The DailyBeast is not a site I'd normally go ( tend to be a little more on the Conservative side if you will ) but an interesting story is an interesting story, how could I not share it?
Why More Physicists Are Starting to Think Space and Time Are 'Illusions':
A concept called "quantum entanglement" suggests the fabric of the universe is more interconnected than we think.
And it also suggests we have the wrong idea about reality.This past December, the physics Nobel Prize was awarded for the experimental confirmation of a quantum phenomenon known for more than 80 years: entanglement. As envisioned by Albert Einstein and his collaborators in 1935, quantum objects can be mysteriously correlated even if they are separated by large distances. But as weird as the phenomenon appears, why is such an old idea still worth the most prestigious prize in physics?
Coincidentally, just a few weeks before the new Nobel laureates were honored in Stockholm, a different team of distinguished scientists from Harvard, MIT, Caltech, Fermilab and Google reported that they had run a process on Google's quantum computer that could be interpreted as a wormhole. Wormholes are tunnels through the universe that can work like a shortcut through space and time and are loved by science fiction fans, and although the tunnel realized in this recent experiment exists only in a 2-dimensional toy universe, it could constitute a breakthrough for future research at the forefront of physics.
But why is entanglement related to space and time?"
There is some really deep stuff there, really quite something.
The propeller on my beenie cap doesn't spin fast enough to elaborate in a more intelligent fashion, I recommend just reading it for yourself.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 01, @02:08AM (2 children)
The idea that professors are doing anything but sell expensive educational certificates and rent apartments to foreign students is one of the greatest achievements of science.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 01, @02:51AM (1 child)
The idea that incels are doing anything other than munching Cheetos, gaining weight, and sobbing in everyone's face about how victimized they are and how entitled they feel is one of the greatest achievements of propaganda.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 01, @03:23AM
Your comment is pro-incel wrongthink. Please do not downplay the terrorists.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 01, @02:17AM (12 children)
When physics runs up against the wall, it kind of looks like religion and starts trying to answer the same kinds of questions. Given that we're dealing with quantum stuff, maybe faith and reason are two sides of the same coin somehow. Of course that doesn't mean that thousands of conflicting dogmas about the nature of the world, the afterlife, penalty for sin or the lack thereof are all right and wrong at the same time, or does it? There. Now give me my PhD, or don't. I really don't care or do I? I should know, after all, istartedi or am I?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Wednesday February 01, @06:30AM (5 children)
Sounds like a relativity of wrong [usherbrooke.ca] kind of thing. What has religion done to make itself less wrong?
The problem here isn't what they're trying to answer, but how they're trying. My take is that religion basically settles on a solution that feels good for the worshipers. The science approach tries to figure out what we can know, but there's a good chance it won't feel good as we figure stuff out.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Wednesday February 01, @03:02PM
My take on this is: Alan Watts would be right at home with this concept.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Watts [wikipedia.org]
"It is easier to fool someone than it is to convince them that they have been fooled" Mark Twain
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 01, @05:03PM (3 children)
Religion is more answering the question "How to Be" in society. Science doesn't really go there, especially not physics. That's why if you go into a physics lab you will see indentured servitude, injustice and all the ills of hierarchy on full display. Proudly on full display. Religion in this situation is the glimmer of light that talks about "weird stuff" like the kingdom of heaven and the meek inheriting the earth. That is a reminder that heaven - happiness - is not in the direction of hierarchy but among the meek. The friendships, the shared experiences, the realness of life, all fade away when you enter into the back-stabbing culture of hierarchy. Sure, the private yachts are compensation.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Wednesday February 01, @06:53PM (2 children)
Sorry, I don't buy that part. There is a natural hierarchy - God on top of the pyramid with the saved in the next tier and those in Hell in the third tier. Add in angels and demons, common Christian accoutrements, and you have quite the system. More relevantly, it's an inversion of the real world hierarchy - all the meek are above the leaders and such who go to Hell - a wish fulfillment scenario. And in practice, there often is quite a hierarchy structure in Earth-side religions.
Or not, depending on the religion or lab. What's missed here is that every human social structure shows these problems coming from our nature - even things that you couldn't believe anyone would care enough to fight over. Religion doesn't escape that. What we can do whether it's a physics lab, religion, or chess club is understand those weaknesses and work around them so that we're applying our strengths instead.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 01, @07:45PM (1 child)
Religion is *contaminated* with that too. There is an undeniable reality we experience that is separate from what anyone tells us. I see the seed of religion as the reminder, the eternal reminder, that the internal experience is the true one, while the external experience - aka "the boss" - is for the most part fake. Then you can see our entire education and work lives are about convincing you of the opposite; that your own direct experience of reality is wrong, and what they tell you is right. (Not going to mention the obvious that your experience of them is still your experience).
