TheVat

Unless the NaCl is on some peanuts. This was a drink in the southern US, to drop some peanuts into a coke, the salt washes off the peanuts right away and it fizzes intensely for a bit. Wait a few minutes and drink, has a delicious nutty flavor and less carbonation "burn." Our family lived for about six years on the northern edge of the region where this was popular. Be sure it's classic Coke and the peanuts are salty. (This does NOT work with diet colas, and is probably an abomination) Why is this in inorganic chemistry?

I wouldn't think interior dirt has much effect on connections, just the thermal effect Studiot described. Dirt where jacks are inserted might be more the problem.

James Bond Cola, stirred not shaken.

Sugar accelerates various degenerative diseases and the aging process, so usually the option with least sugar is the best. What you want is food with a lower glycemic index - you can google charts that show glycemic index for most foods. (Figs or bananas for example are better than refined sugar sweets, as they have more fiber to slow absorption in the gut) And watch out for empty calories with bad side effects, like this.... https://www.cnn.com/videos/media/2022/12/02/cocaine-bear-trailer-moos-cprog-orig-bdk.cnn

This is just some background reading on what some foreign policy experts are saying we should be thinking about, in terms of a possible escalation to war with either China or Russia. About a ten minute read. Among other things, it gets into what scenarios are likely if the US actually decided to give military support (direct action) to Taiwan, and how few living Americans have real experience of a world war and the levels of sacrifice and suffering it would involve. https://archive.ph/2022.12.02-155532/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/02/opinion/america-world-war-iii.html (PW free screenshot)

It was the subtitle of the book, Three Men in a Boat, that exchemist was telling us about finding the French edition. It means To Say Nothing of the Dog. Three men, and Jerome added one fictitious dog. And yes, it's also a separate title for a Connie Willis novel, which naturally references the Jerome book. A funny time travel story, and one where a character journeys back to the precise year of the river journey detailed in 3MiaB.

A dire rien du chien. Would be fun to reread - I recall it seemed surprisingly fresh for something written in the late 1800s, and that the dog was fictional. Regarding what we retain of foreign languages, I'm sometimes amused/puzzled by what comes back to me from high school German. (French I seem to remember more consistently, probably due to Francophone friends and then speaking quite a bit with my daughter). Es tut mir leid, ich habe meinen Kopf an die Decke geschlagen! I could swear that was a line of dialog in one lesson but now wonder if the memory can be trusted.

I tend to agree, re Time Reborn, on the questionable need for a full length book. In fact, I skipped the large first part of the book which is a review of the history of physics, and dipped into the second part, which explains why he believes earlier theories are somewhat wrong. I.e. the need he sees to reestablish time as fundamental (and probably space as non-fundamental)(contra Einstein). Smolin's idea, shape dynamics, is how to do that. I confess I haven't followed up in the decade since he wrote it on reactions from peers. I suspect TTWP might cover a fair portion of what I read in TR.

Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami. (started it, then dropped it, about fifteen years ago, finally came back and really got into it this time) I've read Smolin's Time Reborn with great interest. Do the titles you list make good companion reads to that?

Joe Rogan, is that you?

Respectfully disagree. A sentient cloud of gas and ash is a good look for me.

I saw an AP story this morning about people evading censors to register outrage at the Party over that fire in Urumqi, support the protests, etc. I learned that the phrase "shrimp moss banana peel," in Mandarin sounds very similar to "step down, [banana peel is same initials as Xi's name]". Sounds like there is a lot of creativity there. And some people have a VPN, so they can vault over the "great firewall of China" and follow foreign coverage of events suppressed in Chinese media. Then fire off screenshots to friends. My guess is censors, in these times, just cannot keep up.

In case y'all are wondering where the Drag NATO Into War theory is coming from.... https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/11/17/pers-n17.html (World Socialist Website) I had a chuckle at the bit: And why were they able to precisely target an inhabited building in a sparsely populated rural area? Syllogism.

While I am usually one to lean towards diplomacy, I think this might be a Teddy Roosevelt situation (i.e. walk softly and carry a big stick), given that Putin and his inner circle seem to be inoculated against diplomacy and appeals to humanity. The fact that he has no problem with the new Death by Winter strategy, which is leaving millions of noncombatants in the dark and cold, with a potential for catastrophic loss of life, suggests that it's time for some tough love. If that doesn't mean military action, then we would have to, along with NATO and other allied nations, take economic warfare to the next level. Start turning sanctions not just on Russia, but any nations that continue to transact business with Russia. Tell India, China, Iran, et al: if you support a war criminal, then we will deem you complicit in war crime and slap you with massive sanctions.

