Year: 2019

Unhoused

Chill Regular-ass Post

At first it wasn’t planned, and I know I rant about this often, but I am glad I never got most of my wealth tied up in a high-risk illiquid decaying asset. That is, a house.

That was probably the second-wisest financial decision I ever made. (The first was stock market games I play.) Since I am partnered and luckily we share thinking in many areas, if we need to bug out with a big wad of cash to another domicile where they don’t speak much English, we can. We have nothing really tying up that.

One day, we will probably own a house. But we’ll make sure that most of our wealth doesn’t get locked down in that asset. It’s a terrible investment and it has huge financial risks — even absent something like a Great Recession. Replacing a roof is $30,000. Something not covered by insurance and there goes $200,000+ down the hole.

Our housing policies and practices in this country are terrible; housing as an investment is one of the worst ideas in history.

AB

Chill Uncategorized

Because I enjoyed Annalise Basso so much in the “Safe and Sound” episode of Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams, today I peeked at her IMDB page to see what else she’d appeared in.

I found Cold, a show I’d never heard of. Turns out it was only on a short-lived network called Go90 that Verizon shut down last year sometime. The show didn’t appear to be available in any format at all anywhere — lost to history. Dammit.

Prepare

Chill Uncategorized

I’ve had a few people say to me lately some variant of, “I wish I had your life.”

No. I have a great life, no doubt. Wonderful partner. Enough money to travel, to buy the things I want. I generally do what I want to do when I feel like doing it. But the thing is to get where I am and to be who I am, they would’ve had to endure the experiences I had to withstand prior to all this. All of those days of dread and fighting that made me the person I am, that gave me my ambition, my smarts, my outrageous stubbornness and perseverance in the face of vicious detractors.

You have to walk that path to make it here; there is not another way. Most people who say they want my life would have no interest at all in any of that. Sure, a lot of life is luck and circumstance. But another part is how you deal with those two vicissitudes as they arise.

I am capable of the things I am because I was forged in the fire of neglect and implacable bullying and hatred over many years, followed by five hard years as a paratrooper. I can be so carefree and bold and brave because of all that, not in spite of it.

Walk that path, you can be me. Trust me, you don’t want it that bad.

Hilbertian

Chill Uncategorized

By the way, when you hear Quantum Trajectory Theory, the “trajectory” there is not a trajectory in normal space. This misleads many, I think. This trajectory is in Hilbert Space, which is an abstract vector space. The reason that QTT requires a Hilbert Space (good lord, I am simplifying a lot here) is that calculating anything superpositioned (before decoherence) is that it evolves through an abstract vector space that does not correspond to normal Euclidean space.

This is the trajectory to which QTT refers, a trajectory through Hilbert Space.

Not What Happened

Chill Uncategorized

When magazines pay people to write articles like these about quantum mechanics, I wish they’d find people who know what they were talking about. That article is total, utter, worthless crap and you emerge from reading it less knowledgeable than you were before.

Read here for more information about the actual result.

In short, what the paper actually succeeded in doing was measuring and “observing” a quantum state transition occurring, which had never been done before. However, that such a state transition is not instantaneous and takes time is a standard part of QM, is nothing new had been known for 50+ years. This is just the first time it’d ever been measured and reversed.

Quantum trajectory theory does NOT makes predictions that are impossible to make with the standard formulation, contrary to what the Yale researcher claimed in the Quanta piece. Why a scientist claimed this, I have no idea. But nevertheless, he is 100% wrong. Perhaps he was misquoted.

The researchers did achieve something and that is notable. But they did not achieve what the Quanta article claimed, nor is the researcher correct about what exactly they discovered.

Also, that quantum state transitions are predictable once they start occurring has also been known for 50+ years — and that’s because the Schrödinger equation itself is completely deterministic. What is random and always will be is when and where a quantum transition will start — in other words, a specific uranium atom cannot ever be predicted to emit a photon, but when it starts to transition, we can predict its states and how long it will take.

As I said, the researchers did achieve something quite cool and that had never been done before. However, they did not discover anything new at all about QM and this changes that theory in no way at all. Quantum energy state transitions have always been deterministic once they start and have always been known to take time.

AC Ever

Chill Regular-ass Post

Do Americans Need Air-Conditioning?

Usual NYT northern liberal bullshit. Try living anywhere south of Virginia without AC in the summer. Many elderly and children won’t survive.

Where did they find such a collection of morons and incompetents to quote in this article? Do you put up some kind of sign saying, “Total dipshits welcome?” Anyway, its such an equivocating mess why even bother writing it? Seems to function more like a clickbait space-filler.