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday February 02, @04:28AM
You don't directly experience reality, you remember it. And given the weirdness of human senses and mental processes, that leaves plenty of opportunity for your experience of reality to be wrong.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mcgrew on Wednesday February 01, @06:47PM (5 children)
The question of reality and what it really is can't be answered. It's illustrated by an ancient Asian story, I've forgotten what country.
Five blind men discover an elephant. One feels its trunk, one its body, one its leg, one its tail, one its ear. When they go to tell the populace, who are also blind, one says elephants are like snakes. No, says the second, and says they're like tree trunks. The third says he's crazy, just the tree limbs. The next proclaims he's nuts, they're like blankets. The fifth says they're all wrong, they're like walls.
Within my lifetime astronomers were blind to all frequencies of light except optical frequencies. Within my lifetime it was believed that nobody could ever measure gravity waves, if they even existed. Now we see them.
Science is those five blind men trying to understand that elephant.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Wednesday February 01, @07:07PM (4 children)
One thing from mathematics that can solve that particular problem is the concept of an atlas [wikipedia.org]. It would basically consist of those blind man observations and a stitching, a set of consistency conditions between the observations. For example, the blind man feeling the elephant's side can realize that the guy feeling the elephant's legs is overlapping with him - the upper parts of the legs match the lower parts of the elephant's side. So there is a way to map from the perception of wall to the perception of the tree trunks along the edges. If a third blind man's region of observation then overlaps with both these two, then they can not only come up with similar mappings with the third man, but also from any two of the three mappings construct the third mapping in these regions of triple overlap - that's the consistency condition.
You can keep adding blind men observations until the entire surface of the elephant is so described. At that point, the elephant is not only completely covered by observations, but these observations now fully describe everything that blind men can learn about the elephant. Adding another blind man will not yield any more information about the elephant because his observations are fully encoded in the existing observations!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mcgrew on Thursday February 02, @04:28PM (1 child)
True, but can you have every subatomic particle that exists with five blind men observing different parts of it, then more to see how those particles interact to become atoms, then how atoms interact to become elements...
What's infinity times five? That's how many people need to study the universe to really understand it. The universe is, after all, a lot bigger and more complex than a single elephant.
All five blind men agree that the elephant has something to do with shit and hay.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Thursday February 02, @11:23PM
Sounds complicated. And it may well be even more complicated than what we currently observe. For example, we don't presently know of any sort of remotely stable atoms composed of anything other than the normal protons and neutrons, but there could be something out there (the sci fi "unknown element"). But on the other hand, this stuff we presently have collapses pretty well to models of greatly reduced complexity. As I see it, the present problems are between models that work great in their regimes, particularly general relativity and the Standard Model, but we have no way to stitch the regimes together as of present.
(Score: 2) by pdfernhout on Sunday February 05, @02:00PM (1 child)
http://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxrp.htm [bkent.net]
"A message to mapmakers: highways are not painted red, rivers don't have county lines running down the middle, and you can't see contour lines on a mountain.
For some time now my work has concerned the representation of information in computers. The work has involved such things as file organizations, indexes, hierarchical structures, network structures, relational models, and so on. After a while it dawned on me that these are all just maps, being poor artificial approximations of some real underlying terrain.
These structures give us useful ways to deal with information, but they don't always fit naturally, and sometimes not at all. Like different kinds of maps, each kind of structure has its strengths and weaknesses, serving different purposes, and appealing to different people in different situations. Data structures are artificial formalisms. They differ from information in the same sense that grammars don't describe the language we really use, and formal logical systems don't describe the way we think. "The map is not the territory" [Hayakawa].
What is the territory really like? How can I describe it to you? Any description I give you is just another map. But we do need some language (and I mean natural language) in order to discuss this subject, and to articulate concepts. Such constructs as "entities", "categories", "names", "relationships", and "attributes" seem to be useful. They give us at least one way to organize our perceptions and discussions of information. In a sense, such terms represent the basis of my "data structure", or "model", for perceiving real information. Later chapters discuss these constructs and their central characteristics -- especially the difficulties involved in trying to define or apply them precisely.
Along the way, we implicitly suggest a hypothesis (by sheer weight of examples, rather than any kind of proof -- such a hypothesis is beyond proof): there is probably no adequate formal modelling system. ..."
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Sunday February 05, @02:24PM
This. No matter how detailed the map, eventually you run out of things to describe.
(Score: 2) by Barenflimski on Wednesday February 01, @02:21AM (19 children)
Ask 100 people about life, and you'll get 100 different stories. A good portion believe theirs only.
