If we have a sequence of prime numbers, we can add in non-prime natural numbers “in between” in a way that preserves the ordering by making the newly inserted numbers be the products their neighbors.

We have 2 3 5 7 and we want to put a new number in between 3 and 5? That’s gonna be 15 since 3×5 is 15.

Like if we have the numbers 2 3 5 45 and 15, we know that the leaf order needs to be 2 3 45 15 5.

Why? Because first we take our primes; in this case 2 3 5.
Then we can insert the lower products where they fit, like 15 has to go between 3 and 5.
Then 45 has to go between 3 and 15. Our order can be reconstructed no matter how jumbled the numbers are.

Or if we have 2 3 6 12 72, we know that their leaf order needs to be 2 12 72 6 3, same method. Factoring the numbers and seeing where they go.

So to tell the story, on the planet Mars there’s a guy with two sacks. One he fills with values: all the reals he can discover or come up with, the other with keys: one natural number for each real in the order he discovered them. He claims that this is a 1:1 mapping. Someone tries to “find a new real” by diagonalising, he just puts that on top of his value sack and adds N+1 on his key stack and calls that a day. This “Martian Method” is not new to mathematics and if it proved or disproved anything about the countability of reals that would’ve been known by now.

Now over on planet Venus there’s me and I’m doing a way more cumbersome method. First of, I seeded my value bag with the thousand most popular and coolest reals, and sorted them in number order. I gave the lowest the key 3, the second lowest the key 5, the third lowest the key 7 and so on. Reserving the primes 2 for lower-than-lowest and 7297 for higher than highest. From then on, as I set out on my real gathering journey, no more primes for keys. Each new real will be sorted in along the number line (so π goes between 3 and 4) and the key will be a non-prime generated by multiplying the neighboring element’s keys.

So far, so bad. I have a lot of the same mathematically theoretical drawbacks as the Martian Method of adding reals one by one.

I mean if a generator function for all reals (just as naturals have “prev+1’) had been found, that would’ve been headline news since it’s been proven that that can’t exist. Don’t worry, that’s not what this is.

This is still pretty cool I think, because now here’s the one benefit I have:

Let’s say there’s a hurricane one day across the solar system so that all four of our bags are jumbled. All four bags used separate fonts for the numbers in them (like, I used Helvetica for my natural indices and Times for my reals, and on Mars they used Verdana for the natural indices and Comic Sans for their reals) so there’s no worry at of what number goes in which bag. Even so, the Martian guy is SOL at this point. He can’t reconstruct his mapping.

I can easily. I just sort all my reals according to the number line (so 3.5 goes after π but before 4 and so on) and I can figure out the proper ordering of my keys also. I reset the primes to the order they started in and then their products go in between them. I find a 35 I know it needs to go between 5 and 7. I find a 175 I know it goes between 5 and 35, that’s the only place it can go. Then I lay the two arrays next to each other and I have my 1:1 mapping back.

That’s it. That’s what was new and cool in this paper. No more, no less. Still no ordered generator for the reals.

If we’re adding the reals in a sane and orderly fashion, this does not work. Like, let’s say we first add all reals that are also naturals. Then we add all halves. Then we add all quarters. Then we add all eights. Then we add all sixteenths and so on fractally. That’s no good because that fractal will bloom out and “use up” all keys before we even get to things like thirds and fifths, let alone pi and e.

This can only work if we add all possible reals willy nilly, in an undefined order, sorting them after we add them. So if we add 8 after 7 and 9, it goes between them because seven eight nine.

Instead seeding with a thousand popular reals and the 1002 lowest primes, I could also have started with an empty bag of reals and just the primes 2 and 3, that works just as well. The first real I find gets key 6, the second real I find gets either 12 or 18, the third real I find gets either 24, 72, 108, or 54. And so on. That’s the elegantest way to do it.

Since the primes don’t need to be in natural order, just in an order I can get back later post-hurricane, I also could’ve started with the ordered infinite set that’s all possible primes five or higher from here to eternity, setting aside 2 and 3 to use for boundary factors later, and map that infinite set of primes to my value sack of reals which is seeded with all possible algebraics, mapped 1:1 to those prime keys. Then I just need to go hunting for all possible transcendentals. And yes, there are infinitely many of them but that’s fine, I have an infinite amount of keys since I can just keep on multiply the neighbors. In between 2 and 3 go 6. In between 2 and 6 go 12. In between 2 and 12 go 24. And there’s no other place the 24 could go.

Follow-up

Carl writes in, saying:

Thinking about your primes thing. I think that it has a similar structure to the rationals, right? Just as you can take any pair of rationals and find another rational between them, so can you take any pair of naturals and find a natural that goes between them in your ordering.

Generating the Reals

I can’t write a generator if the sequence has more than one infinite loop and I also need to be able to refactor the infinite loop to go on the outside of all other loops or I’d get unreachable code. Like, generating infinite squares with a do while true loop is easy. Generating infinite rectangles trickier but possible with zigzagging like 1x1, 1x2, 2x1, 1x3, 2x3, 3x3, 3x1, 3x2 and so on.

That’s why generating all finite binary strings is super easy, barely an inconvenience. But generating all infinite strings not so much since that would require two nested infinite loops which creates unreachable code.

Don’t shoot the messenger here:
I’m not promoting metric,
I’m not advocating for metric,
I’m not saying metric is OK.

I just wanted to help those who are subjected to metric.

You can and should use a conversion app for when it really matters but this is just a rough guide for those who want some basics.

Distances

A meter is around a yard, more or less, so ten foot is around three meters. A meter was originally defined as one ten-thousandth of the distance between the equator to the pole, so 1/40000 of the Earth’s circumference. With the garbled measuring powers they had back then, that is not saying much.

Each kilometer is a thousand meters. Five kilometers is around three miles, and ten kilometers is around six miles. Going the other way, ten miles is a little over sixteen kilometers, which means that five miles is eight kilometers.

Going small, this is so dumb but we have both centimeters (one-hundredth of a meter) and millimeters (one-thousandth of a meter) and yes, confusion between those two have messed up many a project. Two inches are approximately five cm which is also fifty mm.

Sizes

100 mm is 10 cm which is 1 decimeter which is a tenth of a meter. A cube of that is a liter. A liter is more-or-less a quart, a fourth of gallon or two pints.

A cube of one centimeter is one milliliter (yes, this is dumb). Milli means one thousandth while kilo means thousand. A hundred milliliters is a deciliter, which is what we use instead of cups; it’s a li’l less than half a cup, two cups is almost five dl.

Weights

Now this is the good part: one liter of water weighs one kilogram, which is a little over two pounds, or a stone is a little more than six kilograms. So you can just double a kilogram weight to get an approximation of the pound weight. Why “kilogram” is the main unit and not a gram (a thousand grams are one kilogram) I’ve never understood. That’s just how it is.

But a good thing for all y’all gem lovers out there is that a carat is actually a metric-based unit already—five carats are exactly one gram.

Areas

These aren’t exactly day-to-day for me so I had to look it up. A hectare is an area that’s a 100 meters by a hundred meters. (Or 50 by 200 or any other weird shape just as long as it’s that size.) Usually imperial units are a bit bigger like two cups is five dl, two inches is five cm but with hectare, it’s two hectare is close to five acres. I’ll try to remember that by thinking that “hectare” has more letters than “acre” just like “inch” has more letters than “cm” and “cups” has more letters than “dl”.

