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Doomed, doomed
As advertised in my September 22nd podcast, I have been listening, via Audible, to Mustafa Suleyman’s The Coming Wave, just published this month. If you’ll excuse me repeating myself:
The subtitle is: ”Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma.” It’s about the, yes, coming wave of technology—most particularly Artificial Intelligence and bio-tech—that will transform the world we live in.
Suleyman, that Turkish-sounding name notwithstanding, is another Brit (although he now lives in Silicon Valley), and one well qualified to pronounce on his subject. He was a co-founder of DeepMind back in 2010, and has been a leader in AI research ever since. He has interesting and important things to say …
He sure does. No one knows better than Suleyman how fast things are moving in those two areas of technological advance.
That phrase in the book’s subtitle, ”the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma,” refers to the great good these changes could accomplish, the great evil they might unleash, and how we steer the human race towards the good and away from the evil. The latter part of that—steering us away from the evil—Suleyman discusses at much length under the heading ”containment.”
The central problem for humanity in the 21st century is how we can nurture political power and wisdom, technical mastery, and robust norms to constrain technology and ensure they continue to do far more good than harm …
But:
The odds are stacked against us in making this a reality.
For a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist like me, the book is a banquet. Has the COVID panic got you worrying about possible leaks from big, expensive labs staffed by credentialed scientists under careful surveillance? Very soon, perhaps already, a hobbyist tinkering with synthetic biology in his garage could kill a billion of us. (Suleyman is actually quoting a biotech expert there, but he seems to believe it.)
Suleyman did have me shaking my head a few times, to the degree my headset would allow it. I suspect he is uncritically Woke. In Chapter 14, for example, we get this:
A few years ago many Large Language Models had a problem. They were, to put it bluntly, racist. Users could quite easily find ways to make them regurgitate racist material, or hold racist opinions they had gleaned while scanning the vast corpus of text on which they had been trained. Toxic bias was, it had seemed, ingrained in human writing and then amplified by AI.This led many to conclude that the whole setup was ethically broken, morally nonviable. There was no way LLMs could be controlled well enough to be released to the public, given the obvious harms.
But then LLMs, as we’ve heard, took off. In 2023 it’s now clear that, compared with the early systems, it’s extremely difficult to goad something like ChatGPT into racist comments.
Is it a solved problem? Absolutely not; there are still multiple examples of biased, even overtly racist, LLMs, as well as serious problems with everything from inaccurate information to gaslighting. But for those of us who have worked in the field from the beginning, the exponential progress at eliminating bad outputs has been incredible, undeniable.
Suleyman doesn’t give us his definition of ”racist,” but I suspect it is congruent with Ibram X. Kendi’s. Thence to the question: What happens to truth—truth that contradicts social dogma—when AI supplies us with all our knowledge?
I’ll guess that LLM knowledge bases strongly resemble Wikipedia: handy if you want to look up Dirichlet’s Theorem or the Battle of Lepanto but deeply unreliable on anything—or anybody—connected to social dogma on race or sex.
And Western World Wokery is a pale, weak thing by comparison with social dogmas elsewhere. What would a Chinese LLM have to say about Mao Tse-tung’s great famine, or the Tiananmen Square protests? What would a North Korean LLM tell me about the Kim family?
And with North Korea in mind: If one guy fiddling in his garage can kill a billion of us, what might a malevolent nation do?
Mustafa Suleyman does his best to offer hope, scolding what he calls ”techo-pessimists” and urging us to more enlightened regulation, better international cooperation, etc. He sounds worried, though. So he should. ”Nurture political power and wisdom”? Has Mustafa Suleyman ever attended a session of the U.S. Congress?
Twenty years ago I reviewed a book by Britain’s Astronomer Royal arguing that humanity will not survive to see the 22nd century. He made a good case. The Coming Wave, for all the author’s earnest, plainly heartfelt urgings towards ”containment,” makes an even better one.
The love that never fails
In my July Diary I had words to say about romantic love and the decline thereof. I omitted to mention the deepest, most robust, most enduring variety of love. Permit me to remedy the omission.
Actually, I’m going to summon up Alexander Pushkin to remedy it for me. Here we are in Chapter 4 of Eugene Onegin. Tatyana has confessed to Onegin that she is in love with him. Onegin has given her an honest but brutally frank rejection, breaking the poor girl’s heart. The poet addresses his reader.
