Friday Notes (Sep 11, 2026)

After putting the blog largely on hold this spring and summer, I’m trying to get back into it by doing a bit of catch-up. (Or at least discover if and how I really want to get back into it.)

Five posts so far this month (not counting this one) compared to five posts during the three summer months (June, July, August), so I’m off to a good start.

Didn’t manage even to post a Friday Notes in August, so there’s more than enough for (at least) a second edition this month.

I haven’t mentioned it (other than in a comment on the post in question), but this blog reached (and now slightly passed) the 1500-post mile marker (this is post #1510). The post was the Friday Notes post in June, and I meant to mention it, but it slipped my mind. Forgot again in July, and the earlier September edition was already bursting at the seams.

So, belatedly: 1,500 posts and counting (albeit more slowly these days).

A lesser milestone, the Main Index hit 1,300 posts as of the previous post. It has a lower count than the total because it doesn’t include the Sidebands or Brain Bubble posts. (Or the Special Relativity series.) Hitting that milestone meant a new list section, and that meant a new section title.

I’m continuing the “flight level” naming convention and dropping the two least significant zeros, making hundred-entry sections, and naming the section after the remaining digits. So, the Index went from The Midnight/Noon Cycle (a reference to “12”) to The Triskaideka Cycle (“13”). Earlier sections were named after stuff going on in real life or with the blog, but that ended when the Index hit 1,000.

It took (weirdly exactly) two years and one month to fill the 1200s section (from this post on 2024/08/07 to this post on 2026/09/07). I expect, at the rate I’m going, that it’ll take even longer to fill this section. (To cut down on revisions, I only update the Index when there are five new posts to add.)

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Here’s one of my favorite pictures of my pal Bentley (from 2013):

The reason I love it is that she’s planted herself on my side of the couch! And she knows it. I’m standing right there and she’s making a point of not looking at me, let alone making eye contact. If you click for the big version, you can see the blur on her tail, which is wagging furiously. If you know her, the tail, the facial expression, and the overly calm posture are screaming, “Who? Me? You weren’t here, so I’m keeping your spot warm!!” It cracks me up every time.

I’m looking forward to her annual 10-day visit the latter half of this month (19th through the 29th). We’re both getting old, so we’ll be taking it slow, but we manage to see the sights and have some fun.

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If smoking is so bad, why does it cure salmon?

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In the first year of this blog’s span, I posted about that time in the late 1990s when I and my [girlfriend → fiancée → wife] got into skydiving [see First Skydive, Second Skydive, and First AFF Skydive]. The second year, I posted a couple more [see AFF Graduation and The CASA Boogie].

That pretty much exhausted the skydiving story hopper, and it wasn’t until I posted my old skydiving logbook last year that I revisited the topic (other than the occasional mention over the years).

All of which is prequel to this:

The jumpsuit I had made when it seemed I’d be doing a lot of skydiving. That plan didn’t pan out; I just didn’t have time needed to devote to it, and I wasn’t very good at it.

Left is the front view; right is the rear. It has toe-booties to form a smooth surface from toe-tip up the leg (for planning horizontally). Far left is the altimeter I wore on my forearm; top left is my helmet.

I had to stand on a chair to fit the whole thing in my camera’s view, plus I had to hold the camera (phone) out as far as possible to reduce visual keystone, and that unstable platform made it hard to hold the camera steady. End result: the photos are blurry. Sadly, I didn’t realize it until I’d put the thing in the trash.

I still have my parachute rig but haven’t decided what to do with it. When I do, no doubt I’ll take a picture. It’s packed, and I wonder what shape the nylon main and emergency chutes are in. Be nice to spread out the main canopy for a picture. The color scheme looks like this:

Each (vertical in the diagram) band is a cell with an open leading end. Moving through the air, they inflate, stiffen, and together form a rigid(-ish) glider wing. Forward velocity under canopy is usually about 22 MPH with a downward velocity of about 5 MPH (depends on the chute).

Two things in life I really wanted to invest myself in but realized I didn’t have the chops for: music and skydiving. But I sure enjoyed exploring both!