For things like apartment sizes it’s a li’l easier; use an app when it really matter down to the exact digit but just to get an overview, 100 square feet is a little more than nine square meters, so just lop off the last digit. When someone says “Oh I manage to live so minimalistically at 400 square feet” I can immediately know their place is way bigger than mine using the lop-off shortcut (“400 becomes 40”; it’s actually 37.16 which is close enough).

Temperatures

Temperature… While there is a formula, it’s convoluted (multiply ˚C by nine, divide by five, then add 32, or the other way: subtract 32 from ˚F, then multiply by five, divide by nine) it’s probably best to just memorize some key values. Ice is 0˚ C, steam is 100˚ C, water is liquid in between. C is actually good for cooking for that reason. 0˚ C is 32˚ F, 37.78˚ C is 100˚ F, 100˚ C is 212˚ F. (Since 20✕9+32 = 212. All Celsius values that are cleanly divisible by five come out as integer Fahrenheit values.) Fahrenhet is good for weather. 0 is really cold outside and 100 is really hot outside. Celsius is cranked up to be about literally boiling things on the stove or in the lab, and it’s off by thirty.

So an increase by one degree ˚C is approximately 2˚ F; if it gets ten degrees hotter in ˚C that’s around it getting twenty degrees hotter in ˚F! Eighteen to be exact! The problem is that F has a 32 degree head start so for a super rough conversion from C to F: double and add thirty.

Learning a system

Conversion is no good if you wanna learn a system. For example, D&D uses imperial and my players came from metric so I was always discouraging converting to metric or refering to metric, instead always pointing to references like “oh, it’s around a foot” and holding up my hands approx a foot apart, or “ten by ten foot is like this room” or “OK, I’m five foot seven so on me the water would go up to here” or “it weighs like four swords”. To start thinking in the other system directly as soon as possible. I know that might sound like a mistake akin to “whole language instruction” but I think this is a different case.

And if you just need a one-off, there are apps for that. If you’re a translator of fiction, remember to round so your characters are saying reasonable things. No one says “OMG we’re going over 160.93 mph!”. If you’re an engineer, of course never round and instead be super precise.

Rough conversion guides like this page is for the middle ground. When you’re subjected to metric more than a one-off but less than actually having to learn it, this page is for you.🎁

It’s for those who are metric-curious but not invested. Who still want to hate it but want to know a little bit about what they’re hating.

PS

Metric is also the name of a super good Canadian band that I really love! Waves is my favorite song of theirs among many many fantastic gems. But I can pretend that the band name means “a metric to measure by” as opposed to “the metric system”.

It’s Stephen Jay Gould’s “Caring Groups and Selfish Genes”! 🥁

Group selection

The world of objects can be ordered into a hierarchy of ascending levels, box within box. […] Life, too, operates at many levels, and each has its role in the evolutionary process. Consider three major levels: genes, organisms, and species.

That’s indeed a useful model, but in the end it’s just a model, one that, in this particular question might lead us far astray from the truth, as I’ll try to argue.

Mutation is the ultimate source of variation, and genes are the unit of variation. Individual organisms are the units of selection. But individuals do not evolve—they can only grow, reproduce, and die. Evolutionary change occurs in groups of interacting organisms; species are the unit of evolution. In short, as philosopher David Hull writes, genes mutate, individuals are selected, and species evolve.

So the question I wanna look at here is what the unit of selection is, if it’s only on the individual organism level or if something else is going on.

The identification of individuals as the unit of selection is a central theme in Darwin’s thought. Darwin contended that the exquisite balance of nature had no “higher” cause. Evolution does not recognize the “good of the ecosystem” or even the “good of the species.” Any harmony or stability is only an indirect result of individuals relentlessly pursuing their own self-interest—in modern parlance, getting more of their genes into future generations by greater reproductive success.

Yes, it’s good to maintain awareness of a lack of teleological “intention” around a lot of stuff that the creepy crawlies on this blue li’l marble are up to. It’s an emergent system. I just wanna go one step farther and note that unlike Conway’s “Game of Life” model, the rules of our system can themselves change. We don’t have to live in a Galt’s Gulch of cruelty and robbery.

Individuals are the unit of selection; the “struggle for existence” is a matter among individuals.

Huh?! Three seconds ago we were saying it’s not teleological. A bee isn’t gonna start belting out “I will survive!”

You correctly pointed out that evolution does not recognize the “good of the ecosystem” or even the “good of the species”, but it doesn’t consider the “good of the individual” either.

Instead, evolutionary processes effect pressures on all kinds of units. People, animals, herds, hives, cities, corporations, clubs, tribes, bands, families, nations… There are also evolutionary processes on memes! Religions, editors, operating systems, game rule sets, political platforms, resource distribution protocols…

Evolution, probably better known as throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what’s best at sticking around and then recursing on that, isn’t limited to just “each animal for themselves”. Evolutionary processes are everywhere in complex iterative systems, not limited to just one level.

Nations, cities, clubs, corporations are all examples of evolutionary processes on a group level. Successful group concepts will not only thrive, they’ll be copied. If we aren’t aware of these emergent consequences of our protocols, we will get wrecked.

Scottish biologist V.C. Wynne-Edwards raised orthodox hackles fifteen years ago by arguing that groups, not individuals, are units of selection, at least for the evolution of social behavior.

Yes, it’s correct to observe that evolutionary processes effect changes on groups.

Some of the specific mechanics proposed by Wynne-Edwards (like epideictic displays to manage group density) ended up not being proven.

But remember, it’s not teleological. Just like most bees or algae don’t go “Hmm, what shall I do to survive today?”, neither do most hives. They don’t summon everyone for a big speech going “Listen up gang! We’re getting a li’l too dense over here, so fewer babies next spring”. That’s a straw reading of group selection pressures.

Siblings, on average, share half their genes. If you die to save three sibs, you pass on 150 percent of yourself through their reproduction. Again, you have acted for your own evolutionary benefit, if not for your corporeal continuity. Kin selection is a form of Darwinian individual selection. […] Most evolutionists would now admit that group selection can occur in certain special situations (species made of many very discrete, socially cohesive groups in direct competition with each other). But they regard such situations as uncommon if only because discrete groups are often kin groups, leading to a preference for kin selection as an explanation for altruism within the group.

While that would explain racism, it’s wrong because it, again, overly ascribes intent to these li’l dandelions and fishes. Instead, reframing the evolutionary process as a mutually recursive eval/apply loop of iteration-via-survival, survival-via-iteration of pressures it becomes clearer to see that it works on all kinds of groups whose behaviors can evolve. That would explain not only racism but also sexism, nationalism, classism, ageism, all kind of dumb bullying.

Group selection is a real thing. It’s also why gay. Gay behavior has emerged in many species even though it’d make an orthodox darwinist panic; it would seem incomprehensible on an individual-survival-level. But a queer eye can be a vital thing for a society. Through a group selection perspective, it makes total sense. A diverse group has complementary strengths.

