Watch this guy in France begging Tencent to extend their service to France. Wechat is probably the worlds largest social network. Sure, Facebook has more registered users, but Wechat users are much more active, and rely on Wechat for payments, maps, and a lot of other functionality. It was the way I received my first salary in China, the way to pay for a snack from a street vendor, send a tip to a street musician, and the way one collects contact information from any new friend or colleague. It’s a nice piece of software, however it looks like the TenCent CEO didn’t take that guys advice and instead made it harder for everyone to use wechat.
So what’s the problem? Well a few months ago, Wechat quietly ended their web service. There is now no way to access the network with a browser!!
This is sad not only because now it’s much harder to use wechat and share files from the desktop, but also because it represents in some sense the death of the world wide web. Yes, people are returning en mass to the mid 1980s model of installing software from individual companies for everything instead of using a browser, making everything take up more space, more memory, and making everything less secure. This change also breaks all third party links to wechat that I know of, such as electronic-chat and rambox.
Particularly of interest is the language in the error message when you try to log in:
“To protect your account, logging in via the web has been suspended. Use wechat for windows or wechat for mac to log in from a PC.”
Note the similarity here to Nixon’s infamous 1971 speech announcing that the federal reserve note would no longer be guaranteed to be worth any amount of gold:
“I have directed the Secretary of the Treasury to take the action necessary to defend the dollar against the speculators.
The idea that forcing us to use either malware or malware could “protect our accounts” is similar to the idea that removing all backing of value for a currency might protect its value. Basically they are telling us that they are dumping water on us to keep us dry.
So, what are we to do? Well we could run a windows VM just for wechat, but that requires some fiddling to get file transfers working from outside the VM so isn’t ideal. We could also use scrcpy to control our phone from the desktop, but that requires a usb cable. It turns out that using the windows emulator Wine (and WineHQ and using winetricks to install the fonts we need), we can get the windows app going semi-natively. Make sure to set the locale properly so that CJK fonts are activated with LC_ALL="zh_CN.UTF8" wine WeChat.exe or similar, and you should be back in business. It’s much harder and still less secure than the web interface, but at least we can still drag and drop files and such.
Edit: Best Solution to Date (August 2023)
Even better is to use this package from the folks at Ubuntu Kylin OS, which installs immediately with no tinkering and works like a charm on the latest Kubuntu for me and older versions for a colleague. Thanks!
“软件介绍
微信 作为一款国民级APP，已经成为我们日常生活中不可或缺的一部分。但是，目前 Linux 发行版下的微信替代方案，都与原生版本有一定的差距，极大的影响了用户的日常工作效率，以及日常影音娱乐需求。为了进一步丰富完善优麒麟用户的生态需求，提供更顺畅的沟通交流环境，麒麟软件与腾讯公司联手推动了基于Linux平台的原生微信适配工作，微信官方版2.1.1正式上线，并在麒麟软件商店上架。想要体验的用户，只需在麒麟商店搜索“微信”，一键完成安装，扫码登录即可随时畅聊。”
In the end, perhaps it’s a good thing that wechat has abandoned the web, and the Tencent guys are just trying to prod us in the right direction: Don’t completely rely on our centralized service you fools!
I’ve used ibus and fcitx on my linux desktops in several different configurations, but somehow recently everything broke and I couldn’t get my chinese input to work on this xfce desktop running on the ubuntu / debian stack. 哎呀！ After several re-installs and re-re-installs (“restart your computer three times” they told me) I realized I had to manually create the file ~/.xprofile as follows:
Don’t get me wrong. I am all about comedy and parody. All in good fun! And to point out the comedy of hubris, what could be better than to suggest that all the world is nought but what we say it is and nothing more? The world is nothing more than a selection of words, for dear reader, after all what else do I have at my disposal to describe to you the world? Pure information, and number – as in that symbolic portion of our minds – make up the world around us. The universe is nothing more than a simulation, a finite state machine. The territory is a map. Symbol is reality! Fake it til you make it.
The future humans simulating our world hate it when you do this, they need to build new Dyson spheres around stars to preform the necessary computations.
Ha! Yeah, well spoiler alert: sorry but it’s not.
Lets go through some of the evidence and common sense against anything at all really being “just a simulation”:
Simulations have never exactly predicted any physical system
Even abstract simplifications of reality such as the three body problem cannot be accurately simulated, and will be wildly and quickly different from perfection at any finite simulation strength.
Simulations can not even perfectly simulate what other simulations will do.
Simulations are run on real hardware which at the base level must exist in reality, hence there must be a reality which isn’t a simulation.
Yeah it’s really quite amusing to me. I like to smoke because I know all the extra terabytes of storage being used to simulate the hydrodynamics of the smoke diffusing and convecting. Think about how many extra processors must get put online to simulate the fluid mechanics every time you put some cream in your coffee. Right now there is a subroutine whose job it is is to figure out if we are stupid enough to believe this nonsense. Do you think that particular subroutine was handled recursively?
You know that’s not what Descartes meant when he said “cogito ergo sum” right? It wasn’t that the world is actually thoughts, nor that the territory is just the map, rather he was saying that the “I” implied in “sum” , the beingness of the self is the thinking. He was saying he was a thinker at heart, the one who thinks is the self, and that is why he never would have for one second considered such an amusingly puerile proposal as the real world being a computer simulation.