But whom to love? To trust and treasure?
Who won’t betray us in the end?
And who’ll be kind enough to measure
Our words and deeds as we intend?
Who won’t sow slander all about us?
Who’ll coddle us and never doubt us?
To whom will all our faults be few?
Who’ll never bore us through and through?
You futile, searching phantom-breeder,
Why spend your efforts all in vain?
Just love yourself and ease the pain,
My most esteemed and honoured reader!
A worthy object! Never mind,
A truer love you’ll never find.\
Eugene Onegin, 4:22, Falen’s translation. Original Russian here.
The value of forms
Issues of Congressional decorum were in the news this month. Thirty-six-year-old Representative Lauren Boebert (R, Colorado), who is in the throes of a divorce, was imaged getting seriously handsy with a date at a pop-music show: ”Roman hands and Russian fingers,” as the old joke goes. (You have to hear it spoken.)
And then in mid-September Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer annulled the Senate’s dress code for members. The junior senator from Pennsylvania promptly entered the chamber September 20th in shorts, beach shoes, and a short-sleeved, untucked leisure shirt with no tie.
There have been consequences in both cases. Rep. Boebert is of course up for reelection a year from now. Voters in her district are reported to be widely unhappy about what I guess we should call Gropegate.
And in the Senate chamber, a resolution that business attire be worn on the floor of the chamber was introduced on the 27th of the month by Joe Manchin of West Virginia, whom God preserve! The resolution requires men to wear a coat, tie, slacks and other long pants in the chamber. It was adopted by unanimous consent.
Senate Passes ‘SHORTS‘ Resolution; John Fetterman Must Wear Pants https://t.co/OeOsLOlqcB via @BreitbartNews
— Joel Pollak (@joelpollak) September 28, 2023
As a reactionary geezer I naturally favor dress codes. I am at one with the bishop in Barchester Towers, of whom Trollope tells us:
He understood well the value of forms, and knew that the due observance of rank could not be maintained unless the exterior trappings belonging to it were held in proper esteem.
I can recall the time when dress codes were everywhere. As a young computer programmer circa 1970 I had the idea to go for a job interview at IBM, which had a regional headquarters in west London. Asking around for advice, I heard from more than one informant that if I did go for interview I should on no account wear brown shoes. IBM didn’t hire applicants wearing brown shoes.
Now that’s a dress code! I commend it to the attention of Senators Manchin and Schumer.
One small step for man
Not only are my days numbered, so are my steps.
When we moved to our present house we acquired a dog. I took to walking the dog every day. Thirty-one years and two dogs later, I’m still doing it.
I soon structured my dog-walking to four routes appropriate to how much time I had on any given day. The four were: very short, short, regular, long. Then, to get a feel for how much walking I was doing, I counted my paces. My pace measures eighty centimeters on level ground.
(How do I know that? Because the local high school is nearby—810 paces away, if you must know—and has very nice sports facilities, including a running track marked off in 400-meter lanes. One day I hiked over there and paced off five times round one of the tracks—two thousand meters. It was 2,500 paces, near enough, and the result follows.)
From that I worked out the mileage on my four dog-walking routes. With paces to three-digit accuracy:
- Very short, when I’m really pressed for time: 1,290 paces, which is 0.62 miles.
- Short, when I have time but not much energy: 1,810 paces, = 0.90 miles.
- Regular, most weekdays: 3,260 paces, = 1.62 miles.
- Long, most Saturdays: 4,340 paces, = 2.16 miles.
(Mrs. Derbyshire walks the mutt on Sundays.)
Those computations were all done back in the Clinton administrations. I counted the paces off by … counting, in my head. People tell me that nowadays there is a smartphone app that’ll do the counting for you.
I still don’t have a smartphone nor any intention of getting one; but I’m glad to know the damn things are good for something besides making phone calls … and making totalitarian population control way, way easier than it’s ever been before.
Hubble and Schrödinger, a century on
While technology roars ahead at, according to Mustafa Suleyman, an accelerating rate, key regions of theoretical physics can’t seem to make any headway.
For science geeks this is especially frustrating right now. This present decade, the 2020s, is of course a century on from the 1920s. It was in the 1920s physicists suddenly, massively, improved their understanding of the big and the small.