Life is the illusion that each wishes to believe.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by anubi on Wednesday February 01, @03:27AM (18 children)
The amount of what I consider to be absolute idiocy in the world strongly suggests to me that this whole charade of my existence is to train my neural net.
How should I react to authority without reason? Blind obedience? Insubordination? Flat out revolt?
I feel I am a puppet of the banking system, while my spiritual side is constantly warning me about the evils of the love of money. Some of my ancestry ( Native American Indian ) seems to me to have the best take on it, the other part of my ancestry ( European ) seems hell-bent on greed and control of everyone else. Those two factions are at war in me, and I have yet to resolve what should have been done to avoid the mess I find myself in.
I feel being well educated in philosophy and history is key, albeit I am an engineer, who pursued the 60's dream of making the world a better place.
After witnessing what I consider the unbridled evil of those who pursued wealth and control of others ( Leadership Skills : How to Compel others , and Marketing Skills : How to Deceive and Lie. I have observed what I consider an almost total lack of compassion. Replaced by a hyper competitive race to the bottom, fueled by selfishness, greed, and lust for authority.
Good thing I am not God. I would be so disgusted with this simulation I would abort the whole shebang in a fit of nausea.
Its only the spirituality of my ancestors that give me the faith that what I am presently experiencing is only training my neural net so I will understand what is expected of me, and obey, not out of fear, but out of understanding why.
Please tolerate my terrible lack of communication skills. I fall back on engineering jargon as it seems to have the most efficient terms for expressing what I consider to be truths.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Barenflimski on Wednesday February 01, @05:21AM (2 children)
I think you summed it up well.
Amen.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 01, @07:05AM (1 child)
just upvote then instead of leaving a pointless comment
(Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 01, @08:02AM
Yeah, ...because the last thing we need around here is comments.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Wednesday February 01, @07:53AM (10 children)
You are an engineer. You have worked with worse. Engineers don't expect their materials to be perfect much less their constructions, right? So why would you expect the materials of people and the resulting societies to be perfect either? My take is that just like an engineer gets the best results when they understand the strengths and weaknesses of the materials and systems they work with, so do we with our societies.
Here is a lesson. The very pursuit of wealth in modern society bridles this very evil you complain about. The typical structure of a democratic capitalist society also provides plenty of opportunities for those who pursue control of others to dissipate their energies in relatively constructive ways.
I think there's considerable subtlety to a healthy, good society. It doesn't try to make people good. It instead structures incentives and opportunities so that evil doers will still do good, if only coincidentally, to fulfill their selfish desires.
(Score: 0, Troll) by anubi on Wednesday February 01, @09:38AM (9 children)
Thanks for the reply.
My angst is not against those who organize companies to make useful things.
Its that I am getting convinced there are organizations who seem hell bent to profit by engineering woes, only to sell treatment for the woe, as a business model.
People like Phizer. They ( project veritas ) have even caught them red handed, and it's getting covered up. All this damn secrecy and privilege so as to claim immunity for people claiming authority to experiment on others.
I have watched people claim authority via governments basically shut down our economies and way of life with all I see being a demonstration of their power to control others.
I find damn near nothing in my understanding of science to support the hell the power people are demanding of us. But I see a lot when I look at it from a leadership viewpoint, which has to do with psychology, not physics.
It looks to me like the WEF is orchestrating this mess that the rest of us have to put up with.
If it's not the COVID, ( of which I am convinced was designed in a lab, at my expense ), it's blowing up the Nordstream pipelines, shutting down BASF, steel plants, power generation systems, insisting on adding electric cars when we are already cracking under trying to power existing loads,
Seems to me Russia has the only leadership worth saluting, and I feel if it wasn't for Putin's calmness, we would already be in WW3. Meanwhile, our own President coyly threatens vulnerable energy sources to Europe, and sure enough, it happens.
Then I see people taking hunting rifles and shooting our own power transformers.
I just can't see the lunacy as we "de-industrialize" and "depopulate" via plandemics ( and looks to me freezing to death, starvation, and civil race war are also being fomented ). If population is the problem, why do we continue to force women to produce unwanted ( hence unloved ) children? And why do we still incentivize reproduction via tax incentives?
We seem hell-bent to waste, waste, waste. Trying to demonstrate we can afford wasteful behaviour to signal our social status.
We know the price of everything, but don't know it's worth. We throw away things of great worth ( like older technology that can be maintained ) and actually buy stuff that's designed to fail, be very expensive to maintain, and likely not be capable of performing a useful function, other than show publicly that one has bought in to whatever is being pushed. ( Battery powered snowplow? Come on. The energy density of batteries is nowhere near what is needed for the job!)