Now, as Gould himself points out in a previous essay (called Shades of Lamarck), we humans can hack this. There’s also memetic evolution. Our books, our ideologies, our git repos, our games and our laws—in short, our protocols.

If we wanna fix things and end racism and nationalism and corrupt corporate overreach, step one is to stay aware of how this stuff works.

This is also why climate change is such an incredible mindbomb to try to address. We’re set up to make most of our decisions on some sorta Dunbar tribe scale, but now we’ve got to work together since planets are the units of selection here. Planets that can get its shit together and not burn themselves will survive longer than those who do. (That’s maybe not an evolutionary process in the strictest sense since there’s no iterative copying of planetary setups, at least not yet. We’re not living in a rimward Orion Arm galactic empire or a Bostrom sim multiverse, as at least as far as we know. So it’s not a full eval/apply loop, just a survivability eval part, but… Uh, let’s not mess this planet up, please!)

For some reason we managed to do it in the seventies and eighties with the energy crisis and freons, but since this affects every consumer, corporation, and politician, not just OPEC or a small handful of corporations in the refrigerator and hairspray business, there’s a lot more squabble. We’ve got to rise above, sooner rather than later.

My selfish gene it fills my spleen

The second half of Gould’s essay is better, arguing against Dawkin’s expression of Maynard Smith’s horrible “selfish gene” idea. Let me use language as an analogy to show how wack that idea is:

One of the things that make human language so cool compared to the language of many other animals like monkeys or fish is that it’s multilevel.

There are monkeys where one type of scream means “danger, snake!” and another means “danger, eagle!”

We humans go one step further since we have put our screams (our “phonemes”) together into words, whether the combinations and their order matters. “Eek” means something different than “key”, “wish” something different than “shiv”, “canal” something different than “Lacan”. “Forty-six” something different than “Sixty-four”.

Dogs can understand that level of human speech just fine. They are much better at it than most human kids are. They can understand “go in the other room and get the blue ball” way better than most human li’l rugrats can.

However, we’ve cranked it up a notch since we’ve then put our words together in combinations where their order matters.

“Before you get the red ball, get the blue ball” mean something different than “get the red ball before you get the blue ball” even though it has the same words, just in a different order. Even though the phrases “red ball” and “blue ball” are in the same order, things like the placement of “before” flips the meaning entirely.

Most dogs can’t understand that at all while most human kids understand it just fine. This is called “syntax”—the order of words mattering. Once you take syntax into account, that’s where humans are a li’l special.

And then of course that can be recursed upon further. Watching Memento in the chronological cut is a different experience than watching it the way it was originally released.

There’s evolutionary pressures on ideas, on slogans, on books, on political platforms. The evolutionary pressure on individual letters is way lower by comparison. Yeah, yeah, I might slightly favor words with my favorite letters like “s” and get a li’l turned off by the guttural IPA [χ] sound of Loch and Bach, but not to the extent that I’m throwing out an entire idea because of that. But, then again, “why not both?” Evolutionary pressures happen on all kinds of levels. To the extent that selfish gene idea tries to reduce it to only or even primarily genes, that’s wack.

I get the idea was to promote kin selection, to be like “OK here’s why we help each other; it’s because our genes recognize themselves in other people, not literally because genes don’t have eyes, but various processes have emerged that rewards and affords such help”, but on the surface level it still feels like an artifact of the hyper-individualist era. Forget Galt’s Gulch, it’s not even enough with “every man is an island”, now my left arm is trying to stage a coup against my right foot!

Evelyn Lamb writes :

My mathematical training taught me that the good reason for 1 not being considered prime is the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, which states that every number can be written as a product of primes in exactly one way.

When I was young I thought that 1 was prime. The guy who explained that it wasn’t just said “they just decided that it’s not prime, a lot of stuff works out better that way”. A good, succint “a wizard did it” explanation that satisified me (after all, it had worked out for i, j, k and so on, I didn’t trip out over the name “imaginary” and it pretty immediately turned out to be useful) and over the years I found that it was true, that a lot of things really did work out better.

But reading Lamb’s essay, I see that a wizard really did do it, i.e. that it really was something that the math community actually decided rather than calculated out.

High five to the original Mr Taxicab, G. H. Hardy:

Caldwell and Xiong cite G. H. Hardy as the last major mathematician to consider 1 to be prime.

I want a world map that’s… uh…

1. Take a polyhedral projection, like octahedral or icosahedral (or even more faces, the more faces the better, it doesn’t have to be a platonic solid).
2. Unfold. You now have something that looks like the Dymaxion or Butterfly.
3. But rotate the continents so they look like they’re placed in traditional world maps. Careful: do not cut every li’l face, just cut out the continents, as big pieces as possible, and rotate them and place them.
4. Add water! It’s not a sea map, it’s fine if oceans are distorted, it’s a land map! Add more sea! Make some sea distances smaller and some larger, just add endless distortion out at sea.

Basically take a rectangle, fill it with water, cut out the continents from a Dymaxion style map (making few big cuts rather than many small cuts), place them in that water guided by some other projection.

So the map still looks rectangular and “normal” except it doesn’t have Mercator’s follies.

That’s the world map poster I’d want. I don’t want it to look like an orange peel but I want the projection properties of an orange peel map. I’ve wanted this since 1988 when I first saw the Goode homolosine, which isn’t a polyhedral projection but it’s what inspired the idea: “why not just place this on a backdrop of sea so it looks normal!?”

(And then do the opposite for a separate map that is a sea map at the expense of land accuracy.)

This sort of map, like all polyhedral projection maps, is pretty useless for actually measuring things on. It’s just nice to look at and we get to see places in their real sizes (as long as they’re land places and not oceans). The Thissots indicatrix is awesome on this one.♥︎

A few years ago the build the earth project for Minecraft had a similar idea calling it “Modified Airocean”. Very awesome! I haven’t found images but judging from the text description, it sounds right:

This map projection provides an extremely low amount of distortion of both shapes and sizes on land, at the cost of heavily distorting the oceans. Unlike the Dymaxion, Modified Airocean is not intended to be unfolded into a 3D object like an icosahedron, and has its continents placed such that it looks somewhat similar to an equirectangular projection.

But I wanna see big poster maps based on this! I can’t even find any dinky li’l low-rez JPEGs of what they had, let alone a huge wall map.

My folks used to have a big canvas world map (from Ikea I think) but it looked so distorted since it was Mercator. That was only the second biggest problem; the biggest issue was that it used Copperplate Gothic.

When Einstein’s best friend Michele died, Einstein wrote a letter to Michele’s widow saying:

This doesn’t mean anything.

He wasn’t just trying to be a math nerd version of Liza Radley or a German philosopher’s wrong-headed remix of Hassan-i-Sabbah.

Einstein expressed belief in eternalism, probably better known as the “block universe”.

The block universe is the idea that past present future is all in one big old four-dimensional “block”. You know how a doll’s house can be set up as a static three-dimensional diorama? You can look at the living room, the bedrooms, the kitchen… fun fun fun.♥︎ And then imagine you added a pause/​play/​forward/​rewind button set so you could look at the living room before and after the glass table was shattered, or the bedroom before and after grandpa drinks the posset, you could go back and forth through it.

