Linklist: June 17, 2023
Links (links with excerpts below):
highly recommended: 1, 2, 8, 10, 13
Heisenberg on Helgoland (2017)
“Right of boom”: Meet the experts who respond to nuclear disaster
Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a child in the backseat is a horrifying mistake. Is it a crime? (2009)
Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness Contest: Psychedelic Cryptography (Innovate)
⚛️ Heisenberg on Helgoland (2017)
"The moonlight illuminated the path in front of him, but there were few other lights on the tiny island. This was what he liked best about it though. Very few people, very few lights, almost nobody to talk with, but plenty of opportunities for walking and swimming in the cool water. And the air, the air. Crystal clear and seemingly designed for clearing both his nasal passages and the cobwebs in his mind. His hay fever seemed almost gone already. He could read Goethe and think about physics as much as he wanted. When he arrived at the inn he greeted the innkeeper, who when he arrived four days ago, had seemed horrified at his swollen face. She had asked him if he had been in a brawl. Sadly, political brawls and beatings were not uncommon in Germany. After a light meal of sausages and potato dumplings, he retired to his room.
In Munich, for his doctoral dissertation, he had chosen an uncontroversial topic in fluid dynamics. The final exam had been a fiasco though, and he wrinkled his brow as he thought about it. One of the examiners, Wilhelm Wien, had asked him a question from elementary physics about the resolving power of a microscope. He had forgotten the formula and had gotten hopelessly entangled in trying to work it out. He was trying to solve problems at the forefront of quantum theory; why was he being asked to answer questions that were better suited to a second-rate undergraduate? Wien would not let up, however, and Sommerfeld finally had to step in, assuring the examiners that his student was certainly promising enough to be awarded his doctorate. He had still barely escaped with a passing grade. It still rankled.
He had packed his bags and gone straight to Göttingen from Munich. It was partly to start off on quantum theory right away, but also to escape the depressing pessimism that gripped German society. The past year had seen unprecedented inflation cripple his beloved country. At its height an American dollar had been worth a trillion marks. People were carrying entire carts full of money to trade for a load of bread or for some potatoes. They were using it as insulating wallpaper in their homes. Is this what his country really deserved? As he pondered the situation his eyes burned with anger. If nothing else, he would show them that Germany was still not lacking in scientific talent."
"In the field of mathematics one moves from a set of assumed truths (axioms) to a set of derived truths (theorems), proved by the logical consequences of the axioms and their interactions. This is the logical basis of mathematics. And this foundation suggests that math is a science based on the discovery of truths that already exist but were simply previously unknown. In this sense, the goal of the field of mathematics simply is.
Or is it? Despite such high ideals, mathematical thought occurs within historical and cultural contexts; moreover, mathematical results and their applications can have cultural consequences. Contrary to protestations of some students, mathematics does indeed have implications in the “real world.”
The history of mathematical thought and thinking considers both the history of mathematics itself and the history of motivations driving mathematicians at different times. Alma Steingart provides a history of mathematical thinking over the twentieth century: a compelling review of the increased abstraction of mathematical thought as well as its embrace of deep exploration of alternative axiomatic systems."
"In the mid-thirteenth century, William of Rubruck, a Flemish Franciscan friar, travelled to the Mongol Empire. The main purpose of his visit was to undertake missionary work, but he also wrote a colourful account of his travels for King Louis IX of France, in which he described the region and its inhabitants. Among his many curious observations, he was astonished to find that the local physicians, who were generally skilled and knowledgeable, did not examine their patients’ urine.1
To the modern reader, this seems an odd detail to highlight, but William came from a world in which uroscopy — the examination of urine for the purpose of diagnosis and prognosis — was one of a doctor’s most valued skills. The link was so strong that the urine flask became the identifying symbol of the late medieval physician, who was often shown examining a sample. The symbol was used both to celebrate illustrious figures such as St Cosmas (the patron saint of medicine), and to punish charlatans like Roger Clerk of Wandsworth, who in 1382 was found guilty of selling useless “cures” to the poor, despite having no medical knowledge or training. He was led to the pillory on a saddleless horse, “a urinal being hung before him, and another urinal on his back”, in mockery of his malpractice. Satirists jeered at practitioners for their obsession with such unsavoury matter (Petrarch memorably claimed that the papal physicians were pale and emaciated because they “rummage around in sloshing chamber pots”), and comic images of monkey-physicians examining urine flasks are found in both manuscript marginalia and in early fourteenth-century stained glass at York Minster.2
Medieval physicians were interested in their patients’ urine because it provided immediate insight into the humoral state of the body. Before William Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood in the seventeenth century, physicians believed that the principal purpose of digestion was to convert food into blood, which was constantly being used up, and thus had to be replenished every night while the patient slept. Digestion was a complex, multi-stage process, and it led to various waste products like urine, which bore traces of the organs involved in its production (including the stomach, intestines, liver, and kidneys). Consequently, if the body was too hot or too cold, or if its humours were out of balance, this would be apparent from the urine it produced.3"
"It’s a warm spring day in downtown Indianapolis. An emergency operations team is delivering its situation report, one of several coming in from county governments and field teams responding to the chaos after a 10-kiloton nuclear device exploded in the city, just an hour earlier. Radiation, fires, and limited capacity at area hospitals and shelters complicate treatment of the wounded and communication with a panicked public.