These so called leaders, with outstretched hand, but heads apparently filled with substandard concrete, yet are granted the privilege of authority, are enough to drive engineers nuts. We Have to honor the Laws of Physics or it won't work. A signature won't make it work.
This planet and biological structures we have, and the systems our predecessors have left for us are magnificent masterpieces of design. There is a lot of things to do to optimize them for our comforts.
Our job is to build infrastructure, not destroy things.
Yet what I am seeing is a bunch of spoiled brats destroying the magnificent structures their parents left them. We've never experienced the hardships our ancestors had to endure, but everything in me tells me that a lot of us will have to relive the very miseries our ancestors worked so hard for to spare us from.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 01, @02:41PM (7 children)
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 01, @05:16PM (3 children)
I think there is a segment of the population who is very impressed with distant, stern, father-like figures in Leadership. Not so much for themselves, but to stick it to the libs. Let's take, for a random example, Christians. Boy do they change their tune when given a whiff of power. Forgiveness lol, no. Punishment. Rules. Appearance. Pretense. These are the things a Christian believes in nowadays.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday February 02, @02:19AM (2 children)
I believe ALL God-based religions will do this, believing their authority is granted by the Almighty, and their purpose here is to cleanse the Earth.
Roku's Basilisk.
A very dangerous concept.
Those of us who understand how this religious virus works in the human psyche can swindle the ignorant of all they have. Legally. Without firing a shot.
I have pontificated at great lengths on these forums about my distrust of organized religions.
Do I believe in a creator? Yes, I believe there is some sort of intelligence out there, way beyond my senses and comprehension, that causes me to be.
I very rarely find what I seek in a church. I find it in me. Just where my American Indian ancestors told me where to look.
To me, I see what's going on today is like people watching a fishbowl arguing over the colors of the fish, and now some of the people have the power to blow up the bowl just to prove a point.
In the long term, it's meaningless in the grand scheme of things what happens on this little more of dust, circling a small star, way out on one of the arms so a small insignificant galaxy in a universe so large, maybe infinite, that despite all our technology, we still can't find the end of it.
What happens to me doesn't matter at all. If I perish, I perish. I just want peace with that which made me.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0, Redundant) by anubi on Thursday February 02, @02:47AM
I should have said "$Deity-based religions".
The "little voice inside me" is often at odds with what I observe. That " little voice" is known by many names...your conscience, The Great Spirit, your soul, the Holy Spirit, and I am sure everyone on this planet has this little snippet of instinct in them to guide them in whats right and wrong, albeit lust, greed, hate, and fear often override it's guidance.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02, @04:08AM
> I have pontificated at great lengths on these forums about my distrust of organized
religionsanything.Glad I missed that! But FTFY,
> Do I believe in a creator? Yes, I believe there is some sort of intelligence out there, way beyond my senses and comprehension, that causes me to be.
Then you're a dipshit. You believe in something someone told you. What do your own eyes tell you? If there is a Universe then you are directly connected to it, are you not? Namaste.
(Score: 3, Informative) by pvanhoof on Wednesday February 01, @07:28PM (2 children)
Read up on the Monroe Doctrine and you'll understand that having a enemy bulwark at your borders isn't acceptable. What The Kremlin (not Putin, The Kremlin) is doing in Ukraine is doing whatever they think is needed to stop that from happening.
To be honest The Kremlin is doing this, so far, with calmness. I actually expected that by now nuclear war against the West would have already started. Perhaps you are right that it hasn't escalated to nuclear war due to the consequences Russia would face. But I do think that it's just avoiding the consequences. But that it will take the consequences. With that I mean that nuclear war is on the table if we proceed with placing our NATO assets near their border and in the direct proximity of Moscow.
For all the Western propaganda that I'm sure you are completely convinced of, ideologically. You have to understand that we are placing NATO assets at less than 150 - 200 km from Moscow. Read up on the Monroe Doctrine and you'll understand that the US would also start a nuclear war to prevent this. I know that it isn't an argument and that it's even a false argument in philosophy. But then again, consider that NATO is placing its assets absurdly close to Moscow. That NATO (more specifically the US) was trying to make Ukraine a member. That this is and was and always will be completely unacceptable for Russia. That a war was and is and always will be a inevitable consequence of that.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 02, @04:15AM
The Monroe Doctrine is simply a recognition of a bunch of new governments in the Americas (from Mexico on down to the tip of South America). It is notable both for its anti-colonialism and being one of the earliest international recognitions of those countries. What is traditionally thought of as the Monroe Doctrine (that the Americas were the US's turf to exploit) comes later, much later [soylentnews.org].
