looks like Chiclayo (pretty far up the Pacific coast towards Ecuador) is a ways away from either of the large geographical concentrations of such speakers.
Wikipedia identifies Isaac-Benedict Prevost as “a Swiss Protestant theologian” who was also an expert on mitigating fungal infections in plants, back in the era when people were less narrowly specialized. But I agree that Quebecois Catholic immigrants are more likely than Genevan Calvinist immigrants as a source of the surname in the U.S. population.
Is “morally-handicapped” a new euphemism for “dangerous sociopath”?
I just looked up the meaning of “golf handicap”. The greater the handicap, the more likely you are to prevail over competitors. But a moral handicap should imply the opposite, or ?
Unless the competition is spineless or brown-nosed … ah, now I am getting an idea of how Vance gets away with what he does. It’s another version of co-dependency.
Is “morally-handicapped” a new euphemism for “dangerous sociopath”?
Not that new. A friend used to point out in the ’80s that it was appropriate for able-bodied people to park in handicapped spaces, because they were morally handicapped.
@Jerry: That is very witty ! It resolves my confusion over moral and golf handicaps.
Perhaps “morally knee-capped” would be less ambiguous. The joke would still work, but not as cutely.
I originally wrote “moral dwarf” but rejected this on the grounds of possibly hurtful nanism and also potential ambiguity*. On reflection, “dangerous sociopath” would indeed have been preferable.
* Tyrion Lannister, is, I am told, a comparatively moral dwarf, especially given the GOP-like setting of the series. And Gimli, IIRC, is an unequivocally moral dwarf.
“Why does it have to be a dwarf?”
Just to show how you can’t be sure about anything, one prominent Prevost in Canadian history was General Sir George Prevost, Bt., who was the senior British official in place in Canada in 1812 who oversaw the defense of Canada against the (unsuccessful) U.S. invasion and likewise oversaw the (likewise unsuccessful) British/Canadian invasion of the U.S. He was of course neither Catholic nor Quebecois, but was the son of Augustin Prevost, a Genevan Protestant who had become a career British military officer and who likewise fought against the United States back during our Revolution. (Sir George was born in colonial New Jersey while his father was stationed there following the French and Indian War.*)
*Called the Seven Years’ War by non-North-Americans, although I had to look that up.
Hmm, I thought I had put a time stamp on that, but it doesn’t seem to work. Skip to t=10m58s.
By the way, I’ve heard at least three different versions of the new pope’s surname on the news — obviously he was such a dark horse nobody bothered to prepare for his election. I found an interview from a couple of years ago with someone who seemed to know him well enough to know the correct version, and he said “PRAY-vost.”
‘French and Indian’ is a better name – there are too many wars named after their length, as if there was nothing else to notice about them – but out of context it would probably make people think of actual India.
Eienne wrote:
First a Jesuit Pope, and now an American one. We definitely do live in interesting times.
He is also an Augustinian friar, I believe, the first Augustinian Pope we’ve had in a long, long time if I’m not mistaken. I don’t know if Etienne is a practicing Catholic but as one myself, I agree that we do live in interesting times.
@JeninEd: The ambiguity from the U.S. perspective is that there were at least four major wars involving hostilities between the English/British colonists in what is now the U.S., on one side, and the French in New France and their indigenous allies, on the other, but “French and Indian War” only means the last of the four. The first one, for example, which was the North American piece of the Nine Years’ War alias the War of the Grand Alliance etc etc is “King William’s War” in US historiography (don’t know about Canadian. And then Queen Anne’s War (a sideline to the War of the Spanish Succession) and King George’s War (a sideline to the War of the Austrian Succession). Since the relevant King George (II) was still on the throne when the next war came along, I guess it needed a different name so “French and Indian” it was.
The Quebecois supposedly call the French and Indian War (which ended up with them becoming subjects of the next King George) La guerre de la Conquête.
When people talk about the “French and Indian War,” they almost inevitably mean the Second French and Indian War, which was the Seven Years War in Europe. I don’t know what they call it in India, where it was also fought.
The two major Western wars of the mid-eighteenth century included substantial colonial conflicts between the British and the French, both in North America and South Asia, with the French suffering massive losses of colonial possessions. The wars in Europe are generally known as the War of the Austrian Succession (of which the actual Central European Theatre is divided up into as many as three separate Silesian Wars) and the Seven Years War. It presumably did not seem to the British in North America that the first conflict had much of anything to do with the Austrian succession, so they called in the “French and Indian War.” When war broke out again, they became the First and Second French and Indian Wars. But as I said, when referred to without an ordinal, it means the bloodier and more politically significant Second War (or it means the whole conflict, including the years of relative peace in the middle, considering it—quite sensibly in the colonial theaters—as just one long war).
Adding: Apparently, J.W. Brewer learned a somewhat different tradition for the naming of the wars.
You can’t really beat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Jenkins%27_Ear
for war names.
Also just seen (reposted by my Beautiful and Accomplished Daughter):
A Chicago Pope implies the existence of an MLA Pope and APA Pope.
One of my favorite piquant bits of historical trivia is that George Washington started the French and Indian War.
For those who care, black smoke is from anthracene, aided by potassium perchlorate and sulfur. White smoke is Greek pine resin, aided by potassium chlorate and lactose. The official recipe was published in 2013.
Certain academic-type historians but as far as I know pretty much no one else deploy the conceit of a “Sixty Years’ War” (Guerre de Soixante Ans) lasting from 1754 (and thus triggered by Geo. Washington) until 1814*, the point being that it was the cumulative effect of what are usually treated as three separate wars with some smaller intervening local conflicts that permanently reshaped the political landscape of eastern/northeastern North America.
