So this is what $2 million gets us: a universe in which sequins shimmer intelligently.

On the other hand, Elisabeth Vincentelli of the New York Post called it “overhyped” and, more incendiously, “a steaming pile of literary dung.”

There are long stretches (like a couple hundred pages about a child choking on a cough drop which devolves into a mind-and-time-bending journey through history, the future, extra dimensions, the spirit realm and, mostly, Moore’s remarkable imagination) that play out like pure, mainline literary fireworks.

misconceptions about pilot-wave theories

eka-mark:

Pilot-wave theories, the best-known and -studied of which is the de Broglie-Bohm theory, are physical theories intended to provide a realist microphysics that yields the same statistical predictions as standard quantum theory. Misconceptions and outright false claims about pilot-wave theories abound, so I’ve paired some of these claims with references to debunk them here.

Supposedly, pilot-wave theories

• are ruled out by Bell’s theorem [0] (particularly ironic as Bell was a vocal proponent of such theories and came up with his theorem to defend them)
• can’t be extended to treat relativistic (spinning or otherwise) particles [1]
• can’t be extended to (relativistic or otherwise) field theories [2, 3, 4]
• can’t make novel, testable predictions that differ from standard quantum theory [5]
• are necessarily “one-world” rather than “many-worlds” theories [6]
• describe quantum systems in terms of trajectories that are fundamentally unobservable [7]
• don’t help us calculate anything we can’t just as easily get from standard quantum theory [8, section 4.2]
• yield no insight into the Born rule  [9, 10, 11]
• aren’t actually used by researchers in practice [12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19]
  

eka-mark:

The fact that fluid systems can behave in a large number of qualitatively different ways is reflected in the large number of dimensionless quantities used to characterize them.

And they’re all* named after people instead of what the mean

I’ve always wondered why this was the case, since it seems so bad for communication/understanding.  Maybe a trend got started and then kept going once fluid dynamicists noticed this was a promising way to make their mark on the field’s history?

*(almost)

Something cool I found out about in that Agent Foundations conversation was this paper on the “speed prior,” which is like Solomonoff but with probabilities inversely proportional to the time it takes to compute things.  Does away with uncomputability issues, and you can get some “excellent” (the authors’ word) bounds for it.  (Don’t really feel qualified to evaluate the paper, plus I just haven’t looked at it in much detail, but it seems cool)

femmenietzsche:

kontextmaschine:

Hey does NYC still have that magazine baseball league where High Times is the Bonghitters?

Yep:

The slugging stoners, as they’re also known, went on to win 11-4. They never trailed and never seem bothered. The highlight came in the bottom of the sixth, when Big D, who’s in his 21st season as a Bonghitter, ripped a standup triple to the gap in right center. (Big D, like many players, preferred not to give his name, because it’s still against federal law to smoke marijuana.) The victory brought the team’s record to 19-1 for the season and secured them the top seed in the New York Media Softball League (NYMSL) playoffs. After the game, players gathered on the infield, as they always do, to sing The Ol’ Bong Game: “So it’s root, root, root for the stoned team/Everybody get high.”

Back in the city, the Bonghitters remain an industry powerhouse. They’re the defending league champions after defeating the Journal in last fall’s final. And they’ve been blazing through opponents since forming in 1991. This season the Bonghitters have downed all six of the other official members of the NYMSL—Chartbeat, Institutional Investor, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, WNYC, and the Bullets, formed by alums of DC Comics—plus challengers including Vanity Fair, BuzzFeed, Gawker, Vice, the Paris Review, and New York magazine.

As the sun sets, Agueli cradles a beer in his mitt. “The thing about us is, if we catch the ball we win,” he says, through a haze of smoke. “And we always catch the ball.” Deep.

I find it quite satisfying that they keep creaming like Buzzfeed and NY Mag.

(via dagny-hashtaggart)

Since I seem to be relatively in-touch with dream memories at the moment, here are a few bits I want to note down:

For some reason, several recent dreams have riffed on the weird stoner house I lived in all the way back in 2010-11.  Similar “vibe” to the reenroll-in-college dreams.  I move into some maze-like, dusty, dimly lit catacomb in Portland.  In one it was claustrophobic and cave-like with several below-ground floors and carpets covering not only the floor but the walls; in another, it’s vast with big decrepit rooms, high ceilings, ridden with cobwebs, no basement but just one floor that seemed to go on forever.

