What questions? There are no questions here. If you choose not to get vaccinated, fuck you. You don’t get to play anymore. Should be mandatory house arrest until you get jabbed. This is the same as the anti-maskers should’ve been treated too, by the way.
Day: February 18, 2021, 9:40 PM
Texas, Next Us
Millions of Texans struggle for drinking water following deadly winter storm.
F-f-f-failed state. Coming next to a location near you! If you are in the US, anyway.
This is what the future here looks like. Get used to it.
Big Bills
Post something about yourself that seems made up but is actually true.
— Diva Deadpool 💋🌊🌊🎤🎭✡️ (@MarinaSilver6) February 15, 2021
A Secret Service agent handed me a big stack of money in Egypt for some photos I’d taken of him and his team shooting guns in the desert.
Wheel Deal
When no one gave a single fuck about safety.
Imagine that thing on hills. Aww hell no.
Prob Bubbly
On the origin of probability in quantum mechanics.
Goddamn that is a good paper. Some of the questions have been partially answered since then, though it would take me too long now to write about that. I love how it shows that philosophy is not divorceable from quantum mechanics (or, really, any human endeavor).
I’ve been thinking a lot about probability lately, in this context and others, and how it’s a flawed but useful tool.
For N sufficiently large and |c+| ≠ |c−|, it can be shown that the vast majority of the 2N realized observers (i.e., weighting each distinct observer equally) see an outcome which is highly unlikely according to the usual probability rules. Note that counting of possible outcomes depends only on combinatorics and is independent of c±. As N → ∞, for all values of c± (excluding exactly zero), almost all of the realized observers find nearly equal number of + and − spins: there are many more outcomes of the form, e.g., (+ + − + − · · · + − − +) with roughly equal number of +’s and −’s than with many more of one than the other. This had to be the case, because counting of outcomes is independent of the values of c±, leading to a symmetry between + and − outcomes in the combinatorics. In contrast, the Born rule predicts that the relative number of + and − outcomes depends on |c±| . In the large N limit almost all (distinct) observers experience outcomes that strongly disfavor the Born probability rule: almost all of the physicists in the multiverse see experimental violation of the Born rule. Or: almost none of the physicists in the multiverse see outcomes consistent with the Born rule.
That’s something I’d realized myself, though I’d not put it quite that formally. Reality is essentially broken, because no matter how you think about it, using the best tools we have, there is something strange going on: either causality is false (this appears to be true in this universe), or you lose locality. And in most formulations of QM probability is completely wacky in irreconcilable ways! And it just seems to be the way the universe works.
Some Covers
The first ten on today’s playlist:
Struck In
Those are some skills right there, ya’ll:
Her chair looks really uncomfortable though.
Small Cars
Examples of men in television/film depictions driving small cars as being weird or emasculating.
Silicon Valley.
I think this kind of thing is really insidious. It's really common too. I can't find a picture of the other good example I am thinking of. pic.twitter.com/PMMcr9hnU4
— Angie Schmitt🚶♀️ (@schmangee) February 17, 2021
Driving a car with such a short wheelbase is horrendous. And those small cars invariably have absolutely shitty brakes. The Smart ForTwo has a stopping distance of 124 feet.
My car — which outweighs that one by 1,700 pounds — has a 60-0mph stopping distance of 108 feet. That’s a difference of 16 feet. That is not minor. My car has saved me from several accidents in Florida that absolutely would’ve occurred if I’d had worse brakes.
Make a small car that doesn’t drive like a garbage can with shitty brakes, I might consider it.
Clash
If you look at the resignation of Donald McNeil and what has occurred with Slate Star Codex and the NYT as a contest for jobs and authority (which gets one jobs), then it all makes a lot more sense.
Like what #MeToo morphed into, and many other intra-elite competitions, this is all just extended elite internecine warfare for the declining number of professional jobs out there.
Beginning End
The actual order of reasons:
1) Seaonality.
2) Seroprevalence.
3) Social distancing/masks.
4) Shots.
Quickly, “shots” will zoom up to overtake the other three, though seasonality matters a lot more than anyone is giving it credit for. By August, as I’ve noted before, the lockdown scammers will be searching far and wide for reasons to keep us all sequestered away from the world as daily case rates will be so low.