I mean do you want an actual apple in your hand or just the word “apple”? These guys are arguing it’s the same thing, the world is really just the words. Oh, so you are simulating the apple, the feel, the metabolism, the digestion, and.. what, graphing some predictions? What is the purpose of this simulation? Is this whole simulation running just to fire a few input signals into a brain in a vat somewhere unspecified which doesn’t count as part of the world because it isn’t being simulated? You gotta wonder how far down into Jupiter the simulations are running because there’s a lot of hydrodynamics going on there.
————–
When we say “the world is three dimensional” we mean that we can put three numbers on any object and specify its position, and do pretty well with describing the world around us. We mean nothing more and nothing less. There’s none of this about how the world “is solely those numbers”.
You like that? Information is now a physical thing, because we can simply pretend nobody actually read Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication and that we can just make up numbers and publish them for comedy purposes.
I mean we could point out that information has a definition as a quantity of communicated material, but that would ruin such a pretty story, when we could just pretend information exists without communication. Lets say a particle simply is information. Why not? How about 1.509 bits per particle? The black hole guys got away with it, why not the armchair solipsists?
Well obviously the position of a single particle could encode quite a lot of bits of information, as could the spin, mass, charge, flavor, and plenty of other stuff. It seems likely that one could even encode an arbitrary amount of information in a single particle if one was so inclined. Timing of arrival could hold a lot of information, limited only by the resolution of our clocks. Definitely many kilobytes. Make up a number, because hey it doesn’t matter here – we’re having fun. A megabyte of fun per gram. Every electron in the universe contains 12.441 bits of comedy, lets squeeze them out with our bit-juicer.
A more compelling story is that the entire world is exactly ONE bit of information. “On” it is telling us. Not “off”.
Or perhaps we should stick to actual physics where our communication and labels are not the real world itself but are merely here to describe the real world as best we can, in a series of always improving approximations. Would that be too much to ask? Not enough clickbait there I suppose.
The world is just a map, said the cartographer. The world is a song, said the musician. The world is just words, said the writer. All the world is a stage, said the playwright. Can I get in on this? Maybe the world is a blog post. A wordpress site.
“Physicist writes blog post which turns out to create the universe in which he sits, and in which every electron has <NaN> bits of information”.
That’s not the strange loop that Hofstadter had in mind you know.
And don’t give me this “Boltzmann Brain” nonsense. I don’t care how much more difficult it would be for us to construct the entire universe than it would be for us to construct a brain in a box thinking it was in our universe.. because where is the brain and the box? Is it brains in boxes “all the way down”? Why am I imagining myself capable of constructing a universe? The world doesn’t care how improbable we think it all is, really it doesn’t. When something most definitely is undeniably happening, it’s no longer all that improbable is it?
The world simply is here, go take a look for yourself, I’ll wait. It’s not a simulation because A) who would be simulating what on what hardware here? B) everything we know about simulation, computer science, and chaos theory says that would be impossible anyway and C) Error: $C Flle Not Found – Aborting Simulation
—-
As an aside, we can look at the psychology of anyone who might actually believe this nonsense of the world as a simulation. The “sorcerer’s explanation” describes two aspects of our psychology, one which defines the world as symbolic, things with names and communicable properties, and the other which recognizes a real world beyond the symbols. Such a “real world” is exemplified in the “real numbers” which are made up mostly of uncomputable numbers as demonstrated by Cantor, uncountable and outside the world of the symbolic.
The portion of the brain which focuses on the symbolic and communicable is said to be a “tyrant” which wants to control and explain everything. It doesn’t like the existence of the uncomputable. These theories about the world as a simulation or pure information are perhaps an act of desperation from that portion of the psyche which doesn’t want to acknowledge anything outside the symbolic and computable.
Some are desperate enough to assume that future humans have infinite computing ability and that this somehow enables them to evade the laws of chaos and simulate to arbitrary precision something or other. Oh, and we’re going to put this assumption far ahead of the evidence that we are alive here in a world of uncomputable numbers and inherently chaotic behavior.
You see that sun and those stars? And feel the cold wind on bare nipples? All that was created by an advanced man on a silicon computer. Bwahaha.
If in fact I’m wrong and the universe was created by a future human via programming it on a finite state machine, I would like to personally thank whoever was responsible for programming the laugh reflex which chokes me up when I think about how totally wrong headed the idea of the world being a simulation is. Nice job buddy! Are you paid by the line of code? Wanna get a drink sometime?
Dear person of Earth, I must confess that I was perhaps not going to bother with explaining to you the details of this issue if it were not for a small subtlety of dubious comedic value, just enough to allow motivation to tunnel through that quantum barrier of action vs. inaction. To explain, and blessings upon you for bearing with me because this probably won’t be easy, this piece must begin with a parable. A user generated parable.
No not that one! More on that later… Instead, I want you to think of some idea which was favored by a large number of people, possibly gained momentum in numbers, obtained a position of authority in which people were compelled to give the idea lip service sometimes even if they disagreed with it, and yet was simply undeniably wrong. A great lie, believed, at least on paper, by many. Insane you say? Impossible? Well if you cannot give a current example, a past example, or even imagine that such a thing is possible, it won’t be worth continuing here because at this point we need to call out such an idea.
The idea crudely put, which you undoubtedly have heard, is that the Earth is overpopulated and we simply must have fewer people so we can destroy less of the arable land, biosphere, and have less garbage thrown in the sea and the air, fewer endangered species being shot, less shitting in the streets, less burning forests and so forth.
Have you heard it? Good. At this point in the story we need to stop and point out that this idea logically is utter nonsense and is in that sense alone undeniably wrong!
