Песец

You could say it's for quotes!  It has a green background.

* Don't believe everything you read on the Internet
    — Abe Lincoln

* Significant macroeconomic after-effects of pandemics persist for … decades, with real rates of return substantially depressed, in stark contrast to what happens after wars.  …  capital is destroyed in wars, but not in pandemics; pandemics instead may induce relative labor scarcity…
    — National Bureau of Economic Research

* We are all Keynesians now.
    — Richard M. Nixon

* not sure anyone has heard but, I resigned
    — Jack Dorsey, founder and ex-CEO of Twitter and censor of Donald Trump.

* I am not a crook.
    — Richard M. Nixon

* W. in the Oval office, leaning to look under a piece of furniture: Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be here somewhere
    — George W. Bush

* The rules are defined on text normalized in form NFD but the default rules have been written to provide equivalent results for non-NFD text so it's okay.
    — Mark Davis, Ph.D.

(Brown text = post-election edits.)

It’s been almost six years(!) since the last time I linked to the blog of my American friend and colleague, Dr. J.  Gotta cross-link to your homies to keep our Google rankings up!  Anyway, Dr. J works for the US gov’t, so he may be obligated to write political tracts in support of the incoming Stalinist dictator Constitutionally-limited president.  He published this tract on a Sunday, perhaps to hide the fact (if it is one) that he was required to write it on paid government time.  There is a law against that, but it’s widely ignored like most good-government laws in the USA.

The didactic form that Dr. J chose is the “in an alternate universe, Hillary is actually guilty of something” meme, which isn’t bad as propaganda styles go.  Certainly it is less objectionable than the style chosen by Dr. Phil Plait, who basically starts from the reasonable “Global Warming is the most important issue” and the unreasonable ”politicians do not lie” and somehow manages to conclude that Hillary is the best candidate — even though she is pro-WWIII and Donald is against it and the world wars show up as spikes on the historical temperature chart.  So I guess I could perhaps join in on this fun, although personally I endorse Jill Stein because she tells the fewest lies.

Before we begin, I should note that Dr. J’s piece is actually funny, which is probably more than I can hope to achieve with my own work.  His Churchillian grammar reference is excellent and I found myself agreeing with the imaginary crowd furious at Hillary’s misquote.  It’s “shall not”, I say!  Yet even in an alternate universe, it is still the anti-Hillary forces that are correct.

Alternate Universe № ❰∞,∞,∞,26,∞,0,19,∞̅…❱ (see supernatural numbers, which I don’t actually believe in because ∞ is a figment of the mathematical imagination; Objective Reality probably doesn’t contain any numbers larger than around 10⁸⁵ or so).
      Conceit: In this universe (which we can never locate because its ID number is transfinite), Hillary actually had a legitimate reason to operate her honeypot email server that provided live feeds to Russia and Al Qaeda and Goldman Sachs containing the classified info that she received.
      Resulting difference: Not much, really.  The Espionage Act of 1917 says it applies to everyone, including the president.  It does not offer any exemption for politicians who possess a legitimate national-security reason to burn an agent’s cover; if that action results in another agent’s death then the politician is supposed to get the electric chair.  So Hillary Clinton is basically in the same category as Dick Cheney. Alternate Universe № 5.2761 (but keeping in mind that fractional numbers which are not ratios might not actually exist; they might instead be mere measurement conveniences arising from the enormous gap between human-sized units and physics-sized ones).
      Conceit: In this universe, Hillary actually still has a shred of decency left in her, so she does not make a big deal of Donald’s misogynistic ways.  Because, you know, her husband Bill has done most of the same things — except only Donald dared to talk about it when he knew the mic was on, thus showing that Donald is an idiot.  And Hillary has insisted all along that absolutely nothing Bill has ever done was actually wrong, so therefore (for her) those same things should also not have been wrong when Donald did them.  Donald's contemptible attitude toward women could certainly be criticized by other Democrats (such as Huma Abedin, who divorced her own husband for less) but this would lead to questions about Bill that Hillary doesn't want to hear.
      Resulting difference: None.  It doesn’t matter which acts of muck-raking Hillary decides are beneath her (if any).  Barack Obama has already announced that the winner of the election shall be Hillary.  He has also hinted that if for any reason the vote-counting machines ring up “Donald” as their answer, that could only mean that the machines were hacked by the Russians because the American people do not have permission from their president to vote for Donald.  Heil☭Hillary!  It outta be a crime not to love her! Alternate Universe № ^{31415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751}⁄_10⁴⁹.  (This ratio *might* be the true value of π, if transcendental numbers do not actually exist.  In any event, because our home universe is quantized, there is probably no physical experiment that could ever be performed which would prove that this *isn’t* the true value of π.)
      Conceit: In this universe, Hillary is openly working for Goldman Sachs, the vampire squid that wants to RULE THE WORLD by installing its Manchurian candidates as the leaders of all major governments.  None of the policies she espouses on the campaign trail have anything to do with her actual plans for her presidency, which consist of transferring all remaining wealth from Main St to Wall St while waging a causeless war against Russia in order to bring about the Nuclear Apocalypse, thus ensuring the Second Coming of Jesus Christ among the poor bedraggled survivors on a burnt-out planet.
      Resulting difference: Um, there seems to be a technical glitch in our Inter-Universal Counterfactuality gizmo.  Apparently the ID number for this “alternate universe” is actually a synonym of our own.  Anyway, by the Reflexive Property, there cannot be any difference between two universes that differ only in name and not in character.