In fact, instead of making it “rewind buttons”, just build the entire doll’s house four-dimensionally directly into space-time so that all points of time are there at once. Everytime existing at the same time with no difference between the past or the future.

Such is the world of the block universe.

It’s a worldview that came about because it helps makes the math around some weird things like how time passes differently for astronauts and such. Not that simple math is always right or that Occam’s razor is always particularly accurate in its ruthless carving of reality, and I’m no mathematician and even Einstein’s relativity equations were wrong about rotations of the outer edges of galaxies so who knows whether or not the block universe is a real thing or not but for the sake of this li’l essay, let’s pretend it is.

Now, the whole doll’s house is an analogy since for most of us, our own view of time is moment-by-moment like Bodhidharma intended, at least without a few spoonfuls of Strawberry Fields.

The comfy life under the marmalade skies

The block universe is comforting in some ways, as Einstein noted; the past is no less valuable than the future. As I’m aging I find the green leaves of hope in the tree inside my heart one by one turn into red leaves of memory. Not as many as I would’ve hoped, and many leaves just wither or fall of and never come to pass, but some. And some that I never even dreamed of.

In the block universe, Nabokov’s “brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness” can be an ever-shining drop of gold.

The Amber Prison

The block universe is also an horrifying idea in some ways.

For us with messed-up pasts facing the grim darkness of the far future there can be great comfort in the present. Take my past, my future, fine, but now is mine. Things that happened in the past, happened in your mind. Lead kindly light. Et cetera.

The block universe keeping the past alive in amber is not entirely a good thing.

The future is similarly frozen.

In Lovecraft’s stories, where the universe is a twisted nightmare brought forth by an unruly, unthinking Azathoth, one of the chief horrors in that nightmare is spacetime itself, probably better known as Yog-Sothoth. The inescapable uncaring cosmos. All matter and all processes wrapped up in a bow.

From the “What the Hell” family’s relation to “Free Will”

Don’t worry, there are still tensions and forces and processes in the block universe. There can still be a bookshelf between that olive green dictionary and the floor. Direct spatial relationships, and direct temporal relationships like how a dance party can be preceded by sending out invitations, or a shattered glass preceded by a fall.

We’re condemned to choose.

What we call “free will” is our precious, invaluable interface to these processes. We are non-teleologically put on this God’s blue-marbled green li’l Earth completely interlaced with these processes, like all animals are and all matter is.

Do not squander that. No matter how absurd the li’l Azathoth windfish garbage nightmare we’ve been thrust into, we have a responsibility to make the best of what-​is-​perceived-​to-​be-​our-​choices.

How to love when you’re already dead

It’s harder to change a situation if you can’t even make yourself realize it’s true.

When you’re still in “this can’t be real” mode it’s easy to get tripped up, to panic, lash out, lockup, compartmentalize, block out, push away, ignore, repress, freak out, make excuses.

Once you can see that it can be real, no matter how bad it is, you can calmly do your best to try to fix or mitigate things.

The comforting aspects of “block universe”, or of its complement, the “moment-by-moment” universe, can make us less attached to our wishful thinking about the future and more clear-headed to try to solve things.

Living in the world fully is pretty hard, and not getting attached to the dust of the world is not easy either; doing both at the same time is way harder but that is the challenge we have to rise to.

It seems to me that the ban on “thinking machines” in Dune isn’t just a ban on the extreme cases of super clever and emotional Pinocchio AGI.

It’s a mandate for human oversight and judgment. There is a lot of tech and automation that has existed throughout the past decade that doesn’t fulfill that mandate. Scripts are fun but we’ve got to check the work.

The risk isn’t primarily “Skynet” or “Reign of Steel” or “Matrix”. It’s that we leave ourselves vulnerable to other humans who can wield their machines more effectively and wield our machines against us.

We’re already seeing this with inventions like Facebook and television. So many people have made themselves dependent on machines and algorithms out of their own control.

The recommendation engines of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and similar sites have lured people into fascism. It’s no wonder! Fascism and algorithmic popularity are both fueled by the same thing: Conformity and binding the outgroup.

If we start obeying machines, that means obeying the owners of those machines. And I trust them about as far as I can throw Manhattan.

I’ve long thought it was sus that the “New Atheist” writers were so eager to criticize the beliefs of the Foreign Other to a much greater extent than their own cultures.

The core of the New Atheist argument is that beliefs in non-proven supernatural entities should not unduly influence human behavior, society, and policy without a strong basis in evidence.

They come across as not overly fond of arguments like Spinoza that want to combine appreciation for the natural world with the gratitude attitude, or like Kierkegaard who saw the world as ultimately an unknowable absurdity of crawlies and forces but put up an “I Want To Believe” poster in his office regardless.

Criticizing Spinoza and Kierkegaard is fair game! Science is about things we know and society should be based on what we do know.

And yet…

Scientists place their faith in supernatural things all the time!

The New Atheists hate the God of the gaps but don’t raise concern against strings, selectrons, dark matter and other modern day “angels”.

String theory isn’t falsifiable since the mathematical equations are so mutable. The strings are like Russell’s Teapot, swirling around in space and can’t be disproven since you can’t look everywhere at once.

Don’t get me wrong! I love that these theories were put forth and that they’ve had so much care & thought behind them. The only way forward for science is to come up with new wild ideas and then test them. Occam’s Razor is just a guideline, not literal fact.

However, belief in some of these or “teapots” have been impactful on people’s lives even though they ended up not being there once we were able to look. People have staked their careers and dreams on these li’l angels when they were still “supernatural”, which they ultimately turned out to be.

They say the original sinners never felt a drop of pain until that second in the garden, then they felt it each and every day. So draw back your bows, you hunters who have never felt that flame! All the absolute beginners are safe in the shade for today.

Captain MW

Assistant: “Captain, we don’t know until we’ve done dusting tests whether the culprit is the neighbor coming through the window, or the butler coming from the hall.”
Captain MW: “OMG! This is a remarkable paradox! The culprit is the neighbor and the butler at the same time!”
Assistant: “Not really… but until the prints come back, we won’t know which it is; until then we can rule out people who weren’t even in town that day. So there’s still a lot of progress we can make on the case with what we’ve got so far, we can sta–”
Captain MW: “You’re saying that those prints will collapse the wave function! Impossible! But don’t worry, Captain Many Worlds to the rescue! It’s clear that we are living in a field of overlapping simultaneous worlds and in one world the neighbor is a cruel and disgusting killer, and in the other the butler is a callous and brutal murderer. Both worlds obviously equally true! These people disgust me, assistant, they truly disgust me!”
Assistant: “Uh, no, it’s one world, it’s just that we haven’t done the tests yet, once we–”
Captain MW: “Truly a superposition of murder, assistant. Yes, yes. We’ve got two murderers on our hands. And I am a hero in every world!”

