Friday Notes (May 17, 2024)

I’ve been a semi-surreal mood lately. From a combination of things. It’s an election year. Politics these days is bad enough, but the last few Presidential elections seem to have written a weird new normal. Now, one candidate is in a criminal trial and potentially could be jailed before the election.

I spent winter wondering if I’d have wasps in the house again come summer. I’ve found three so far. Still no clue how they get in. Looks like I need an exterminator. Another surreal bullet point: this past winter kinda… wasn’t. Oddly, I missed it.

The surreal aside, however, Friday Notes marches on.

I wonder sometimes how the ubiquity of cameras (not just still cameras, but video cameras of high quality) has changed society. We’ve become one of the more heavily self-documented cultures, although it’s hard to say if any of it will survive as long as ancient Babylonian texts have. But that’s a post of its own. To the point here, our phones also make it easy to jot down (or record) thoughts, and it’s possible those preserved thoughts are just as quotidian as all those pictures. With that in mind, a Note from my phone:

The ultimate beginning, the beginning of everything.

Assume: First there was nothing. The alternate assumption would be first there was something, but this just pushes back the question of where/when/how it all started. So, the ultimate beginning assumes first there was nothing.

Assume: Then something appears. Because Heisenberg Uncertainty? Perhaps a single quantum of volume. But that something was so much more than nothing, and so improbable, that it appeared infinitely dense. And expanded into our universe.

(Note a third assumption: That time is axiomatic and fundamental. First there was nothing. Then there was something.)

That first appearance of something: Like a crystal? Suppose a perfectly ordered single quanta of volume “unfolds” (like a crystal or machine) to form all of physical space and matter. It has zero entropy because of its crystal structure (perfect regular periodic). A singularity implies no structure, so structure might have formed randomly, but could also have been regular with quantum fluctuations later randomizing that crystalline structure.

But: A huge amount of energy is implied in all that matter. The initial singularity led to everything we see. Did a universe-creating random event need to be sufficiently large to matter and not just vanish back into the quantum foam?

And: Does something appearing in nothing imply there is no more nothing? Nothing would have no extent, no physical dimension, no sense of “here” or “there”, so does nothing no longer exist once something appears?

And: Is the quantum foam, if that’s what it was, that allowed the Big Bang the same or different from the quantum foam that’s the vacuum for our universe? Could another Big Bang happen in our universe? Or does the lack of nothing mean no more universes?

And: What about dark energy? It is possible dark matter is just large-scale gravity behavior, but dark energy is harder to explain. Vacuum energy? It increases as the universe expands, so there’s more of it over time. Is dark energy a reappearance of the inflaton field that (supposedly) caused inflation?

Great questions, but will humanity ever know the answers?

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Data used to seem so precious. There are bit patterns (images and text files) I’ve copied from drive to drive for decades. In some cases, since the 1980s, so going on four decades. It used to seem so important to have copies ready to hand, but so much of it is obsolete or otherwise useless.

Every time I visit one of those old folders, I ask myself why I keep this stuff. Part of the answer is that it’s essentially free. Storage is cheap these days, and I suffer from no lack of it. The space I’d gain back by deleting that stuff (especially the text files) is a drop in a bucket.

But funny how they’ve gone from treasure to dross in that space of decades.

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FākMēt™. If I ever write a science fiction story, I want to use that name.

I look forward to cloned vat-grown meat. I enjoy meat too much to give it up, but I am conflicted due to the horrific, yet generally necessary, conditions of industrial meat production. And I’m aware that it takes a lot of sunlight to make a cow. Or pig or chicken or fish or deer or sheep or et cetera.

So, let’s just clone the stuff.

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There are many different kinds of dualities, of Yin-Yang pairs (even outside the readily apparent daily ones such as hot-cold, light-dark, up-down). A classic is the mind-body duality. Another example is the AdS/CFT correspondence.

Another key duality: ontological–teleological reality. Or physics-metaphysics, in the sense of a physics beyond physics. Or no-faith/faith, from a spiritual belief point of view. Or maybe just head-heart, to be metaphorical.

The power of the former is undeniable, but the latter has demonstrated power, too (irrespective of its actuality). Science works, but so does Faith, in its own way.

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Tips for Reasonable Discourse (from a video I watched recently):

1. Read a book (read lots of books).
2. Travel and experience other cultures (but don’t be the “ugly American”).
3. Concede something. No one is perfectly knowledgeable and certain.
4. And be willing to say, “I don’t know.”
5. Don’t view politics and discourse as a sport with winners & losers.

Generally good tips for a well-rounded mind, but too often absent. How do you instill those in people? [Oh, right. Good well-paid teachers, good schools, and a curriculum oriented on teaching critical thought.]

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Speaking of surreal, do you realize we’ve had almost a quarter-century of the 2000s?

Very weird for those of us born halfway through the last century.

I really thought the future would be different. Better.

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Back in 2021, when I was using Brain Bubbles to do what Friday Notes does now, I wrote about how our existence here on Earth is — compared to the universe in general — at damn near absolute zero. Given the temperatures of some astronomical objects, we’re basically a rounding error above zero Kelvin.