It is perhaps worth noting exactly where the logic breaks down. The claim is made mathematically, and we simplify here, that the destruction D must be exactly equal to the amount of people N multiplied by the damage caused per person P:
(Eq. 1)
So far so good! This absolutely must be mathematically true because P is defined as . But what have we done here? Nothing really, as we have introduced and defined a dependent variable P (damage done per person), and basically restated its definition. Note that D and N could have any meaning at all and this would remain true.
Now then, we are supposed to infer that because N and P are on the right hand side of an equation, now the only way to influence D must be to influence N and P. Therefore we must reduce N. Gotta reduce the population, haha!
This is of course utter nonsense. Lets do a few examples of the same logic for fun.
Take W to be the number of attractive women in the house with you at the moment.
Now let’s define C to be the amount of cigarette butts on your floor. Lets define D to be the number of attractive woman in the house per cigarette butt.
Of course we have , the number of attractive women is equal the the amount of butts on the floor times the women per butt.
Now taking the same idea as before, we can see that the logical way to increase the number of attractive women is for you to increase C, and throw more cigarette butts on the floor. I think you’ll agree that throwing trash on the floor isn’t usually a good way to meet women, and so there must be something wrong with the logic here. But, the same logic told us something that “everyone knows” is true, what’s going on here?
How about another one. Let’s say you have a nice house for your family but with a problem. You have a problem in that someone is shitting in the kitchen and it’s really gross in there. Barely livable. That’s the problem. Clearly we have a situation where the amount of human excrement E you must step over to reach the fridge is equal to the number of people in your family N multiplied by the amount of shits taken there per person S. So we have .
Here we can clearly see the best way to solve your problem is to kill off a few of your family members, maybe half or so?, and then you will have reduced the amount of excrement E by about one half.
Does that sound like a reasonable solution to your problem? Fuck no. Is it a reasonable syllogism to the question at hand of some humans fucking some shit up on the Earth? Well yeah it is.
The simple logical point here is that equation one implies exactly nothing about how N and P might relate to each other or even the sign of P. It’s not even stated as to why we’d even be considering N here, isn’t the idea to talk about the damage being done? Why does the number of people on the planet even get introduced? It certainly could be introduced to the discussion of the anthropocene era and maintenance of our planets life support mechanisms in a variety of ways, but in the way that this idea is presented that doesn’t happen. Instead we have equation 1 out of the blue and everything that could ever go wrong on the planet is now distributed as a fault of every other individual for being born. Or even worse, we could consider the modification of equation one in the “COPSEC” photo. Services per person? Really? What kind of number is that, 8? 800? Wtf even constitutes a service in this context? It’s shameful really. You’ve got commercial fishers rapidly pulling out the last 10% of ocean biomass, bombs falling, slash and burn supporting bullshit business plans supported by fiat issuance, and we are making up nonsensical dependent variables and performing some arithmetic hocus pocus as if that would help in the slightest. The total CO2 produced has nothing at all to do with how many services a person consumes, and a lot more to do with how many army aircraft are at this moment moving supplies from one base to another. “Maybe if there were fewer of us at least we wouldn’t be killing as many fish and shitting them out in dead zones above dams” or whatever. It’s not the number of people on the earth that was the primary acting figure determining whether that BP captain was drinking or not when he hit the sandbar. A million less people in Tokyo wasn’t going to save bambi despite what equation 1 might lead us to believe.
Another example. Suppose I am robbing you blind. As I rob you, I tell you that the amount of money I take from you M is equal to the number of ants in the world N multiplied by the amount of money that I take per ant A. [math] M = N * A It’s true right? You can’t argue with basic arithmetic!
Now as you may have guessed, I’m going to tell you that in order to stop me robbing you, you’d better go on a hunt for them ants. Gotta reduce N if you wanna reduce M, right? Are you buying this, or are you gonna simply punch me out, walk away, and M is zero?
Note that we don’t even have to bring up actual arguments about population, such as the incredible specializations which can occur in a larger population. Do you think we’d have a thousand people working on the specifics of just one chemical engineering step required to make galvanized rubber if we had only half a billion people? Industrial society requires an industrial populous society. The technology and knowledge we have is in the minds of the living people. One could equally well (not saying much) argue that we need more people because the amount of trash cleaned up would be greater. No you don’t need to mention the incredible amount of solar energy we could collect, or all the vast undeveloped areas and inefficiently used resources. The idea is already clearly debunked.
——-
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that some Chinese products were used in the raising, transporting, and carving of those Georgia guide stones, and that’s decent comedy.
I’m kinda torn here in interpreting the psychology of this particular delusion. Do you think there is anyone who really believes that there is some kind of “damage done per person” that makes sense as a constant? Humans will always be moronic self destructive vandals to the degree of X because I said so? Is that it? I mean seriously, did we really think that made sense, this idea of needing less people? Someone dumps a shitton of nuclear waste in our water supply and we respond by killing off half the population of our town to address the issue? Because “nuclear waste per person” ? Utter pesh, I’m sure you’ll agree.
So here’s the subtlety of dubious comedic value. Why would people believe some reeking bullshit idea like that we need to reduce the population, that pollution and ecocide are here because there are too many people, even though such a conclusion is ridiculous on its face and stands naked in front of you claiming to be the pope? You know why? It’s because there’s an echo chamber and we like to bounce things around, and there’s power in numbers, and if you heard it then we all heard it and it’s a thing that everybody knows. It’s the damn power of “everbody knows” to influence us, the power of numbers. Life is easy, with our industrial populous society, and so we can be intellectually lazy and just believe some total nonsense because a lot of people said it. It’s because there are too many people.
