ㅁ the weirdness of the banal extends even past nightfall to occupy a dreamt thrall
– an englyn milwr.
Month: February 2022
Caveat: Tree #1108
This tree down at the mouth of the river was also overseeing a dogless landscape.
[daily log: walking, 6km; dogwalking, 2.5km]
Caveat: Dogwalking #28 and robot dogs that walk
I continue the dogwalking habit. She has good days and bad days in terms of behavior. This morning was a very bad day – somewhat stressful. I generally let her off her leash for a while, when near our house. Mostly she runs around in circles and explores but always within earshot. This morning, though, she went chasing some waterfowl down the beach and completely disappeared.
I wandered and called her name for 30 minutes, then went back to our house, reported the situation to Arthur, called Mike and Penny to let them know their dog had disappeared, and went off along the road calling the dog’s name and hoping she’d hear me and come to me.
Meanwhile, she showed up at our house right after I’d left again – so Arthur, knowing the dog was “lost,” let her in. But instead of keeping her at our house until I came back, he decided to deliver the dog to Mike and Penny’s. So off they went, though I think honestly the dog would have found her way home without Art’s escort. Of course Art didn’t think to contact me that he’d found the dog. So I’m walking along the beach and the road eastbound, calling for the dog and stressing out. Art is walking west, with the dog, without a care in the world, and he and the dog arrive at Mike and Penny’s and Mike gets the dog back on the leash.
I guess I would have preferred to know what was going on, as I spent another 30 minutes walking up and down the road, calling the dog’s name. But eventually Penny came driving along and found me, to let me know the dog was found.
Here is a picture of the dogless beach.
Meanwhile, I have been watching these videos about a guy building an open-source dog robot. He provides an immense amount of detail. It’s all very interesting. In the specific video below, the 7th in the series, he is refining the dog’s walking style.
Caveat: Poem #2015 “Bad Code”
ㅁ My own software has some bugs my brain seems to be on drugs though it's just neurons like slugs
– an englyn milwr.
Caveat: Tree #1107
This tree was in the distance when a dog watched a duck.
[daily log: walking, 4km; dogwalking, 3km]
Caveat: Friday Blogroll
So what’s open in my browser this week?
Rationalist, Policy, Philosophy
Politics or culture
- Richard Hanania’s Newsletter (rightish)
- Eschaton (leftish)
Science, Computers, Programming and AI
Internet Culture, Linguistics or Language
Caveat: Poem #2014 “Here in the rainforest”
ㅁ the rain and then more rain came not even the clouds bore blame instead everything stayed same
– an englyn milwr.
Caveat: Tree #1106
This tree worked with a neighbor to frame an ancestor against a backdrop made of sea.
[daily log: walking, 2km]
Caveat: Hacking as spectator sport
This video intrigued me more than I expected it to. The guy is “hacking” one of those hardware wallets for cryptocurrency. He’s doing it for a fee, at the request of the device’s owner (because he lost his password), so this is “white hat” hacking.
The guy in the video reminds me a lot of my good friend Mark, in certain aspects of not just professional capacity but also personality.
Caveat: Poem #2013 “Melting”
ㅁ I shovel paths through the slush. The rain on trees breaks the hush. Some snow slides down in a rush.
– an englyn milwr.
Caveat: Tree #1105
This tree experienced fresh snow beside an icy road.
[daily log: walking, 3.5km; retailing, 6hr]
Caveat: Poem #2012 “Title”
ㅁ the poem starts out with energy full of ambition and big plans but then as the lines proceed concepts are forgotten syllables cut off words are unused things get terse shorter stop
– a nonnet.
Caveat: Tree #1104
This tree is very small and it is growing out of the top of a steel culvert.
[daily log: walking, 3km; retailing, 6hr]
Caveat: Increasingly vague turtles, farther down
I read weird things online, almost every day.
Today, I read an article by Physics and Computer Science blogger, Scott Aaronson, in which he asks: Why is the universe quantum-mechanical?
He requests answers from the public. I wouldn’t dare to presume to participate – I lack knowledge. Nevertheless, I found myself rather quickly forming a thoroughly amateur opinion about it.
My own hypothesis:
If the universe is in fact finite (by definition presumably), its quantum nature simply makes sense. It’s a kind of requirement. A universe governed by classical mechanics suffers a problem of essentially infinite potential precision – what level of precision is necessary to produce all the universe as it is? It’s unbounded, and regresses to infinity at ever-smaller scales. But in a quantum-mechanical universe, there is an upper bound on the amount of information required to “run” it (to run the universe, that is). That’s because only examined values need to be precise – otherwise there are just fuzzy probabilities.
There’s the old joke about the scientist who asks some traditionalist guru about their supposed notion that the world is on the back of a giant turtle. The guru insists, preemptively: “Don’t even ask. It’s turtles all the way down.”
Instead of “turtles all the way down” it’s more like “turtles receding into the distance, until they are only specks, and which when examined through a lens, are really only just specks, or rather, they look like turtles to the best of our ability to resolve the image, but that ability suffers constraints due to the quality of the lens.” The turtles farther down are less precise, until, at some very distant point, they are only notional turtles at best. Consequently, though the “number” of turtles is definitionally infinite, the amount of memory required to store all the turtles is finite, because each one is less precise than the one above it.
I think the universe being quantum-mechanical in nature solves a similar problem that arises in classical mechanics.
Out of 500+ comments, Scott Aaronson succeeds in rebutting my amateur answer somewhere around comment #5:
Responding to comment #2 (which in some broad respects resembles mine), he writes, “Any answer along those lines, it seems to me, immediately crashes and burns once we realize that passing to wavefunctions, far from decreasing our classical simulation cost, has exponentially increased it—the fact famously exploited by quantum computation.”
I’m not sure it completely makes sense. It depends on whether you assume that all the collapsing wave functions must necessarily be collapsing. Isn’t there something in QM that says that the wave functions only collapse when someone looks? Isn’t most of the universe not being looked at, most of the time? Schrödinger’s litter box, and all that…
Caveat: Poem #2011 “Detail”
ㅁ space and time unfolding operating not quite like clockwork more like a blind person reading out each moment's steps in a tactile way across knots tied in tiny strings made of ether
– a reverse nonnet.