- While at some point in the optimization game Goodhart’s Law will also apply here, before that happens I thoroughly enjoyed the insights from reading it and will try implementing some version of it to gauge my productivity before jumping to another metric always aware of the abyss, the ultimate procrastination: being unproductive by trying too hard to optimize productivity.
Unproductivity is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my unproductivity. I will let it pass through me. When it is gone, only action will remain.
Jump!
- What would the people who sealed the grave do when they accidentally unearthed a sophisticated burial site from the middle bronze age? Leave it alone? Maybe. I'm not sure, humans are curious.
Well the effort and care put into the grave made us - 2000 years later in cyberspace - in a sense remember the person. Who was this young woman? They even gave us hints/rewards. Made us curious.
So maybe they prepared her for an afterlife ... of continued memory and presence among the living, which they with their technological limitations succeeded in, we are talking about her, now.
- > It's amazing when people flag this as a bad thing when it's undoubtedly a key component of getting places to prosperity in the first place. Got to get people away from being starvation-limited.
Exponentially falling fertility rates can create dynamics which can be destructive in its own right. As with other complex phenomena it would be for example foolish to rapidly cool the earth's climate. Stability is the key, here. Right now India is just below replacement which short to mid-term looks very promising but will it stabilize? Looking at worldwide trends I very much doubt that. A growing economy needs some demographical stability so coming from a long-term view fertility dropping off a cliff, now, could be bad news later (in one, two generations).
Turning some knobs one way or the other does not produce linear results, quite the opposite, there are thresholds, there is criticality. To draw on another more time compressed analogy here: I guess some operators thought back then: What could go possibly wrong by running a nuclear reactor (RBMK) at safer lower powers?
- For me largley shaped by the westering old Europe creaking and breaking (after 2 WWs) under its heavy load of philosophical/metaphysical inheritance (which at this point in time can be considered effectively americanized).
It is still fascinating to trace back the divergent developments like american-flavoured christian sects or philosophical schools of "pragmatism", "rationalism" etc. which get super-charged by technological disruptions.
In my youth I was heavily influenced by the so-called Bildung which can be functionally thought of as a form of ersatz religion and is maybe better exemplified in the literary tradition of the Bildungsroman.
I've grappled with and wildly fantasized about all sorts of things, experimented mindlessly with all kinds of modes of thinking and consciousness amidst my coming-of-age, in hindsight without this particular frame of Bildung left by myself I would have been left utterly confused and maybe at some point acted out on it. By engaging with books like Der Zauberberg by Thomas Mann or Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften by Robert Musil, my apparent madness was calmed down and instead of breaking the dam of a forming social front of myself with the vastness of the unconsciousness, over time I was guided to develop my own way into slowly operating it appropriately without completely blowing myself up into a messiah or finding myself eternally trapped in the futility and hopelessness of existence.
Borrowing from my background, one effective vaccination which spontaneously came up in my mind against rationalists sects described here, is Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung which can be read as a radical continuation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason which was trying to stress test the ratio itself. [To demonstrate the breadth of Bildung in even something like the physical sciences e.g. Einstein was familiar with Kant's a priori framework of space and time, Heisenberg's autobiographical book Der Teil und das Ganze was motivated by: "I wanted to show that science is done by people, and the most wonderful ideas come from dialog".]
Schopenhauer arrives at the realization because of the groundwork done by Kant (which he heavily acknowledges): that there can't even exist a rational basis for rationality itself, that it is simply an exquisitely disguised tool in the service of the more fundamental will i.e. by its definition an irrational force.
Funny little thought experiment but what consequences does this have? Well, if you are declaring the ratio as your ultima ratio you are just fooling yourself in order to be able to rationalize anything you want. Once internalized Schopenhauer's insight gets you overwhelmed by Mitleid for every conscious being, inoculating you against the excesses of your own ratio. It instantly hit me with the same force as MDMA but several years before.
- An interesting read on that topic an nyt-article from 2002 "killer songs"
- Regarding Corbin Bleu the english wikipedia article itself mentions this oddity [0] apparently some great fan from Saudi Arabia [1](the article in Arabic itself is also unusually verbose [2]) put in the effort. The number (212) essentially didn't move since 2019 (then #5).