I mean the really big and the really small. In that marvelous decade a hundred years ago we developed new, durable models of not only the biggest thing that physics talks about, the entire universe, but also the smallest things: those subatomic particles of which human-scale matter and energy are mere epiphenomena.
Imagine that a precise hundred years ago, in September 1923, you had asked an astronomer to describe the universe. He would most likely have told you that our own Sun, with all the planets and stars you can see in the sky, and some luminous smears and blobs—probably just gas clouds—mostly visible only in telescopes, all cohabit in a single huge disk-shaped collection.
The Milky Way, he would have told you, is our view of it all from our position inside the disk. There is nothing else, just this almighty star-disk. The Milky Way is the universe.
A Midwestern-American astronomer named Edwin Hubble, working in California, blew that all apart in 1924. Yes, indeed: all the stars in the sky and millions of others are packed into a disk-like structure many thousand trillion miles across—a galaxy. And yes: the Milky Way is that galaxy, seen from the inside.
However, some of those luminous smears and blobs are not part of our galaxy. They are galaxies in their own right, ”island universes,” some much bigger than the Milky Way, all millions or billions of trillions of miles away.
That not only revolutionized our understanding of the cosmos at large, it also led quickly to the overall model we still have: the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, the cosmic background radiation from that event, and the expanding universe—the galaxies (mostly) flying away from each other.
At the other end of the size scale the 1920s gave us mature Quantum Theory. To quote myself, in reference to the years 1925-27:
These were the years when it dawned on researchers that the intuitions we acquire through our interactions with reality at everyday scales of measurement are simply not appropriate to events in the realm of electrons and protons.
Those new understandings gained in the 1920s had great staying power. They are still our basic models for the colossally large and the inconceivably small. There have of course been modifications and improvements, but the cosmology and the microphysics of today resemble those of 1930 far, far more closely than 1930s resemble 1830s, or even 1920s.
There are also problems, though. What, exactly, keeps the universe expanding? All that matter in all those galaxies: shouldn’t its gravitational pull slow down and eventually reverse the expansion, ending in a Big Crunch? So it was supposed until the 1990s, when observations showed that the expansion is accelerating. Eh? What could cause that?
A hypothetical Dark Energy, a kind of energy hitherto unknown, makes the mathematical equations work; but then, according to quantum theory, we should be able to find a particle for Dark Energy, like the photon for electromagnetic energy, but … we can’t.
What about gravity? How does that look from the level of quantum theory? Is there a particle for it, a graviton? If there is, we can’t find it; and there are good reasons to think there isn’t.
And as if we didn’t have enough unresolved questions in cosmology to ponder, this wonderful new James Webb Space Telescope, now deep into its second year of operation, is giving us more. We can now see galaxies far, far back in that 13.8-billion-year span (because their light has taken billions of years to reach us). They don’t look the way our theories say they should have looked in the early universe, that close to the Big Bang.
Quantum theory itself still has intractable conundrums, like the Measurement Problem—the one underlying the famous Schrödinger’s cat thought-experiment. Efforts here have generated all sorts of oddities, most notably the Many Worlds interpretation, which has itself begotten nontrivial problems in Philosophy of Science. Is a theory any good if there is no conceivable way we might validate it?
So while it hasn’t by any means been total stasis in physics since Hubble and Schrödinger, it’s been walking pace by comparison to the amazing sprints of a hundred years ago, with even a few backward steps. Some of the problems they raised have proven as durable as the truths they revealed.
Perhaps AI will be able to untangle it all for us.
Unreasonable anger
Speaking of extinctions: When I hear that someone I know has committed suicide, I naturally feel sad. The sadness, however, is garnished with a light seasoning of anger—anger towards the deceased.
My anger is unreasonable, of course. It’s also by no means universal. Most people, the handful of times I’ve mentioned it in company, have looked puzzled at me, then looked away.
I’m not totally alone in it, though. When I mentioned it once to a work colleague, he confessed he felt the same. Then he offered the only explanation I’ve heard that is at all plausible. He: ”It’s like you’re in a game of football [i.e., soccer; this was in England] when all of a sudden one of your teammates stops playing and just walks off the field.”
Math Corner
Here’s one from Southall & Pantaloni’s charming little 2018 book Geometry Snacks: Bite Size Problems & How to Solve Them.