——————————————————
OK, so I warned you it wasn’t going to be all that funny really in the end, but there it is. Hey, don’t blame me! The amount of annoying pedantic blog posts by physicists is equal to the number of people on the planet times the number of annoying pedantic blog posts by physicists per person. The reason my writing has annoyed you is that there ARE too many people on the Earth.
So let’s recap. The number of people momentarily stupid enough to believe we need to depopulate the world, a remarkable level of momentary stupidity, is equal to the number of people in the world times the amount of stupid created per person in technological services and “everybody knows” social media chitchat. Therefore we need to depopulate the world in order to stop people from believing we need to depopulate the world. Spread the word!
You’ve got be careful out there. These youtube math channels are getting better like every two weeks. All I’m saying is you got to enjoy your motherfucking life. And if you aren’t watching youtube math videos, I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with you. Maybe you should see if watching these videos will improve the quality of your motherfucking life. OK If you have a good job, then by all means go get that paper boo boo. But if you don’t got no job, and if you aren’t watching these math videos, then I don’t know what the fuck you are doing with your life I really don’t.
Jens Fehlau is Pappa Flammy and teaches us how to solve some really great stuff, getting us used to manipulating infinity bois and reminding us at the right time that if we have one apple, we still have one apple. Great merch, memes, great no-notes lecture style, top level enthusiasm, what’s not to love here? Putnam problems, check. Sure there aren’t any expensive animations or video effects but we like to keep things simple. I love chalk. Love this guy, love this channel. Go support his work.
Difficulty – Medium to Expert. Mostly some calc is needed.
Steve with his alien microphone ball is super clear, super fast, and tackles great calculus problems. Sure, whiteboards suck compared to chalk boards but you know what? Who cares. He uses those colors really well and who else can make integration by parts fun? No one, that’s who. Mad props to this guy. Go learn from him and support his work!
Difficulty – Medium to Expert. Mostly some calc is needed.
Grant Sanderson has some truly amazing videos, you really need to see them all. Things that you have heard and never understood, he makes them visual and accessible. And he has what is probably the best video of all about the details of how bitcoin works. Absolutely essential viewing. Go watch and support his work!
This channel rules. Brady Haran, Matt Parker, James Grime, et al.: thank you!! So many great videos, interviews, topics, and enthusiasm. Crazy interesting problems and demonstrations. Tens to hundreds of millions of youtube views, if you believe those unverifiable and often rigged numbers. Of course you’ve watched some of these videos already, like the mile of pi video, but: go, watch more. Share with your students and your kids and your grandparents. Buy their books and support their work if you can! And sure check out their sister channel “computerphile” as well.
Why do we put mathologer in the first place? Well it’s not because he (and his team) are cooler, nor because the math T-shirts are better (that’s subjective of course). Maybe it’s because of Burkard Polster’s German accent? Well we like that from papa Flammy as welll. Perhaps it’s because he seems more a quintessential math geek than the other guys who transcend that with sex appeal and drug references. The general impression is one of general correctness, and unbounded enthusiasm for getting some extra “ah ha moments” and bringing in some lessons in from off the beaten path that even the seasoned mathematician will get something from. In any case, go watch the videos! And support the channel if you can.
Difficulty – Medium to Expert
Honorable Mentions:
Terence Tao
OK so this isn’t a youtube channel but there are a number of his talks available on youtube, and you will want to see them. Especially the cosmic distance ladder, absolutely mandatory viewing for those with very little math background. The other stuff is mostly expert only.
Great stuff. Check out him listing prime numbers for three hours if you doubt his dedication. Hands on stuff easily accessible. Go watch and support his channel!
More amazing content. Hands on math and geometry. Go make some hexaflexagons with her and enjoy her artistic explorations of fascinating mathematics! Support her channel if you can.
OK so there are tons of university classes now available for your viewing pleasure, this one just happens to have caught my attention as a physicist and this guy is amazing. He reminded me of one of my favorite professors Martin Lee, and after mentioning him to Marty I learned that Prof. Lee had in fact studied with Prof. Bender! Megaclassic lectures on techniques in mathematical physics.
Yeah, I love this kind of thing. It’s called an Epimenides paradox. This type of logical paradox is the same kind of thing Gödel used to show that mathematics will always be incomplete. And yet despite the statement being clear nonsense, people seem to be saying it a lot these days. Well, one guy did anyway so lets make fun of him. Lets go over how it makes no sense.
For starters, you are already doing your own research by reading this article. In fact, you were doing your own research every time you read somebody saying that you shouldn’t do your own research. So it’s kind of funny that the only way you can hear his advice is to have actively contradicted it.
Don’t read this! Reading this sentence could be dangerous to your health.
To be fair, the quite reasonable idea that Ethan Siegel (author of above linked article) and others are trying to convey is that we aren’t capable of figuring certain important things out, and so therefore we would be better served by letting experts tell us how those things work. Well yeah, sure. So far so good. The question is, who are the experts we should trust on whichever issue? Well the procedure for vetting them might be called “research” and so the only way to proceed and follow the advice of the “don’t do your own research” crowd is to, wait for it: do your own research.
So lets correct the error shall we? The only way to actively not do your own research appears to be to simply go into a coma and let whatever is gonna happen happen. Otherwise, you are doing your own research. Imagine, using your own eyes to research what is going on in the world around you! Sounds dangerous. But are you doing it well? Did you turn the lights on? Are you trusting the right folks and finding the right things to read? Probably not, and neither am I. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, and improve our methods with experience.