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corbin_Bleu
>In 2013, an MIT study discovered that Bleu was the third most-common biography article subject among all the different language versions of Wikipedia; pages on him were available in 194 languages, placing below only Jesus (214) and Barack Obama (200), and above Confucius (192) and Isaac Newton (191). The contradiction between Bleu's high notability on Wikipedia and low real-life notability comparative to the aforementioned historical figures made the creation of these pages unusual.[171][172] Years later, a Reddit user found that these translations were likely done by a single user whose IP addresses on Wikipedia locate to Saudi Arabia. By 2019, Bleu had dropped to #5 on the list of biographies, but increased in Wikipedia notability, by then being available in 213 languages.[173]
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/aetmh9...
[2]https://ar.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%83%D9%88%D8%B1%D8%A8%D9%...
- Without the proper philosophical/historical context[0] the final part of Hilbert's speech and its end slogan (Wir müssen wissen. Wir werden wissen.) cannot be fully appreciated.
The "simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous" (to borrow from Bloch) in 1930: the triumphant and festive present (Hilbert) confronting the past (Du-Bois-Reymond) with fate already sealed (Gödel).
The past:
>Du Bois-Reymond's investigations of electrical properties of the nervous system had led him to long-standing fundamental questions, especially the nature of matter and force and the relationship between mental phenomena and their physical aspects. He recognized scientists’ general belief that when we do not know a solution—ignoramus in Latin—nevertheless, under certain circumstances, we could know. However, he countered, concerning riddles of the material world such as these two, we must decide in favor of a harder truth: ignorabimus—we shall never know. Du Bois-Reymond reported later that his 1872 speech had excited considerable controversy and his ignorabimus slogan had become a sort of shibboleth in natural philosophy.
The present declaration by Hilbert:
>[...] This conviction of the solvability of every mathematical problem is a powerful incentive to the worker. We hear within us the perpetual call: There is the problem. Seek its solution. You can find it by pure reason, for in mathematics there is no ignorabimus.
And then the barely noticeable turn of events:
>Besides the meeting of the Society of German Natural Scientists and Physicians, the other three conferences at Königsberg in early September of 1930 were:
Second Conference on Epistemology of the Exact Sciences,
Annual Meeting of the German Mathematical Society, and
Annual Meeting of the German Physical Society.
The first of these was the most momentous of the four, a major step in bringing the adherents of the Vienna Circle of philosophers to both inner agreement and public notice. Their program challenged and eventually helped supplant much of the type of philosophy discussed and developed in the German universities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. On September 6, two days before Hilbert’s speech, the young Austrian logician Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) presented his completeness theorem, which filled a major gap in Hilbert’s finitist foundation of mathematics. In a round-table discussion on the next day, the day before Hilbert spoke, Gödel modestly announced his first incompleteness theorem.
[0]https://old.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/david-hilb...
- I think the underlying assumption is that we all suffer i.e. challenges and struggles in life.
Say first time heart-broken, some people really lean into it, and some of those people decide to do a deep dive into their chaotic feelings in order to retrieve a meaningful and personal perspective on a otherwise supposedly trivial thing, which they can finally articulate in an art form.
Put it differently: One can go through the motions and mostly copy paste the cultural wealth on a given topic or one can choose a very idiosyncratic route, depending on your craftsmanship the former will most certainly "resonate" with more people the latter only really resonates with you at first, normally it stays that way. But you can refine the process further going through a lot of cycles and with some luck get noticed for your individual/novel/fresh approach, an arduous process and the perseverance mostly comes from the art created being a very personal thing i.e. self-exploring. I think the hardest part is not getting lost when suddenly you manage to garner a lot of attention.
- Going through a lot of iterations until one band name "stuck", true to his obsessive working ethos in finding the "right" sound for his music.
> L: Where did the name Nine Inch Nails come from?
T: I don't know if you've ever tried to think of band names, but usually you think you have a great one and you look at it the next day and it's stupid. I had about 200 of those. Nine Inch Nails lasted the two week test, looked great in print, and could be abbreviated easily. It really doesn't have any literal meaning. It seemed kind of frightening. [In his best he-man voice] Tough and manly! It's a curse trying to come up with band names.