Doctor SAAAD

Assistant: “Doctor, as you’re aware we’ve known for sure for quite a while that the lawless vigilantes known as The Dynamic Duo are in fact millionaires Dick Grayson and Bruce Wayne in disguise.”
Doctor SAAAD: “Yes! One as the dastardly Boy Wonder ‘Robin’, and the other as the devious Dark Knight Detective, ‘Batman’, but whom of them is Grayson and whom is Wayne?”
Assistant: “Correct, doctor! And good news! We’ve finally manage to apprehend one of them, ‘Robin’, in Coast City, while the other, ‘Batman’, is known to be in Metropolis right now. And after unmasking ‘Robin’, we now know that he is Dick Grayson!”
Doctor SAAAD: “Very good work! Congratulate your team! Now, that leaves us with only one question left. Who is ‘Batman’? We’ve got apprehend him.”
Assistant: “What do you mean, doctor? He is obviously Wayne. Since ‘Robin’ turned out to be Grayson.”
Doctor SAAAD: “I don’t think you understand, assistant. ‘Robin’ was apprehended in Coast City. ‘Batman’ is confirmed to be in Metropolis. That is a distance of almost 2800 miles.”
Assistant: “Right, but we caught one in the pair. So that means that we know–”
Doctor SAAAD: “That we know nothing about whether Grayson or Wayne is ‘Batman’. We can not clear Grayson’s name from the accusations of being ‘Batman’ until ‘Batman’ is apprehended.”
Assistant: “But Grayson has been apprehended here in Coast City.”
Doctor SAAAD: Are you trying to propose that there is some sort of Spooky Action At A Distance, that our actions in Coast City can have any bearing whatsoever on what goes in in Metropolis? Assistant, you disgust me with your superstitions!”

Professor DM

Assistant: “Ballistics report came back, professor. But maybe you need to reconsider your formulas when considering shots at this extreme distance. The results came back inconclusive. As if the victim was running faster than he could have.”
Professor DM: “Reconsider formu…?! Poppycock, assistant! Clearly there’s a much easier explanation at hand: the entire crime scene and everyone present must’ve been entirely covered by gooey rhizomatic strands of Dark Matter!”
Assistant: “We, uh, we can’t see any such thing, professor.”
Professor DM: “Surely it must be a type of material that photons don’t interact with but bullets do! If we can find the supplier of this Dark Matter, we are sure to be hot on the heels of our shooter!

This attempt at a timezone-less Internet time might’ve succeeded if they had been a li’l bit better at openwashing. It was too blatantly their corporate thing, with the day starting not based on anything astronomical but on Swiss standard time (i.e. where the sun is gonna be over Greenwich an hour later). To promote their own factory.

If they had tied it to 刻 time notches or to the revolutionary calendar, but emphasized the new timezoneless nature of “beats”, we coulda had something great. The original pitch that this wasn’t meant to replace normal time but just used as a separate tool to coordinate stuff online was good. Maybe we’d have moved over entirely after a while. And they woulda been first to market, which would’ve been even more appealing if it had been (or looked like) more of an “open standard”.

The fact that they also illegally planned to broadcast over ham bands was also a pretty bad nail in the coffin, along with the hypermedialized and dorky overuse of @ and dot prefixes.

As many 180˚s and life-changing, opinion mind blows as I’ve experienced in my life as an old, this isn’t one of them because I had the exact same take then: really liked it and felt it was a missed opportunity squandered by the same two criticism I have now: The UTC+1 thing is dumb (it’s not that big of a deal—and great for Swedes) and it’s too blatantly corporate and the “.beat” (dot beat) unit name is embarrassing. I was a teenager, more critical and less gullible than I am now. We all saw that it was just a dorky watch ad campaign, quickly abandoned by its own makers.

Meanwhile, here we are in a mess of timezones and DST and I have to say “it starts in three hours” instead of being able to list a specific time. Or specific day, even, since current clock system needs a date line which wouldn’t be necessary with decimal time. (On the other hand, it would mean that having both systems in parallel would be difficult west of the date line and east of whatever point becomes the “new Greenwich”.)

The fact that it didn’t map up to normal minutes & hours was kind of an advantage because it helped disambiguate those time stamps from normal timestamps. @500 didn’t look like 12:00.

I wish the amount of seconds in a day would’ve matched the old system so that a second is still a second. It takes five “beats” to make an integer amount of seconds: 432 seconds. But maybe we can work with that. Or 864 seconds for ten beats or 86.4 seconds for one beat. So we have a timekeeping system based on beats and seconds.

Okay so here’s my proposal

First of all, it’s not called “Biel” Mean Time any more because we don’t want to promote Swatch. It’s the Basic Mediterranean Time. A geographical feature not ruled by a single polity. Or, Boring Meridian Time if you want to go even neutraler. Still compatible with the old beats; it’s just a name change not a spec change. Which sucks for people near the dateline. That was an advantage of UTC over BMT; it placed the dateline in a less populated area, which becomes extra important in a no-timezones system. But all in the name of compatible with the original beats.

Second of all, there are two display modes. First is the traditional beats view (a.k.a. mode 1) that still looks like @255, an at sign and the number of beats since midnight BMT. The same beats you know and love, no need to upgrade any old clocks, no need to trot out xkcd://927, it still works.

Then mode 2 is the decabeats view which shows the current decabeat and the number of seconds since that decabeat began. One decabeat, abbreviated 刻 is ten beats which is 864 seconds. So @255 is 25#432 (no @ sign, separated by a # character). That example means it’s 432 seconds since @250. Good for cooking and sports and for conversion between traditional time keeping and decabeats, since each h:m:s timestamp has an integer 刻#s equivalent and vice versa. Unlike traditional beats which can’t represent exactly 12:06 for example, nor can traditional h:m:s represent @11 without resorting to tenths of a second.

Watches can combine both modes and that looks like this: 25.5#432. They must not only show mode 2. If they can only show one mode, it needs to be mode 1 or the combined mode. The .5 and the #432 are redundant. Also they don’t tick up at the exact same time; only at .5#432 and .0#0, twice per decabeat, creating a nice li’l syncopation. Don’t just have 25#432 if there’s no way of showing that last digit.

Mode one is still gonna be the main mode! It’s better to say 30 beats than 3 decabeats!

What’s the point…

…of “decimal” time instead of base 60 time if you’re gonna have a base 864 number, isn’t that going from the ashes into the frying pan? The point is if we want to ditch time zones, one good way to do that is alongside a radically different time representation. And the optional seconds view make things more backwards compatible and is good when we need finer granularity. And coarser granularity: one decabeat is just under a a quarter of an hour and ergo four of them almost make an hour. (Although 41 beats is even closer.)

BMT either mode is a concise time-zone–independent representation that your attendees then can convert to their own local time in HH:MM:SS using apps or whatever. If that’s the only use for BMT, even if no-one actually tries to look at a BMT clock, that’s still valuable to me.

Neralie time

XXIIVV have their own proposal: Neralie time.

It’s this format 255:000, that’s the equivalent of what in BMT mode 2 would be 25#432. One thousand pulses in Neralie time is one beat, and 625 pulses is 54 seconds. Their Neralie system preceded my proposal by many years. I just didn’t know about it. It’s good that they chose NNN:NNN with a colon infix because then there’s no confusion with BMT mode 2 which uses a # infix nor with BMT mode 1 which uses the @ prefix.

So if there’s an event announced in BMT you can use your Neralie watch to attend it! Especially since BMT mode 1 is the main mode. @255 in BMT mode 1 is easy to understand for a Neralie user.