Second, I don't buy the propaganda narrative that this was done because Ukraine would become an "enemy bulwark". For starters, who's the enemy? There hasn't been a war between NATO and Russia over the entire existence of both, even now. Seriously, NATO didn't get involve when Russia sucked up Crimea and the Donbas region and even now, NATO refuses to fight Russia. That's not much of an enemy.
Similarly, Putin babbled a lot about scary Ukrainian nazis, but last time they were in an election, allied with every ultra-rightwing group they could find, they racked up a whole 2% of the vote [soylentnews.org]. For those paying attention, that's not a lot of nazis. I'm not going to bother with the rest of the excuses because Russia has been shopping for a war pretext that will stick, and hasn't found one yet. The scary NATO cooties seems the best of the batch, but it's still silly.
My take is that the obvious reason that NATO would be an enemy is because Russia was planning mischief that would force NATO to be an enemy, like say, invading Ukraine and other former Soviet republics. NATO has been purely reactionary over its entire life and presently was little more than a military-industrial complex extension, intent on turning public funds into private profit. Then Russia invades Ukraine in force and that all changed.
Calmness? Like when they were wetting their pants over Ukrainian nazis? Or starting the largest war (for Russia) since the Second World War? Threatening nuclear war? Sorry that sort of thing isn't calmness. It's madness.
Here's the sort of thing I think of for consequences: if Russia uses nukes in Ukraine, then NATO moves its assets in and Russia completely loses control of its air space west of the Urals. Nukes might get used a bit too to help clear that space. I certainly wouldn't count on many of Russia's tac nukes being effective once NATO figures out where they are - and they're pretty good at that. Then it's either Russia gets used to losing its entire armor and artillery force or it goes nuclear for real.
And that's another can of worms for the Russians. They planned this whole invasion out - there was no more important task for that military and yet, massive corruption turned what could have been a quick win into this interminable slog. If their nuclear force is just as ill-prepared, this could be a disaster for Russia with no parallel in history - the country wiped out with minor damage to everyone else. That has to be weighing on Putin's mind.
This is merely a scenario, but one that Russia would not want played out.
FTFY. Ukraine is closer than NATO members, but it's not right next door. If that proximity really is a genuine problem for Russia, then move Moscow. It's cheaper than what they're doing now. I'll note that Cuba is within 500 km of a lot of the US. While some drama and war did ensue during the Cold War, nobody did a major war over it. The US did a number of hijinks including a poorly planned insurgency and assassination attempts on Castro, but that was about it. USSR had its assets all over that island. So that whataboutism fails hard.
And of course, by "assets" you probably mean nuclear weapons. Well as of 2021, here's [armscontrolcenter.org] what the US had in Europe:
Aside perhaps from that Turkey base (though this link [gwu.edu] indicates the US has been there forever), these look like the same deployments of nuclear weapons that the US had for the last half century. I doubt the other two nuclear powers of NATO, UK and France have moved any weapons closer to Russia in the past half century either. That's the "enemy" which somehow justified Russia's invasion of Ukraine!
Thus, I don't buy the Russian narrative that they were concerned about NATO "assets" getting real close to Moscow. I think rather that this is an attack to destroy Ukraine as an independent country as part of a greater scheme of empire building. A huge tell here are the expedited bogus referendums on the various captured Ukrainian territories joining Russia. Crimea in 2014 and the ones last year. That's just a statement by Russia that it wants to absorb these territories into Russia. And if Russia had managed to succeed at that, then Ukraine would be a rump state without a coast, and wholly dependent on its neighbors for trade. That's very easy for Russia to control now and absorb at a later date. I imagine other countries in the area would be next: the Baltic states, Moldova, and perhaps Finland, Poland, Romania, or Bulgaria.
Finally, I'll note the sentence "For all the Western propaganda that I'm sure you are completely convinced of, ideologically." Here, we get the usual silliness about something being propaganda and I'm somehow ideologically blind, but utterly missing the point. My lesson on leadership was all about the propaganda!
For example, Putin's long table - there are so many examples of this in the media and every one of those photos was taken under Putin's control. In the movies, the long table [tvtropes.org] is used as a lazy cliche for clueless, socially isolated, rich people. That's what Russian propaganda ham-handedly projects when they have Putin puttering around at the end of one of these things. At least they don't put a ridiculous table decoration in the middle that you have to talk around.
Similarly, it doesn't take a lot of searching to find Zelenskyy in a t-shirt with military styling while mixing with live people. He's got his game on.
