mnl

The difference is that in fictional works these devices might harm fictional characters, but in the real world this can maim, disfigure and blind actual people causing actual and pretty nasty suffering. There are safety regulations for this kind of equipment, at least where I live there are.

I find troubling the mindset in which fictional devices, societies, persons and universes aren't perceived clearly as just narrative tropes meant for making the narrative where they're contained work.

I must be getting old because all I can see is an insanely dangerous gas welding torch.

Here's Sabine again stating things without further reasoning. I'm sorry but I have a hard time reconciling Laplacian determinism with quantum physics, I'd like to see more details.

Anyway, I don't think it matters really because as long as I can choose to do the opposite of what I want every time I feel like it just because I can, the philosophical debate about free will doesn't add too much to my own experience of it.

Being omniscient this special molecule can tell which identical molecule is which in the gas, that's some interesting physics.

Of course it can also predict the final states of collisions between other molecules. Even when that information just doesn't exist in the perfect a priori knowledge about the system, which is something that if this special molecule could obtain somehow and then store for later use should violate half a dozen theorems or so.

Really this could make some sense if we were talking about an ideal gas of classical particles that obey deterministic mechanics, but then not even the special molecule would be able to determine the initial conditions with sufficient precision to make useful predictions, beyond a short path and a few collisions in the system.

This special molecule of Stephen's is essentially a Maxwell's demon (it could use that information to open or close the door by choosing appropriate collisions, or simply act as the gate itself). There's a lot of literature about that.

Actually Stephen's special molecule is more powerful because it's omniscient. Ordinary Maxwell's demons just see fast or slow molecules coming at the gate and act accordingly. This one knows the momentum and position of every other particle it needs to know something about, which can be peculiar if you don't think about uncertainty.

I don't care for them. If people enjoy that good for them I guess, but nothing changes the fact that they're fantasy. The colors are simply made up, that information isn't in the film, you can't tell from luminance which colors were there.

I cringe at colorized films for the same reasons. If you can't take B&W you should consider that make-ups, costumes and all settings were chosen according to how they would look in B&W. In the same way that Technicolor forced you to have one of their color advisors supervising everything. At some point some audiences decided that B&W was boring and the aesthetical appreciation of that whole graphical universe was lost, as a result the expectations are that everything has to look in a very definite way or else it's unwatchable. I find such way of thinking the most narrow-minded by far.

Physics isn't ontology. You perceive a phenomenon, pick quantifiable observables, take measurements of them using units which are nothing more than reference measurements, come up with a mathematical model for those observables and test its predictions. That happens to be the best you can do with inductive reasoning. Believe it or not we don't establish reality, we just live in it.

This is only a general comment because I don't understand anything you've written so I can't address your points, which undoubtedly must exist.

The thing is Pi is ubiquitous.

One of the interesting consequences of the recent redefinition of the SI units is that now h, k, e and a few others are considered exact constants, just like c. A caveat: physicists are well aware that their trade is about mathematical models of magnitudes they can measure (and extra stuff they can't yet comes in handy to do that), not reality or the physical world in itself, whatever that might be it's something dealt with epoché.

So now the Stefan-Boltzmann constant, which involves powers of c, k and h is exact. It also involves the fifth power of Pi (through the value of the Riemann zeta fuction for argument 4). As you can measure the Stefan-Boltzmann constant being creative with a radiometer, you could determine increasingly accurate values of Pi experimentally. In the sense of magnitudes as used in physics, which is a fruitful approach to being quantitative in this confusing physical world, this "thing" we call "Pi" behaves like a dimensionless physical constant.

Before you'd object, if we came up with more precise theories, experience shows that that would mean corrections to the laws implied above. It also shows that when this happens instances of "Pi" don't deviate from the Platonic value of Pi.

> I can not accept a claim that mathematics is discovered

Why?

Finding out that Pi is irrational and then transcendental are discoveries. I won't be able to make anything work if I fork mathematics to make it rational.

