Homomorphism

Has USAU announced bids for sectionals to regionals yet? Presumably you could figure it out from frisbee-rankings.com but I haven't.

I really like the flavor of Lure of the Deep Wilderness so I've been playing them a bunch, but I always wind up going top track and picking up major powers. Because your growth is so slow and you don't grow when you reclaim, I feel pressure to avoid reclaiming by not playing many cards. However, this feels less rewarding, because you usually don't get to hit big innate power turns.

How do you go bottom-track and still play well as this spirit? Just take a ton of minor powers for the elements? Play with Rampant Green and have them feed you presence growth?

I don't (necessarily) mean how you decide who gets playing time when, I mean how do you actually figure what names to call and get everyone marked on the sheet? Keeping track of all the names and checking the boxes is hard! Especially if you're trying to coach at the same time. Are there any tricks you've picked up to make it easier?

As context: I'm helping coach a brand-new high school team, so we were calling even lines: each point one handler and two cutters rotated out for someone else. I was really struggling trying to keep track of everyone and make sure I was taking out the right players.

During roughly 800-1100 lots and lots of people from what is now Scandinavia traveled all over Europe trading, raiding, and conquering. Why did they? It seems like something must have been going on: they were enough people who were motivated and organized enough to conquer Normany and parts of England.

Donald Knuth taught a course at Stanford on technical writing in the 80s. The course notes include the following quotation regarding introductions to books and how people always skip them:

As for those readers who do know how to study my composition, no author can accompany his book wherever it goes and allow only certain persons to study it. - Maimonides

However, there's no reference to where its from (or what translation) and I couldn't obviously find this passage on Wikiquote.

Is this a real quotation? If so, what, exactly, was Maimonides talking about? From other excerpts from the preface to The Guide for the Perplexed it seems like he might be saying "don't blame me if someone i

Wikipedia claims, without citation, that:

the University of Cambridge did not require a formal doctoral thesis until 1919

Assuming that this is true: How did this work? Was there an oral defense, or a publication requirement? Were Proper British Gentlemen just supposed to promise they'd actually learned something?

I'd also be interested in the history of the PhD dissertation/thesis in general, but that might be too broad a question.

I'm playing a game with NUTS and FIRS and would like to have some trains change cargo type. Does anyone know if NUTS supports refitting at stations? Depots seem to work fine.

The question is mostly in the title, but I'm thinking of things like this, which seems to be largest in a succession of games. Why were people making these? Was it to actually play them? To have an excuse to show off their fancy sets? Was there just a mid-16th century Japanese nobleman (woman?) who was kind of a nerd?

I know that there are modern board games that can get very complex, but I think of those as being a pretty recent phenomenon. What was the context in Japan?

I study math, but not philosophy. I have this vague idea that category theory in mathematics (see below for a summary) is something like "poststructuralism" in literary criticism or "postmodernism" in philosophy, in that they both have to do with engaging not just the ideas but the frameworks in which those ideas live.

Or something. I don't actually know much about literary theory, which is why I'm hoping AskPhilosophy can clarify things for me, or at least point me to where I could learn more.

What is category theory?

There is a field/idea in mathematics called "category theory," which started in in the 40s but really took off in the 60s. The basic idea is that you shouldn't just

I recently was trying to recommend a book on representation theory (especially of finite groups) and realized that I didn't know a good undergraduate-level book.

• Fulton and Harris covers this but does it pretty fast. I like that they have lots of examples, but it's really a graduate-level book, even the first part.
• Etingof et al. is a really cool book that I learned a bunch from in undergrad, but only after coming back to it a few times. They take a pretty high-level approach from the start that's hard to appreciate in a first course.
• Dummit and Foote has a single chapter that didn't seem terribly enlightening to me (the group algebra is cool but not a good first object to work with)

It's the first example of "real" process worked out in Peskin and Schroeder, and they mention that it's used as a calibration for detectors. Can anyone tell me about this? Specifically, I'd naively expect e^- e^+ -> e^- e^+ to be easier to observe, because the right-hand mass is lower.

It's possible I could answer the question by computing the cross-section myself, or reading more, but I'm a mathematician and don't know anything about experiments so I'd probably get it wrong.