[0]https://web.archive.org/web/20150813023119/http://www.thenin...
- Looking at extreme examples of historical spelling (e.g. Tibetan) English isn't particularly bad, even in the context of Great Britain, e.g Manx [0] is way more off.
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manx_language#Spelling_to_so...
- You are likely referring to ignorance: not knowing what you don't know thus resulting in a possible false confidence.
The article is about "feeling stupid" in hindsight. Because you cannot unsee it anymore. Which makes you wonder about other myriad obvious things you are missing.
"Feeling stupid" can also mean that you get the impression that everyone around you gets it but you don't.
The irony especially in maths - it seems - is that you can feel stupid because you don't get it and then quit but also keep feeling stupid if you finally got it because in hindsight everything falls so neatly into place that you can't imagine that you had so much trouble to get it in the first place!
- GenZ are mostly aware[0] but feel powerless about it so they don't act accordingly which may seem that they are oblivious.
From personal experience in a controlled setting (tutoring) if I'm strict about the form: no phone and all learning material prepared beforehand I get mostly positive feedback and some even feel relief for that time. Imo the deeper truth of the matter is that they are used to adults struggling to give them full attention, too, a two-way-street but all the blame is usually given to the younger folk.
I find it surprising because it took e.g. smokers a lot longer although the evidence was overwhelming [1] in 1964. Today (almost) every tobacco smoker acknowledges the negative health effects.
It is a insidious kind of addiction: a massive amount of very short-lived, small dopamine spikes throughout the day seamlessly incorporated into your "normal" functional life which makes it extremely hard to get out of the loop.
[0]https://talker.news/2024/08/28/why-3-in-4-gen-z-blame-social...
[1]https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/add.16007
- Surprisingly it is obvious for Gen Z that social media in its current form is highly addictive and destabilizing in terms of well-being because (usually framed as "mental health"). Since I'm older I had a more of a choice in terms of social media presence (and get away with basically none) the younger folks practically don't.
Basically, I could have got "hooked" as my pre-frontal cortex was already fully developed and I kindly declined. Gen Z for the most part was confronted with the "choice" of small dopamine hits designed after the newest slot machine research [0][1] when they were underage.
As others have pointed out the 90s-00s had its own limitations and frustrations so going back to that nobody is really nostalgic about that part but back then you had to at least choose video games (install it, meet the hardware requirements and get sufficiently proficient in it ;) ) to get to today's level of addiction which permeates mainstream online social interactions.
[0]https://ihpi.umich.edu/news/social-media-copies-gambling-met...
[1]https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11245-024-10031-0
- Interestingly, the most toxic thing about the Revigator wasn't its added "radioactivity" through Radon to the water but its leaden spout combined with the impurities leaked considerable amount of arsenic, lead and vanadium into the water[0]
[0]https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2010/01/what-were-they...
- >Landa and Councell evaluated the leaching of uranium into different solutions over a 24 hour period. The glassware they used was designed to hold liquids (e.g., drinking glasses). They determined that the average resulting concentrations of uranium were 0.052 ug/liter (1.7 x 10-11 uCi/ml) for water and 5.9 ug/liter (2 x 10-9 uCi/ml) for acetic acid. The highest measured concentrations were 0.63 ug/liter (2.1 x 10-10 uCi/ml) in water and 30.1 ug/liter (1 x 10-8 uCi/ml) in acetic acid. They noted that less uranium would leach into solution when the experiment was repeated. The presumed explanation is that less and less leachable uranium becomes available.
According to the WHO[0] the tolerable daily intake (TDI) for uranium is 0.6 µg/kg body weight per day. So, 42 µg/day for a 70kg/150lbs person.
Worst case scenario for drinking 5l of water daily from those glasses would give oral exposure to 3.15 µg in total. Even if you were for some reason a vinegar enthusiast 1l/day would leave you with "only" 30µg.
Maybe you want to err on the side of caution and don't try pickling with those.
