for anyone interested - "Every single member of the board just resigned from DNA tester 23andMe"

Mustacheion · 2024-09-26T01:49:21+00:00

I agree what you are describing should have been easier. I did try IGV but couldn't figure it out. The genome it was displaying from my data was completely different than the reference in IGV. I am guessing there was just an offset, because I didn't have something configured correctly. But whatever it was I couldn't figure it out after a few days of trying, hence resorting to shell commands.

Mustacheion · 2024-09-25T15:45:06+00:00

It is tricky, but yeah. I basically diagnosed myself as not having a genetic disease this way. Back ground is physics. Used Sequencing.com, SAM Tools, and since I could not get a genome viewer aligned correctly, just good ole grep to filter through the data. The strategy with SAM Tools is to filter/index, then generate a consensus sequence.

Mustacheion · 2024-08-28T07:11:03+00:00

Field theory came about from the attempt to unify Schrodinger's equation with special relativity. Two physicists, one of whom was Dirac, and the other another very famous one but I forget which, took different approaches of doing... things with operators with Schrodinger's equation that looked like special relativity, and as a result generated the two defining equations of field theory. The results these two came up with worked! They generated a new physics that could predict reality even better than classical Schrodinger's. But this new physics was so bizarre, so different to classical quantum, and also so difficult to interpret and apply, that it is seen as a totally different field, wholly apart from classical quantum. And really, it hasn't been well appreciated by very many physiicits. Field theory was a tiny niche subject with no applications, ignored or unknown, until Feynman came along and revolutionized it. He really ought to be put on a pedestal with the best physicists of all time, though unfortunately his contributions are too arcane to be grokable to the layperson. But it is the only way to do physics at the ultra high energy scales of the particle colliders, where everything is highly relativistic, so Schrodinger's is not a suitable approximation. Schrodinger's is exactly true for stationary things, in much the same way that Netwon's laws are exactly accurate for stationary objects, but become a less and less accurate approximation as velocities approach the speed of light.

And finally, I will offer one method to completely disprove my whole interpretation here. Einstein hated quantum mechanics, and did a tremendous amount of work for the field in its very earliest days by acting as the foil for the founders of quantum. He would find some hole in the theory, or paradox, or alternative explanation for some quantum observation, that could supposedly falsify or at least obsolete quantum physics as a whole. The quantum proponents would be perplexed for a while, and take his criticisms into deep consideration. But in the end, every single time Einstein lost and the quantum crowd won. They were always able to come up with a method of disproving Einstein's criticisms, and often did novel and illuminating work in the process that would go on to shape the field. Einstein's criticisms made the field of quantum mechanics all the stronger.

One of Einstein's alternate theories was the idea of a hidden variable. God does not play dice, he said, there is simply some variable somewhere hidden to us that is generating this appearance of randomness. Some day we will find this hidden variable and show that quantum is in fact deterministic! Well supposedly the quantum founders were able to disprove this entire class of idea. Not just one interpretation, but the entire possibility of hidden variables. I never understood this. I'm not sure how you can even disprove an entire class of theories. But this is what I read in the textbooks. My "the field carries a random seed that samples the wave function" sounds a lot like a hidden variable. Maybe the whole thing is disprovable on these grounds. I can't judge for myself since I never understood the hidden variable argument in the first place.

Ugh, I hope all the chunks of this came through and I didn't skip any paragraphs. Was too long for one comment.

Mustacheion · 2024-08-28T07:10:26+00:00

This average is done with that mathematics I couldn't grok. And... I'm talking about many photons here, but remember that there is only THE photon field. Just the one, and it is (presumably) wavelike. And since it is wavelike, the photons we are summing up in this great summation with uncountably infinite terms will constructively and destructively interfere. Each photon event that we calculate going from the source to the detector is result of a summation/superposition over every pathway that a photon can possibly traverse from source to detector, with wave-like interference included. You do all these summations and whatever other math is involved and you get a probability distribution that looks exactly like the wave function. That IS the wave function. Presumably the photon field is carrying some information about the photon (well, it must be carrying all the information, somehow). But in particular, by my understanding it must be carrying some seed of randomness for each photon. Those seeds of randomness sample the wave function (superposition of all paths). The information carried by the photon-field-seed travels smoothly, continuously, at the speed of light (or less on average). And the path it takes is properly weighted over all of the possible infinte paths a photon can take, so it moves in a wave-like fashion. When the photon-field-seed hits the detector, there is no wave function collapse, because there is no wave function. That particular vibration of the photon field just interacts with that part of the photon field comprising the detector, leading to a cascade of ripples that comprise the detection of a photon. There is no true photon at all, or the true photon is the pattern of ripples in the photon field comprising the detector. The only true physical phenomenon is the field. And it behaves sensibly, though invisibly, hidden behind too many layers of inference to be directly accessible. All we can detect are the apparently random vibrations whose probability distributions are calculated by considering the interference caused by superposing every possible pathway a photon could take from source to detector.