*And into a teensy bit of 1815 but only because in those pre-telegraph days certain military commanders in remote locations didn’t know that the peace treaty had already been signed.
Cofree comonad comonad
Just managed to parse this:
The co- is evidently Bleek-Meinhof Class 15 ku-, mostly containing nouns referring to body parts; the plural would be in Class 6: mafree mamonad mamonad.
The reduplication of the modifier -monad is probably intensifying. The form itself looks like a derivative of -mona- “see” with the so-called “reversive” derivational suffix -(u)d-: hence “highly invisible.”
The stem -f(u)ree, of the head noun in this noun phrase, has no obvious proto-Bantu etymology, but from the context, and given that it is likely to refer to a body part, I would guess something like “bottom”, with a similar semantic extension to Kusaal gbin: “bottom, meaning.”*
Thus: “highly inscrutable meaning.”
* Alternatively, It is possible that the f derives from proto-Bantu *k via the well-documented fricativisation of velars to labiodentals before pB *i *u, which would suggest the root *kur- “tortoise.” However, the semantic extension to “fundament, underpinning” would still be natural, given the widepread traditional African belief that “it’s turtles all the way down.”
Time stamp for 10:58.
I heard a sentence or two from a recent interview today and didn’t notice. His Latin, though, sounds completely Italian – no hint of an English or even a Spanish accent there.
He was ordained in Rome in 1982 and then wrote his thesis on canon law there.
Perhaps not for the part that happened in Prussia…
@David M.: The new fellow would have first learned to say things in Latin out loud as a young altar boy in the Sixties at the very tail end of the Latin-Mass era. I expect that normal liturgical/ecclesiastical pronunciation of Latin on the South Side of Chicago in those days was probably pretty “Italian” compared to other European variants (regardless of the specific local immigrant-ethnicity mix), and certainly nothing like the reconstructed “Ciceronian” pronunciation taught in secular U.S. public schools.
A Chicago Pope implies the existence of an MLA Pope and APA Pope
there’s that red smoke now!
in another such sphere of formalism, YIVO and the Yidish-Lige [née Frayland] remain sedevakantim, as weinreich and schaechter obstinately remain deceased*, but Oksford retains a living pontiff in dovid katz (long may he wave!), though he still sits in eastern exile.
.
* as is traditional in their respective regional lineages, viz the 7th lubavitsher and the 1st breslover.
@David M.
His Latin, though, sounds completely Italian – no hint of an English or even a Spanish accent there.
When I heard his first public sentence in Italian as Pope, I thought he had a Chicago accent.
@J. W. Brewer:
I expect that normal liturgical/ecclesiastical pronunciation of Latin on the South Side of Chicago in those days was probably pretty “Italian” compared to other European variants (regardless of the specific local immigrant-ethnicity mix), and certainly nothing like the reconstructed “Ciceronian” pronunciation taught in secular U.S. public schools.
What you describe applies to a non-Italian college friend of mine from Philadelphia who’s at least five years younger than Pope Leo.
The Pig War could start a war against the Jenkins’ Ear one, to see which is the better name.
I’ve always been fond of the Anglo-Zanzibar War, considered the shortest state conflict in history. It lasted something like three quarters of an hour. For another similarly short historical event, and a topical one for this week, there was the anti-papacy of Philip, lasting about an hour on July 31, 768.
Yes, yes, but you’d still expect the occasional English diphthong.
I did notice one probably aspirated /p/.
If you accept that the succession to the French throne is automatic but that kings can abdicate, there was a Louis XIX of France and Navarra for about twenty minutes.
have practical applications
The comonad package; a slather of monad practical applications.
… even if the purported ordinary-language illustrations don’t stand up to examination.
Indeed. You can ‘execute’ a program using no more than pencil and paper; or marbles running along tracks; or dominoes cascading. Don’t need no operating system.
France is substrate independent!
When I heard his first public sentence in Italian as Pope, I thought he had a Chicago accent.
I didn’t go as granular as “Chicago,” but I definitely thought he had an American accent. (Incidentally, it turns out he “is descended from Creole people of color from New Orleans,” which is nice to know and a poke in the eye to the God-Emperor and his minions.)
Note that the new Pope is also more “Hispanic” in the usual American conceptualization than his predecessor was, although of course the pseudo-legal American definition is broader than the prototypical conceptualization and involves lots of questionable edge cases.
Didn’t realize there was already a thread about the pope’s accent(s). I posted in another thread with a video of him speaking English. I originally found the video because I was wondering if he had the Northern Cities Vowel Shift or if he had missed it or lost it living in Peru. You can judge for yourself.
I didn’t go as granular as “Chicago,” but I definitely thought he had an American accent.
“Chicago” was just from knowing where he was from. I can’t tell Chicago from Detroit or my home region of Cleveland even in English. But I thought I heard the Great Lakes. At a better moment I’ll see if I hear any NCVS when he speaks English, but he’s older than I am and I have no more than a trace of it.
Another fun quasi-linguistic fact about L-14 is that he was once the titular bishop of Sufar in partibus infidelium. He presumably never visited Sufar, because unfortunately (per wikipedia) the “location of the seat of the bishopric is now lost to history, but it was somewhere in what is now Algeria.” More specifically in the quondam imperial province of Mauretania Caesariensis.
Here is an example of the new Pope, as the new Pope, speaking English:
https://youtube.com/shorts/CBF121hmtbw?si=pB5AO6RlTLWcjf_H
It was from a mass he celebrated earlier today.
Not bad… not bad at all.