Messages: a life online

Asking the Info-Mac digest whether a Sony CDU-6100 with a 40-pin connector could be attached to a Macintosh II, and what the port was. Info-Mac Digest V7 #166, distributed on comp.sys.mac.digest.

Had anyone implemented the Korteweg–de Vries equation in Mathematica, or solved it by inverse scattering through the Marchenko equation? Quoted in Chris Eilbeck's reply on the MathGroup list, June 1992.

A Usenet question about scanners, October 1992, posted through the Oslo news server.

A question on sheaves in sci.math.research, January 1993. The Math Forum mirror that used to hold it is gone.

On pen input for mathematics, relayed through the sci.math.research moderator at the Freie Universität Berlin.

An early post on Connes' noncommutative geometry, the subject that would occupy the following decade, in sci.math.research.

A small bug in imake reported to the linux-activists list on 5 March 1993: the MakeDirectories function lacked a semicolon between if and done. Linux was two years old and the graphical side was still a struggle.

December 1993, on the www-talk list at CERN: was any browser implementing the HTML+ FIG element? Client-side image maps looked more powerful than the server-side ismap, and needed no GIF at all if the map was just a box with coordinates. Geographical maps were about to proliferate.

January 1994, replying to Tony Sanders on www-talk. People were drawing ISMAP maps of the web by hand; if HTML+ FIGA arrived soon all that work would be wasted, and client support would allow HyperCard-style transparent buttons with no drawing at all.

October 1994: two experimental pages on dftuz.unizar.es with a flavour between imagemap and HyperCard, built with PRE tags and small GIFs and needing no server-side interaction. One was a card; the other a clickable map of Spain.

A week later, the server logs of those two pages as a measure of the patience of www aficionados: of 137 requests for the card, only 77 fetched the last GIF and 50 went on to click anything. The better-looking page was requested far less.

December 1996, to www-html and www-annotation at the W3C. The CERN server could record which external pages linked to ours, so why not list them dynamically in the HEAD as LINK relationships, for browsers to offer related pages? Which REL or REV value would fit? Backlinks, ten years before they became a business.

A Usenet post from the sol.unizar.es account, listed in the original page only by its title.

On the bionet photosynthesis group: could circularly polarised light, from an ice block or another birefringent material, have been at some point an evolutionary advantage? The Indiana University gateway that served the group has gone.

A post on history, from the same account with an anti-spam suffix in the address, which dates it to the year the spam arrived.

Messages in the Spanish Yahoo group memoria, on mnemonics, myths and songs. Yahoo Groups closed in 2020 and took the archive with it.

Contributions to the Arthurnet list on the Grail legend, including the Valencia chalice, and a citation on a mythology links page. The Memorial University list server and the links page are both gone.

December 1999 on the Historia Matematica list, on infinitesimals and their history. The Tennessee archive of the list has gone offline.

A sci.math thread on renormalisation as geometry, the idea that later grew into the papers on Connes' tangent groupoid and, much later, on refinement passages. The Math Forum mirror of sci.math is dead.

A sci.math question posted through Deja News in its last months.

History of mathematics: a sci.math thread on the Tao and numerical coincidences, and a companion post on Chinese naming.

History of mathematics again: the volume of the truncated pyramid, from the Moscow papyrus onwards.

On the atomists before Dalton, the ground covered by the Llull paper on rhythmos, diathige and trope.

A programming question, calling X11 from Pascal, in the comp.lang.pascal groups.

A sci.physics.research exchange with Ian Jermyn on embedding a discrete space in a manifold within noncommutative geometry: what happens to the Hilbert space and the Dirac operator? One message was lost in transit, so the whole thread was kept as a text file, still on the blog.

A sci.physics.research post asking whether the coordinates themselves could be read as supersymmetric partners, an early form of the composite-supersymmetry idea.

Reading on the history of alchemy led to a calculation: Hg-201 to Pt-197 plus an alpha is exothermic but blocked by a huge barrier, with a near-threshold Gamow pseudostate. Pt-197 then beta-decays to Au-197, gold. Left unpublished; some cold-fusion groups in Texas had reported that beta radiation.

Joined Physics Forums on 17 March 2003, in its first weeks, as member number 81. Twenty-three years and some 3,500 messages later the account is still active; most of the threads below live there.

Keeping the alchemical quest, the reading turned to the massive bosons of the Standard Model, W, Z and the still hypothetical Higgs, and their masses.

Solved, in the Mozilla newsgroups: when does an IFRAME fire its onload?