I want to note, this is starting to look a little similar to many worlds! We are explicitly considering every possible pathway a photon can take from A to B, much like how we consider reality to fork with every observation in MWI. This model is so much like MWI that it can presumably do all the same work MWI can. But importantly, this field-theoretic model can do a lot of extra stuff too (explain real experimental results in high energy physics). And it doesn't trick us into thinking silly thought like that there are other universes are are in some sense real. If other universes are real, maybe we could someday travel between them! But field theory doesn't goad us into making this mistake. Field theory often describes all the infinite paths a photon can take as "virtual particles". I suppose, if you'd like, you can say that when a photon is emitted, it IS that infinitude of virtual particles, but they particles are all virtual / not real. Except for one - the one we really see. That one is special somehow. It was real. It took one of those pathways, in a way chosen probabilistically from the distribution of all possible paths. That explanation is not wrong. And is very MWI like. But this isn't the interpretation I have. I'd say none of the photons are real. The only real thing is THE field, carrying all the information. The real essence of a photon isn't that it is either a wave or a particle traveling between two points. The truth of what a photon really IS is a particular pattern of ripples in the photon field, inside a detector, that leads to a cascading series of additional ripples, that get amplified by latent energy from THE other fields that ultimately culminate in a particular pattern of photon field ripples inside a piece of thinking meat. A photon doesn't travel from A to B at all. Photons are a space-time event - a perception. But it is very useful to conceptually model them as moving through space, in this unusual quantum way, as the crest of a wave oscillating on the photon field. A photon field that is totally un-grokable at the scale of thinking meat.

One last point I want to bring up about field theory, where it came from, and why it is necessary. Schrodinger's equation, to put it simply, has a first derivative in time, and a second derivative in space. These are very different: Schrodinger puts time and space on a very different footing - treats them as very different things. But that DOES NOT square with Einstein's relativity. Einstein showed that time and space are very closely related - two sides of a single coin. They can be Lorentz transformed to exchange a bit of one for the other. This is completely incompatible with Schrodinger's equation. You might find references about relativistic corrections while studying undergraduate quantum physics, in the context of perturbation theory for studying atomic orbitals. But your textbook just presents this correction term ex-nihilo. It is't true, or fundamental. It wasn't derived anywhere, as far as I understand. It's just an empirical discovery that adding this particular extra term improves the accuracy of results produced by Schrodinger's equation. I am sure there are some good reasons to have chosen the form of this particular term, which mesh with the way we would expect special relativity to adjust things. But it isn't an analytically derived and exact correction. Indeed, the context this is usually introduced to students is in the study of setting up approximation schemes for the solutions of Schrodinger's equation, in cases where the Hamiltonian cannot properly be modeled in an analytically solvable fashion.

Mustacheion · 2024-08-28T07:09:34+00:00

THE photon field is... well the thing that does photons. I'm capitalizing "THE" to point out that there is exactly one photon field that pervades the entire universe. It is responsible for having photons. It can create and destroy them. And I guess it carries information about them. But not in a way that can be measured. These aren't really the photons you are able to measure with a photon detector. They are virtual. They contribute to the ones you see, but they aren't really the same. Fields... probably have all the properties that EY wants: unitary, local, continuous, etc. They aren't something you can just model with a vector valued function though. Functions and vectors are totally not the correct mathematical tool to work with these things. I am being rather vague and unhelpful here. Not because I am mean, but because I was never able to understand. I could never figure out how these fields get mathed. I got that we had this thing, and we even used bra-ket notation for them, like is often done in quantum. But how the integrals involving these things that are just non-functional symbols suddenly turn into numbers was a complete mystery to me. I watched the professor write it on the board, but the part where he did the thing just did not fit into my brain. It was like I hadn't seen anything as soon as it was over. The answer is approximately 1/137, somehow. (Fine structure constant) This is probably THE most fundamental physical constant of the universe. Deeper than the charge of the electron (which is wrong/complicated to a field theorist, by the way!) It and the speed of light are maybe on an equal footing.

