About Wyrd Smythe
The canonical fool on the hill watching the sunset and the rotation of the planet and thinking what he imagines are large thoughts.
Father’s Day, 1994
This post rises from deep in my Drafts Folder. I started it back in 2012 as a follow-up to the Sad Day; Perfect Day post. That one recalls a special 1994 memory about Samantha, my dog (who died a little before her time, in 2004). The second post would catalog various memories highlighting how much fun we had and how much she meant to me.
Two years later I did post a version of that eulogy: Dog Tales: Games. That post was actually the second beat to a post the day before, Sam’s Final Walk, which described the disposition of her ashes.
For Father’s Day, I thought it appropriate to post once more…
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17 Comments | tags: Black Lab, Black Labrador Retriever, dog games, dogs, family, kids, love, Marriage, Sam, Samantha | posted in Life
The two Solstices are the only universal holidays I celebrate. There are many personal holidays, almost all anniversaries of whatever happened that day: births, weddings, deaths; the arcs of jobs and love affairs; graduations and engagements; all the milestones of life. (The trick is to avoid Marley’s chains and chests.)
When it comes to the world, I see only two true holidays whose meaning every mind on Earth shares; two that everyone can anticipate and appreciate. These holidays are defined by the star that gives us life. They mark our orbit as precisely as the numbers of a clock mark the hours.
In fact, there are four such star-marked days; two major, two minor.
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13 Comments | tags: astronomy, four, moon, Ophiuchus, Sagittarius, Sagittarius A*, scorpion tail, Scorpius, solar system, Solstice, stars, Summer Solstice, Sun, three, twelve, zodiac | posted in Life
“Go home everyone!”
I seriously can’t believe I’ve never posted about this. It’s one of the few times in life I’ve been “in on the ground floor” of something — been there enjoying it from the beginning.
It’s doubly cool for being an overlooked secret in plain view. Something like a great restaurant hidden behind a plain door down the street from the obvious places. It isn’t some great secret, these taste delights; it’s that most people walked out too soon and never saw them.
I’m talking about movie cookies (they aren’t something one eats, but they are a delight).
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9 Comments | tags: Airplane (film), Being There, Body Heat, end credits, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, filmmaking, Grand Canyon (movie), Lawrence Kasdan, outtakes, Wild Things | posted in Movies
In the nearly nine years of this blog I’ve written many posts about human consciousness in the context of computers. Human consciousness was a key topic from the beginning. So was the idea of conscious computers.
In the years since, there have been myriad posts and comment debates. It’s provided a nice opportunity to explore and test ideas (mine and others), and my views have evolved over time. One idea I’ve found increasing skepticism for is computationalism, but it depends on which of two flavors of it we mean.
I find one flavor fascinating but can see the other as only metaphor.
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10 Comments | tags: algorithm, analog computer, brain, brain mind problem, computationalism, digital computer, human brain, human mind | posted in Computers, Philosophy
Little Big Town: (l to r) Karen Fairchild, Phillip Sweet, Jimi Westbrook, & Kimberly Schlapman.
The last few weeks have been astonishing: Minnesota in the news for all the wrong reasons (but change may be coming); the COVID-19 thing ongoing; our strange politics ever stranger; we’re all going a little nuts. On the other hand, summer is here, so at least the weather has been cool and lovely (though there have been some hot and steamy evenings).
This past week or so, I’ve been mostly basking in my tree trying to figure it all out. Luckily, I’ve had some good music helping me along, and today I thought I’d share (once again) my love for the band Little Big Town.
It was eight years ago that I wrote about how I stumbled over them; they have been favorites of mine ever since.
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12 Comments | tags: country music, Fleetwood Mac, Little Big Town, rock and roll, The Highwomen | posted in Music
Back in 2015, to celebrate Albert Einstein’s birthday, I wrote a month-long series of posts about Special Relativity. I still regard it as one of my better efforts here. The series oriented on explaining to novices why faster-than-light travel (FTL) is not possible (short answer: it breaks reality).
So, no warp drive. No wormholes or ansibles, either, because any FTL communication opens a path to the past. When I wrote the series, I speculated an ansible might work within an inertial frame. A smarter person set me straight; nope, it breaks reality. (See: Sorry, No FTL Radio)
Then Dr Sabine Hossenfelder seemed to suggest it was possible.
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12 Comments | tags: Albert Einstein, ansible, causality violation, faster than light, FTL, FTL radio, light speed, Sabine Hossenfelder, simultaneity, spacetime, Special Relativity, speed of light | posted in Physics
I don’t normally reblog, but I’m still trying to find my voice on this, and I thought this post very well expressed many of the things I’m feeling. I’ll get out of the way and let you read it.
I started this blog as a place to discuss science, and have refrained from discussing overtly political matters. This is no longer possible. Today is June 10, 2020 – the date set to strike for black lives. I want to contribute in a tiny way by writing here. If that seems inappropriate to you or […]
via Black Lives Matter — Triton Station
Black Lives Matter.
Leave a comment | tags: #BLM, Black Lives Matter | posted in Basics, Life
Last time I started talking about entropy and a puzzle it presents in cosmology. To understand the puzzle we have to understand entropy, which is a crucial part of our view of physics. In fact, we consider entropy to be a (statistical) law about the behavior of reality. That law says: Entropy always increases.
There are some nuances to this, though. For example we can decrease entropy in a system by expending energy. But expending that energy increases the entropy in some other system. Overall, entropy does always increase.
This time we’ll see how Roger Penrose, in his 2010 book Cycles of Time, addresses the puzzle entropy creates in cosmology.
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27 Comments | tags: black hole, cosmology, entropy, galaxy, Immanuel Kant, laws of thermodynamics, Roger Penrose, thermodynamics, universe | posted in Physics
I’ve been chiseling away at Cycles of Time (2010), by Roger Penrose. I say “chiseling away,” because Penrose’s books are dense and not for the fainthearted. It took me three years to fully absorb his The Emperor’s New Mind (1986). Penrose isn’t afraid to throw tensors or Weyl curvatures at readers.
This is a library book, so I’m a little time constrained. I won’t get into Penrose’s main thesis, something he calls conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC). As the name suggests, it’s a theory about a repeating universe.
What caught my attention was his exploration of entropy and the perception our universe must have started with extremely low entropy.
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12 Comments | tags: arrow of time, big bang, cosmology, entropy, laws of thermodynamics, Roger Penrose, thermodynamics, time, universe | posted in Physics
It’s always the quiet ones. As I’ve said before, sometimes the most interesting movies are the ones that slip by mostly unnoticed. In some cases, they’re movies many people didn’t realize were much better than they thought. (I’ve long thought Johnny Mnemonic and Johnny Dangerous both fell into that category.)
Last night I watched American Ultra (2015), directed by Nima Nourizadeh and written by Max Landis. I thoroughly enjoyed it, although it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. It’s either an action-thriller with comedy, or a comedy with action thrills. Those can be hard to pull off well.
I think if you like Quentin Tarantino’s films, you’ll like American Ultra.
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17 Comments | tags: Connie Britton, Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Max Landis, Nima Nourizadeh, Topher Grace | posted in Movies
Logos con carne 