Same thing that finding out that if you tie a string to a stake and then go around keeping it tight, you have to walk a distance that is two times pi times the length of the string to get where you started. I don't need a language for that, just more pieces of string.

Ok (although this isn't reddit yet): Tomorrow Never Knows (Chemical Brothers' breakbeat, just 30 years earlier), A Day in the Life, Helter Skelter, Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey and I Want You (She's So Heavy). What would you draw in your sketchbook?

BTW, I also miss say Hot Rats in this rag, no King Crimson either, but then there's Ege Bamyasi, Kimono My House and Different Class which are favourites of mine and hadn't noticed before.

How can Muddy Waters Anthology drop 445 places in 8 years?

I've had a soft spot for the Miseducation since 1999, but pumping it 300 places to make it into the top 10, I don't know about that.

I don't understand the swings with Funkadelic's nor what they've done with Forever changes.

This list is what it is, but come on.

(So Nevermind is the new RSS' London calling, it's official, we're old now.)

May I ask about a reference for that? There's the Herzberg continuum in 200-242 nm and I understand there's O2 photodissociation and therefore ozone production there. What am I missing?

We're supposed to be civil here but frankly the linked post is twaddle. You can't give the reason for not having unaffordable personal libraries and then disregard it immediately because you're selling your theses, whatever those might be.

The thing is books used to be very expensive, yet people managed to read as many as they could get their hands on and even spend crazy money on them. Open any book from say the 17th century and you'll see how they quote as many works as they could. Take the Quixote for instance, there's a famous chapter about the library of Don Quixote, the whole novel is built around satirizing a popular genre that Cervantes as an avid reader also knew well.

Many years ago I was using an MCA (multi channel analyzer) ISA card connected to a surface barrier detector to measure beta decay spectra. This stuff basically counts the number of pulses from the detector binning them according to the height of the signal. It had its own acquisition software meant for DOS (the manufacturer provided the sources as well).

The thing is you could operate it under Windows (98) in protected mode, but then you lost statistics. How come? Well, Windows scheduling meant that the MCA only took data while it was allotted time slices, as a result the dead time of the whole setup increased, and you couldn't tell by how much.

Under real mode DOS it took advantage of DOS being almost an RTOS and the program running as a single task and you could be pretty confident about your data.

I don't think using adapters with this sort of cards is a good idea. It's not a matter of drivers, sometimes the old stuff simply doesn't work well when plugged in newer systems because everything has changed and you need to redesign everything. If the old stuff does the job, the OS being unsupported only becomes an insurmountable problem for the folks that consider using an unsupported OS some sort of crime in itself. Well, there's usually more than just an abstract computer being used in such circumstances.

And physicists have been writing code for a while simply because the number of software engineers with a working knowledge of physics (as in ready for research), have been trained in numerical analysis (as in being able to read applied mathematics) and then are willing to help you with your paper for peanuts is about zero.

I don't understand why it is so hard to see that you need either a pretty big collaboration where somebody else has isolated the specifications so you don't need to know anything about the problem your code solves really, or becoming a physics graduate student yourself for this line of work.

I'd never have thought cancel culture would extend to Newton.

The thing is if we were only taking into account the contributions of saints according to contemporary moral standards, we would have empty libraries. If we're into building some comforting society in which human beings aren't complex, don't have flaws, don't make mistakes and there's an inherent morality in whatever you accomplish just because it's you who's done it (this decade's favourite non sequitur), well I'd say that's teen brain modal logic if I ever saw one and then excuse me, but I'll be protecting those libraries brimming with stuff written by evil evil people, because a world where that exists is more valuable to me than any project of safe paradise where it doesn't.

I consider PC a wonder material yet I went back to 1.7 AR coated glass (higher than that it's a bit overkill unless you really need it IMO). It's crisper, actually cheaper, heat resistant and virtually scratch proof if you clean it properly. It's heavier but I'm not going back to finding pinpricks after bouts of wind and all the extra care. The thing about glass is that it can shatter upon impact, plastic lenses won't but basically get ruined all the same in my experience.