So what the article is really saying is, don’t research things badly, as in (quoting):
formulating an initial opinion the first time we hear about something,
evaluating everything we encounter after that through that lens of our gut instinct,
finding reasons to think positively about the portions of the narrative that support or justify our initial opinion,
and finding reasons to discount or otherwise dismiss the portions that detract from it.
Yeah, that doesn’t sound like the scientific method as I learned it. Nor a good use of bullet points but hey, in terms of reasons the editor should have rejected this piece that lies way on the bottom.
He provides a useful example of doing these things with his exposé on fluoridation, where he tries to put forward a case that fluoridation is a slam dunk provable win for dental health ignoring all other opinions and statistics such as Sweden’s no fluoridation and very low dental caries rate compared to e.g. France, which does fluoridate. Of course I’m not here to argue for and against fluoridation, just to point out that the author’s examples of why we shouldn’t do our own research seem to exhibit precisely the behavior of research he is trying to avoid: “finding reasons to discount or otherwise dismiss” whatever reasoning e.g. Germany uses to decide against it. This example again leads us to the same conclusion: do you own research!
So yeah, do your motherfucking own research. It’s the only way, period the end, to have any hope. Sure, we suck at it (as amply demonstrated by the author of the Forbes piece), and depending on our level of confidence this is mostly going to be about finding people we can trust on certain issues (like hmm I don’t know, maybe our doctors?) but one thing is for damn sure: asking your doctor is in fact doing research. Acknowledging that you are going to have to do your own research is step one. Step two is figuring out what kind of research you are going to do. Etcetera. Mainly etcetera.
We present an argument that the “there’s no such thing as” line of rhetoric used all too often towards explaining a proposition, is not a well defined argument in that i the truth value of the statement “there’s no such thing as X” in some context is immediately false for all X.
Let us denote as “there is such at thing as”.
We could for example say that
(1)
Meaning that the integer between three and four is not a thing.
However the standard
(2)
seems to be more precise and the truth of (1) is by no means clear. The integer between three and four is a thing insomuch as we can look for this thing and discover that it isn’t there in the that we know and love.
The “thingness” implication of is not an evaluation of the statement , but merely of the logical definition of the statement itself as a reasonable criteria. If the existence of a predicate is to be evaluated, it implies that the evaluation can take place – and thus that the predicate is a thing which can be evaluated. If we can write a symbol and convey meaning, then as such is a true statement.
Anyway you can probably see where this is going.
If as we were just saying:
(3)
then
(4)
which appears to contradict (3)!
One possible interpretation of this contrived and circular elocution is that there are in indeed an infinity of objects which we can insert into the “is not a thing” operator and return true, only that none of them could ever be named or actually exist as arguments for the “is not a thing” operator.
Nervous? I understand. I am also worried about financial market crashes, novel coronaviruses, mistaken swat team raids, and heart diseases. But why should we stop there? Solar megaflares, asteroid impacts, nearby supernovae and giant tsunamis should also worry us. Today however we are going to go even further and talk about some things that make even these disasters seem petty. So don’t bother to buckle up, it won’t help.
Solid Ground
Sometimes we want something solid to stand on. You know, like, the solid ground. Something to rely on that just doesn’t change. The topography of an acre of land and a good solid building. The nose of El Capitan. Those things couldn’t possibly change could they? Well it turns out that on a geological time scale, this is laughable. An earthquake will shake our confidence in solid ground. Things shift along fault lines and new land emerges as lava from rifts. Sink holes suddenly emerge and what was once solid ground becomes quicksand. It’s not often, but it happens.
Now lets consider the solid ground of interstellar space. Objects separated by pure near-vacuum space. What could be more solid than space itself? Pure Minkowski space-time, the fundamental aether which makes up our world of extension and duration. This is so solid that even Newton called it absolute:
“Absolute space, in its own nature, without regard to anything external, remains always similar and immovable.”
Well we know now that space has properties, and as Einstein said about his theory of General Relativity:
“According to the general theory of relativity space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an aether. ”
Every point of space-time has an electric field and a magnetic field, or alternatively an electric potential and a magnetic vector potential. Space also has a metric tensor, a property which defines geodesics (straight lines) and produces gravitational fields. All this before we even consider those disturbances to space-time which possess mass, charge, or other properties such as lepton number or strangeness. If you prefer QFT formalism, space-time is a foam of virtual photons. But even this viewpoint shows the cold hard vacuum of space as solid ground, always similar and immovable in the laws governing the virtual photons, right?
Well imagine now that we are considering things on a galactic timescale. If the solid ground of Earth is no longer constant and immovable when we consider geologic time, then why should the interstellar space which makes up the galaxy be constant and immovable over galactic time scales?
Observations show that there are many interstellar absorption clouds and regions with different absorption profiles even when considering spectra taken along very similar lines of sight. In other words, fault lines could be numerous in the enormity of local interstellar space. However I’m not just talking about different density of plasma or different densities of molecules and dust, as astronomers usually characterize different regions of interstellar space, but fundamental differences in the vacuum of space-time between neighboring regions. Fault lines of space itself.
Spacequakes
So what would it be like to have one of these things come ripping through our stellar system? Well the first difficulty would be in surviving the shock wave, the strong forces created at the boundary between the two different regions of space. It’s easy to imagine that these strong forces might just rip everything apart at the atomic level as the spacequake wavefront made its way through unimpaired at the speed of light. In this scenario we definitely wouldn’t know what hit us.