- Never heard of the "learning zones" as a concept but from my own teaching experience after a while I was aware if I made my lecture too accessible and easy to follow through my students got overconfident and didn't fully engage with the problems I gave them as an assignment.
On the other hand if I deliberately left little things out to later test them, they became more engaged because they knew I only gave them the necessary tools but they had to work out the little things by themselves. The students were more on the edge and this resulted in better engagement overall.
It was fascinating to experiment with it because my expectations of hard/intermediate/easy problems were at times wildly off.
And surely, there are adaptations at play here, if one is used to discomfort in order to learn hopefully the danger zone gets smaller with time. Sometimes I feel - especially for younger folks coming fresh from high school - the zone between comfort and danger is pretty small as they got habituated on cramming which is essentially all danger zone.
- Except for Mercury (eccentricity[0]: 0.2056) and the displayed transneptunian objects Eris (0.4407(!)), Pluto (0.2488), Haumea (0.1887) and Makemake (0.1559) all other planets (including the dwarf planet Ceres (0.0758)) are pretty accurate.
Current orbital eccentricites for our plantes in ascending order:
[0.00002 (Triton)]
0.0068 (Venus)
0.0086 (Neptune)
0.0167 (Earth)
0.0472 (Uranus)
0.0541 (Saturn)
0.0934 (Mars)
[0.9951 (parabolic) (Comet Hale-Bopp)]
So, the planets eccentricities (except for Mercury) are within one order of magnitude (0.01 and 0.1) nearly circular.
- >The sacred fire at Udvada Atash Behram, for example, kindled in 721 CE in Sanjan, burns continually to this day, now in Udvada since 1741, and housed in a magnificent Persian style temple building since 1742.
That it some impressive cultural feat. It combines the human ability to take on the extraordinarily long term view [0] - planning ahead - (our prefrontal cortex is only fully developed at 25 years of age) and the control of fire which goes back at least 1 million (!) years [1].
Some of the Proto-Indo-Europeans [2] seemed to be very keen at ritualizing the control of fire which can be attested through various examples in Indo-European practices [3].
If one traces back the Indo-European origin of the word fire there are 2 main terms:
(1) *h₁n̥gʷnis
(2) *péh₂wr̥
The first one refers to the animate feature of fire (e.g. as "Spirit"/"God", "active") while the second one to the inanimate ("substance", "passive") [4], interestingly Proto-Indo-European is thought to have animacy gender as a distinct grammatical feature [5] which was later replaced by the masculine/feminine gender.
The germanic root for fire comes from the inanimate one while the Persian atash, the latin ignis or Agni (Vedic deity of fire) from the animate form.
[0]https://longnow.org/ideas/the-fire-that-never-goes-out/
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_hum...
[2]https://www.science.org/content/article/new-language-databas...
[3]https://books.google.at/books?id=cI-bEAAAQBAJ
[4]https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-E...
- >On her seventh ED visit, the patient presented with slurred speech, alcohol odour on her breath, and an elevated ethanol level of 62 mmol/L.
About 0.285% or 2.85‰ (!). For a 200lbs (90kg) person about 14 drinks[0] for a 120lbs (55kg) person about 11 drinks.
TL;DR: The issue was resolved with a low carb diet (about 6 months) and putting her on courses of fluconazole.
[0]1 drink = a 12-ounce (350 ml) beer or 5 ounces of wine (140 ml) http://www.clinlabnavigator.com/alcohol-ethanol-ethyl-alcoho...
- Well, it's not that he is the dark lord but rather that he is so far ahead of the curve in the craft of mathematical modeling in physics (he won the Fields Medal) that he can easily solve a lot of actual mundane problems but he chooses not to. Incidentally this seems to be the legacy of String Theory after 50 years, a powerful tool for mathematical modeling in physics and not a direct road to the ToE.
So, when you come up to him as a fellow theoretical physicist and criticize his "platonic" stance his reply would be - if he is bothered at all to answer: "Ah, so the thing you are working on, did you try ... gives essentially an elegant mathematical solution to your theoretical problem that you were trying to solve for months."
Of course this is embedded in an institutional failing - namely funding throughout the 50 years.