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Serious question: In your world, do you “play catch” or “have a catch”? The question arises because in the tied-for-best-ever baseball movie, Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) asks his ghost-dad (Dwier Brown as John Kinsella):

Ray Kinsella: You catch a good game.
John Kinsella: Thank you. It’s so beautiful here. For me, well, for me, it’s like a dream come true. Can I ask you something? Is, is this heaven?
Ray: It’s — it’s Iowa.
John: I could have sworn it was heaven.
Ray: Is there a heaven?
John: Oh, yeah. It’s the place where dreams come true.
Ray: Maybe this is heaven.
John: Well, good night Ray.
Ray: Good night, John.
[They shake hands and John begins to walk away]
Ray: Hey… Dad?
[John turns]
Ray: [choked up] You wanna have a catch?
John: I’d like that. Very much.

Costner uses the phrase “have a catch” a couple of other times in the movie, and it has raised the question among baseball fans about the phrasing.

We “play [tag|cards|baseball]” but we “have a [walk|workout|rest]”.

I have no opinion on the matter, but I think it’s an interesting question.

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The thing about this selfie:

Is that I really look like that (though I have new glasses now). Because of my psychedelic Hippie days in the 1960s and 1970s.

At least I think I look that way, but so does the whole world, so maybe it’s me.

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Wouldn’t it be funny if YES stood for “Yes, Exactly So!”

Then it would be infinitely recursive like GNU (“GNU’s Not Unix”) or YAML (“YAML Ain’t Markup Language”).

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I had a handful of posts go mini-viral. It surprised me as those posts have gotten few views since they were first posted.

The first thing I saw:

I typically get from 100 to 200 views per day. Sometimes more; sometimes less. The sudden drop August 18 wasn’t that unusual. Less usual was the growing traffic spike culminating August 26 and then dropping off quickly.

The spike was mostly due to four posts:

1. The Giant File Room — about “The Chinese Room” due to John Searle.
2. Is Reality Determined? — thoughts about determinism.
3. What is Consciousness? — discusses the properties of consciousness.
4. Entropy Isn’t Fundamental! — points out entropy is a consequence or measurement, not a cause.

What’s odd is that none of these posts has any links to any of the others, but:

The coincidence is pretty strong, especially the drop-off at the end (no long tail on these). The first and third are at least related, but the second and fourth are their own topics with no great connection to the other two (or each other).

The Giant File Room (575 views total) had 328 views in August, more than twice its biggest month ever (when it was published May 2019: 141 views) and many times more than all other months. Only two months had double-digits, and most months were zero or low single-digits.

Is Reality Determined? (415 views total) had 219 views last month compared to 64 views each of its first two months (June & July of 2021) and mostly zero or low single-digits save two double-digit months (which are almost the same two months as the GFR post; one’s exact, one’s adjacent).

What Is Consciousness? (191 views total) is comparatively an also-ran with 83 views last month compared to 78 in its first month (May 2019, part of several posts about consciousness around then).

Entropy Isn’t Fundamental! (149 views total) is another also-ran with only 67 views, but it’s another post that had views when first published (19 in May 2021) and has been mostly ignored since.

Interesting that the ranking of their total views is the same ranking as their views in August.

Views are back down to essentially zero since; I guess they got their fill.

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Science Notes from here on if you want to tune out or jump to the tag line.

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An article in New Scientist tells how the folks at CERN took some antimatter for a ride. In a truck:

This wasn’t an easy task. Containing antimatter typically requires powerful magnetic fields produced by superconducting magnets, which need to be kept at near-absolute zero, requiring huge amounts of power. Smorra and his team designed STEP to use just a 30-litre tank of liquid helium to keep the magnets cool, so the electronics can instead run on a simple diesel generator. For the upcoming test run, though, it will use only battery power.

The magnet also has to be engineered to cope with the stop-start accelerations that occur while driving, as well as a bespoke vacuum system to ensure that the absence of problematic regular matter can be maintained while the antiprotons are loaded into and unloaded from the trap.

It was a proof-of-concept demonstrating the possibility of transporting antimatter (presumably from the production facility to the starship power generator).

But once the antimatter delivery service is up and running, you could be driving down a Swiss or German motorway and find yourself next to a truck full of antimatter. This might sound like a concerning proposition, given antimatter’s tendency to annihilate when it meets regular matter, but people shouldn’t be fearful, says Smorra.

“There’s nothing dangerous about the transport of antimatter, because the amount that we are transporting is so small,” says Smorra. “If you transport 1000 antiprotons and it gets lost, you won’t even notice it.”