One team leader relays a request from a heavily damaged adjacent county to help house survivors of the nuclear blast. Field teams report back on the radiation doses they’ve received while navigating a pickup truck through the city to respond to people who need assistance.
“We didn’t wreck anything,” one driver says.
“Show-offs!” yells another.
These reports are part of a three-hour drill I’m observing inside a large conference room at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Indianapolis. The jurisdictions used in the exercise are fictional, with sci-fi county names like Endor, Caprica, and Druidia. The truck missions are run on a video-game-like simulator, designed by a former Energy Department scientist who, among other things, assessed radiological impacts in Japan during the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster."
"The demonstration began on the afternoon of May 21, 1946, at a secret laboratory tucked into a canyon some three miles from Los Alamos, New Mexico, the birthplace of the atom bomb. Louis Slotin, a Canadian physicist, was showing his colleagues how to bring the exposed core of a nuclear weapon nearly to the point of criticality, a tricky operation known as “tickling the dragon’s tail.” The core, sitting by itself on a squat table, looked unremarkable—a hemisphere of dull metal with a nub of plutonium sticking out of its center, the whole thing warm to the touch because of its radioactivity. It had been quickly molded into shape after the bombing of Nagasaki, to be used in another attack on Japan, then reallocated when it turned out not to be needed for the war effort. At that time, Slotin was perhaps the world’s foremost expert on handling dangerous quantities of plutonium. He had helped assemble the first atomic weapon, barely a year earlier, and a contemporary photograph shows him standing beside its innards with his shirt unbuttoned and sunglasses on, cool and collected. Back then, the bomb was a handmade, artisanal product."
"In 2021, a team led by Lee Cronin of the University of Glasgow in Scotland and Sara Walker of Arizona State University proposed a very general way to identify molecules made by living systems — even those using unfamiliar chemistries. Their method, they said, simply assumes that alien life forms will produce molecules with a chemical complexity similar to that of life on Earth.
Called assembly theory, the idea underpinning the pair’s strategy has even grander aims. As laid out in a recent series of publications, it attempts to explain why apparently unlikely things, such as you and me, even exist at all. And it seeks that explanation not, in the usual manner of physics, in timeless physical laws, but in a process that imbues objects with histories and memories of what came before them. It even seeks to answer a question that has perplexed scientists and philosophers for millennia: What is life, anyway?
Not surprisingly, such an ambitious project has aroused skepticism. Its proponents have not yet made clear how it might be tested in the lab. And some scientists wonder whether assembly theory can even deliver on its more modest promises to distinguish life from nonlife, and to think about complexity in a new way."
🚗 Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a child in the backseat is a horrifying mistake. Is it a crime? (2009)
"He made the decision on the law, he says, “but I also have some idea what it feels like, what it does to you, when you lose a child.”
So, after his son’s death, Andrew Culpepper was sent home to try to live the remainder of his life with what he had done. After his son’s death, Miles Harrison was charged with a felony. His mug shot was in the newspapers and on TV, with the haunted, hunted, naked-eyed look these parents always have, up against the wall. He hired an expensive lawyer. Over months, both sides developed their cases. Witnesses were assembled and interviewed. Efforts at a plea bargain failed. The trial began.
The court heard how Harrison and his wife had been a late-40s childless couple desperately wanting to become parents, and how they’d made three visits to Moscow, setting out each time on a grueling 10-hour railroad trip to the Russian hinterlands to find and adopt their 18-month-old son from an orphanage bed he’d seldom been allowed to leave. Harrison’s next-door neighbor testified how she’d watched the new father giddily frolic on the lawn with his son. Harrison’s sister testified how she had worked with her brother and sister-in-law for weeks to find the ideal day-care situation for the boy, who would need special attention to recover from the effects of his painfully austere beginnings.
From the witness stand, Harrison’s mother defiantly declared that Miles had been a fine son and a perfect, loving father. Distraught but composed, Harrison’s wife, Carol, described the phone call that her husband had made to her right after he’d discovered what he’d done, the phone call she’d fielded on a bus coming home from work. It was, she said, unintelligible screaming.
In the end, Fairfax County Circuit Court Judge R. Terence Ney found Miles Harrison not guilty. There was no crime, he said, citing the identical legal reasons Earle Mobley had cited for not charging Andrew Culpepper in the first place.
At the verdict, Harrison gasped, sobbed, then tried to stand, but the man had nothing left. His legs buckled, and he crashed pathetically to his knees."