But as Planck - who found himself reluctantly in the middle of a turning point - remarked on how insurmountable institutions and the persons associated with it can become: Science progresses funeral by funeral.
On this note: Ed Witten's dad a theoretical physicist himself, still lives at the ripe age of 102.
- Thanks for the correction, I remembered it wrong.
From his blog:
>[...]Eine ganz besondere Zugfahrt zum nördlichsten Bahnhof Europas, Narvik.
>A very special train journey to the northernmost railroad station in Europe, Narvik. [0]
- On October he did began to incorporate the Global Pass (3 months) which got him as far as Istanbul and Ankara and high up north as Kiruna in Sweden, Lapland.[0]
Seems a very cautious guy, as he was booking a night train from Budapest to Bucharest, apparently he was warned at the counter by an employee which made him very uneasy. Reminds of the story of that TEDx talk.[1]
He is clearly enjoying it so I hope the positive experiences encourage him to even go beyond Europe, like to India ;) [2]
[0]https://leben-im-zug.de/mein-jahresrueckblick-2023/
- A very dark chapter of IBM - to me common knowledge - but only a few days ago I've touched this topic with a much younger person, provocatively stating: "Well, IBM provided the technology for the first heavily automated genocide and forced labor allocation" Hollerith erfaßt. He didn't believe me.
So, granted Dehomag[0] was only an IBM subsidiary, there is some evidence that IBM's US-headquarter was well informed and decided do not forgo the excellent business relationship and thus large profits (funneled through Switzerland).[1][2]
However the case might be here, it is nevertheless a cautionary tale how the ease of mass data collection can immensely leverage (bad) intent.
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehomag
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/mar/29/humanities.hig...
[2]https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0609607995/theameric...
- Not entirely sure if it applies to this two cases "Big Ring" and "Giant Arc", here, but other large "structures" have been found in the past and this paper "Seeing patterns in noise: gigaparsec-scale "structures" that do not violate homogeneity (2013)[0] addresses the possible randomness:
>In general when using an algorithmic approach to identify clusters of points in a distribution, one must employ some criterion in order to decide whether the results obtained correspond to ‘real’ structures in the Universe, or are merely artefacts of the algorithm. One possible criterion is theoretical: if there is a good reason to believe that the points in the cluster are in fact gravitationally bound, for instance, or if its properties match those of structures that are expected to exist in the real Universe, it may be regarded as real. Alternatively, to assess unusual clusters which do not conform to theoretical expectation, the relevant criterion is whether they are unlikely to have arisen purely from noise.
Since the linkage length used to identify the Huge-LQG is so large, there is no reason I know of to believe that it forms a gravitationally bound structure. Certainly no real structures of such size are expected in the standard cosmology. On the other hand, when using this linkage length the clustering algorithm often finds such extended structures even in pure Poisson noise. It therefore appears that the Huge-LQG fails to satisfy either criterion, and so its interpretation as a ‘structure’ is highly questionable. This conclusion is even more applicable to the other slightly smaller quasar groups whose existence has also been claimed.
- Searching for a short elaboration regarding "Yellow Springs" (地獄 - dìyù) [0] I ended up digging way too deep:
>In this variation of Chinese mythology, there are 12,800 hells located under the earth – eight dark hells, eight cold hells and 84,000 miscellaneous hells located at the edge of the universe. All will go to Diyu after death but the period of time one spends in Diyu is not forever – it depends on the severity of the sins one committed. After receiving due punishment, one will eventually be sent for reincarnation. Diyu is divided into ten courts, each overseen by a Yanwang. Souls pass from stage to stage at the decision of a different judge
Indeed very much useless!
- >When Maglio pestered them to write a review, they did. He’d bought them dinner, cooked for them, collected them. That free hospitality makes it hard to write a bad one. Their review was positive.
From a psychopathic view he got a really good setup:
(1) active policeman (2) cultural differences to wash the line between appropriate and inappropriate (3) young woman from far away globetrotting with little experience just staying few nights (4) over the top hospitality (5) sleeping over in his own home + tranquilizers
>(“You’re 21 and sleep in someone’s house for free? You get drunk in his house and blame the host?”)