And there's plenty of other stuff that we can deduce without requiring us to swallow Western propaganda or mean ideologies. The fact that the war still goes on indicates that it's not going well for Russia. Honestly, I thought Russia would steamroll Ukraine inside of two weeks. Now, they've lost a lot of ground even if we ignore the massive withdrawal at the beginning of April. That demonstrates a huge failing on Russia's part. Sorry, if that's propaganda, it's true propaganda.
We can also impartially evaluate Russia's pretexts for invasion which I did above. Sorry, citing NATO as a military threat dire enough to invade an innocent country doesn't pass the smell test. And it wasn't hard to observe Russia lying outrageously [barrons.com] going into the war or when fluffing up [soylentnews.org] the alleged importance of those staged annexation referendums, indicating that they probably were just as truthful about their motives for going to war.
Even if that were true and I don't believe it is, it's just a weakness of Russia that's being cured right now. One way or another, what is acceptable to Russia becomes less relevant every year. My take is that your argument ignores the fundamental problem. War is not the first thing you do when you don't like something. Yet Russia created eight years of civil war and then this invasion. A country shouldn't invade with frivolous pretext, not even a superpower. And no, propaganda easily inflates any silly pretext to sound more serious than it actually is.
Moving back to the start of this thread, I think Russian apologism is extremely toxic to one's view of the world and this thread seems to strongly suggest I'm right. Of course, the world will look bad when your moral compass is that messed up.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 02, @01:12PM
(Score: 4, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday February 01, @02:41PM
No wonder your viewpoint is so fucked. You went full Orwell. Russia doesn't have leadership. It has thugs that are killing normal Russians at a rate of hundreds a day.
Here's a leadership lesson for you. No matter how cynical or psychopathic you are as a leader, you'll get a lot of mileage out of appearing to share the pain of your followers. Instead with President Putin, we have the table [forbes.com] and a suit who can't be bothered to go anywhere the front lines. At this point, it'd probably be pretty lethal for him just due to his own troops.
Meanwhile the Ukrainian President Zelenskyy shows how it's done. He wears informal military-style clothing all the time. He shows up at warzones. Even if he's a corrupt tinpot, he knows how to be a leader and in large it's appearing to care about the people fighting this war. And the results show in Ukraine's surprising ability to repel Russian forces.
As to Putin's alleged calmness to prevent WW3, we wouldn't be anywhere near a world war without Russia's invasion of Ukraine. That he hasn't escalated to nuclear war is due more to the consequences he'd face than to any virtue he might be hiding.
My take is that much of the other things you stated here are reasonable concerns, but praising Russia's leadership is outright insane. It's a shitshow out there even compared to the Western world and that leadership is why. Thus, I diagnose your troubles with the world as a perception problem. Fix your optics then talk about it. But when up is down, war is peace, etc you don't have a viable frame of reference by which you can judge these things.
(Score: 3, Touché) by srobert on Wednesday February 01, @06:09PM (1 child)
Suppose someone showed up here commented,
"Some of my ancestry (European) seems to be quite industrious and productive, the other part of my ancestry (Native American) seems hell-bent on being lazy and feeling entitled." Do you think they'd get a pass on that? I'll fight like hell for your right to say it, but you should think about the racist implications of it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02, @04:13AM
> Suppose someone showed up here commented...
Hmm let me think. I would probably say, what's your motive? Are you buttsore about some masculine weaknees? Are you in fact a tiny pussy that whines and botches instead of taking it on the chin and making it right.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pvanhoof on Wednesday February 01, @06:59PM
Both Chinese (Tsun Tsu) and European (Machiavelli), but also modern European psychology (Goebbels, yes, for teaching us how effective propaganda is) will explain you that leadership skills require alongside compelling others to have strategic skills (propaganda is ~ strategic skills combined with the skill to compel others, at scale).
Helter skelter! What a negative set of spirituality. What would you do after said abortion? Start a new kind of human species? After several hundreds of thousands of years they'll again write books like Tsun Tsu's and Machiavelli's. And again there will be a Spinoza to make definitions to such a degree that we at least can try to make sense of it all.
Your communication skills are just fine. And good luck to you and your engineering adventures.