A Physics Forums thread on the quantum Kepler length of a particle: can the quantum of action be recovered from a gravitational argument?

Does the inverse-square law justify compactification to 3+1 dimensions? Is that compactification compulsory from quantum mechanics alone? A Physics Forums thread.

Someone else's find, but possibly important, especially combined with Smirnov's identities: one gets ln(sin θ_Cabibbo) = −sinh(ln π). Amazing even if only as a mnemonic. The chip-architect page it pointed to is gone.

A long, long thread collecting numerical amusements, 2004 to 2007. On page 8, in 2006, we become alphaologists; in entry 219 of the same page it is conjectured that we are also getting the Higgs. The idea was revisited in 2017, in a thread on the top, Higgs and vacuum relation, suggesting 3/8 for another link between W, H, Z and t.

Registered as Arivero on the English Wikipedia on 24 June 2004; first edits on the nuclear shell model and magic numbers. In November 2006 the Koide formula article got its references, and it remains the article most edited from this account, together with its talk page. Other edits: academic genealogy, the fine-structure constant, Zichichi, Archimedes' palimpsest, the Holy Grail.

A blog in Spanish, una bitácora de Alejandro Rivero, written from Teruel between October 2005 and July 2006, while teaching at the engineering school there. The last post, partimos, closes it on 21 July 2006 before a stay in Cambridge. The domain is gone; the Internet Archive kept it.

The arXiv note that collected the numerology of the previous years into a review of Koide's 1981 formula for the charged lepton masses. Still the most cited of the preprints. The other notes of these years are on the publications page.

A thread on G and G_F, or on ħ and c: what would it take for the top mass and the Fermi constant to be related through gravity?

On 16 October 2007 Tommaso Dorigo hosted a guest post on A Quantum Diaries Survivor presenting the supersymmetric bootstrap: the idea that the scalar partners of the quarks could be built as pairs of the quarks themselves, so that no new particles are needed for supersymmetry.

An account opened in December 2008, in the first year of the service, with a hello-world template; the research repositories came much later and have their own page.

A December 2009 edit to the supergravity article, the last of the 2000s from the Arivero account.

Joined in February 2010. Early questions: manifolds whose isometry group is Pati–Salam (May 2010), a process for a Gamma distribution with non-integer shape (September 2010), and in March 2011 whether the T-duality between SO(32) and E8×E8 reflects a group-theoretical fact, a question that came back in 2017 and in a 2024 paper.

Joined in August 2010 with a question on redundant distributed filesystems for a handful of nodes. The questions track the work: JSON responses that start with )]}' (2011), graph databases and bipartite projections (2012), and later Scala, Spark and PostgreSQL.

Joined on 15 January 2011, days after the site left beta. The first question, on the relation between renormalisation in physics and divergent series in mathematics, is still the highest voted. Others from that year: why gluinos must be spin 1/2 rather than 3/2, whether there is an explanation for a top Yukawa coupling of 1, what happens to a single quark in lattice QCD, and why the pion stays massless under chiral symmetry breaking while the quarks do not.

The most voted answers are to other people's questions from the site's first year: whether heavier objects fall faster because they exert their own gravity, whether the Jauch–Piron–Ludwig axiomatics lead to quantum field theory, whether E = mc² applies to photons, what the implications would be if the LHC found no Higgs, and what quarks are made of.

Two threads to discuss the supersymmetric bootstrap, framed as a pairing mechanism for low-energy supersymmetry in string theory, and the state of the Koide sum rules. The second is still alive fifteen years later.

No elementary scalars in experimental supersymmetry (viXra, February 2011), A new Koide triplet: strange, charm, bottom (viXra and arXiv, November 2011) and A possible origin of the q=4/3 diquark (arXiv, November 2011). The Koide waterfall, the chain of triplets that descends from the top quark to the electron, got a Prezi presentation.

Joined in September 2011 to ask whether triality survives in product Lie groups.

On 16 August 2012 the blog came back, in Spanish and at its own domain, a.rivero.nom.es. The first months mix local quantum field theory, Kaluza–Klein notes, Connes–Lott models and Pati–Salam with income inequality, Lorenz curves, Leontief tables for the Aragonese economy and Cervantes on the Nigerian scam. Two hundred and fifty posts have followed.

Physics Stack Exchange questions of the year: what is the massless limit of massive electromagnetism, and the mass of a superstring stretched between two branes; in 2013, is there an open oriented superstring?