Another more likely possibility however is that the spacequake wavefront would be moderated by something like a Liedenfrost layer smoothing the edge forces, while things like the heliospheric magnetic field and the Earth’s magnetic field might further intervene to shunt forces away from the front that was colliding with our planet, as they do with interplanetary plasma shocks. In this case, we might imagine a world in which we woke up one day on the other side of a spacequake, somewhat shaken, with our atomic structure somehow intact. Perhaps we are even still alive despite massive shifts of air and water on the surface of our planet. There might even be some warning if the thing was stationary or moving slowly (relative to the sun).
What changes would we observe? Well distances might suddenly appear scaled, along the lines of the “nocturnal doubling hypothesis” but also in a more observable sense of a dynamic Friedmann-Robertson-Walker metric (inflated or deflated time vs. space component of the metric tensor). Suddenly the sun is much closer, or further away. Scared yet? Still more fanciful scenarios could also very well arise such as a change in the local rotational inertial frame or even the local fine structure constant. The Earth might appear to change its gravitation or even rotation in such an event, and there could even be a sudden blue or red shifting of emission lines. We could even imagine an event in which after passing the spacequake our vision sensors no longer happen to match the atmospheric spectral hole, while solar system dynamics become suddenly vastly different.
These spacequake fronts, as they move or exist in the galaxy, would of course provide an ample location for first and second order Fermi scattering, creating populations of accelerated cosmic rays. Like those we see. Many cosmic ray populations such as ACRs and high energy GCRs remain somewhat of a mystery which spacequakes could account for. Accelerated neutral atoms emerging from such a spacequake shock might even be visible to our instruments on board NASA’s Interstallar Boundary Explorer satellite [https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010ApJ…715L..84G/abstract].
Galactic Eruptions
While we are thinking along the lines of galactic time, in which a galactic day is about 250 million years, we might glance around and see what is going on in other galaxies. Well it turns out there are quite a lot of more violent events in other galaxies, with active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and massive jets and explosions taking place around the central supermassive black holes, or whatever you prefer to call whatever it is in there.
It’s not hard to imagine that from time to time, a star is captured by the Sagittarius A object (heretofore referred to as our Milky Way’s supermassive black hole), and a limit is reached. A phase change ripples across the local space-time and a massive eruptions sends pure energy and boiling space-time hurtling out. Quasars or even baby galaxies might be formed in such an eruption, as envisioned by Halton Arp trying to explain the strong statistical correlation of quasars with “foreground” galaxies. Sounds like a lovely birth event, just like a volcano giving birth to a mountain is a beautiful thing to behold. However you might not want to be near. The whole solar system might wind up swamped in Pompeian galactic dust, or the galactic aether lava might temporarily (only a few million years or so) drown out the sun like a Krakatoan cloud.
So there you have it, that’s what I’ve been worrying about while I try to sleep at night. Perhaps spacequakes and galactic eruptions can help to explain the Fermi paradox (hey there’s Fermi again!) of why we don’t see more intelligent beings around. Enjoy your rest!
Always proofread to make sure you didn’t any words out.
This sentence is meaningless because it is self-referential.
I am lying.
This sentence claims to be an Epimenides paradox, but it is lying.
This sentence contradicts itself; well, no, actually it doesn’t.
Disobey this command.
This sentense contains exactly three erors.
Cette phrase en français est difficile à traduire en anglais.
What it is like to be asked, “What is it like to be asked, self
embedded in quotes after its comma?” self-embedded in quotes after
its comma?
You can’t have your use and mention it too.
You can’t have “your cake” and spell it “too”.
“Playing with the use-mention distinction” isn’t “everything
in life, you know”.
In order to make sense of “this sentence”, you will have
to ignore the quotes in “it”.
This is a sentence with “onions”, “lettuce”, “tomato”,
and “a side of fries to go”.
This is a hamburger with vowels, consonants, commas, and a period at
the end.
Let us make a new convention: that anything enclosed in triple quotes,
for example, ”’No, I have decided to change my mind; when the triple quotes
close, just skip directly to the period and ignore everything up to it”’,
is not even to be read (much less paid attention to or obeyed.
A ceux qui ne comprennent pas l’anglais, la phrase citee ci-dessous
ne dit rien: “For those who know no French, the French sentence this
quoted sentence has no meaning.”
i should begin with a capital letter.
I am not the person who wrote me.
I am not the subject of this sentence.
I am jealous of the first word of this sentence.
Well how about that — this sentence is about me!
I am simultaneously writing and being written.
Cut me out, twist me, and glue me to form a Mobius strip, please.
I am the meaning of this sentence.
I am the thought you are now thinking.
I am thinking about myself right now.
I am the set of neural firings taking place in your brain as you read
the set of letters in this sentence and think about me.
This inert sentence is my body, but my soul is alive, dancing in the
sparks of your brain.
Do you think anybody has ever had precisely this thought before?
You are under my control because I am choosing exactly what words you
are made out of, and in what order.
No, you are under my control because you will read until you reach
the end of me.
Hey, down there — are you the sentence I am writing, or the sentence
I am reading?
And you up there — are you the person writing me, or the person reading
me?
You and I, alas, can have only one-way communication, for you are a
person and I, a mere sentence.
As long as you are not reading me, the fourth word of this sentence
has no referent.
The reader of this sentence exists only while reading me.
Hey, out there — is that you reading me, or is it someone else?
Say, haven’t you written me somewhere else before?
Say, haven’t I written you somewhere else before?
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a word.
No language can express every thought unambiguously, least of all this
one.
When you are not looking at it, this sentence is in Spanish.
I had to translate this sentence into English because I could not read
the original Sanskrit.
The sentence now before your eyes spent a month in Hungarian last year
and was only recently translated back into English.