"In darkness, evolution proceeds in a symphony of blue light. This dominance of bioluminescence, however, does not mean that the deep sea is a constant riot of light. Producing light is expensive, a reaction of molecules—luciferin and luciferase—that are a luxury in a place where food is scarce. It is also risky. To turn a light on is to risk drawing unwanted attention, and there are always hungry eyes scouring the darkness for a glimmer of opportunity.
“The deep-sea isn’t an amazing collection of light,” Johnsen says. “It’s an amazing collection of potential light.”
So why do Taningia invest so much energy, place themselves at so much risk, by illuminating the largest photophores in the animal kingdom?"
"The main result of this exercise was that only three submissions seemed to have any promising psychedelic cryptography effects. The three pieces that win stood out head and shoulders (and trunk and even knees and ankles) above the rest. It turns out that in order to decode these pieces you do require a substantial level of tracers, so only members of the committee who had a high enough level of visual effects were able to see the encoded messages. Some of the members of the panel reported that once you saw the messages during the state you could then also see them sober as well by using the right attentional tricks. But at least two members of the panel who reported seeing the messages while on mushrooms or ayahuasca were unable to then see them sober after the fact no matter how much they tried.
The three winners indeed are using the first classic PsyCrypto “encoding method” described in “How to secretly communicate with people on LSD”."
"On June 6, 2023, at 7:13am, we fried our last whole egg on station (over medium, salt and pepper):
And that’s it until November! Another milestone, another reminder of the unique circumstances of South Pole Winter."
"To understand what happens in higher dimensions we need to compute the radius of the inner sphere in terms of the dimension. The radius of the inner sphere is equal to the length of the diagonal of the cube minus the radius of the spheres at the corners. See Figure 3. The latter value is always 1/2, regardless of the dimension. We can compute the length of the diagonal as [some formula]
Thus the radius of the inner sphere is (d^0.5)/2 - 0.5. Notice that the radius of the inner sphere is increasing with the dimension!
In dimensions two and three, the sphere is strictly inside the cube, as we’ve seen in the figures above. However in four dimensions something very interesting happens. The radius of the inner sphere is exactly 1/2, which is just large enough for the inner sphere to touch the sides of the cube! In five dimensions, the radius of the inner sphere is 0.618034, and the sphere starts poking outside of the cube! By ten dimensions, the radius is 1.08114 and the sphere is poking very far outside of the cube!"
"Obituaries, in distilling a lifespan to a few hundred words, mirror contemporary values; they write and reinforce scripts for what constitutes a “good life.” Language models trained to recognize and parrot the linguistic patterns of old obituaries are more likely to reproduce those scripts, inadvertently projecting forward the values of the past. While technology may enable broader representation of everyday people in obituary pages, the specific technology of LLMs risks reproducing the biases that have emerged in obituaries—like the veneration work and the single-minded attention to “notable” achievements. Before we embrace the age of auto-obituaries, we must think more deeply about the submerged political content of the form itself.
Contemporary obituaries in the United States bear limited resemblance to their ancestors. Benjamin Franklin’s death in 1790 prompted the Pennsylvania Gazette to publish no more than a cursory death notice and short doctor’s note grieving its editor. Franklin’s obituary in another paper, the Federal Gazette, ran a lengthy sixty-nine words. He was, the paper noted, a “FRIEND OF MANKIND” whose “singular abilities and virtues” had long been proven to the world. Franklin was survived by two children, but this did not seem to warrant attention. Neither did his invention of the lightning rod, bifocal glasses, or his co-authorship of our founding documents. It was, in the editors’ view, “impossible for a newspaper to increase his fame” and therefore not worth a longer treatment."
"Ancient Astronaut Theorists (AATs for short) have spent fifty years arguing that ancient Hindu texts present firsthand reports of prehistoric nuclear explosions. I have discussed and debunked the case of nuclear weapons in my eBook Ancient Atom Bombs, where a fuller discussion of the claim can be found. However, a major problem with efforts at debunking AATs' claims is that most scientific debunkers focus on, logically enough, the science involved since the most prominent debunkers tend to be physicists, evolutionary biologists, astronomers, etc. Fewer are experts in history and the humanities, which AATs have exploited, basing much of their evidence on ancient texts and artwork that hard scientists are not always able to effectively debunk on the merits of individual cases. Even an archaeologist, by dint of specialization, may not have the broad cross-cultural knowledge to spot the mistake in a quotation from a sacred text from an unfamiliar culture or time period.
Here, I’d like to focus on a problem with texts used by the AATs to show exactly how a false belief arises, how it is sustained, and how a mixture of ignorance, half-truths, and misrepresentation creates fanciful new extraterrestrial “texts” out of very different originals. Our sample text will be an alleged "quotation" from the Mahabharata "reporting" on a nuclear explosion and its aftermath."