Of course I make fun of it. It's the only way to cope with this kind of stuff after being exposed to it for decades. It's cranks in physics, they don't take the trouble to really look up anything by doing actual work, they just know that everything's wrong. It's all there: dark matter doesn't exist, the universe isn't expanding, the big bang is a lie, string theory is bogus, quantum mechanics is incomplete and/or we don't understand it. The list used to include that Einstein was wrong and Special Relativity was false, luckily that's becoming rather unfashionable nowadays.

I'm sorry, but there's a pattern here. Whatever kind of scientific topic that drives "common sense" folks out of their comfort zone has to be wrong, because well, it has to be. It doesn't matter that there are actual measurements and heaps of relevant technical literature full of excellent reasons for this or that theory (I mentioned a few). Whatever the people working in a field find convincing just can't be right because after having spent a few hours trying to fit the headlines to what they think they know about reality, they just can tell it can't be and that's that. Well, saying that something is wrong in science isn't enough, you have to include your convincing reasons for it or else your proposition turns out to be as valuable as saying that gremlins did it (but less fun).

It's been a while now that new pieces of knowledge in physics fit over the old ones. That's because data exist and it's the result of measurements, not subjective numbers, so new theories can't disagree quantitatively with the confirmed predictions of the old ones. The anomalous magnetic moment of the electron won't change the day we find the mythical theory of everything (if such a thing exists), and the mythical theory of everything will have to include within itself a scenario in which plain QED first and then the full-blown SM happens, otherwise it's unlikely that you could predict its value to such an amazing degree. Again, there are technical reasons for this that you can find in texts about effective theories.

To be honest and IMO true and false belong more in mathematics than they do in science. Newton's gravitation theory isn't false, it's a good approximation to a better theory that won't be false either if we come up with something even better. About true theories as in involving the things in themselves, I don't think we're doing that after Kant.

Of course it's lazy, but I said I could improve on it, don't expect me to put in more work than that.

Then it's the job of the alternative theorists to come up with working models with better descriptions and/or predictions. To my knowledge neither MOND nor VSL theories do that, but I wouldn't have any inner conflicts if they did. We're here to learn about the Universe, not to dictate how it works.

I don't understand what's so interesting about pointing out things you personally dislike in whichever discipline without making any attempt to justify why you think they're wrong. That's simply prejudice of the lazy sort.

I can improve on this.

Cosmology:

    If there isn't any dark matter out there, there must be gremlins pushing stuff around to make it look like as there is. Otherwise there's no sensible way to explain the Bullet Cluster for starters.

    If the Universe is not expanding, there must be much bigger gremlins stretching homogeneously everything everywhere out, otherwise there's no way to explain the observational Hubble's law.

    If the Big Bang is wrong, there must be very naughty and ubiquitous gremlins matching somehow the primordial nucleosynthesis ratios and the CMB distribution everywhere you look at.

I would have continued with the physics section, but I can't picture the gremlins doing theory atm.

It's one thing to have a problem with whatever you think you know after reading pop sci, but there's textbooks and papers. That's way harder, but it's all there, the arguments, the counterarguments and more importantly the observational/experimental facts. You can't allow yourself to have problems with facts, if your intuition gets in the way of accepting them, just get rid of it.

He likes WordStar 4.0. There are people who like WordPerfect for DOS, Word 5.1 for Mac or even XyWrite.

It's fairly easy (not always cheap) to get almost any old computer you could think of in very good condition to run the programs you like without further hassles. This can make a lot of sense because sometimes there are hassles associated to virtualisation/emulation/modern hardware.

Maybe you feel at home using WordStar 4.0 + VGA text mode in a CRT monitor. If that's the case, you can't beat the ease and responsiveness of a DOS computer. I have this conviction that there's nothing wrong with that.