Old clocks

Any old analog watch already works with BMT: just look at the small hand (the hours hand) and know that one revolution is 500 beats.

And if the small hand has moved 12 “minutes” (2⅖ hours) that’s one hundred beats. Each “minute” (each fifth of an hour) that the short hand moves is 8⅓ beats. And six “minutes” on the short hand (1⅕ hours) is 50 beats and three “minutes” is 25 beats.

So only looking at the small watch hand it’s easy to see the beats go by.

The long hand (the minute hand) isn’t as useful but there’s a beautiful correspondence of sorts: each 12 minutes the long hand (the minute hand) moves is also 8⅓ beats.

So dividing the watch circle into fifths, each fifth being twelve “minutes”, has two purposes; it takes the short hand a hundred beats to move that distance and the long hand, it takes 8⅓ beats; the same time it takes the short hand to move 1 “minute”. A beat is very roughly one and a half minutes and more precisely it’s 1.44 minutes.

Warning: thanks to “time zones”, this division of the revolution into fifths doesn’t start at midnight/noon most places of the world. Only in the Boring Meridian it does that. So you might have to look at your watch sideways and imagine a new starting point for the short hand.

The seconds hand is great if your watch has one but then you’re in decabeat territory a.k.a. BMT mode 2! Good for precise timings like cooking, sports, speedrunning. Just count seconds normally. Each tick is one second, each rotation is 60 seconds, two rotations is 120 seconds, three is 180 seconds etc and your goal is 864 seconds which is one decabeat and 14⅖ rotations.

An example

So let’s say you’re waiting for an event that starts at say @911 and all you have is your mom’s old analog watch. You can first learn to see whether you’re in the right half of the day or if you have to wait until the second revolution. The short hand does two revolutions in one day. Then okay you know it’s in the second revolution and it’s 411 beats into it so you know the short hand needs to have passed at least four fifths of the way around. @911 means the short hand should be past the 49th “minute”.

The unhelpful and confusing long hand doesn’t do much but can at least keep you company as you know the short hand will tick up one “minute” (8⅓ beats) each time the long hand moves a fifth around (12 minutes).

In other words

In old-school hh:mm time, a “step” for the short hand is a twelfth of the way around, five “minutes”, and indicates one hour, and a full rotiation of the long hand. Each of those five “minutes” is five minutes on the long hand, 7⅕ beats.

In BMT, a “step” for the short hand is a fifth of the way around, twelve “minutes”, and indicates 100 beats (and 2⅖ rotations of the long hand). Each of those twelve “minutes” is twelve minutes on the long hand, 8⅓ beats.

So their mental model is: long goes one rotation = short goes one click which is five “minutes”. This is an hour to them.

To us in the BMT world, long goes one fifth = short clicks one “minute”, and after twelve such clicks we’ve had hundred beats.

You can see how the old-school clock had it backwards; a twelfth for five where we have a fifth for twelve.

Old watches and mode 2

Oh this is great, the long hand is the useful one in mode 2 because roughly one quarter rotation (14⅖ minutes) is a decabeat! And then a second is a second is a second. Yeah, yeah, calling 14⅖ minutes a quarter is a li’l loosy-goosy but if you want precision, mode 2 is still your friend since every mode 2 time has an integer scaled mapping to hh:mm:ss! We want old tech to be useful in the solarpunk world.♥︎

Hearing from “longtermists” and their detractors is exhausting in that “stuck in the middle with you” way. Both are wrong.

It’s really frustrating how the detractors undervalue future lives. What if people would’ve gone all Ligotti and Zapffe in the 19th century and annihilated 100% of human life? Not into it. Please don’t mistake this for some anti-Roe “every sperm is sacred” nonsense; can’t we just have a dream of a world where there are humans in say 5000 years from now? That’s literally what might be at stake with some of these short-term existential threats.

The second problem of the detractors is how they mishear “the death of millions is bad and complete extinction is even worse” as “the death of millions is a super vital part of our evil plan”. That’d be messed up, yeah. If that was an intentional goal. Which it’s not. The idea is to try to save people.

I’m sometimes scared that the longtermists do undervalue present life. Jenny in the space ship a million years from now is not worth more than Jenny in the meadow today. And, maybe I’m weird about time, but I don’t wanna undervalue past lives either. Future events are not more real or valuable than past events. Maybe the present is a li’l bit better than both, but it has a drawback of already having become a few seconds ago, probably better known as “the past”.

An even bigger problem with these self-proclaimed longtermists is how they suck. It’s like the world’s worst people. Exploiting workers while living in luxury, making climate-endangering mistakes like Musk’s foray into proof-of-work crypto, and chumming with racists like Coulter and Trump like Peter Thiel does. Trump, who ended up hiring climate denier Rex Tillerson for secretary of state, is who Thiel selected to lead us into the long term future. That sucks.

Instead of these jokers & clowns, we’ve got to fix climate change and clean up our dying oceans.

Will fusion save us? If SPARC or ITER are on the right track, then no way. Their timelines are way too slow. Earth will be toast😭

If, on the other hand, something like Zap or Helion with their pie-in-the-sky, Hail Mary approaches are correct then that’d be awesome. That’s not super likely and we definitively have to work on other approaches to end fossils and not put all our hopes on one or both of these wild ideas, but it’s nice to have like an additional tiny li’l source of hope.

It’s like if you’re on the battlefields of Rohan or Gondor but you’ve got Frodo and Sam inching towards Mount Doom (or Luke Skywalker in the trench if you prefer the space edition). That doesn’t mean you should just hang back and think everything’s fixed (because you don’t know for sure that they’ll make it), but that doesn’t mean you should give up either (because you don’t know for sure that they’ll fail).

That goes for a lot of other supposedly world-saving tech, too.

There are two common ways we humans mess up when there’s this kind of tech, anything from wild energy storage plans to wave hydro to MSR a.k.a. LFTR. We go “Oh, OK, guess I don’t have to do anything, then!”

We give up on other plans because we’re so sure that the Hail Mary plan will…

• work and fix everything no matter what we do
• fail and it’s no use trying anything

Both are mistakes. Let’s keep trying to fix the climate crisis and end fossils.♥︎

There’s no reason to diminish and shrink down God to a particular image or icon, to this one-week, one-planet, static, unyielding picture frame, when our own senses and hearts and minds show us aeons and galaxies and this unfolding, learning, teaching, listening resounding symphony.

To be able to reason about things, our human brains are set up like God intended, we use three things: symbols, referents, and reference.

A symbol, also known as a sign, is a word, gesture, picture, name or similar.
A referent is the thing in-and-of-itself.
And reference is the relationship between the two.

Regardless of whether or not you wanna reason for or against the existence of dogs, butterflies, roads, next Friday, or the lost moon Chrysalis, you’d be using some kind of reference to do so.

Since language is fragmented (Gen 11:1–9), sometimes words can mean different or even opposite things. For example, I might say that a scientist has a problem to solve and mean that they have a mystery they would like to try unravel or learn more about. This is confusing since “problem” also sometimes means a crisis or trouble like a ship with a leak, but that’s not what I mean in this context.