(Score: 3, Informative) by pdfernhout on Sunday February 05, @02:48PM
On the interplay of Tribal (mainly meshwork, gift, subsistence?) and European (mainly hierarchical, feudal, planned, exchange?) ideas:
http://netbase.org/delanda/meshwork.htm [netbase.org]
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Age_Ahead [wikipedia.org]
"Dark Age Ahead is a 2004 book by Jane Jacobs describing what she sees as the decay of five key "pillars" in "North America": community and family, higher education, science and technology, taxes and government responsiveness to citizen's needs, and self-regulation by the learned professions. She argues that this decay threatens to create a Dark Age unless the trends are reversed. Jacobs characterizes a Dark Age as a "mass amnesia" where even the memory of what was lost is lost."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse [wikipedia.org]
"Societal collapse (also known as civilizational collapse) is the fall of a complex human society characterized by the loss of cultural identity and of socioeconomic complexity, the downfall of government, and the rise of violence. Possible causes of a societal collapse include natural catastrophe, war, pestilence, famine, economic collapse, population decline, and mass migration. A collapsed society may revert to a more primitive state, be absorbed into a stronger society, or completely disappear. Virtually all civilizations have suffered such a fate, regardless of their size or complexity, but some of them later revived and transformed, such as China, India, and Egypt. However, others never recovered, such as the Western and Eastern Roman Empires, the Maya civilization, and the Easter Island civilization. Societal collapse is generally quick but rarely abrupt."
"Delving into the Six Stages of the Internal Cycle with a Particular Focus on the US Now"
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/delving-six-stages-internal-cycle-particular-focus-us-ray-dalio [linkedin.com]
A simpler perspective on civilizational cycles:
"Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times. (G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain )"
On different perspectives of economics:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
https://web.archive.org/web/20040806183644/http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/mythologyofwealth.htm [archive.org]
"The Market as God"
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/03/the-market-as-god/306397/ [theatlantic.com]
"The Real Economic Parasites"
https://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/08/the-real-economic-parasites/ [counterpunch.org]
Contrast the last three for balance versus these two:
"Parasite Economics: The Free Market Has No Systematic Victims "
https://fee.org/articles/parasite-economics/ [fee.org]
"Planning Through the Market: More Equality Through the Market System"
https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/change/science_market.html [ucsc.edu]
And in general (although, as above, who is a "parasite" is a political issue):
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=economic+parasites [duckduckgo.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasite_load [wikipedia.org]
Ideas for moving forward:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Civilization#New_Tribal_Revolution [wikipedia.org]
"Daniel Quinn coined the term "new tribalism", which appears in Providence, My Ishmael, and, finally, in the most detail, in Beyond Civilization. He often discusses the proliferation of this new tribalism in terms of a New Tribal Revolution, analogous to the Industrial Revolution in that it refers to a gradual, sociocultural period of change and creative outpouring as opposed to a single, violent, political uprising. ... e argues that organizing tribally can start well before any kind of total immersion "back into the wild" and that a new tribal community does not have to look like the old tribal stereotype of "cavemen," since returning immediately to foraging in the natural community is not a viable or even possible solution for the billions of people on Earth today. He consistently phrases the revolution not as a movement to "go back" to some earlier style of living (though he certainly credits the achievements of particular earlier styles of living), but rather, a movement to "go forward" into something new. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Quinn [wikipedia.org]
"Takers and Leavers — "Takers" refers to members of the dominant globalized civilization and its culture, while "Leavers" refers to members of the countless other non-civilized cultures existing both in the past and currently. Quinn later regretted these terms, supposing that "hierarchical" and "tribal," respectively, may be better alternatives."
"The Great Forgetting – widespread historical ignorance regarding "the fact that we [humans] are a biological species in a community of biological species and are not exempt or exemptible from the forces that shape all life on this planet; this also includes our forgetting of the fact that most of human history has been based on an ecologically sound way of life (largely hunting and gathering)"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neotribalism [wikipedia.org]
"Neotribalism, also known as modern tribalism or new tribalism, is a sociological concept which postulates that human beings have evolved to live in tribal society, as opposed to mass society, and thus will naturally form social networks constituting new tribes. "
https://www.cfkurtz.com/confluence/ [cfkurtz.com] (by my wife)
"A path winds its way through a forest. Why does it go the way it goes? Did someone design it? Or was the path made smooth by feet that chose the smoothest path? Maybe some of both? Confluence examines the many ways in which organized, intentional plans (like paths we design) and self-organized, unintentional patterns (like paths that emerge where we walk) intermingle (happen at the same time and place) and interact (influence each other). The book lays out seven “thinking spaces” (like this one) that explore various aspects of the structures and relationships that flow together in our lives."
Examples from my writings/collecting:
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY [youtube.com]
"High Performance Organizations Reading List"
https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance-Organizations-Reading-List [github.com]
"Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism"
https://pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html [pdfernhout.net]
Good luck finding ways to bring together different themes in your own life in a constructive way!
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Wednesday February 01, @06:10AM
Ever since I've tried to grasp exactly what all this "quantum" stuff is about, I've been assuming we almost certainly have it mostly wrong and the theories will drastically change in the future.
If you asked a random passerby on the street "Quantum _____"? they would probably respond "entanglement", yeah.
Because we still have very little idea how the hell it works?