You could have said the same stuff about the neutrino after Pauli introduced it in 1930 to explain the missing pieces in the beta decay. The alternative could have been giving up on the conservation of energy-momentum, but then if you have a continuous energy spectrum in an apparent two-body decay, it makes sense to think there's a third body there that makes it all work as expected despite you being unable to detect it at the time.

It took 26 years to confirm, and that's thanks to having man-made high flux sources. Detection of solar neutrinos had to wait until the 60s. Funnily there was a puzzle with those, as around two thirds of the ones you could expect seemed to not being there (again). This mismatch took another 40 years or so to confirm, so now we know that there are neutrinos indeed and that they show flavour oscillation, that's why if your experiment is looking for a particular leptonic flavour, well you're missing the other two.

So this is not the first time such there must be something there I can't see, yet I can say something about so it all fits together does the job. Hopefully it won't be the last time.

A few comments. This is a port of Basilisk II. If someone feels uncomfortable using an Electron app, they can still install plain Basilisk, which works just fine.

I don't know if you can distribute OS 8.1, but there certainly might be a legal issue with the original ROMs. You're including one and the thing is people used to look elsewhere for those. They're easy to find, and there are tools to dump them if you happen to own such a Mac which would make this issue disappear.

About some posts here. I've never had decent performance with Hypercard in Basilisk II, on the other hand Mini vMac works great for that.

Lemmings run nicely in Executor, which happens to be a nowadays free compatibility layer for 68K Mac software that doesn't need neither a dumped ROM nor any copy of the Macintosh System Software.

I would have mentioned at least DESQview because it's rather nice and then OS/2 for obvious reasons.

About the memory model, for instance Wikipedia does a decent job (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_memory_management). I think it's definitely necessary to understand the gist of what you're writing about and not simply give up because as you can't find it easily now with the whole Internet at your fingertips, then surely few did back then or it's not really important. That strikes me as a strange way to approach these topics tbh.

I don't understand the point about Windows 95 and VGA. The minimum requirements for Windows 95 included VGA, but no one inflicted such pain on themselves. By the time Windows 95 appeared, pretty much everybody got something like an S3 Trio and went with SVGA/XGA. I mean, try to use Word 95/97 with a 640x480 14" screen, it's cramped and you get less PPI than an early 90s $999 Macintosh Classic.

It's just that at some point you run out of letters, having some 35 glyphs more just comes in handy. Very much so if you have indices for different spaces.

Notation shouldn't be a problem if it's compact enough. Then the bra-ket one is foolproof and not too many physicists study functional analysis proper, so it makes sense to simply follow Dirac there.

I think that if you really believe your idea has some merit, you should still write a paper. After that you can blog about it for any audience out there and maybe write a follow-up. You're a professional, you know how it works.

Well, it happens to be both things. I have no doubt that you will find international criminal law fascinating, you just have to google it.

Wow... So the military of the state that has contributed most to the global cumulative CO2 emissions (25%) can "solve" the problem with indiscriminate attacks and war crimes everywhere else now. Fascinating. Are people forgetting about this practice of thinking about their idea at least for 30 seconds before starting to type?

>Europe outside of Germany has no advanced industrial capabilities at all

Could you at least google about this topic before going on building a whole theory on top of an absurd statement?

So France, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden etc in the EU have no "advanced industrial capabilities at all", nor have the UK or Switzerland outside the EU, really?

> If we were really nitpicky about falsification, we would completely cease doing/studying/researching psychology, economics and a whole host of complex topics.

Each scientific discipline has its own standards. We're talking about physics, so I don't think what psychologists are or aren't doing with their field is relevant.

In physics you used to produce predictions and test those predictions experimentally. It's not too sophisticated but it has worked pretty much miraculously so far. Now, if we're into building models that can't produce predictions, that might be deep and useful at some point, but it doesn't mean everybody else has to accept an inversion of epistemology now to make room for it simply because there are people asking to do so.