If this sentence were in Chinese, it would say something else.
.siht ekil ti gnidaer eb d`uoy ,werbeH ni erew ecnetnes siht fI
If this sentence didn’t exist, someone would have invented it.
If I had finished this sentence,
If there were no counterfactuals, this sentence would not be paradoxical.
If wishes were horses, the antecedent of this conditional would be
true.
If this sentence were false, beggars would ride.
What would this sentence be like if it were not self-referential?
What would this sentence be like if pi were 3?
If the subjunctive was no longer used in English, this sentence would
be grammatically correct.
This sentence would be seven words long if it were six words shorter.
This sentence is not about itself, but about whether it is about itself.
because I didn’t think of a good beginning for it.
This sentence was in the past tense.
This sentence has contains two verbs.
a preposition. This sentence ends in
In the time it takes you to read this sentence, eighty-six letters
could have been processed by your brain.
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This gubblick contains many nonsklarkish English flutzpahs, but the
overall pluggandisp can be glorked from context.
This sentence has cabbage six words.
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combined.
It feels so good to have your eyes run over my curves and serifs.
This sentence is a !!!! premature punctuator
This sentence, though not interrogative, nevertheless ends in a question
mark?
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This hear sentence do’nt know Inglish purty good.
If you meet this sentence on the board, erase it.
This sentence verbs good, like a sentence should.
I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.
I have nothing to allude to, and I am alluding to it.
Do you read me?
This point is well taken.
You may quote me.
I am going two-level with you.
I have been sentenced to death.
This prophecy will come true.
This sentence will end before you can say “Rumpelst
This sentence will end before you can say “This sentence will
end before you can say
Surely no article on self-reference would be complete without including
a few good examples of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Does this sentence remind you of Nathan Hanish?
Please, oh please, include me in your list of self-referential sentences!
What question no verb?
What is a question that mentions the word “umbrella” for
no apparent reason?
How far across the page will this sentence run?
How do you keep a reader in suspense?
This sentence contains ten words, eighteen syllables and sixty-four
letters.
Has eighteen letters.
In this sentence, the word “and” occurs twice, the word “eight”
occurs twice, the word “four” occurs twice, the word “fourteen”
occurs four times, the word “in” occurs twice, the word “seven”
occurs twice, the word “the” occurs fourteen times, the word
“this” occurs twice, the word “times” occurs seven
times, the word “twice” occurs eight times, and the word “word”
occurs fourteen times.
Only the fool would take trouble to verify that this sentence was composed
of ten a’s, three b’s, four c’s, four d’s, forty-six e’s, sixteen f’s,
four g’s, thirteen h’s, fifteen i’s, two k’s, nine l’s, four m’s, twenty-five
n’s, twenty-four o’s, five p’s, sixteen r’s, forty-one s’s, thirty-seven
t’s, ten u’s, eight v’s, eight w’s, four x’s, eleven y’s, twenty-seven
commas, twenty-three apostrophes, seven hyphens, and, last but not least,
a single !
Complete the following sentence by filling each “__” with
one or more digits: In this sentence, the number of occurrences of 0 is
__, of 1 is __, of 2 is __, of 3 is __, of 4 is __, of 5 is __, of 6 is
__, of 7 is __, of 8 is __, and of 9 is __.
The following sentence is totally identical with this one, except that
the words “following” and “preceeding” have been exchanged,
as have the words “except” and “in”, and the phrases
“identical with” and “different from”.
The preceeding sentence is totally different from this one, in that
the words “preceeding” and “following” have been exchanged,
as have the words “in” and “except”, and the phrases
“different from” and “identical with”.
This sentence refers to every sentence that does not refer to itself.
This sentence does in fact not have the property that it claims not
to have.
This statement is inoperative.
The rest of this sentence is written at Nathan Hanish’s house on
It goes without saying that …
If the meanings of “true” and “false” were switched,
then this sentence wouldn’t be false.
I’ve heard that this sentence is a rumor.
which is actually not a complete sentence, but merely a subordinate
clause.
Never use the imperative, and it is also never proper to construct
a sentence using mixed moods.
I don’t understand a thing I say.
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5.
All invalid syllogisms break at least one rule. This syllogism breaks
at least one rule. Therefore, this syllogism is invalid.
Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.
They don’t write oldies like they used to.
I used to think I was indecisive, but now I’m not so sure.
I never make a mistake. One time I thought I did, but I was wrong.
In this sentence, the concluding three words “were left out”.
This sentence offers its reader(s) various alternatives/options that
he or she (or they) is (are) free to accept and/or reject.
If I stated something else, would it still be me?
If I were you, who would be reading this sentence?
You have, of course, just begun reading the sentence that you have
just finished reading.
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with the German conventions agree.
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phrase does?
Every last word in this sentence is a grotesque misspelling of “towmatow”.
I don’t care who wrote this sentence; whoever he is, he’s a damn sexist.
This analogy is like lifting yourself by your own bootstraps.
Although this sentence begins with the word “because”, it
is false.
Despite the fact that it opens like a two-pronged pitchfork — or rather,
because of it — this sentence resembles a double-edged sword.
This line from Skakespeare has delusions of grandeur.
If writers were bakers, this sentence would be exactly a dozen words
long.
If this sentence had been at the beginning of the list, this very moment
would have occurred approximately five minutes ago.
The whole point of this sentence is to make clear what the whole point
of this sentence is.
Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am master of my fate and
captain of my soul.
I was born in a log cabin built with my own two hands.
Always remember to form plurales correctly.