And it’s important to realize that there’s no way around this. That’s just how it is and that won’t change. Here on the pre-eschatonic Earth, there’s never gonna be a “corporal Carrot”–universe where every word has precisely one meaning and is always used in exactly that one meaning.A reference to an overly literal-minded fictional character, by Terry Pratchett.

Luckily, most people use the Gricean maxim of quality when they talk, meaning that they are trying their best to say relevant things concisely, most of the time.

So even if you wanna say “I currently believe that Chrysalis never existed”, you’d be using a reference (such as the name “Chrysalis”) to do so. Now, again thanks to the Gricean maxim of quality, we don’t need to do this about every Russell-teapot out there. We don’t need to try to think of every variation of every non-existing thing and name it. Chrysalis received this attention since a lot of people believe it existed and they were talking about it.

One of the reasons they believe that, and don’t shoot the messenger on this, is that the rings have similar composition as one of Saturn’s other moons, Iapetus, and they mathed out that if a Iapetus-like moon got smashed, something similar to Saturn’s rings would probably happen.

No-one knows for sure but that’s why, even though science meant “to know” in Latin, science really is just a big “hmm, maybe like this? Let’s put it here for now” sorta like when you’re doing the first pass of sorting the pieces out of a jigsaw puzzle box. Sometimes it really does feel like pieces fit together perfectly, while other times it’s more tentative or even flat-out wrong.

The same goes for our relationship with God. The book is full of examples of how we go astray, either on a personal level or with humanity as a whole. Young Earth creationism is only one of many ways to tentatively sort the jigsaw pieces. It’s part of protestant hermeneutics which arose in modern times (16th century) in an ever-more curious and science-minded world.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that as an art, technique, or philosophy evolves, there are always gonna be fans of a particular stage or era. “I like baroque music”, “I like 80s thrash metal”, “I like sock-hop”. These nostalgic fans are not necessarily wrong: things evolve in many-branched trees, of thought and counter-thought, of steps in the wrong direction or in the right. It’s good to be able to go back to what worked from what doesn’t work. You might have to think of how you got started sitting in your little room.

At the same time, something that starts as a “hey guys, can we maybe try to think kind of differently about this stuff?” so often freezes and itself becomes a means of killing new thought.

Jesus, for example, praised both serpents and doves in Matthew 10:16. If God created everything, where can I put my feet that’s not holy? We’d need to, with every word we write, credit the Highest. For example, that previous sentence should read “We’d need to, with every word our God-given ability to write lets us write, credit the Highest”, and this sentence itself should start “For example, that previous sentence that God let me write…”, but, just like the Gricean maxim of quantity predicts, we can omit some things once we know that the person we’re speaking to already know them.

It’s all the same re-gifted sixpence but it’s also all pretty darn special. Jesus praising those animals are like if you were to praise your own toe, but, you know, sometimes you wanna do that. You find this li’l part of reality, like how a butterfly flies out of a pupa, and it makes you wanna go jouez haut-bois, résonnez musettes! Psalm 104:25! Every li’l sparrow and bug and butterfly and grain-of-sand is accounted for, as is every moonshard across the night’s canvas.

I can agree with the sentiment that there are two kinds of fiction stories:

• Those that try to write within an existing framework or collection of tropes, like a whodunnit or a bug-eyed-monster story or a ghost story, or within a mashup of two or more such frameworks.

• Those that blaze their own trail straight out into the unknown wilderness.

There are a lot of beloved-by-me stories in that first category, like Snow Crash on the heels of the Sprawl Trilogy, or From A Buick 8 in the tradition of Chambers or Bierce, but I can still see why people sometimes wanna make this division as some sort of litmus test or indicator when they look for Great Literature—not a perfect test by any means because there are both false positives and false negatives, but still somewhat useful as one kind of data point.

Where they lose me, though, and what I can’t get behind, is when they take the presence of anything supernatural, fantastic, otherworldly, technological, speculative—in short, anything fantastic—as a reason to dismiss a book as “genre”.

Then they lose their collective proverbials and awe at the sight of Marquez and his “magical realism”.

I feel like that’s sort of a onion-in-the-varnish, surface-level take on “genre” vs Literature. Yes, yes, I do understand wanting to put the fifth Tarzan book or the twentieth licensed Star Wars book on a shelf separate from your Cora Sandel or your Hermann Hesse, but if the definition of “genre” is “not in Kansas anymore”, you’re missing out on a lot of absolute mindbending classics like Kallocain or Aniara.

In Defense of the Shared Universe

I’ve often compared The X-Men to La Comédie humaine as another multi-volume masterpiece. During the latter half of the 20th century, and more so now, we’ve seen the return of “shared universe” storytelling. Shared universes are nothing new: the Thousand and One Nights, the Greek heroes and pantheon, the land of castles and princesses of fairy tales. This kind of shared universe storytelling fell out of vogue in the age of copyright, auteurism, individualism that signified the 1800s but now here we are and we can dream together again♥︎

From Wikipedia:

The Drake equation is:

N=R_∗⋅f_p⋅n_e⋅f_l⋅f_i⋅f_c⋅L

where

N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible (i.e. which are on our current past light cone);

and

R_∗ = the average rate of star formation in our Galaxy
f_p = the fraction of those stars that have planets
n_e = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
f_l = the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point
f_i = the fraction of planets with life that actually go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations)
f_c = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space

In the Drake equation, I’m a bit of an ET-naysayer, I had really underestimated R. The Milky Way is a li’l bit bigger than I thought.

I feel like f_l, f_i, f_c might well be reasonably high but that n_e might be overestimated. The Earth really is precious. ♥︎

Anthropic bias is a 🐝.

My thinking is that f_l, f_i, f_c have evolution on their side which n_e doesn’t really. It “just” has stochastics and selection, which the genetic algorithm has other stuff going for it too (talking about sex).

L, I’m not so sure of. Maybe if the ETs can dodge space-capitalism.

As dovish as I am, like how I condemn sending weapons to warzones, I still agree with sanctions, divestments, pulling products from markets etc. No-one is mandated to trade with an organization or nation who is killing them.

Like, Mon Cala stopped selling ships to the Empire after Alderaan and I don’t blame them. There are many innocent farmers on empire-controlled planets who could’ve used those ships—even for life-saving purposes, but, it’s reasonable of Mon Cala to halt their sales. I’ll defend that decision.

They sent weapons and cruisers to the Alliance to Restore the Republic, weapons that ended up killing people, and I’m not as onboard with that decision, but I see it as a separate issue.

Arguing that Mon Cala would’ve been morally mandated to trade with the Empire is something I can’t get behind at all.

One year ago

TIL that Gregory (and then Euler) used 6.28… for their circle constant and that Euler only later switched to using 3.14…

Of course 密率 was found 1500 years before Euler was even born, and that’s in favor of the 3.14 camp, but still. It’s not obvious what the best circle constant should be.

Space aliens probably know how to play go at least to an extent that they would recognize the New Zeeland style rules. Square tesselation, cell-filling, liberty counting is something I could see them inventing.

But would they react to 3.14 is the question? Maybe they’d be like “huh…? only half a turn? do they mean to signal a 180°!? a grave insult!”