It’s clear, though, that the writer doesn’t give a crap about the roughly 30% of the country where AC is absolutely required. I mean, that’s where the deplorables live, right?

The Trick

Chill Regular-ass Post

I do think most scientists are attempting to be honest most of the time, but this is a common scientist trick where they control for anything and everything that makes any difference, and then declare there is no difference. What a shocker, there. Kevin Drum pulls this one, too, but he’s definitely not attempting probity.

There is of course a political agenda* with examination of millennials and their proclivities, so that is always more distorted than most other areas but even outside of this it seems a pervasive scientific blindness to the world to “control” away most of what you are explicitly attempting to measure and then declare it does not exist. Why this is the case even outside of political point-scoring I don’t know.

*The agenda here being to show that the world is not changing, therefore has no reason to change.

No Repurpose

Chill Uncategorized

Oh please tell me this is a joke. I want to believe it’s a jape, a jest, some drollery because if not this is horrific and a fail train. This will already be dropping packets like drunk Aunt Cora at a family reunion carrying a tub of potato salad, and will only get worse over time.

For those who aren’t familiar with Ethernet cabling, Cat 3 is made to transmit 10mbs and although it can carry more, it is unreliable — meaning it drops a lot of signal at the physical layer, thus dropping packets at the data layer, making the connection by default slow and unreliable even when it’s technically pushing more than it can actually handle.

For non-networking folks, this is like Lucy from I Love Lucy in the chocolate factory scene — that scene is exactly analogous to what is happening on this network.

This is terrible and I feel the pain of the condo owners who have to endure this inevitably shoddy connection.

Never, ever do this.

Hunger

Chill Regular-ass Post

I think that the world of The Hunger Games presents a fairly-accurate representation of what the planet will look like 400 years hence: a much-reduced human population due to war and climate change, the elites keeping some measure of power, cloistered from the deplorables who have been relegated to far-away work camps and labor collectives.

No, I don’t think anything like the Games are likely (though certainly given human history not impossible), but the Hunger world itself is eminently possible after climate change and a few nuclear exchanges.

People really seem to hate their children, or perhaps they just don’t want to know how bad climate change is going to be.

The true Hunger Games, then, are how the Boomers and Gen X are perfectly fine consigning their own kids to fighting over the scraps of a disintegrating civilization.

E Aww

Chill Uncategorized

The Honda E Is the Electric Car I’ve Been Waiting For.

Cute car. I like it and would drive it, but not in the US. It’d be a deathtrap here. I drive a 4,000 pound large sedan and it’s almost a deathtrap since it has to compete with 5,000-7,000 pound mega-SUVs and large trucks that sit much higher than my car.

The Honda E weighs just over 3,000 pounds and is small. I would not want to drive it on modern US roads.

More regulation is needed to eliminate large and high-riding SUVs and trucks except for strict work purposes (and work purposes would also need to be stringently enforced).

Distancing

Chill Regular-ass Post

There’s a reason I bought roughly a thousand plastic straws recently. Have to do something to battle against useless doofus incursions.

Current corporate and political climate change and environmental strategy is a very intelligent one, overall. It’s a version of denialism, really, and that is to prioritize small changes that really make no difference at all, to value the centrist view, the “reasonable.” Meanwhile, the true reasonable in the face of such a vast threat is to be running at full war footing, Apollo program x 10, to adapt, mitigate and even to reverse climate change with a combination of the known and trusted with some smaller part of that portfolio consisting of crazy plans that also might work.

I draw very little distinction at all between outright, classical denialism of the Republican variety and that of the Drum/Scalzi variety. Both will result in little difference in the end, and aren’t actually that far apart other than as a matter of ideological aesthetics.

We occupants of the last few hundred years of capitalist dominance, who know nothing else, can think nothing else, will all be lumped together in our varieties in the judgment of history, a menagerie of debased humanity: Republicans, liberals, Nazis, Democrats, Socialists, populists, theocrats, authoritarians and libertarians alike — all those of the generations who poisoned the planet, who despised their own children and grandchildren so much that they were perfectly willing to literally kill them.

We’ll all look the same in the judgement of history, and that judgment will be correct.

One Of

Chill Regular-ass Post

One of the interesting things about not holding predictably ideological views is that I’ve been called everything from a Republican puritan to a ultra-Marxist to a white supremacist to someone who hopes the white race is extinguished by the scary brown hordes…sometimes by the same people a few months apart.

The charts, I am off them. Apparently. People I think don’t like it when you don’t fit neatly into their boxes.