Yeah, but the point is that transporting large amounts of it would indeed be pretty scary (assuming we ever got that far and that it actually made sense to store energy in antimatter). It’s one of those situations where you must actively keep the tiger in its cage; passive restraints (pipes, tanks) don’t cut it.

But it’s one tiny, tiny step towards a Star Trek future.

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One of my favorite topics: dogs (also from New Scientist).

Ancient remains in Turkey from 15,800 years ago have been confirmed as coming from a dog, the earliest one ever found. Genetic evidence also reveals that our best friends were already widely distributed across Europe 14,300 years ago, when humans were hunter/gatherers and agriculture hadn’t yet emerged.

[…]

“By at least 15,800 years ago, dogs were already dogs, and they already look genetically and morphologically like modern dogs,” says Scarsbrook. The team also genetically confirmed that remains from Gough’s cave in Somerset, UK, were of a dog dating back to about 14,300 years ago.

We and our canine friends go way back. Fifteen thousand years. Humanity’s best and oldest friend.

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Speaking of consciousness:

Philosophers have a long-standing fascination with the structure of experience. By structure, they mean how sensations relate to one another. “Structure will be at the core of the science of consciousness,” says David Chalmers at New York University, who coined the hard problem of consciousness in the 1990s.

If structuralists are right, our experiential repertoire is holistic in the sense that every experience depends on every other experience. When we encounter red, we draw a contrast with other colours, not to mention entirely different perceptual categories. For instance, red is sort of like orange, but distant from blue, and nothing at all like pain or joy. “Any individual experience hinges on this totality,” says Holger Lyre, a philosopher at the University of Magdeburg in Germany.

To an extent, this resembles what happens with LLMs. They create a huge parameter spaces that associate similar concepts closely and dissimilar concepts distantly.

The article (yet again from New Scientist) later says:

People’s judgements are fairly consistent, says Tsuchiya. Across age and culture, they make broadly similar assessments about colour, sounds and other sensory qualities. In research published last year, he and his colleagues queried 247 children aged 3 to 12 in Japan and 29 children aged 6 to 8 in China, as well as a contingent of 84 adults, about colour. The responses hardly varied. “The effect of language, culture and development seems rather small,” he says. Language, culture and environment determine the colour words we use, which can vary drastically: land-locked Indigenous Tsimané forager-farmers in the Bolivian Amazon, for instance, elide blue and green into a single concept, whereas the ancient Greeks had a whole lexicon of words to describe the nuanced shades of the sea. Although culturally specific labels shape our view of the world, says Tsuchiya, they don’t seem to alter our immediate experiences.

At the same time, people’s judgements often differ from how those qualities have historically been structured through musical scales and colour mixing rules. Most study participants don’t identify tones an octave apart as the same, as musicians in diverse cultures do. The colour comparisons they make often seem mutually inconsistent; they don’t line up neatly on the rainbow. In other words, their experienced colour space has more than the standard three dimensions – redness, greenness, blueness – in the widely used RGB colour system. Based on his experiments, Tsuchiya estimates that we experience at least seven dimensions of colour.

This all goes to the “inverted spectrum” notion and the more general notions about just how individual our experience of reality really is.

Apparently, not all that much, which suggests a center in the unimaginably vast parameter space of conscious experience, the something it is like to be human. And by presumed extension, the something it is like for other conscious beings (such as bats). They all have their centers in the parameter space of sentient experience.

Which rather solidifies the concept of the something it is like.

[None of which denies or confirms physicalism. Sorry, but the jury remains stubbornly out (and they’ve ordered dinner).]

More to the point, I’ve long been askance at the talk about different cultures literally seeing color differently as supposedly evidenced in their vocabulary. But the above seems to indicate the talk is cultural but how we actually perceive it is more universal.

If true, someone from a different culture would be able to learn a different color structure. For instance, to distinguish green and blue as separate.

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Take a moment to remember 9/11 — it has been 25 years. As someone born in NYC, it was a significant event for me, and I’ve posted about it a fair bit, so I won’t do more than mention it today.

[For more see Ten Years Ago Today (2011), On This Day We Remember (2016), and 20 Years Ago Today (2021). I tried to do it justice.]

[[If interesting in the conspiracy theories, see these 2012 posts: Conspiracy Theories, Beams of Steel, and Final Thoughts. TL;DR: they’re bullshit.]]

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

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