mikhailfranco

A new physics Theory of Everything, based on quantum information.

There's a summary talk slideshow, a paper calculating the Fine Structure Constant α within current experimental bounds, and a large compendium of further conjectures.

https://alexwg.org/publications/ChainTheoryTalk.pdf

https://alexwg.org/publications/ChainTheoryAlpha.pdf

https://alexwg.org/publications/ChainTheoryCompendium.pdf

Interesting recent work by Emad Mostaque...

https://emad-ii.github.io/chirality-standard-model/

With nice presentation, paper and proofs.

The name Halstatt seems to mean Salt Town.

Can't read the article behind a paywall.

But checkout https://thegrid.ai/

The process and presentation are also noteworthy.

The web page has a dynamic explanation based on sophistication of the reader.

The physics problem was cast as a question exploring consistent mathematical algebras, symmetries and relations.

AI was used to search a large space of possible solutions under physical constraints. AI results are cross-checked using several different methods. All AI notebooks and results are published for others to check independently.

The actual paper is here:

https://emad-ii.github.io/chirality-standard-model/paper.pdf

The blog post was not written by Terry Tao :)

Similar argument expanded to all product design:

Why Nothing Looks Cool Anymore | Design Theory

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgjXjPP_p3s

Saudi Arabia changed the weekend from Thursday-Friday to Friday-Saturday about 10 years ago. The existing week only had 3 days' overlap with western businesses, and the smaller Gulf states had already changed.

The weekend discussion had been percolating quietly inside the Shura Council (royal advisors) for several years, but when the King decided, it was only announced with about 10 days advance notice!

Now UAE has now moved to Saturday-Sunday weekend, but practically it is 2.5 days, starting at noon prayers on Friday.

Lake Mead (1,040ft) is 5ft above 70% power impairment (1,035ft).

But if you look at the last 2 years, this date is typically the minimum for the year. So it seems unlikely to hit zombie power pool this year.

https://mead.uslakes.info/Level/

Now we have a Super El Nino starting, which should bring higher than usual rainfall to the Colorado Basin in the fall and winter. So, in principle, next year might not be as bad as this year, and power pool limits are postponed for 2 or more years out.

Multi-year web traffic statistics for HN?

English people learning Chinese are told that goodbye is zài jiàn ('again see'), only to find that most Chinese informally say bái bái ('bye-bye').

I think the basis of this is the same as WFH, which has not been mentioned in the article or the comments: insurance, mostly on probabilities of fire and injury.

Their infamous editorial Drowning in oil (4 March 1999) bottom-ticked the oil price.

Counter argument from Matt Ridley:

Why the flames of Britain's wildfires have been fanned by the Green agenda as much as the weather

https://www.dailymail.com/debate/article-16017973/Britains-w...

Good inside analysis from Martin Shkreli:

Martin Shkreli Breaks Down the Collapse of Situational Awareness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJdgh9eEZvw

Also Nicolas Gisin on Curt's podcast:

Nicolas Gisin: Time, Superdeterminism, & Quantum Gravity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcHzgy0I6gk

We should also mention Nicolas Gisin.

One of his mantras is Time is real; Real numbers are not. He conceives of real numbers resulting from processes (approximations, relaxations, computable calculations) that unfold over time. So there is a Heisenbergish uncertainty principle of observable precision and elapsed time.

Selected papers:

Indeterminism in Physics, Classical Chaos and Bohmian Mechanics. Are Real Numbers Really Real?

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.06824

Real Numbers are the Hidden Variables of Classical Mechanics

https://philarchive.org/rec/GISRNA

Time Really Passes, Science Can’t Deny That

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.01497v1

Popular articles:

Real numbers don’t cut it in the real world, this physicist argues

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/real-numbers-physics-fre...

Lotteries are pay-to-play and always have a negative expected return (like the fairground). Participation (like second marriages), is always the triumph of hope over experience and rationality. People are just willingly paying a tax to have a hopeful thought, or in the fairground, to have a fun experience (allegedly).

National lotteries are generally trustworthy, but the mechanism for you to get a real ticket might not be (street hawkers, fake web sites).

The problem is believing the fairness of the toss.

The odds with a fair toss are obviously stacked to prefer taking the gamble, hence inducing all credulous rationalists to take the bet.

It is rare for anyone to give away £50k, and even rarer to give away £1m. There is no realistic scenario where such a bet would be offered ... Almost all of us have been to the fairground (yes, the analysis is very different when you have to pay to play).

Most people instinctively reason that the actual probability of a win is close to 0: exactly zero in a one shot game, but perhaps some epsilon in a repeated trial in the fairground, so as to advertise a verified previous winner.

[I am willing to bet that fairground stalls give a giant cuddly toy to an employee to walk around the ground, or perhaps throw a game to an employee in front of a crowd of onlookers, to suggest that there is an epsilon of hope, even when there is none in reality].

Everyone's prior instincts should be conditioned to take the smaller 'sure' reward, since that requires strictly fewer trustworthy steps to success (one payout, compared to both a non-zero toss and a payout).

The irony is that in a thought experiment, no game is actually played, so the expected return is always what the wise fair-goer assumed - precisely zero.

How many are available on Safari? ($43/month)

and the Earth's orbital diameter is 10^3 light seconds

so the Earth's orbital velocity is 10^-4 c

Windows 11 seems to feign forgetting your PIN password to force a restart.

A long-form critique of Suno by a musician/producer:

Suno, AI Music, and the Bad Future | Adam Neely

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8dcFhF0Dlk

A detailed philosophical discussion of his point=of-view:

AI Music is Not Music - Adam Neely | Alex O'Connor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sbv0iX_EyLM

Consumption taxes and sin taxes.

Consumption tax is sales/VAT tax excluding some necessities and capital goods. Yes, there are some awkward edge cases: in the UK the exclusions were food and children's clothes, which leads to battles over prepared cold food (e.g. sandwich), takeaway and restaurant dining.

Sin taxes are obviously things society might want to discourage, mainly for health reasons, like alcohol and smoking, but also gambling and externalities, like pollution. Some might stretch that to all carbon emissions to moderate climate change.

Don't tax things you want: working / income and investment / capital gains.

Inheritance tax is doubly wrong because the wealth is already taxed, and death is unavoidable (but emigration is possible, which might help in some countries).

Also The Shock of the New with Robert Hughes.