Quasi-Whittaker modules
Cunguang Cheng, Wenting Gao, Shiyuan Liu, Kaiming Zhao, Yueqiang Zhao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05917 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.0…
The convex structure of the Parisi formula for multi-species spin glasses
Hong-Bin Chen, Victor Issa, Jean-Christophe Mourrat
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06397 https://
Enhancing Data Processing Efficiency in Blockchain Enabled Metaverse over Wireless Communications
Liangxin Qian, Jun Zhao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04657 …
In Ursula K. Le Guin's "A Man of the People" (part of "Four Ways to Forgiveness") there's a scene where the Hainish protagonist begins studying history. It's excellent in many respects, but what stood out the most to me was the softly incomprehensible idea of a people with multiple millions of years of recorded history. As one's mind starts to try to trace out the implications of that, it dawns on you that you can't actually comprehend the concept. Like, you read the sentence & understood all the words, and at first you were able to assemble them into what seemed like a conceptual understanding, but as you started to try to fill out that understating, it began to slip away, until you realized you didn't in fact have the mental capacity to build a full understanding and would have you paper things over with a shallow placeholder instead.
I absolutely love that feeling, as one of the ways in which reading science fiction can stretch the brain, and I connected it to a similar moment in Tsutomu Nihei's BLAME, where the android protagonists need to ride an elevator through the civilization/galaxy-spanning megastructure, and turn themselves off for *millions of years* to wait out the ride.
I'm not sure why exactly these scenes feel more beautifully incomprehensible than your run-of-the-mill "then they traveled at lightspeed for a millennia, leaving all their family behind" scene, other than perhaps the authors approach them without trying to use much metaphor to make them more comprehensible (or they use metaphor to emphasize their incomprehensibility).
Do you have a favorite mind=expanded scene of this nature?
#AmReading
Ground state energies of multipartite $p$-spin models -- partially lifted RDT view
Mihailo Stojnic
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05916 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2…
The Taylor Measure and its Applications
Athanasios Micheas
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04760 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04760…
Factorizations in Geometric Lattices
Alex Aguila, Elvis Cabrera, Jyrko Correa-Morris
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14892 https://arxiv.o…
Differential Shannon and R\'enyi entropies revisited
Yuliya Mishura, Kostiantyn Ralchenko
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04373 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.0…
Density convergence of spatial average of solution to a one dimensional stochastic wave equation
Chengbo Sun, Yaozhong Hu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01872 https://
On the Smallest Singular Value of Log-Concave Random Matrices
Manuel Fernandez V, Galyna V. Livshyts, Stephanie Mui
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17745 https://