So LJ updated its formatting today.  That shouldn't be the end of the world!  How come nobody is posting anything?  Anyway, here are some "smart jokes" from Reddit:

What do you get if you cross a mosquito with a mountain climber?  Nothing. You can't cross a vector with a scalar.

How many Chicago School economists does it take to change a light bulb?  None. If the light bulb needed changing the market would have already done it.

Why was epsilon afraid of zeta?  Because zeta eta theta.

Did you hear about the guy who froze himself to absolute zero?  He is 0K now.

Why stand in the corner when you're cold?  Because a corner is about ninety degrees.

Why do programmers always mix up Christmas and Halloween?  Because Oct 31 is Dec 25.

Why are flights to Poland only boarded on 1 side?  Because poles in the right side of the plane are unstable.

Pavlov is sitting at a bar when another patron walks in and a bell on the door rings. Pavlov stands up, says, "I forgot to feed the dogs," and leaves.

A dog goes to a telegram office, takes out a blank form and writes, “Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof.”
    The clerk examines the paper and politely tells the dog: “There are only nine words here. You could send another ‘Woof’ for the same price.”
    “But,” the dog replies, “that would make no sense at all.”

Paddy leaves Ireland and gets an interview for a building job in the city. The interviewer says "Look Paddy, no offence but we've had some dumb pricks applying for this, so I've gotta give you a little test. Paddy says "OK shoot" "What's the difference between a girder and a joist?" asks the interviewer. Paddy hesitates, scratches his head. The interviewer looks pointedly at his wristwatch, waiting. "No, no, wait" says Paddy. "I have it...... Girder wrote Faust and Joist wrote Ullyses!"

One day my girlfriend asked me if she was pretty. I told her "you're definitely a 6". Now I don't have a girlfriend... I tried to explain that 6 is perfect, but she was never one to understand number theory.

I get an RSS feed from the Reality-based Community.  Today they wrote what is basically a re-tweet of this article from Nonprofit Quarterly, which is apparently a print journal of low significance (since it has no entry at Wikipedia).

The NPQ article is itself "an edited and abridged version of a memo, titled “Sweet Grapes,” to the board of the Public Welfare Foundation (PWF) from Thomas Scanlon on the occasion of his leaving the board after 40 years of service, including 12 years as board chair".  Wikipedia has no entry for Mr. Thomas J. Scanlon, who founded a company called Benchmarks, Inc (that also has no Wikipedia entry).

The Public Welfare Foundation has no entry at Wikipedia (notice a pattern here?) even though there are 23 Wiki articles that have unlinked references to it, and even though it has an endowment of friggin' $450 million (and that ain't hay).  Most bizarrely, it was founded by Charles Edward Marsh, who has no entry at Wikipedia even though he was a newspaper magnate, a close friend of President Franklin Roosevelt, and the inspiration for an old TV show called The Millionnaire.