Folding a pattern on viXra (February 2013), Alain Connes finding a composite Higgs, Feynman's delta, Simpson's paradox and Berkeley, doubts about quantum mechanics, a precursor of the uncertainty principle, and links for reading Newton.

A viXra note (August 2014) on getting the three generations from the bootstrap, and on the blog the top mass from Koide with the b and c quarks, and a VIA video from IN2P3 on the Koide formula.

The data-science side of the blog: Twitter against Google Trends as election predictors, the numbers of Podemos on Appgree, d'Hondt coalitions for mayoralties, and a Scala question on Stack Overflow that became its most voted: how to convert a DataFrame row into a case class.

A Physics Stack Exchange question on whether there is a special case where a fermion mediates a force, one of the roads into the composite-supersymmetry picture.

Possible sensibility of nuclear fragmentation to the mass of W on viXra (September 2015) and a three-part blog series, weak force and nuclear shells, revisited, plus bound states of the Yukawa potential à la Bohr and a conjecture on how mass is generated.

On Physics Stack Exchange, bound states of the ±δ'⁽ⁿ⁾ potential (the second most voted question), a no-go for D=9 Kaluza–Klein QCD+EM, and supersymmetry between Dirac and Klein–Gordon solutions. On MathOverflow, when the underlying space of a torus orbifold is a sphere. And a new account on History of Science and Mathematics Stack Exchange, in August.

The Powerball jackpot as a game, hawks and doves with mixed strategies, bargaining equilibria for politicians, several rounds of statistics on the 2015 and 2016 general elections, Pokémon Go in Zaragoza, and unrelated mass sums.

Regularising the minimal action, bootstrapping a space from its tensor square, and in July Families from SO(32), followed in January 2018 by Families from USp(32). In August PhysicsOverflow imported the Stack Exchange question on group-theoretical links between SO(32) and E8×E8. On Physics Forums, entry 17 of a thread on the top–Higgs–vev relation suggested 3/8 as a link between W, H, Z and t.

Koide in other formats (March), the Spanish EGB and the new mathematics, lattices against categories, the return of the Venn–Euler diagram, IPv6 tunnels and ONT connections on Linux, news on octonions and the Standard Model, and at the end of the year La del Higgs.

The viXra paper of January 2019, then on the blog references on octonions, on E6, and sBootstrap not found in E6. Also: alternatives to PageRank, the fractal dimension of a social network, and a bot for search trends.

March 2020: a non-compartmental toy model and its extensions, then circle intersections for COVID, Gompertz against Kermack–McKendrick, herd immunity, and de Vries with more digits.

A quiet year: Koide in numpy, Koide and Viète's cubic, chess by vote as collective intelligence, the distance to the Moon, and the Python course for the master in physics of the universe, on GitHub.

An account on mathstodon.xyz from 9 November 2022, after the Twitter exodus. Some three hundred posts since, in Spanish and English: Koide with John Baez, Ptolemy noticing the unequal seasons, calculators in the classroom, and the observation that even when asked to imitate Newton the language models cannot avoid this is not... it is.... The blog that year: NCG, space and SUSY.

April 2023: the first posts on talking with a language model, on numerical integration and derivation and on adaptive attention. In June and July, the simplicity and the complexity of the Koide formula; in August, The crisis in the sBootstrap, the Bjorken–Zeldovich see-saw and Spin(8) triality as the missing ingredient for SUSY in Connes' approach. Also: a Hugging Face account (March), a Bluesky account (September), and on Wikipedia a note on the Koide formula's talk page and an edit on doubling the cube.

The January post, the preprint ten years later in July, the paper in EPJ C in October, and a question on Math Stack Exchange on completing a proof of Newtonian gravity from areal velocity, which became the Qeios preprint On Planck areal speed. Also Gravity as the strongest force, Carr's duality, a backup of the blog, and on Wikipedia the origins of the Longinus story and a correction to the reduced-mass article.

Compton radius in Kerr black holes, a Canva of categories for children, practical proposals to make GPT-5 better at remembering and forgetting, AI alignment is applied theology, calculators for children and circular keypads (the quickcalcs repository), and in October an in memoriam for Luis Joaquín Boya, thesis supervisor.

The Physics Letters B paper (May), announced on Mathstodon as the first PLB since 1993. On the blog: mass gap from Kaluza–Klein, issues and agents, Koide with AI, nuclear stability, Riley as a precursor of the sBootstrap SUSY, Witten's no-go as a Higgs in disguise, nuclei by Fable et al., and in September A repository for the mathematics my successors will inherit and The future arrived while we were writing the handoff. The repositories themselves are described on their own page.