Prove that the three dark matchstick heads are collinear (that is, they lie on a single straight line).
John Derbyshire [email him] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him.) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.
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Very interesting. The Webb telescope is indeed a marvel!
On the brainteaser, the matchsticks form two triangles embedded in a square and an equilateral triangle. Assuming all the matchsticks are of equal length, the line connecting the left two dark matchstick heads forms the base of an isosceles triangle with equal base angles 75 degrees, hence, this line (line A) is depressed 90-75=15 degrees from the horizontal. The rightmost matchstick, being part of an equilateral triangle inside a square, is inclined upward 90-60=30 degrees. Since the line (line B) connecting the two right dark matchstick heads forms the hypotenuse of a right isosceles triangle (45 degree angles), the inclination from the horizontal of line B is 60 (because of the equilateral triangle)-45=15 degrees. Since lines A and B meet at the middle matchstick dark head with the same inclination, they form a single line connecting all three heads, hence the three heads are collinear.
Sure thing! At the rate we’re going, AI will instruct humans from birth that the Earth is flat, the sun crosses the sky thanks to winged horses, and God is an unjustly-accused Negro whose righteous rage can only be quenched by the enslavement and torture of wypipos.
To arrive at this conclusion requires only modest extrapolation from current trends. But go ahead and believe in your Brave New World – with luck I won’t be around to see it.
“The Big Bang Theory” (BBT) is nonsensical and based on a silly assumption, which is easily proved to be nonsensical, that light always and only travels at “The Speed of Light” ie 300,000 km/ sec.
From this false premise billions of dollars and millions of hours have been spent trying to determine at exactly what point in time/space all this light started out.
Thanks to the Webb telescope, rational, intelligent people can now start thinking about the universe in realistic terms.
Like the Climate cult, the BBT cost humanity the ability to question ‘dogma’. There is no chance that people will learn from this and the next cult will have their Gores, Thunbergs, Hubbles and Hawkings with the same silly following and lack of thought.
May both of the ‘theories’ rest in peace.
AI chatbot generative technology is Silicon Valley’s latest con. They have been con artists since they started. In 2017, Google destroyed its own search engine that worked excellently. The dilemma faced by Silicon Valley is that if we approach the singularity, like they promised in 1992 where the internet would be self-correcting and would no longer require exhorbitant payrolls to be met, the people that work for those companies have a vested interest in making sure that it never happens. In 1992, they said that it would take about a decade to reach the singularity, then in 1996, they said that the internet would shut down because of Y2K. They set up the internet just to spy on everyone and steal from them, and enslave the users. They will not admit this because it is totally illegal, evil, and Frankenstein like, but they are illegally ipmplanting people with computer chips placed in their ears, nasal cavities, and dental work that they have ilkegally enslaved to create generative AI that everyone other than the government, Silicon Valley, Wall St. and investors despises. Industry after industry, workers, artists, writers, and musicians have striked against it. It is totally demonic. They are spying on peoples’ thought to create it. They will not admit it. Their is no legitimate medical reason for implanting computer chips, semiconductors, rfids, or silicone fiber in people. Electricity destroys cells. This is such an elementary scientific and medical principle that it is laughable that they would even dare to claim that they can repair someone’s brain or spinal chord with electricity. ECT therapy, stun guns, the electric chair are just a few examples of that. 50-97 % of paralysis victims recover from paralysis, except in rare instances with degenerative diseases like ALS and in some accidents. I have known 2 people that were paralyzed from motor cycle accidents and recovered just with physical and occupational therapy, and I have also known polio victims, and stroke victims that have recovered from paralysis with physical and occupational therapy. It is common to reciver from paralysis. Running volts of electricity through a car without an engine will not make the car run, and that is the case with terrible illnesses like ALS. As far as doing it to ALS victims to communicate, again, there is no excusebecause there are removabke brain scanning helmets that can be worn, To permanently destroy someone’s inner peace by invading it and causing internal scaring in the brain is a sadistic abuse and the psychos doing it to people should be sentenced to death by electrocution. Silicon Valley and the government do not want people to think for themselves or to express themselves. They want to tell people what to think in the most severe form of authoritarian control, and giving people no alternative, no differing oppinions. These chatbots have been out for a while now, and they are still concealing evil crimes by government, the healthcare and mental healthcare sector, Silicon Valley, Wall St., academia, the scientific community, the financial sector, and the military. No surprise there that the censors are creating Generative AI that congress will personaly supervise and monitor the development of. What could possibly go wrong? And speaking of rank and form, when healthcare and mental healthcare workers, government, media, academicians, scientists, bankers, stock brokers, and hedge fund managers, corporations, exhibit the same behavioral problems of Ted Bundy, Dr. HH Holmes, Ted Kazinsky, the Uni bomber, Richard Nixon, the Weather Underground, Joseph Goebbels, and the Manson Family, and Charles Ponzi, they should no longer be in healthcare, mental healthcare, academia, government, or corporations, and should be in prison for the safety of society. They have the same rank as the psychos that I listed, but they are in complete denial about it, and appear to have suffered psychogenic splits, where they believe their own lies as far as who they claim to be verses the horrendous monsters that they truly are. They have chosen to follow in the paths of those monsters but do not want to face the same fates as those monsters, because they are such megalomaniacal, narcissistic, spoiled rotten brutes. The corruption, unaccountability, and their evil, sadistic, predatory, opportunistic, exploitative, mosteros personalities are completely impossible to peacefully coexist with.
