Adam Tentacles (Pre) @pre@boing.world

The #climate will come down to some kind of giga-scale geo-engineering in the end. We are showing little sign of fixing the thing in a timely manner so emergency measures will be all that's left.

Even if it worked, fixing the climate would leave you with this giant legal responsibility though. If you engineer the weather there's going to be someone worse off and they are going to sue.

Coz of the naive human Copenhagen interpretation of ethics (when you interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it) trying to engineer the climate to fix it will be seen as more culpable than the industry that accidentally broke it.

Anyway, cool new Kurzgesagt video on one possible geoengineering route.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSu5sXmsur4

Show still ends up too long. Needs to be more snappy. Least the sound was good this time. Ideally want it more ranty, more pointed and opinionated. Just have to keep practicing I suppose.

Weird not having quote-toots. This is sort of like that though, right?

https://boing.world/@wordcloudtarot/105103023846867678

I was alarmed recently to discover that my mother has always thought of time spent reading books as time which was wasted, when she should be doing other things!

Another dimension in which my mother and I are complete opposites. I'm more like, "why am I at this party when I don't even know what happens in chapter six?"

About the only way you can spend time better than reading is if you're writing your notes about your reading.

Anyone else thinking reading during lockdown is wasting time: No.

Loads of great physics shorts around lately. Must be the season for it.

I am expanding, for sure, but it's not because of the red-shift of the universe.

From Veritasium, "Do you expand with the universe"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DrBQg_n2Uo

More good stuff from The Juice Media's "Honest" Government.

Or is it just more psy-ops?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SoJI_KNV0Q

Rory Bremner's impression of the Muppets singing John Lennon's "Imagine" to the tune of "The Muppet Show"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbzBw3Uiu48

You can manage these things well, or you can manage them badly.

If you manage them well, you get to be New Zealand or China or Korea and have few cases because you saw it early, masked up quick, shut down massive public events, shut down international travel, started an efficient public test and trace system, and your people do as they're told when you tell them to stay home for a bit coz there's a virus about.

If you manage it badly you deny it's happening, fail to stop international travel, fail to mask up, have a fucking horse-race with a quarter of a million spectators, push your hospital overflow into nursing homes FFS, fail to test people, waste money paying incompetent private companies who fail do test or trace anyone, and in the end have to lock down because it's the only weapon you have left.

Then you do that too late.

The UK was probably very early hit, being a global hub. A few cases were likely here before they were really even noticed in China. Our only chance was to move fast and hard.

China and Korea knew what to do because they had Sars1 and Swine Flu. New Zealand is pretty isolated and probably didn't get a case until it was clear how bad it could go.

Sweden banned public events over 50 people, added restraints to restaurants and pubs, generally do what they're told, did make the mistake of sending patents into old folks homes, but had a good test and trace system and isn't as crowded as our island.

I think we did terribly at wave 1, and are about to do worse at wave 2.

Lockdown can buy you time, but is only useful if you actually use the time to do something about public events, international travel, test and trace, mask wearing, public compliance, support for business.

I can't see our government doing anything other than making things worse in any time bought.

It sounds like along way from $13,000 dollars to $20,000 but it's less than 50% increase and #bitcoin did 50% increase in the last 200 days.

New highs for BTC in 2021 I reckon. I wouldn't even be shocked if it was before that.

17 terminal windows open and being used. Everything seems to be going okay so far.

#coderlife

Here's that PBS video teased last week about determinism in the quantum block universe.

"God does not play dice" is what Einstein said, though I say the same thing as "The universe is Turing Complete and computable".

So is the future determined?

No silly, there isn't one future.

The many futures are determined though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JCRDaa3ehk

New #discordian #mask featuring the sacred chao should mix things up a bit.

Upgraded the software running here to V3.2.1 I think, though it's still showing as V3.2.0 on the about/front-pages etc.

But the big instance at .social is also doing that, so I guess maybe they forgot to bump the version number or something?

Anyway, we are on master, bleeding edge unstable latest-version.

Due to recent events in the Fediverse and beyond it's become my duty to explain why I tend to think the universe is turning-complete and computable and therefore many worlds is true and yet the universe is finite.

In the form of a song.

Maybe it's because I'm a programmer,
that I see many-worlds as true
maybe it's because I'm a programmer,
but interference patterns are enough of a clue
When I think about it physically,
collapsing waveforms can't be real,
they're impossibly discontinuous
so acausality is the flaw in it's heel.

Maybe it's because I'm a programmer,
I think universal size is bound*,
maybe it's because I'm a programmer,
that infinity is just too much to stand
When I think about it logically,
our physics is Turing-Complete,
and if the whole universe is computable
then it can't be infinite.

Maybe it's because I'm a programmer,
That I think sentience is software
My consciousness is substrate independent
running it's functions is what makes me aware
When I meditate upon it deeply,
Interacting subsystems describes my mind,
and if it's because I'm a programmer,
my uploaded brain will be similarly inclined.

Maybe it's because I'm a programmer,
I see there's no such thing as fate
Whatever you think your chosen destiny,
you're just ignoring all the alternate states
But when I plan my life and my strategy,
it don't really change my ways, 'coz
in the end the math of random probability
is just the same as worlds out of phase.

* - Well, really unbounded but finite, but that won't fit in the rhythm or rhyme

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pwz7DoX8bak

Enjoyed this PBS video about the passage of time. It's explanation of why it's really pretty likely that there is in fact no such thing as the passage of time was pretty intuitive and nicely illustrated.

The thing me and a friend were arguing about the other day is teased at the end for a future video: Does time flow in the multiverse? Is the multiverse deterministic?

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

Interesting COVID-risk calculator tells me that band-practice indoors for three hours in London with four people at current infection-rates is a about a 2% chance of being infected with the virus.

https://www.microcovid.org/

My phone's started doing random little haptic buzzes at times when apparently nothing has happened.

Really short haptic-buzz, shorter than like a message-arrived buzz.

Pretty annoying. Think it might be some app buzzing as it falls asleep. The times aren't entirely random, and do seem to concentrate on the 20 minutes or so after it's put down.

I agree with every word Sabine Hossenfelder
says here while still not agreeing with the headline, "You don't have free will".

I don't really understand why people think free will doesn't exist just because determinism is true.

Choosing between different extrapolations of future worlds is, roughly speaking, the algorithm my brain uses to determine what to do.

So that's my will. It is made out of these systems to imagine possible future worlds and select between them. It works deterministically.

And obviously there are some times in which it is more constrained than others. It's more constrained if I'm bound or imprisoned. I am sometimes more or less able to execute what would otherwise be my more-freely chosen will.

As she says it's coz we're just disagreeing what "free will" means really.

I don't really see the point of it meaning something that can't exist, like some kind of magic ghost in the head.

So to me just it's a phrase referring to the amount of constraint on the decision algorithms which are a part of me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpU_e3jh_FY