........okay, assuming that this is either A) waaaaay dumbed down to try to get people to understand it, thus probably being extremely misleading, and/or B) the journalist reporting on this really doesn't understand what's going on.
Ah yes, here's the confusion.
What? How is entanglement related to anything other than spacetime?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Wednesday February 01, @01:51PM (7 children)
Something the article doesn't deal with - if we assume that the entire universe is a single wavefunction, then we have to wrap consciousness in there as well. We are not independent observers, but rather a part of the wavefunction...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 01, @05:18PM (6 children)
But then who collapses the wavefunction?
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday February 01, @05:53PM
Exactly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 01, @06:16PM (1 child)
My bad. Sorry.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 01, @07:50PM
Yo momma so fat she collapsed the Universe's wavefunction?
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday February 02, @01:10AM (2 children)
Someone who figures out exactly what is going on, in which case the universe will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02, @01:18AM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02, @04:16AM
Maybe some parts of the wavefunction collapse other parts. Or do they...?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Wednesday February 01, @02:04PM (2 children)
This Universe is a computer process.
Entangled objects behave exactly like typical digital objects sharing same operating memory cell referenced inside their separable structures.
Entanglement itself is indirect existential proof of Universe being computer process, by virtue of Occam. It's the simplest explanation possible.
It's the spacetime itself what is an illusion, illusory dynamism of false ἐνέργεια everyone in Physics is obsessed in, though being just an emergent trait of said computation.
The underlying hardware platform was known to Ancients as Indra's Net [Indrajāla, 因陀羅網 Yīn tuó luówǎng], anchored to Dharmadhātu realm of existence.
Konrad Zuse, a pioneer of computers one hundred years ago, was just a visionary of that network. His artistic paintings visualize his higher insight.
Seek for yourself.
I am totally disinterested in ephemeral structure or funny components of currently running program on this Universal platform, like physicists are. It's only a distraction.
What I am really interested in, is the core instruction set.
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 01, @05:25PM
I suggest you seek out the author Jed McKenna. There is only consciousness (Brahma) and appearance (Atman), which beguiles with illusion (Maya). The fundamental error is to think appearance is reality, i.e. the outside is more real than the inside, whereas there is only inside. Everything else is illusion.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday February 02, @02:02PM
The obvious rebuttal - what is a computer? It's not hard to set up the conditions for computing, but that doesn't mean it's a computer in the sense of something is dependent on the results of what gets computed.
But there is a subtler problem. Even recently, there have been multiple stories about the arrow of time - which is essential for something to be a computing process, but basic quantum mechanics doesn't have a preferred time direction - and really while time is a different sort of coordinate than spatial coordinates (due to the shape metric that we see), there's no reason to expect it to correlate to a time dimension in any system it could happen to be embedded in which might not even have a time dimension at all!
Because you have some other way to study the Universal platform? That's assuming it's unique too.
(Score: 3, Funny) by pvanhoof on Wednesday February 01, @05:58PM (2 children)
Yes, sure, makes sense.
Yes, sure, makes sense. They annihilate each other because the two wave are each other's exact opposite, so it's like -1 +1 = 0.
Yes, sure, makes sense. Why is this even considered a strange thing?
But two identical wave patterns shifted by half an oscillation cycle that then annihilate has nothing to do with two other competing realities. The latter are two competing realities. The other two competing realities are other two competing realities.
No, it doesn't. Two identical wave patterns shifted by half an oscillation cycle that then annihilate are two identical wave patterns shifted by half an oscillation cycle that then annihilate. This has nothing to do with two cats in the neighborhood.
It could be strange and morbid to make the two cats oscillate (shifted by half an oscillation cycle) to such a degree that waves in their biological matter would produce waves that annihilate. Although I think you could do this experiment without causing much harm to our feline friends.
But other than that, I don't see any comparison with the waves here.
The only way you might get the neighbor's drift is if the feline bodily matter would be oscillating at such a frequency and etc. that it causes a certain pitch or tone that annoys him so much that after a while he indeed gets a drift.
Because in the quantum world, electrons, neutrons, etc don't get annoyed by the noise that cats make.
I stopped there. Whoever wrote this is trying to mix in cats from I suppose Schrödinger in incorrect and incoherent ways. His cat explanation has nothing to do with entanglement.
(Score: 2, Touché) by nostyle on Wednesday February 01, @06:24PM (1 child)
Entangled cats are generally detectable by the hideous shrieking they emit.
(Score: 2) by pvanhoof on Wednesday February 01, @06:33PM
Now I'm just afraid that styropyro [youtube.com] will try to entangle cats with one of his lasers to test your statement about them being detectable ...
styropyro, if you are reading here: no.