What caught him was the usual over-confidence chasing the ever bigger high:
>Maglio was finally arrested, for another attack. An Australian woman with two daughters had been staying with him, and woken in the early hours to find her 16-year-old in bed with Maglio. She’d been drugged and was non-responsive for five hours. Incredibly, while Maglio was under house arrest for this incident, the police visited and found two new suitcases in his hallway, and two couch surfers in his living room – one with benzodiazepines in her system.
- What do you do if after successfully discovering and studying billions of stars, galaxies and galaxy clusters ... you are stuck with one object - the universe - with nothing to compare to?
One way is to multi-verse out of it another is to recognize the limitations of that methodology.
While in principle you get to keep your methodology in the first approach, by definition you are now also left with unobservable phenomena flirting with the platonic world.
In the same vein reflecting about the methodology also enters the realm of philosophy. But imho in a more honest way by calling out the default, construct another and get back into physics.
A lot of platonic thinking prevalent in mathematics and physics isn't overtly discussed, mostly out of convenience as one mathematician put it: in my workdays I'm a Platonist and on my weekends I can also afford to be an Intuitionist.
Just three weeks after the publications in Nature (April 1953), a Time journalist Joan Bruce was made aware of the hottest story in science and described the discovery in her nearly publication-ready article (professional photoshoots of Watson/Crick were already taken, yes one of those pictures [0] was consequently prominently featured in The Double Helix 15 years (!) later) as a joint effort of two teams (Wilkins/Franklin & Watson/Crick) but the story was killed because apparently among other consulted scientists Franklin herself found the science lacking, it wasn't revised and subsequently no article was published at the time. No pun intended.
> Three weeks after the three DNA papers were published in Nature, Bragg gave a lecture on the discovery at Guy’s Hospital Medical School in London, which was reported on the front page of the British News Chronicle daily newspaper. This drew the attention of Joan Bruce, a London journalist working for Time. Although Bruce’s article has never been published — or described by historians, until now — it is notable for its novel take on the discovery of the double helix.
Bruce portrayed the work as being done by “two teams”: one, consisting of Wilkins and Franklin, gathering experimental evidence using X-ray analysis; “the other” comprising Watson and Crick, working on theory. To a certain extent, wrote Bruce, the teams worked independently, although “they linked up, confirming each other’s work from time to time, or wrestling over a common problem”. For example, Watson and Crick had “started to work on the double helix theory as a result of Wilkins’ X-rays”. Conversely, she wrote, Franklin was “checking the Cavendish model against her own X-rays, not always confirming the Cavendish structural theory”. It has not escaped our notice that both examples render Franklin in a position of strength, every bit a peer of Wilkins, Crick and Watson.
Unfortunately, Bruce was not so strong on the science. Her article got far enough for Time to send a Cambridge photographer, Anthony Barrington Brown, to shoot portraits of Watson and Crick, and for Watson to tell his friends to watch for it. But it never appeared, perhaps because Franklin told Bruce that it needed an awful lot of work to get the science straight. Bruce’s take on the discovery was buried, and Barrington Brown’s compelling images disappeared until Watson resurrected the best of them 15 years later, for The Double Helix.
It is tantalizing to think how people might remember the double-helix story had Bruce’s article been published, suitably scientifically corrected. From the outset, Franklin would have been represented as an equal member of a quartet who solved the double helix, one half of the team that articulated the scientific question, took important early steps towards a solution, provided crucial data and verified the result. Indeed, one of the first public displays of the double helix, at the Royal Society Conversazione in June 1953, was signed by the authors of all three Nature papers. In this early incarnation, the discovery of the structure of DNA was not seen as a race won by Watson and Crick, but as the outcome of a joint effort.
According to journalist Horace Freeland Judson and Franklin’s biographer, Brenda Maddox, Rosalind Franklin has been reduced to the “wronged heroine” of the double helix. She deserves to be remembered not as the victim of the double helix, but as an equal contributor to the solution of the structure.[1][2]
[0]https://wellcomecollection.org/works/s9z3dhkn/items
[1]https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-01313-5
[2]https://x.com/matthewcobb/status/1650877656445988864