A dream clearly from the same template as the “Michel Foucault’s sex museum” one: in both, a (real-world) transgressive figure – in this case, Angela Carter (inspired specifically by “Infernal Desire Machines”) – had designed a building as a curated “artistic experience,” with a succession of floors beneath the ground level.  You could choose how low to descend, and each level of physical descent corresponded to a step into stranger and more transgressive things.  I don’t think I went below the ground floor of Foucault’s museum, but with Carter’s structure (a bare concrete tunnel that wound around in a descending spiral) I actually had to go to the bottom to retrieve something that had been left there (it was a very practical thing, getting a laptop a friend had forgotten or something).  I wasn’t too bothered by this, since I honestly enjoyed the experience of walking along this tunnel encountering creepy otherworldly people (actors?) who would whisper cryptic psychosexual things to me and the like.

Frantic distraught rushing around in some sort of crisis/disaster (?) situation, inside a building that was a … complex of mens’ bathrooms?  There were halls, but every room they connected was a bathroom.  Some were pretty large, felt like locker rooms.  I was somehow an outsider there, I had something gravely important to do, and I was running and pushing my way through droves of guys who seemed also to be distraught and intent, but not for the same reason.  It wasn’t that everyone needed to use the bathrooms, which in fact went mostly unused, but whatever was happening there was in some way connected to them.  The bathrooms were filthy, all kinds of bodily fluids and waste everywhere.  (I suspect this dream was the result of my bladder being really full during the night :P)

Moving in to something resembling a university dorm.  This wasn’t one of the “shameful return to college” dreams – it wasn’t clear where I was, but there was a good reason to be there.  The dorms were laid out in a branching structure, where you’d pass through a door from the hall into a big antechamber with a huge number of side-doors, and one of those would lead to your actual room, which was big but full of beds, with six or eight people to a room.  The rooms were single-gender but the whole dorm was mixed, and I remember this mad rush trying to find my room among the many branches in a throng of many people, confusing a female room for my own, trying to push my way through a bunch of girls who seemed mildly creeped out.  There was an exaggerated gender differentiation in the dorm population – all the guys seemed like stereotypical frat boys, all the girls seemed like stereotypical sorority girls.  My room specifically was (except for me) composed of these really good-looking, socially sharp “finance bros,” who’d all worked on Wall Street before.  After fumbling around for conversation topics with the guy in the bed next to me, I hit upon some quality of myself that impressed him (math background could be lucrative?), and after that I hoped he’d become something like a friend, and help guide me through all the confusion.  Everything was glistening and expensive-looking, as exemplified by the new MacBooks the school had given everyone, their logos glowing in the dorm room at night.

A big party at my old college, and people are driving to and from somewhere else.  Everyone exuded party cheer but there was an atmosphere, for me, of both wariness and dissolution.  The car which was going to take me, among others, somewhere else, pulled up to the curb and I got in and rode for a bit and then time skipped back and the same sequence of events happened again, and again.  I could still choose my own actions, and I tried to explain what was happening, but it was hard and everyone kept ushering me along to the car with their drunken smiles.  Finally, on one loop, I brought this up in the car itself, and the guy in the other passenger seat seemed curious and started asking me questions about it.  I hoped he could help.

Looking at the above, strange buildings seem to be a running thread.  If you expand the category to “strange experiences navigating space,” it’s all over my dreams – many dreams about trains that don’t go where I expect, to distant wilderness or to neighboring counties I’d never heard of, and train stations and airports that contain multitudes.

nostalgebraist:

Really curious if I’ll have a Twin Peaks nightmare after this episode, the way I did after both of the last two episodes

TBH I’m kinda enjoying this, it’s like David Lynch is hijacking my dreams to air Bonus Content

Update: no Twin Peaks nightmare

(In its place, yet another “enrolled as an undergrad again” dream.  This one focused on arriving at the start of the school year, and having awkward interactions with friends in later cohorts, who were clearly happy to see me but tried to dance around the subject of why I was there in the first place)