I was reminded of this recently when someone mentioned density. It got me to thinking we’re at the extreme end on many scales:

• Temperature: very near absolute zero.
• Density: compared to all of space, extremely dense.
• Time: 13.8 billion years is peanuts to the life of the universe.
• Gravity: low compared to large planets and stars.
• Pressure: low on the scale, but high compared to space.

But science has the Copernican Principle, which states that we’re not unusual, that what we experience (here on Earth) is typical. Which is one reason many believe alien life should be plentiful. We’re not special!

Yet there’s a strong argument that we are. For one thing, we’ve yet to find a truly Earth-like among the stars, though right now that’s largely due to the limits of our technology. Giant planets are much easier to spot.

But, as I wrote a while back, if you accept the premise that intelligent life requires at least six events with odds of 1:10,000, then the odds of us being here are:

A rough estimate of stars in the visible universe (100 billion galaxies each with 100 billion stars) is 10²², so it’s conceivable that we’re it. The galaxy only has 10¹¹ stars, which is way less than 10²⁴. Which makes us pretty damn special, at least in being so-called intelligent beings.

(In that previous post, I said five events, but I think it’s reasonable to say six.)

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Do you know what the [Scroll Lock] key on your keyboard does? I used to know but never used it and forgot. More to the point, probably, nothing I used on the PC honored the [Scroll Lock] key, so there was no reason to use it.

What it’s supposed to do — and this is entirely dependent on the application actually using it — is change the behavior of the cursor keys. Normally, they move the cursor around. With the [Scroll Lock] engaged, they’re supposed to move the entire page around in the application’s window.

For example (and this is a rare example that actually does use the key), in MS Excel, the cursor keys normally move the cursor from cell to cell. With [Scroll Lock] engaged, the cursor keys move the entire spreadsheet around.

I tried it with a few apps, but none of them changed behavior, so back into obscurity the key goes. Years from now, I’ll have to watch another video to remember what it does.

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I’ve heard several now recall how, back in the day, the Republican leadership went to the White House and confronted Nixon and told him he’d gone too far. Nixon resigned the Presidency the next day.

Consider how far we’ve come (or fallen). Their tin-plated king gagged by judicial order, the sycophants all parade to the microphone to smear on his behalf. This is the party of Lincoln.

Our values sure have changed. Shame seems out the window.

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An easy logic puzzle caught my eye. Start with four glasses, all upright. The goal is to turn them all upside down. But rules! Each move, you turn three (“three is the count…”). What’s the minimum number of moves to get all four glasses upside down?

In the video I watched featuring this little puzzle, I misunderstood the bigger ask, which was to generalize the solution to any number of glasses where each move turns N-1 (so, all but one glass gets turned each move). I thought it was turn three regardless of number of glasses.

Which is a much easier puzzle. Trivial, almost. Because you only need to solve it for the four-glass case. Every larger case ends up in one of the four-glass case moves. Essentially because with lots of glasses, you turn three until:

1. Zero remain upright: you’ve turned them all upside down.
2. One glass remains upright.
3. Two glasses remain upright.

There are no other possibilities because if three glasses remain upright, one more move accomplishes the task of turning them all upside down. The one- and two-glass cases occur in solving the four-glass case.

And consider that there are only five possible states:

1. four up; zero down
2. three up; one down
3. two up; two down
4. one up; three down
5. zero up; four down

I only spotted my error when I was pondering why the guy in the video said cases with an odd number of glasses had no solution. But, per my misunderstanding, that was clearly false. (An easy example: nine glasses take just three moves.)

So, back to the drawing board.

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Way back in 2018, I wrote about a Japanese anime, Assassination Classroom. I gave it a Wow! rating and thought it was one of the best anime I’d seen. Recently, largely from reading the Resident Alien comic [see Resident Alien], I’ve been more interested in comics again (after losing interest for a period).

My success in finding comics like these at the library led me to seeing if they had the Assassination Classroom manga. They did! I’ve read the first volume, am waiting on the second (of twenty-one, I believe). The anime was very faithful to the manga, so I’m enjoying the latter as much as I did the former.

Just wish manga was in color, though.

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Back in 2016, I posted a rant-y review of the 1994 movie Stargate that I’d written for a friend (like the one I did for Grand Canyon for another friend). We’d seen the movie together and shared a low opinion of it, so what I wrote kind of wallowed in opprobrium. My friend thought it was pretty funny, so I never threw it away (more bits I’ve hung on to).

But compared to many modern stories, Stargate at least had heart. It was laughably bad, but it had heart. Modern stories are commodities, and there is some cynicism involved. Movies are more like amusement park rides. Ephemeral junk food. And often, because of monster budget, they need to have monster box office. High stakes movie making doesn’t leave much room for creativity.

I’m tired of it. I don’t want to go there anymore. I don’t want to take notes while watching something wretched just so I can post about how bad I thought it was. I’ve been debating whether to watch the second season of Reacher again so I can post about how awful (I thought) it was. But why subject myself to that?

So, no more negative reviews (unless something is so awful I can’t hold back). Stuff I thought was really good, though, that’s another story.

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Stay surreal, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.

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