I suppose I could put on my Wikieditor hat and write up these missing articles, but I suspect that would start a Wikifight.  Surely, by this point, if there is any area of human endeavour that systematically has no Wikipedia entries, that is by intent?

An example for how to do scientific conference posters is here.  Acknowledgements: We thank I. Güor for laboratory assistance, Mary Juana for seeds, Herb Isside for greenhouse care, and M.I. Mentor for questionable statistical advice.  Funding for this project was provided by the Department of Thinkology, a Merck summer stipend, and the person who claims she's my mom.

This is for a project that's mainly concerned with the effect of "brainectomy" on the ability of rats to run mazes!

— Op. cit.

An article in the New York Times describes E₈ as “some sort of curvy, torus type of thing” and states twice that it has 57 dimensions.  The Wikipedia article on E₈ contains 2800 words, but after reading them I now know even less: E₈ seems to have only eight dimensions, or is it 248, or perhaps 696,729,600?  The number 57 does not appear there, but only in a catsup article.  They do show a nice Tinker-Toy picture, but obviously it captures very little of E₈’s hyperdimensional grandeur.

The problem is that I pre-announced a post about E₈, but I have no idea what that word *means* to mathematicians.  If I am to write an entire essay about a word that I don't understand, then I must be either a PHB or a linguist.  I actually have half a bachelor's degree in linguistics, so hopefully it will be okay if my hair isn't quite pointy enough for this essay.

So what does E₈ have to do with Objective Reality?  That’s a hard question.  Let's start with an easier one: is E₈ *alive*?  Think about that for a moment.  Does that sound like the silliest question you've heard all day?  It's completely outside the Overton window of socially-acceptable questions.  What kind of Commie-pinko-moonbat loonie would even ask such a thing?  Let's review the range of answers:

• Western Civ: No, because E₈ was not “born” and cannot “die”.  It does not eat, reproduce, or evolve.
• Anishinaabe (the Great Lakes Indians): Yes, because there are questions you can answer by studying E₈.
• Brain science: Maybe, because we don't have a clear idea yet what the word “alive” actually means in terms of brain activation.  Some research suggests that the superior temporal sulcus is active when analyzing situations that Western Civ would say are “dead” while the Anishinaabe would say “alive”.
• Furry: Yes, because the word E₈ can be drawn as a face-in-profile with a goatee.  Add some stick-figure arms and legs and you can make a dancing cartoon that sings about the philosophy of science in rhyming couplets.
• Dictionary: Yes (senses 2 and 5) or no (senses 3 and 4) or begs the question (sense 1) or cupcake sauerbraten tarball (sense 6).

Well, that clears things up nicely, doesn't it?  We can now confidently conclude that philosophy is a method for turning wrong answers into a continuing stream of research grants. 

On to our next question: does E₈ *exist*?  Philosophers have made lots of money on this one!  (Bonus question: define “alive” and “exists” so that God has both properties but rainbow-pooping unicorns have neither.)  Let us review the isms that philosophers have come up with:

• Nominalism: No, the word E₈ exists but the concept it refers to is imaginary.
• Idealism: No, because only consciousness exists, not the things that we are conscious of.
• Intuitionism: No, because only the natural numbers were created by God; everything else is man’s work.
• Formalism: Begs the question because math is just a game and has nothing to do with the real world.
• Logicism: Begs the question because math is just a sub-branch of logic so go ask the logicians.
• Platonism: Sort of, but the E₈ that you or I know about is just a shadow of the real E₈ whose grandeur is beyond any ape’s ability to appreciate.
• Social constructivism: Yes because E₈ is something that mathematicians talk about.
• Empiricism: Yes because it was discovered rather than invented.
• Realism: Yes, but only if E₈ describes string theory and string theory describes Objective Reality.

Well, *now* we're getting somewhere!  So if E₈ is needed to describe string theory and string theory is needed to describe Objective Reality and Mathematical Realism is the correct philosophy THEN WE WIN!

There's an article called An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything that was apparently never published in an official journal.  It was written by “surfer and theoretical physicist” A. Garrett Lisi.  BTW, the phrase “exceptionally simple” is a pun referring to E₈, not a measure of the theory’s conceptual difficulty!  The Wikipedia article has an animation, one frame of which I am showing to the right.  Note the multiple occurrences of the “Star of David” motif, hiding in plain sight within this physics theory, thus proving that Rabbinic Judaism is the only correct religion.