I like it, which means I'm tempted by its seductive promise of dispelling illusions. And I'm open to such ontological flights, though I sometimes fly into the whirling blades of what, then, is a field, be it a field of force (a vector field) or a field of potential energy (a scalar field). If everything that "is" is just a field perturbation, or a gradient, or a vector, what is being perturbed, waved, pointed, attenuated, quantized and so on? What the heck are fields anyway? (Rhetorical question, don't answer) I'm saying, mainly, that any metaphysics is possibly hopeless, and that maybe physics tends to attach a particle term to any quantized jiggle in the jello of reality because anything else feels like chaos and madness. Even David Bohm couldn't get rid of solid particles. Still, I'd love to look into any speculative take on a world of just waves.

Thread seems to draw from the long debate between scientific realism and anti-realism (going back to Carnap and the logical empiricists and then onto other antirealist views, Feyerabend et al). The common form being instrumentalism (SUAC). (Clip from SEP, with my boldings) In the historical development of realism, arguably the most important strains of antirealism have been varieties of empiricism which, given their emphasis on experience as a source and subject matter of knowledge, are naturally set against the idea of knowledge of unobservables. It is possible to be an empiricist more broadly speaking in a way that is consistent with realism—for example, one might endorse the idea that knowledge of the world stems from empirical investigation and contend that on this basis, one can justifiably infer certain things about unobservables. In the first half of the twentieth century, however, empiricism came predominantly in the form of varieties of “instrumentalism”: the view that theories are merely instruments for predicting observable phenomena or systematizing observation reports. (End clip) Some empiricists of the more antirealist persuasion would insist that the word "particle" can only mean, say, "white streak in a cloud chamber" and have no ontological force as to whether particle-like interactions actually involve discrete particulate entities. LIke @Lorentz Jr I am leery of reifying interactions as The particle paradigm is so powerful because of its utility, and because it is so hard to visualize anything else, like say field perturbations or knots of field strength or wave packets or what have you. It's also worth asking: can we speak of a truly "elementary" entity as having properties within itself? The macro scale concept of an object is one that implies a thing that could be split, subdivided, crushed, etc. a concept which has no validity in the realm of elementary particles. At that level, we seem to be in a realm where things only take on meaning interacting with something else - in the macro scale, this would be like a table that is only a table when you set a fruit bowl, or lunch, on its upper surface. Elementary particles are bundles of interactive properties - but no substance. They are particles in a specific and peculiar way that bears little relation to the word's usual usage where we speak of "particles of..."

You mean like "Scrotal Recall" ? Yes, let's hope he doesn't mention that.

If there are sci-fi buffs here, any interest in starting a dedicated thread for the genre?

An idiosyncratic list from a film buff - films that provoke thought and explore the human condition via sci-fi tropes... Looper. Source Code. Primer. 12 Monkeys. Ex Machina. 2001. Blade Runner. Arrival. Moon. The Martian. Total Recall. (Some hokey science, but still...) The Abyss. (Love you, Mary E. Mastrantonio!) Children of Men. District 9. (from the director of Chappie, IIRC) Silent Running. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Minority Report. Gattaca. eXistenz. (have to get one David Cronenberg flick in here) Star Trek II (because why kind of cockamamie list leaves out the wrath of Khan??) Solaris (the original Russian one) and last but not least, World on a Wire (Fassbinder, and definitely not everyone's taste...it also inspired The Thirteenth Floor, another good simulated world movie that's not The Matrix but every bit as good...)(am currently watching a German miniseries that also is influenced by Fassbinders WoaW, called 1899, which I can already say I like better than The Matrix, not least for its gritty and haunting sets and clever use of a period drama framing...)

Last I heard, most tic disorders of that kind are related to either damage (stroke, TBI) or developmental problems in a set of control and inhibitory circuits in the brain in the basal ganglia. The brain bubbles with impulses that the BG normally controls and filters with oversight from the prefrontal cortex. Emotions, voluntary motor movements, eye movements, action selections....the BG is involved with controlling them. Most Tourettes for example is fairly minor dysfunction so you just get throat clearing, blinking, facial tics. Coprolalia is less common because it involves the greater complexity of speech actions and therefore greater dysfunction in the BG and poorer coordination with higher cortical centers. No real cure, just management of the particular form and comorbidities a person has. Basically it's an exploration of techniques to instill some control mechanisms in the brain.

