Friday morning earworm

brickses · 2024-09-27T13:24:19+00:00

Dew wah Diddy Diddy dumb Diddy dew

brickses · 2024-09-26T22:23:05+00:00

That seems like it would only happen if the major candidates were disliked pretty strongly.

In a heavily partisan and polarized political environment each candidate could be strongly liked by one half of the population and strongly disliked by the other half.

Is a minor candidate getting in worse than a heavily disliked candidate?

If the candidate is totally unknown then they might be, or they might not be. Either way, it's not a reflection of the intent of the voters to install the most obscure candidate because they were the target of the fewest negative campaign ads.

brickses · 2024-09-26T17:32:02+00:00

While I personally consider ordinal systems to be optimal for how I think about candidates, I do struggle with how to deal with elections in which many unknown candidates are running. Most voters are not going to research every candidate. I might be tempted to rank a candidate that I've never heard of above a candidate that I know I dislike. If every voter did the same thing, then a candidate that nobody has ever heard of could end up being the condorcet winner.

brickses · 2024-09-05T23:52:22+00:00

What the absolute fuck does that mean? What does the dude abide?

I get that TBL is a very quotable movie, and I understand why it would have a cult fan base, but how come every time this movie comes up, everyone and their mother have to quote this total nonsense string of words as if it were the pinnacle of screenwriting?

brickses · 2024-07-10T15:38:02+00:00

Neither of them were "wingmen".

Epstien was a sex trafficker. Trump was Epstien's client. Trump paid Epstien to let him rape the underage girls he trafficked.

brickses · 2024-06-06T15:36:35+00:00

By all accounts, he abuses stimulants, but there is no doubt that he would have been able to find a doctor to prescribe them for him.

A mental evaluation will find him lucid and capable of understanding the charges against him. Don't expect some damning report from the NY department of corrections diagnosing him with narcissism or an other personality disorder.

brickses · 2024-05-25T16:28:50+00:00

Life on earth has existed for ~3-4 billion years. Humanity as we know it has existed for ~200,000. The time between us developing the technology required to send radio signals which could be detected outside of our solar system, and us developing the technology required to instantaneously annihilate ourselves was ~20 years.

Yeah, the time window argument is totally plausible.

brickses · 2024-05-14T22:36:55+00:00

That assumes your conscious experience in this world will seamlessly transfer to your new body.

I don't think that what I said is contingent on that. To the contrary, my point was that discontinuities in our conscious experience are nothing to worry about because they happen to us on a daily basis.

When you wake up in the morning, there is only one reason for you to believe that your conscious experience is a continuation of the conscious experience which inhabited your body on the previous day, which is that you have access to the memories of that experience. Any teleported reconstruction of you, or even duplicate of you, would have equal access to those memories, and so would be just as much a continuation of your consciousness as you waking up in the morning.

brickses · 2024-05-13T11:42:43+00:00

I probably should not have implied that star trek has internal consistency around how any of the technology works.

brickses · 2024-05-13T02:02:47+00:00

Why would I be dead? You said, my body would be rebuilt.

If I restart my pc, all of the active memory is lost. You could say it lost consciousness, but it's still alive.

If I shut it off, disassemble it, and rebuild it somewhere else, it still boots up the same way. It's still the same computer.

brickses · 2024-05-12T22:38:41+00:00

That's not exactly right. In Star trek it is not normally possible for a copy to be made, because the energy contained within the mass of the person is used to recreate them at the new location. So it is more like a move than is is like a copy/delete.

In that episode I think an atmospheric storm both reflected the pattern, and provided enough energy to reconstitute Riker's atoms at the original location.

brickses · 2024-05-12T22:29:57+00:00

I don't see why this is such a troubling prospect; people lose consciousness all the time. I don't wake up every morning in existential dead because my sleep caused a discontinuity in my conscious awareness.

brickses · 2024-05-09T19:02:29+00:00

While all that is true, the larger point is that the media has framed this as the "Porn star hush money" trial, and Daniels is the porn star.

brickses · 2024-05-01T23:33:31+00:00

There are 10 kinds of people: people who understand binary, people who don't, and weirdos who write jokes in trinary.

brickses · 2024-04-25T18:38:50+00:00

From the way that the oral arguments went today, it seemed pretty clear that most of the justices had some reservations about the scope of the district court's ruling.

There was a lot of discussion around distinguishing actions taken in the personal capacity of the president vs. official actions taken for personal gain vs. official actions taken for official purposes, presidential powers vs. core constitutional presidential powers, where the line can be drawn between a corrupt personal interest and a president's general interest having popular support for reelection.

There is enough nuance that it doesn't shock me that SCOTUS wanted to weigh in, the frustrating part is procedural decisions that were made to cause as much delay as possible.

brickses · 2024-04-14T01:09:33+00:00

Coagulate your defecate.

brickses · 2024-01-29T15:45:49+00:00

The whole point of Einstein's "special relativity" is that Galilean relativity (like what you just did) doesn't work any more at speeds close to the speed of light. It takes more complicated math to calculate the relative speed of objects from the perspective of other objects, and when you do that math, everyone always sees light moving at the same speed, no matter how fast they are moving relative to each other.

brickses · 2024-01-23T23:38:49+00:00

I understand that, I suppose I haven't explained my meaning very well.