Anyway, Lisi’s theory shows how each of the 248 symmetries of E₈ can be thought of as corresponding to one of the 248 subatomic particles (including 22 that are yet to be discovered).  Many mathematician-physicists think that it would be sooo kewl if this theory turns out to be correct, although Gödel told us 80 years ago that there cannot be a “theory of everything” because every theory of the universe must be incomplete, inconsistent, trivial, and/or obsolete.  So why do they even bother?

Since I haven't completely run this topic into the ground, expect a (part III) at some point.

I should just pack it in and move to Blogspot.  This LiveJournal just isn't very furry.  Who am I kidding?  I don’t wear a fursuit, I rarely write furry stories, and the only fursonal drawing I ever bought got ruined during the move to Canada.  There is no place in this Fandom for “an anthropomorphized Homo erectus pretending to be a cat wearing a dogsuit”.  I never have any drama caused by my packmates’ unmentionably-disgusting fursonal habits.  And Wifey would have a fit if I ever did anything that SomethingAwful.com would consider *typical furry behaviour*.  No-sir-ree-bob, we run a prim & proper household here; there is absolutely no reason for Child Protective Services to impound our geeklets “for their own good”.  Well, yes, we do have open-air piles of corrosive dihydrogen monoxide crystals at our homestead, but that’s the government’s fault.  Why don’t they clean these things?  Get that DHMO off my lawn!  It was only a few weeks ago that a fellow down by Sarnia was enveloped by DHMO crystals and died.  There outta be a law!

So, um, Objective Reality.  As I’ve mentioned previously, I think that Objective Reality actually exists, but is beyond our ken.  We live in a Subjective Reality that corresponds to the real world (more or less, sometimes a lot less) but is always separate from it.  In contradistinction to Plato, who believed that the material world is merely a shadow of the Real World of Ideas, I believe that the objects in the universe are just exactly what they are, but our finite ideas about those objects are mere shadows of the infinite ideas that would truly describe Objective Reality.  Unfortunately for our egos, our ideas about our ideas are also mere shadows of the True meta-ideas about how the universe really works.  And so on, to infinity.  There is just no way to think our way out of our sub-reality and into the real world.

I like this religion because it allows me to dismiss out-of-paw some of the wacky ideas that are floating around the noösphere.  Anyone who thumps his Bible as “the complete Word of God” is obviously deluded, because the complete Word of God must be infinitely long and so cannot be captured by any book of limited pages.  There used to be a lot of well-respected physicists who thought that Newton’s F=ma was Reality, but of course it could only ever have been Approximation.  Today, there are probably some scientists who think that Einstein's F=ma ∕ √1−(v²/c²) is Reality, but we *know* that this too must be Approximation because it is a finite formula with only a few variables.  In Reality, everything in the universe depends on everything else for each of its properties.  For practical purposes we can safely ignore most things most of the time—but occasionally something that we thought could be ignored will turn out to have been critically important, such as the effect of Hurricane Katrina upon President W.’s war plans.  This is the conundrum of our existence: we must approximate because we cannot perceive Objective Reality, but “Reality bites” and so we cannot approximate without risk.

Another nice feature of this religion is that it explains the existence of Magic.  As a professional computer programmer, I could hardly profess my Faith in any clockwork-universe philosophy that rejects Magic.  How then could I explain what it is that I do all day?  Arthur Clark said that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, which is sometimes paraphrased as "Magic is technology you don’t understand” (see Zekmalados’ comment here).  To connect this with Objective Reality, I claim that “Magic is useful activity based on approximations of the laws of physics that you don’t happen to know”.  Since the Real laws of physics are infinitely complicated, no one can know all of their useful approximations, so for each person there are things he can do that will be perceived by others as Magic.  With a little practice, you can learn to perceive your own activities as Magic even though you know the physics approximations that make them work.  Do you understand how the “quantum tunnelling” effect works?  You can use a cell phone anyway, but it’s Magic to you!