I don’t think the matchsticks heads are collinear.
If one takes the length of each matchstick to be l, then the coordinates of the matchstick heads are:
(0, l)
(1/2 * l, l * sin 60)
(3/2 * l, l * cos 60)
So the slope of the line connecting the first 2 is (l – l * sin 60) / 1/2 * l = 2 * (1 – sqrt(3)/2).
Whereas the slope of the line connecting the first and third would be: (l – l * cos 60) / 3/2 * l = 1/3
1/3 is not 2* (1 – sqrt(3) / 2)
The slopes are different. They are therefore not collinear.
In fairness, he’s literally brain damaged. You expect him to dress appropriately?
When you refer to your stride length, I hope it is an average stride length, and varies. That is, sometimes you are walking faster (the stride length will be longer), after which you recover (and reward yourself!) with an interval of below-average-pace walking. Or maybe you are varying pace by varying cadence, and the stride length does not change. In either case, you are incorporating into your regimen some faster, more strenuous intervals. I think the above is what the best-evidence medical advice says is best for one, but like Balzac (and Derb?) I am wide but not deep. Of course varying the pace would require giving special attention to the needs of the dog, a loving, loved, member of the family.
Trailer Trash Tim?
Video Link
.. which is just about 1 kilometer.
C’mon, man! You’re supposed to be assimilated by now. Why are you still thinking in those old-timey metric units? You don’t even know you are. ;-}
Also, more seriously, I don’t understand why you referred to Dark Energy rather than Dark Matter. Yeah, I know E=mc^2, all that, but it’s always been that Dark Matter that’s been pulled out of Physcists’ assholes (seriously no pun originally intended, but if it works …) that’s been the explanation for that missing gravitational or other physical forces that make the Big Bang theory work.
Good points, SafeNow. Long ago, for some surveying type work, a group of us measured our “paces” over a 100 yard stretch or so. It’s fairly repeatable, but only if you keep a certain mindset as you pace off some dimension. Holes and furrows and things sure don’t help, but I think walking with a dog would mess it up.
OTOH, does Mr. Derbyshire have an app for this? My wife was counting daily steps for some time. Because we had done a long hike one day and she was very close to getting some big number that would result in cash & prizes (??), my son took her phone and ran around inside the house a bunch of times, till sliding into a cabinet in the kitchen forehead first. Just tryin’ ta help…
While I like your method, Blake, I see a mistake. The coordinates of the 3rd match-head are wrong due to switched-out trig functions.
For that one:
x = l(1+cos30), or because you want to keep 60’s in there, x = l(1+sin60)
y = lcos60 = l/2
The rest, as they say, is trivial, “trivial” meaning I got shit to do outside, so …
That 2nd slope (from head 1 to head 3) would be:
(y3 – y1)/(x3-x1) = (l/2 – l) / (l(1+sin60) = -1/ (2(1+sin60))
OK, look, I really gotta get outside on this beautiful day, so I pulled out the phone using sin60=~.866 and yes, -0.268 = -0.268. Slope 1—2 = Slope 1—3 after my correction. We’re done here. No charge.
