My $0.02: the most valuable piece of information I get from open-ended introductions is typically what people choose to talk about, which I interpret as a reflection of what they consider important. For example, I interpret the way you describe yourself here as reflecting a substantial interest in how other people judge you.

An additional issue is that I'm skilled at being deliberately inflammatory or conciliatory. Good enough that I sometimes do it by accident.

Deliberately... by accident? Accidentally inflammatory, or conciliatory makes sense, yes, but anyone can be that.

My language parsing module is returning a reasonable probability that I'm misunderstanding something in those sentances.

I guess, taken together, I just learned that I don't think introductions are in fact epistemically worthwhile. So I'll update my question: are introductions repairable, and if so, how?

To provide a starting point - a 'this is what I choose to say about myself' - which gives other people some information about your beliefs, personality, and other elements of identity. Often, parts of the introduction will be true and parts false (often due to exaggeration). It will certainly be incomplete, due to limitations of language. But, in the case of error, it would be repairable by demonstrating a correct identity; if (for example) someone erroneously concludes from your introduction that you can't stand the taste of peas, then that error is repairable by your happily eating a large plate of peas.

Without the starting point, people are forced to start out with a blank, generic depiction of you, and then add observed features of identity one by one.

That's what I think, at least.

Well, I didn't introduce myself, but I guess it lets people know stuff about you without having to piece it together from your comments?

The quality of undergraduate and graduate experiences at the same university can be dramatically different, since their funding sources (and thus their incentive structures) are separate. It's possible that Rutgers is broken as an undergrad institution, but not as a graduate one.

(Rutgers also has a good reputation as a graduate math department.)

The answer to that is a firm "Maybe."

The question becomes - how do you create a steady stream of below-Planck photons? In the current model, photons are only emitted when electrons shift valence shells - these photons start, at least, as above-Planck.

Rhydberg's model (assuming I understand where he was going with it correctly) asserts that photons are -also- emitted when the electrons are merely energetic - black-body radiation, essentially. However, if your electrons are energetic, and at least 50% of all photons are being shared by the emitting medium, you're going to get above-Planck photons anyways. (If you're emitting enough radiation to create spots in the receiving medium, you're dealing with energy that is at least occasionally above Planck scales, and this energy is already in the emitting medium.)

An important thing to remember is that the existing model was devised to explain black-body radiation. The Planck scale is really really low, low enough that the bar can be cleared by (AFAIK) any material with an energy level meaningfully above absolute zero. (And maybe even there, I've never looked into blackbody radiation of Einstein-Bose condensates.)

So in principle, for a sensitive enough photoplate (it's currently nonreactive to blackbody radiation), for a dark enough room (so as not to set the photoplate off constantly), yes.

However, that ties us into another problem, which you may have sensed coming - the photoplate would be setting -itself- off constantly.

I assume light is a wave, not is a particle, which gives a little more wiggle-room on the experiment; sections of the plate experience distributed energy build-up, which is released all at once in a cascade reaction when a sufficiently large (still quite small) region of the photoplate has amassed sufficient energy to react with only a small amount (say, a nearby atom reacting) of energy.

Was the alien geometry visible from outside the room? Or would the burglar have had to open the door and thus see the expensive materials before deciding to leave it be?

Yep. It wouldn't impact entanglement experiments, however, and wouldn't impact wave physics characteristics, but rather the particle physics characteristics of the experiment.

The two-slit experiment depends upon the assumption that photons (wave or particle) are above the Planck threshold - if they're beneath it, they wouldn't have sufficient energy to reliably induce a reaction in the screen behind the plate, meaning a strict wave interpretation could be valid (the intermittent reactions could be the product of sufficient energy build-up in the receiving electrons, rather than photons intermittently striking different parts of the screen). In regard to wave characteristics of photons, statistically this would be nearly identical to particle emissions - we should expect "blips" in a distribution roughly equal to the distribution we should expect from particle emissions. I say nearly identical because I assume some underlying mechanism by which electrons lose energy over time, meaning the least-heavily radiated areas to lose energy at a rate rapid enough to prevent valence shell shifting and hence fewer blips.

...which might be evidence for my theory, actually, since we do indeed see fewer reactions than we might expect in the least-radiated portions of the screen, per that open problem/unexplained phenomenon whose name I can't recall that Eliezer goes on about a bit in one of the sequences. (The observed reactions are the square of the probability, rather than the probability itself, of a particle hitting a given section of the screen. I'm mangling terminology, I know.) Laziness is now competing with curiosity on whether I go and actually pull out one of my mathematics textbooks. If I were in therapy for crackpottery this would set me back months.

(Note: Having looking up the experiment to try to get the proper name for the screen behind the plate (without any success), it appears I was mistaken in my initial claim - the -original- intended purpose of the experiment, demonstrating wave characteristics of light, remains intact. It's merely wave-particle duality, a later adaptation of the experiment, which loses evidence. Retracting that comment as invalid.)

Also, keep in mind that the only was an experiment can fail is if it provides no new information; the only way to render an experiment invalid or less useful is to show that you don't know as much more as you thought you did.

But I thought you were referring to the modification of the two-slit experiment where electrons were the wave being measured, not photons.

Apparently I have just registered.

So, I have a question. What's an introduction do? What is it supposed to do? How would I be able to tell that I've introduced myself if I somehow accidentally willed myself to forget?

P.S. I was going to ask about the terms of your NDA. While I agree with greater transparency, I (perhaps idealistically) hope it can be done without breaking promises.

However, I also have a principle, showing honour to honourless dogs is worse than useless.

He couldn't understand why he had needed to do this, and indeed, refused.

I have to disagree that this is ineptitude. He knows which evidence he has to conceal from you, and is doing so effectively. Of course by doing so he only confirms that it is harmful to his case, but it nevertheless grants plausible deniability. Especially as I expect anyone who can fire him will collude in the concealment.

When I submitted this to my boss for approval, she was flabbergasted, and explained that the evaluators job was to collude with the grant proposal submitter,

Sadly I cannot prove this, but I read this after writing the above paragraph. I wasn't primed on 'collude.' I'ma go ahead and conclude nothing happened to the poor bastard sideswiped by a thoroughly unexpected honest appraisal.

every single project I evaluated listed their 'process' and then said that their 'goal' was to enact the process.

Pays the piper, etc... Whoever informed you about the grant application was probably hoping you'd pick up that they were not to be taken seriously. The point of the grant program is to give goodies to certain demographics. The process was indeed the goal, no matter what anyone else said.

There's a limit to how incompetent the rich and/or powerful can be. A single spot check would have caught this, if it wasn't what was intended.

A third. This is, of course, absolutely unacceptable.

I wonder how many of the 2/3rds could have but understood that wasn't the point of the program and didn't bother.

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I can also explain the parent/teacher/math class thing, but you won't like it. But, very short form: you can't say 'racism' and then just stop thinking.

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Edit: I should mention I'm surprised that such overt racism still exists, and I'm going to update a few theories accordingly. Especially, that you can have lily white AP classes without instantly dying under a rockslide of disparate-impact lawsuits. I can't help but wonder if the gadgetry is related.