I’ll admit to a certain vanity in my thoughts about Magic.  I believe that I have more Magic in my right rear dewclaw than you could find in an entire conference room full of Harry Potter fans, but I realize that this belief is Approximation and some Potter fans actually do have the Talent.  Still, it is a useful thought because it helps me to feel superior to the Mundanes.

Regarding E₈ and string theory: Oh dear, this post is too long already.  Maybe I’ll get to those next time.  Meanwhile, here’s a random disconnected link to a certain author’s thoughts on similar subjects.

"There's plenty of scientific evidence that reality is created on the fly by the act of observation, at least in the small world of physics.  So perhaps the elemental particles literally did not exist until the first scientists detected them.  And so it follows that we can cause the elemental particles to have substructures, or not, by how hard we try to detect that sort of thing.  And that process of looking for, and therefore creating, substructures of substructures can be infinite."
--(link)

He's right, you know.  The idea that the laws of physics have never changed is just a convenient but unprovable assumption.  Did Einstein's theory *actually* predict the cosmic microwave background radiation *before* it was discovered, or did the discovery cause changes to the past so that of course the theory must always have described the universe as we see it now?  If the first CMB experiment had been done slightly differently, would we be living in a slightly different universe today with slightly-different physics from what we observe on our own causality/time-line?

If we can get a grip on this, we can start designing our experiments to increase the likelihood that they will have convenient side-effects on the laws of the universe.

Random other links:
• Enough drugs to stupefy a rhinoceros (or: "I didn't get that F, I earned that F.")
• I escaped from the prison you call home.

Abstract:
Our universe is chock-full of traces and signs that we haven't yet learned to interpret—there is so much more to do!  As the study's author told the Wall Street Journal, quadrophobia is “a leading indicator of a company that’s going to have an accounting issue.”  (Unfortunately this quote is apparently not available in the free area of the WSJ website).

Hat tip: Freakonomics

I approve this message.

In other news, I attended last Saturday's Blogstravaganza!.  I didn't record the attendee's blognames because Canadian Cynic was collecting those and was supposed to make a post, but no post has been forthcoming.  I wrote to him to ask about it, but Yahoo's computer (which provides both my email address and his) said, "I'm not going to try again; this message has been in the queue too long."  Why is 27 hours "too long"?

Anyway, it was a bit of a pain trying to find the Blogstravaganza! table on the restaurant patio.  Idealistic Pragmatist's expectation that she would be the only female turned out to be incorrect.  In fact, the group ended up with (I think) four girls and six boys.  Of course, being a non-furry meet, there were no tails worn, plushy table decorations, tables full of nondescript college boys *not* being rowdy, or any other obvious indicators of where I should go, so IP ended up calling out "Bloggers?  Bloggers?" to anyone who walked around the patio with a confused look on their face.

Considering that these were supposed to be the "progressive bloggers", there was rather a lack of political discussion.  It was mostly chitchat about the bloggers' personal lives—the stuff that was too inane to post on their blogs.  I tried mentioning C-61 but it seemed nobody had much to say because they'd already discussed it on their blogs.  Also, the name "Stephen Harper" seemed to be a bit of a sore point.  So we mostly just drank pitchers of dark English ale.

At one point, for no obvious reason, a fellow mentioned those fucking furries who put on their suits and, er, "wiggle".  IP silently pointed in my direction.  I explained that very few furries actually have sex in-suit because it's messy and the suits are expensive and hard to clean.  I didn't go into the anonymous gay sex aspect, nor did I whip out my wallet photos of Wifey and the kidlets.

I probably tried too hard to talk linguistics with IP.  When I mentioned Grice's Rule of Implicature, her laugh suggested inappropriateness and lack of context.  She's a sociolinguist, but I don't really know what that means.  Perhaps she is ozarque's kind of linguist.  I don't like sociologists because they tend to be normative, writing just-so stories to explain why our culture *should be* whatever it currently *is*.  I prefer anthropological linguistics, which may be why I married an anthropologist.

As for "how do I drum up more readers for my blog?", it seemed the only answer discussed was "join a progressive-blog aggregator".  But my blog is too recherche (which means "research" in French and "affectedly pretentious" in English) and I don't know of any aggregate where I would fit.