@joigus I recognize that Gisin's math would really be replacing a foundation under the building, in order to resolve things like the black hole information paradox. (that does have to happen with actual buildings, like those seaside condos in Florida which are threatened with collapse due to salt intrusion). I admit I don't understand a lot of this... In quantum mechanics, information can be shuffled or scrambled, but never created or destroyed. Yet if the digits of numbers defining the state of the universe grow over time as Gisin proposes, then new information is coming into being. Gisin said he “absolutely” rejects the notion that information is preserved in nature, largely because “there is clearly new information that is created during a measurement process.” It feels like playing fast and loose with the concept of information. As @studiot mentioned earlier, "Maths information is about subjects which are carefully specified. So there is no mathematical definition or description of indirect forms of information...." Yes. The reality of these entities and their correspondence to mathematical models is always questionable. One may well ask after the ontology of real numbers. In what sense does Ahmeiri say that they cannot exist? Like Gisin, he says that you can take the digits only to a finite number in the physical world, like the .49999 that may or may not ever become one half. We don't know if a 7 may appear in the string.

I am familiar with his end of time theory, and would be glad to follow any thread you start on him. And I recognize that formula you posted earlier as Heisenberg's quantum conditions formula.... though time will be needed for me to understand the implications of a revision with a non-continuous sort of math. I didn't have probs, thanks. Still catching up. The Stanford entry is a good starting point, and I will get back to it. If only to get some grasp on what someone means when they say real numbers can't exist inside black holes...as this fellow at Princeton did: Several experts agreed that real numbers don’t seem to be physically real, and that physicists need a new formalism that doesn’t rely on them. Ahmed Almheiri, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study who studies black holes and quantum gravity, said quantum mechanics “precludes the existence of the continuum.” Quantum math bundles energy and other quantities into packets, which are more like whole numbers rather than a continuum. And infinite numbers get truncated inside black holes. “A black hole may seem to have a continuously infinite number of internal states, but [these get] cut off,” he said, due to quantum gravitational effects. “Real numbers can’t exist, because you can’t hide them inside black holes. Otherwise they’d be able to hide an infinite amount of information.”

Hard for me to judge, though the rebuff to David Hilbert has an aesthetic appeal to my sense of the fuzziness of things. I am always finding the concept of information as a physical thing quite slippery, as in the part where the article addresses the problems Gisin has with the universe's initial conditions leading to a block universe... Now expand this idea to the entire universe. In a predetermined world in which time only seems to unfold, exactly what will happen for all time actually had to be set from the start, with the initial state of every single particle encoded with infinitely many digits of precision. Otherwise there would be a time in the far future when the clockwork universe itself would break down. But information is physical. Modern research shows it requires energy and occupies space. Any volume of space is known to have a finite information capacity (with the densest possible information storage happening inside black holes). The universe’s initial conditions would, Gisin realized, require far too much information crammed into too little space. “A real number with infinite digits can’t be physically relevant,” he said. The block universe, which implicitly assumes the existence of infinite information, must fall apart. Yes, thanks, the dependence of intuitionism on time - that statements could evolve towards validity over time - is rather mind bending and I have to acknowledge it could be nonsense. I'm only scratching the surface on this, and want to read Brouwer further to get some historical background. Like @Markus Hanke I am open to all this but need to see what kind of evidence there could be.

Act as if it's extremely important that every human on the planet have a good education, one that sets a high value on literacy, critical thinking skills, scientific understanding, ecological awareness and social intelligence. End predatory capitalism and third world debt. And yes, corruption. No nukes, ever. Value having experiences over having material things. Round up fascists and billionaires and make them into a nutritious protein drink. JK on that last one.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/does-time-really-flow-new-clues-come-from-a-century-old-approach-to-math-20200407/ (This is a pull-quote, but I have to warn that reading the full article may be necessary to follow what Gisin is up to. I can't cut/paste everything on this device, sorry.) Over the past year, the Swiss physicist Nicolas Gisin has published four papers that attempt to dispel the fog surrounding time in physics. As Gisin sees it, the problem all along has been mathematical. Gisin argues that time in general and the time we call the present are easily expressed in a century-old mathematical language called “intuitionist mathematics,” which rejects the existence of numbers with infinitely many digits. When intuitionist math is used to describe the evolution of physical systems, it makes clear, according to Gisin, that “time really passes and new information is created.” Moreover, with this formalism, the strict determinism implied by Einstein’s equations gives way to a quantum-like unpredictability. If numbers are finite and limited in their precision, then nature itself is inherently imprecise, and thus unpredictable.