In what way was Nixon a monster? Or a psycho? He was just a politician who stepped on the wrong toes. He grew up in poverty and managed to make a success of himself. He was probably one of our more sane politicians.
Of the golden age of Physics about a hundred years ago: who was it that said it was a time when good physicists did great physics?
Given the hot, humid weather in the summer in DC shouldn’t the politicians dress in the style of Australian businessmen of some decades ago: short-sleeved shirt (ironed), tie, shorts (ironed), white knee stockings, brogues. It’s a brilliant combination of comfortable and well groomed.
“My anger is unreasonable, of course. It’s also by no means universal. Most people, the handful of times I’ve mentioned it in company, have looked puzzled at me, then looked away.”
My sincere condolences for your loss. I have my own experiences with loved ones’ suicides, it is an uncomfortable and complicated thing to have to confront. For my own part, in at least one instance, I derive what might be crazily called a species of almost comfort from learning after the fact that the person in question had gone quite mad before committing the act, and so at least was beyond blame or accountability, and thus beyond being a source of anger. But still, I was thereafter deprived of that person’s company and good counsel, a loss which you just don’t know what to do with.
On the first topic…
“refers to the great good these changes could accomplish, the great evil they might unleash, and how we steer the human race towards the good and away from the evil.”
Well I don’t think I’m going to be taking my cues any time soon from a guy named Mustafa Suleyman, concerning what is good and what is evil.
My motto comes from Samuel Beckett, not the Koran (which is what he’s implicitly referencing…)
“The danger is in the neatness of identifications.”
Yeah, I wrongly assumed the x coord was 1 + 1/2 but you are right it would be 1 + cos(30). (l = 1 in what I wrote).
It is the greatest tragedy of our times that Richard Nixon was one of the samest and most honest presidents in modern history that was violating the 4th amendment rights of others in the Watergate scandal. Tragically, the only time that it seems to matter with the psychos in both parties is when their own constitutional rights are being violated, but quickly sign onto any confessions of high crimes and treason that violates our constitutional rights like the NDAA, & section 702, HR6393, FISA, the Patriot Act, The American Freedom Act, The Heroes Act, the scientific and medical fraud of covid-19, because it is a ficticious virus tgat does not exist and is a Munchausen Syndrome gas-lighting psy-op and undeclared war waged on every American in collusion with the notioriously charlatan quack, Munchausen Syndrome, medical mafia that has been corrupt for all of recorded history.
When Richard Nixon spied on anti-war demonstrators, it didn’t matter to congress, but to Nixon’s credit, he did end the Vietnam War, and create the Clean Air and Water Actl so I applaud Nixon for doing those things. That is probably the reason that the deep state turned on him. They never say what their true motives are when they move to destroy someone, because their true motives are always sinister and extremely unpopular.
Surreal
‘AVOID THE UK AT ALL COSTS!!!…’ (India Tells Their Citizens)
Video Link
Avoid India at all costs, •Indian tells New Yorker:
Video Link
Well,
so probably not.
I’ve long believed that someday it will be possible for a single person or a small group to kill off the entire human race–possibly even by blowing the entire planet to bits. Once that can happen, eventually it will. Reasonably certain that neither I nor anyone now alive will be around by then, but you never know. . .
Glad to have helped, Blake. Since your method was simple and with no assumptions that could possibly be wrong, it HAD to have worked. It would have bugged me if it hadn’t.
I marked the matches (left to right) A B C.
Proving they’re colinear amounts to proving that the rise/run of AB is equal to that of AC. Assuming the matches are length 1. You have the rise/run of AB as:
(1/2)/(1 + sqrt(3)/2)
and that of AC as:
(1 – sqrt(3)/2)/(1/2)
To avoid typing in all the arithmetic, the difference of those two quantities is 0, proving the slope of AB equals that of AC. Therefore A, B and C are colinear.
Expanding Universe?
Well, not really. Or not saying what they mean or meaning what they say. If the Universe were truly expanding then that implies that everything in it is getting larger–neutrons, protons, etc. But that’s not what they mean. The distance between particles in the nucleus is not getting greater, just the distance between big stuff. Just saying.