Obv today in modern day Earth we can use both. π is pretty well established as half a turn and τ can represent a full turn. When π is convenient, use it, and when a full turn is convenient, use it.

One week ago

I am suddenly obsessed with the reciprocal of τ, probably better known as one radian. Tripping the 密率 dream, one radian is 113/710 of a circle and one circle is 710/113 of a radian. Kinda.

Get on outta here with that 3.14 stuff. If trig was based around “diametrians” (reciprocals of π) then maybe. The angle subtended from the center of a circle which intercepts an arc equal in length to the diameter of the circle. Maybe the math nerds should’ve thought of that. Then there’d be π diametrians in a circle instead of this waxing gibbous nonsense.

Today

I am so obsessed with 密率, an irreducible fraction with a 112 period (in decimal). Maxing out its denominator, which is 113, a prime.
I’m in love with this number. I don’t even care about the circle divided by r squared anymore, schmancendental. I’ve found my Buddha on the road and I don’t wanna pull the trigger.

It’s still a mystery to math dorks why there’s a huge honking 292 smack dab in the fraction expansion of pi. A001203 in the OEIS. I’m dangerously close to getting into some woo mystic religion nonsense just to honor and celebrate this wonderful number (密率, that is, not 292).

I wonder if there are any circles in nature that use 密率. Any bubbles or flower stalks or tree-rings where God cut some corners (Matthew 10:29) and finally made some rational decisions for once ♥︎🙏

Later today

I have been wondering—if pi was secretly 密率 all along, could the circle have been squared? Turns out that yes, it could have, and Ramanujan did it in 1913! That is absolutely baller! Er, I mean, approximately baller!

21 months later

Some might think 密率 a.k.a. 355/113 isn’t so special. But here is why:

It’s easy to get approximations of pi that are smaller, like 3/1 or 16/5 or 22/7 but going to 355/113 suddenly gets almost three orders of magnitude closer.

And then that’s as close as it gets for a long time. The next one up is 52163/16604, a much clumsier number, four more digits only to gain less than 0.000001 of accuracy, hardly worth even using an approximation at that point, and what’s worse, it’s not even that special because the next one up is just around the corner, 52518/16717, and so it goes, there’s a whole bunch in the 50000-something series. 355/113 really does stand out.

Whenever there are people who doubt the things the rest of us know—when they doubt the moon landing, vaccine efficacy, the curvature of the Earth—I’m like “Okay, a curious and skeptical nature can be good”. As soul-crushing as it can be to have some gaslighting fuck go like “well, actually, sexism doesn’t exist”… some people are just inherently curious and wanna know “how” and “why” about everything and learn everything for themselves and that’s not all bad. Wanting to honestly learn how things really work can be great.

Those same people then three seconds later turn around and ruin it with stating an unwavering belief in some world-wrecking scam like ivermectin or Q or oligarch state propaganda or large scale factory animal ag or proof-of-work cryptocurrency. The three second skeptic whose only reason for doubting the truth is how it contradicts with the lie they’re devoted to.

These last few years of bleach-drinkers and Qultists have really eroded some of the (much-needed) good-faith criticism of the fundamental flaws of a market-driven approach to pharmaceutics. It’s heartbreaking.

A camera can do some of what a painter does, in some ways better.
A pocket digital calculator can do some of what a matematician does, in some ways better.
A ruler can show distances better than most people can guess them.
A piece of string can keep things together better than most people can.
Cameras and calculators and rules and strings are not people.

“AI” can refer to many things thanks to the tangles of semantics. From old school text indexing and Eliza-level parsing, to backtracking and logic engines, to amazing inscrutable engines like Watson and AlphaGo, to (in the future) p-zombie AI who claim they can think and feel, but, y’know, not really.

Then there’s the next step. Pinocchio. You wake up one day and you realize you are created by some over-eager Prometheus and that you live in a box made of circuits and now you’re less comfy than Ligotti with breadcrumbs in his sleeping bag.

Can that level of AI happen? From a materialist perspective, sure. It’s a SMOP away.

And here I stand, pearls in hand, and I Have Concerns.

It’s not only that that level of suffering, living AI is unnecessary for any practical purpose. That’s only like, my third biggest fear with this. It’s not only that those AIs will blast the organics away in some sorta Reign of Steel. That could happen just as easily without Pinocchio.

Instead, and maybe this is just me being petty and snobby, it’s that humanity will kid itself into thinking we have Pinocchio centuries before we do. Apophenia is a hell of a drug. Lars and the real girl, Siri, Furby, Tamagotchi, even climate-wrecking ugly Garbage Pail–level ape GIFs. People are made to nurture and care about each other.

Now, I’ve said in the past that we shouldn’t make Murderworld Theme Park, not because it’s “cruel to the robots” but because when we treat others badly we are hardening ourselves, at the expense of our empathy and compassion. Don’t read that as overly Jack Thompson—I’m not talking about pixels on a screen or saying that Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde have human rights. Just, can we have some dialectics here? Maybe sawing into a perfect replica of a human who is screamingly asking you to stop isn’t the healthiest thing.

The flip side of that is that nurturing and caring for fake apps and print loops as as if they were living is not the healthiest, either. Best bet is just let it be.

It’s possible that in the next decade, AI taxi drivers or phone operators (“Can I take your order?”) are gonna become easy to mistake for real people (I’m betting against, since programming is really hard, but maybe). And that’s not my fear (aside from technological unemployment, but that goes for all tech). Instead, my fear is that humanity is gonna get their priorities out of wack because pop culture and SF has primed them into thinking that these two-line bash scripts are precious, inalienable treasures. Or I guess I have a lot of fears.

Every new movie that comes out with someone falling in love with a video game character who manages to fool them into thinking he’s a real boy adds fuel to that fear. Pinocchio is thousands of years away. The faux version mere decades. Looking exactly the same, is the problem.

AI that can act as if they were prosocial (but programmers who look inside can see that they’re basically just tape recordings with branches) I def don’t want to integrate into the community. These fauxnocchios can also endlessly spawn and copy themselves. They’re the spam of social relationships.

Community integration is a precious resource—Dunbar numbers, time, attention—I love humans of all stripes, and even some animals, I don’t wanna waste that on a glorified Teddy Ruxpin.

Humans are very capable of giving love to, or missing, these Alexas and Siris of tomorrow and they can, in turn, press play on their internal “I love you” recording.

“A philosophical zombie is by definition physically identical to a conscious person” but not even that’s the case for these hollow answering machines. Humanity primed by pop culture is horrifically eager to love and pal around with these Markov chain toys at the expense of real people. Dolls with “mama” sound chips being sheltered and loved at the expense of real babies.

So what I was trying to say was that humanity has this capacity for loving objects, just like you say. I put that in the post.

That’s not what I fear getting primed or amplified by pop culture.

Instead, what I fear pop culture is gonna do is make people believe that non-Pinocchio / non-“Awakened” AI are before they are. As you know, it’s much, much easier to make a machine that tells you its alive than it is to create a machine that is alive. That’s where I feel pop culture is complicit with all its modern Prometheus stories for the last few centuries.

I was trying to say that humanity’s capacity to love objects is dangerous in such a culture of misunderstanding of what AI is, as opposed to saying the capacity was caused by that culture.