This is the penultimate sentence in this paragraph. “This”
is the penultimate word in this sentence.
This sentence is wondering when somebody’s actually going to ask a
question.
Does this count?
This sentence is a non sequitur. This sentence is not a non sequitor.
Irrationality is the square root of all evil.
At the last costume party I didn’t go to, I went as the Invisible Man.
This sentence four words.
Honk if your horn is broken.
This sentence has an error in the and.
This sentence has a grammitical error with the placement of and.
If you’re like me, you know that there are medical prescriptions or procedures A, B, and C, which if everyone followed around you, would make everyone including ourselves safer. What these procedures or prescriptions are isn’t important for the context of this article, the important thing is they exist and you believe in them. If there were no medical procedures or prescriptions which you believed would benefit us were everyone to take them, then of course this proof would be over already.
So for the sake of this web-proof, so we have something non-trivial to do, assume for a moment that such a procedure or prescription exists. It is not only good for the people receiving it but also helps others, by virtue of the fact that not having sick people around is better for the general health. Or for other reasons, whatever they may be.
Got it? There’s a procedure, be it a vitamin, medicine, diet or otherwise, taken orally, intra-muscularly, or otherwise, which we agree would benefit society, or whatever group of people we might have in mind, a school, a nation, a vehicle, were everyone in the group to undertake the procedure.
Despite this, making this medical procedure mandatory for your school/business/country/vehicle is a terrible idea which no one in their right mind would consider implementing. Why? Thanks for asking.
1 – Mandates are unenforceable and logistically infeasible
Are you sure the person had the pill or the shot? Or did they just pay somebody for a paper signature claiming they did? Are you really planning to see if the paperwork checks out for all your customers / citizens / students? Are you checking their blood and then double checking the test kit with other test kits? Maybe you didn’t think this through did you. It’s not logistically feasible to make sure all your students/customers/citizens have or had not gotten whatever dose is appropriate for their body type. In fact it’s immoral to even try, but we’ll get there soon. Are you ready to pay to jail people who produced imperfect paperwork, perhaps counterfeit? Are you ready to put people in jail who had the proper paperwork just because you need to have the jailing infrastructure in place and you know there will be mistakes? What is your plan to deal with black market certificates and doctors having a price?
2 – Mandates are unscientific – they are explicitly anti-science
Mandates require an authority to say what everyone is required to do. Science is explicitly about not having an authority but instead to use the scientific method. As soon as you have a high priest making the decisions, you don’t have to worry about people like Galileo stirring up trouble with some heresies. If you wish to be scientific you need to let people do their own experiments, read the literature, and draw their own conclusions. The proper way to get people to undergo a medical procedure is to convince them scientifically – not through threat of violence and denial of human rights or services! Making the procedure mandatory is only going to make people question it, because such unscientific methodology is immediately suspicious.
3 – Mandates are grossly corruptible
Obviously, forcing all your customers to buy product X means the producer of product X gets rich. As you can tell, this is a grossly corruptible system. Sure, it could work well if everyone is a saint but this is an unstable equilibrium. Some assholes are likely to arrive on the scene at some point, given infinite time. Sadly, this is the actual reason that medical mandates are implemented – because often people really like corruption, when they can tell themselves they benefit from it.
4 – Mandates incur liability
Not everyone is the same. Even a simple procedure like “drink a glass of water before class” which seems totally innocuous will wind up finding somebody getting the water in their lungs, or breaking the glass and cutting their foot, or having some crazy rare allergy to the wax on your paper cup. Now suddenly you are liable for their injury. Is that something you wanted to incur when you got into the business of education / transportation or whatever it is you do? It’s going to be expensive so you better hope you made a lot from the corruption bit in point 3 to cover the lawsuits.
5 – Mandates enable unnecessary conflict
It turns out that we shouldn’t design systems where people are given a chance to hurt others for no reason. If you don’ t know why then go read about the Milgram experiment. In this case, now we have some health official who can mess up any of our customers/students/citizens day if they feel like it. A really bad idea. People are going to have the medical papers ripped up in front of them and then are going to be locked up – that’s the kind of thing that happens if you embark on this path. Giving some kids guns and telling them they can fuck with people they decide deserve it – this has been tried before, go take a look at a history book to see how it turns out.
6 – Mandated medicine violates human rights and indicates psychosis
Medical freedom is a human right, and if we feel the need to control others solely due to our own insecurities and sad hearts it means we are psychotic. If we are psychotic, maybe we should at least be keeping it under wraps don’ t you think? Rather than telling everyone how sad and psychotic our lives are?
So yeah, this isn’t about whether your favorite medical procedure is a good idea or how safe it is. We agreed that it is a good idea, and that it’s statistically safe. The point is, do you really want to force it on people? Remember “Our bodies, ourselves” ? What are basic human rights to you if you think people shouldn’t get to choose their own medicine? To see people get behind mandatory medicine aka medical fascism and all it implies is really sick. We should be ashamed of ourselves.
(Eq. 1)
. But what have we done here? Nothing really, as we have introduced and defined a dependent variable P (damage done per person), and basically restated its definition. Note that D and N could have any meaning at all and this would remain true. 
, the number of attractive women is equal the the amount of butts on the floor times the women per butt.
. 
as “there is such at thing as”.
(1)
(2)
that we know and love. 
is not an evaluation of the statement 
, but merely of the logical definition of the statement itself as a reasonable criteria. If the existence of a predicate is to be evaluated, it implies that the evaluation can take place – and thus that the predicate is a thing which can be evaluated. If we can write a symbol 
is a true statement.
(3) 
(4) 