Hoyle tried to account for the expansion of the Universe by proposing that matter was being spontaneously created in outer space–helium atoms was it? I don’t remember. And why not? As said, expansion must be fueled by something, all that energy has to come from somewhere. So, inasmuch as matter and energy are interchangeable and inasmuch as matter is just jelloed energy, why couldn’t the driving force behind the expansion be driven by the creation of interstellar and intergalactic subatomic particles?
As for where the energy came from to begin with? That’s easy. Ardor. According to Buddhists, the fundamental impulse of the Universe is Ardor. Schopenhauer called it Will.
Aristotle looked around, saw a pile of rocks and wondered, “What the hey?”. He positing a Prime Mover to get the whole shebang going. Newton said, “No, things are already in motion. Motion is the natural state of affairs”. A Buddhist (and Jasus the Christos) say that Love or Ardor is the fundamental Law of the Universe. The Universe Wills itself into existence out of passion, or yearning. I don’t know about that but it’s obvious that every living being displays Ardor. So, is the Universe alive? It’s got to be. After all, We’re Here (the name of the fishing schooner in Captain Courageous).
Oh Cod,
Did I get a Haddock
While Floundering in the Bering Sea
Just for the Halibut.
What an uninformed mish-mash of New Age nonsense.
“Love is the Law, Love under Will”
— A. Crowley
Puzzle: since these are all matchsticks so they should be uniform. So we have a unit square and two unit triangles, one inscribed and one not. The height of the inscribed triangle is ~ .866
Oh I see several solutions to the puzzle have appeared… moving on.
“Dark Matter”, which doesn’t exist (“It has to exist because we can’t find it. Heretic!”) is the phlogiston of our age, the Age of Feuilleton. Multiplying entities because you can’t solve a math or physics problem jus’ ain’t right Chilluns.
“Dark Matter” doesn’t exist. DitToe for “Dark Energy”.
“Pofessor I noticed you marked this problem wrong?”
“Because it is wrong.”
“Buh, buh, buh I clearly wrote ‘Dark Matter’. Heretic!”
There is already precedent for a US government scientist releasing weaponized anthrax in order to get more funding and prestige for his department. It is not a stretch to imagine a scientist somewhere in the Medical Industrial Complex trying to coax a virus into being along with the curative vaccine, just to teach those stupid MAGATs a lesson!
Look at these scientists who developed the leaky vaccine, wearing masks. They’re absolutely terrified of life as a social pack animal. They know (because they are, actually, scientists) that the vaccine doesn’t suppress the virus, so they don their paper masks in the frantic belief it will protect them from the supposed omnipresent viral miasma from humans who are supposedly constant virus-shedding machines.
Also, if it’s zoonotic origin (LOL) then there’s an animal reservoir and best get used to it.
With the GOF research, we are probably hitting the outer edges of the Great Filter. Here’s a group of scientists bemoaning the fact that they didn’t have more viral Spanish flu to work with. No worries, gentlemen, we’ll get it soon enough.
https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/jvi.00728-22
Stupid, evil and insane.
For the record: I profoundly disagree with you that the 1920s was a good decade for physics. Before the 1920s, we had people like Mach, Poincare, de Broglie, and many others closing on on understanding deep questions — at the end of the 20s that was almost all gone and all we had left were Einstein and Bohr fanboys — I like the lesser physicists of later days like Feynman, poor “von” Neumann, and their peers – many were good people, but they — and God help us, the clownish string theory careerists that followed them — were, viewed as people who were not smart enough to be more than a psychological artefact (High IQ, high lack of originality, high desire for approval), simply not people who tried hard to understand the physical world.
1910-1930 was just as bad for physics as it was for Russian politics.
Also, don’t worry so much about “AI”. Things will get better, they will stay the same, or they will get worse, but “AI” will have nothing to do with it until someone teaches “AI” what it means to want to be happy. And trust me, there is almost nobody alive who knows how to do that. And the people who know how to do that know how to do it right.
No wish-mash. Critique.
How do you know the Universe isn’t conscious? How do today’s biological theorists?
They don’t.
They say, “Our explanation is more parsimonious. We do not need the notion of consciousness to explain how the Universe came into being or how organisms evolve.”
They don’t need it because they exclude a bunch of stuff that they’re theorizing can’t explain. Their explanations are tautological. That they don’t see that is because they’re fundamentally stupid. Sorry, but them’s the facts.