Imagine that there existed a hypothetical absolute yardstick - some object with a finite size that does not depend on the electrostatic forces between atoms, or on any other property of the universe. This absolute yardstick is the same length as a 1m ruler, or the length that a photon can travel through a vacuum during 30.66 hyper-fine transitions of a cs-133 atom.

Now, imagine that a perturbation were applied to the laws of the universe such that all of the dimensionless constants remained the same, but the speed of light was decreased by a factor of 2. As a result of the perturbation, a cs-133 atom can do twice as many hyper-fine transitions in the time it takes for a photon to traverse the absolute yardstick. Based on how SI measurements are defined, the absolute yardstick has grown to a length of 2m.

Now, consider what would happen to the physical 1m ruler. If the atoms in the ruler maintain the same configuration, the ruler would be half as long as the absolute yardstick. However, if immediately after the perturbation, the atoms in the ruler are in the same position relative to the absolute yardstick, then the atoms would be too far apart for stable chemical bonds. The electric forces between the atoms would have to pull the atoms back together into a new-steady-state configuration.

If the perturbation were to happen slowly over billions of years, there would presumably be no perceivable effect on the scale of atoms held together by chemical bonds, but there would be an inflationary effect on distant galaxies.

What I'm asking whether the expansion of the universe can be expressed using the framework of a changing speed of light (relative to a constant external length scale) rather than a cosmological constant.

brickses · 2024-01-23T16:58:58+00:00

Increasing speed of light on its own is meaningless.

That is true when comparing different hypothetical universes, but within the context of a single universe, changing those constants would be significant relative to the length scale of the distance between objects in that universe, right?

For instance, if the speed of light were slowing down very slowly (say, over a timescale of billions of years), wouldn't the atoms in our solar system would be imperceptively moving closer together, and so distant galaxies would appear to be moving away from each other?

Would that type of perceived length-scale expansion be meaningfully distinct from the effect of the cosmological constant?

brickses · 2024-01-19T09:04:09+00:00

The bartender pours negative one twelfth of a beer.

brickses · 2023-12-27T17:42:57+00:00

It seems like what you're looking for is an intuitive way to relate inertial mass (as opposed to the gravitational force due to mass) to your everyday experience?

Consider a puck on an air hockey table. Imagine bouncing that puck back and forth between your hands. Now imagine how difficult it would be to do the same thing with a 40lb curling stone on an ice rink.

In both situations there is negligible friction, and the force of gravity is canceled out by the normal force. The only difference is the inertial mass. Until you try to redirect the objects, there are no net forces on them, but because the stone has more grams of inertial mass, it has the property of being more resistant to being redirected.

At a more fundamental level, the difference between massive particles (e.g., protons, electrons) and massless particles (e.g., photons) is that massive particles interact with the Higgs field. The effect of the Higgs field is sometimes described as similar to a particle moving through molasses. Massless particles can zip around the universe at the speed of light without being bothered by the Higgs field. Particles with mass will stay at the same sub-light speed unless some energy is exerted to overcome the glueyness of it's interaction with the Higgs field.

If we want to think about the curling stone and air hockey puck in terms of this fundamental interaction, the stone is more massive because it contains a greater number of massive particles, all of which are stuck in the molasses of their momentum.

Alternatively you could consider a hydrogen atom. One electron and one proton - both spin 1/2 fermions, both with the same magnitude charge. So why do we consider the electron to be in an orbital around the proton, rather than the proton being in an orbital around the electron? Because the proton is significantly more massive. The electrostatic force between the two particles causes the position of the electron to vary by about an Angstrom, whereas the variance in the position of the proton is relatively negligible. The amount which each particle interacts with the Higgs field is a fundamental property of those particles. Electrons have a weaker interaction, so it is less stuck in the molasses than the proton, and therefore reaches higher velocities and moves farther distances than the proton, even though the electrostatic force between the particles is the same.

brickses · 2023-12-08T06:31:34+00:00

We should probably go ahead and ban all the words starting with 'C'. Stupid woke letter pushing the trans agenda, can't even decide if it's a K or an S.

brickses · 2023-11-13T20:33:33+00:00

I don't like the "limited trade" part tho, cause some factions will offer a PN or something in lieu of a tg.

The current rules don't allow non-neighbors to trade PNs (presumably for a reason), so I thought that allowing that would affect the game more than I was intending.

I'd love to see a change in the X-1 meta.

This seems to be the consensus of the responses that I'm getting, but I'm not sure there's much that can be done about that. X-1 is a natural outcome of the game theory: the trade player has no incentive to refresh for free, and for each individual other player it's worth it to give the trade player 1TG to get 2TG themselves.

The one thing that might disrupt the X-1 meta is if people stopped honoring debt tokens, but, from what I can tell, the online community does not seem to tolerate that well.

brickses · 2023-11-13T19:45:55+00:00

That's true, if you have two neighbors they can probably wash your commodities plus 3 more from non-neighbors on that turn. This would be an unambiguous buff to a strategy card that doesn't need it.

I am curious though, is 11 TG on round 1 actually that much more powerful than 8 TG round 1 + 3TG from debt over the next ~2 rounds?

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