Today I watched a spider weave its web; really intently watched it marvelously manipulating its legs as it felt its way along. With the next strand in one hand, it walked back a bit towards the center (having first completed all the radial strands which were arrayed like bicycle spokes) felt with another leg for the adjacent radial strand, strummed it for soundness, found the previous inner intersection and then felt its way out a bit until it found the right point and then cemented the new strand to the old with a dab of another “hand”. Amazing engineering. Astounding intelligent co-ordination of limbs and intentional consciousness.
Now how did that spider know how to build its web?
“Easy!” says the biologist. “Evolution! You see. Only spiders who could build that web survived to reproductive age and so the trait was passed on.”
Well, one either sees the absurdity in this or one doesn’t.
Those who don’t, apparently, become biology majors.
How could a spider receive the programming needed to know the steps, the exact harmonic dance of interrelated , sequential steps it needed to create a web–itself a secondary tool mind you, not immediately producing food, but rather the means for trapping food? What goes on in the spider’s mind as it gropes for the ropes? Tests them? Finds the intersection? Measures out the new distance and dabs the glue onto the new link?
This is MIND at work in the Universe. If your theory doesn’t comprehend it then you’ve missed the target. Buddhism assumes that Mind is fundamental. So did Plato. So did Pythagoras and Parmenides. Mind is not extraneous, something to be shoved into the closet or explained away as the artifact of physical, electrical discharge. Rather, MIND orders the discharge to begin with. Without coherence there is no physical universe. The Universe is MIND.
Were you born stupid or did you have to go to school for it? To me there are only two possible explanations:
a. you’re a retard, or
b. you’re honing your “trying to get laid with dimwitted college girls” technique and took it on the road prematurely.
To address your main idiocy, no one except a and b above says “Ardor” when the standard word is “Desire”. Putting that aside aside, in Buddhism the three main things are Desire, Hatred, and Ignorance, with Ignorance being the leader of the pack. It’s nice that you’ve got a hobby of saying nonsense and it’s okay with me if that helps you with b. But smart money says “a”.
You’re right. I’m a retard. And, it’s a little late for me to take my act on the road prematurely (whatever that means).
I hone blades. I may not be the smartest guy in the room, but I’m the sharpest knife in the drawer. I’m so sharp, people get cut just by incidental contact with me. I don’t even have to try. It’s just my nature. To be sharp. I can’t help it. It’s what I do. It’s who I am. I don’t mean to harm people, it’s just what happens when they rub up against me. Their own fault, really. They assume everyone is as dull as they are and are careless.
Ardor is the better word. In addition to desire, it conveys longing, or yearning. And we all yearn for home, security and peace, which, unfortunately, we don’t get as long as we’re alive. What Buddhism addresses.
Stay safe out there.
No, it’s still just enormous faggotry. People don’t avoid you because you’re sharp. Maybe because you’re long-winded or odor or because of general douchery.
You have the option to solve that problem in the easiest possible way and I recommend you so do.
Thanks. I’ll take that under consideration.
(Did anyone ever tell you that everything you say is a bit wide of the mark? I knew a guy once who couldn’t shoot a pistol worth a damn. Could barely hit the ply backing the target was pinned to. Turned out he was left eyed but right handed, used the wrong eye to aim or just couldn’t sort the images out. Kinda like you.)
Seems that this one has attracted a lot of interest.
Another way to show that the lines are collinear is to look at the two segment lengths. The left segment is the base of a narrow 30 degree isosceles triangle, the right is the hypotenuse of a 45 degree right triangle and the overall line is the hypotenuse of a long 15 degree right triangle.
The lengths of the two segments can be calculated as 2*sin(t) and sqr(2) and the overall line length as 1/(2*sin(t)), where t= 15 degrees. The sum of the first two values equals the third, proving that the segments are collinear.
Another question: Prove that the circle formed by the top left, bottom left and far right matchstick heads has radius equal (surprisingly) to 1!
Derb, have you changed your mind about offing yourself if you get too decrepit?
https://www.unz.com/jderbyshire/going-out-with-a-bang-instead-of-a-whimper/
August 16, 2012 follow-up:
https://www.unz.com/jderbyshire/odds-sods-gods/
Was your frame of mind at the time influenced by this?:
https://www.unz.com/jderbyshire/february-diary-9-items-rumors-of-war-was-macarthur-right-derb-%e2%99%a5-big-pharma-etc/