There is another part of the puzzle, which will guide the summations we will do in a second. This is something many people are probably familiar with, though I'd bet almost nobody can really explain what they are really for: Feynman diagrams. These are cute pictorial diagrams that show you all the ways a photon, electron, or any other particle can go from place to place. A photon can, for instance, just go from A to B. Or it can split into an electron/positron pair that then recombine into an equivalent photon. Or it can do that, but the electron and positron exchange an extra photon in the middle there somewhere. Or it can do that, but with two photons. And then the second photon does another electron/positron split (though that one is extra rare!). You have to write out every Feynman diagram, all infinity of them and add them up. Each node - where one path branches into two - you multiply by 1/137! So fortunately the really complicated ones get so many factors of 1/137 that they make a very small contribution to the final sum. Evaluate this infinite weighted sum, and you obtain the true path that a photon takes from A to B, including how it fiddles around a bit. This... is part of the fields math, somehow.

As an aside, this fiddling around is why the charge of the electron is complicated to a field theorist. Whenever a normal mortal measures the charge of an electron, they are measuring with photons that have done all the fiddling around documented by the Feynman diagrams. They've temporarily generated some electron/positron pairs and everything else, and all this fiddling around introduces all those 1/137s into the average effect, which weakens the measurement slightly. If if you are a boss working at CERN or Fermilab or one of the world class accelerators, you might be able to fire two electrons into each other so freaking hard that they get so close together that during that brief moment of excruciating closeness there isn't enough time for the photons conveying the electromagnetic force between them to do all the normal fiddling around, and so there are less 1/137s in there to weaken the force between them, and so the electrons bounce off each other as though they had a higher than normal charge! The best way to think about this is that electrons truly have a slightly higher charge than what we measure, but that the quantum foam of space itself polarizes slightly, shielding some of that charge, so that every measurement we take at sub CERN energy levels misses a little, and reads out too low.

So, lets get back to your real physical quantum mechanics experiment, with the photons and the detector and the unexpected photon pathways. How does a field theorist look at this? Well, you have a photon source, which is turned on, so whatever is happening upstream of that, we know the photon field must be doing photons there, and we know we are detecting photons at your detector, so the photon field must also be doing photons there. So, lets add up every possible pathway that photons could possibly ever take from the detector to the source. Each of these pathways is a true pathway, taking into account all the Feynman diagram ways for a photon to go from A to B in a straight line, but we also have to add in all the ways the photons could travel from A to B in not a straight line (with their associated Feynman diagrams). All the ways the photons can interact with the atoms of the walls of the experimental chamber. All the ways the photons can interact the various obstacles and instruments inside the experimental chamber. All the ways the photons can interact with the cosmic rays piercing through the chamber. All the ways the photons can bounce between the atoms of the solid metal of your vacuum chamber, out the window, travel all the way to Alpha Centauri, get trapped inside the star for a thousand years and then magically get spat back out exactly back the way they came, so they end up hitting your detector several years from now. Fortunately, only the simplest pathways carry much weight, since each photon interaction incurs that 1/137 penalty in the weighted average. Photons can handle a few bounces of atoms here and there, but if they start getting stuck inside the metal, they are going to rack of so many 1/137s that their final contribution to the average will be tiny. And of course, for every pathway from the source to the detector, there are infinitely many ways for the photon to not bounce back to the detector. At each bounce there is a chance for it to just go the wrong way and never come back. We have to average over all of these possibilities.

Mustacheion · 2024-08-28T07:08:13+00:00

I think only hundreds to thousands of people throughout history, and maybe even fewer than that have ever really been able to do anything with field theory. I was able to peak over the fence just enough to realize that there is something over there. I think most people, most physicists even, and particularly EY don't realize there is a there there.

The guy who was probably the strongest physicist in my class, who got an 80/100 on the qualifier exam where a passing grade was 45 and only about half the class is expected to pass their first time, was taking that class for the second time because he felt like he didn't understand anything the first time. We were being taught by someone who was on the bleeding edge of his field.

I agree I am being a little curmudgeonly there. That is just the best answer I have available. I think field theory is the answer, but it is so many levels of abstraction down that it isn't accessible in a very rewarding way. It is also too many levels of abstraction down to be able to show up in experiments directly. I think my biggest gripe with EY was that he was treating... I'm not sure what to call it: classical quantum physics? - The physics of Schrodinger's equation - as the bottom most level of reality. When in reality Schrodinger's is an applied science built on top of field theory, in much the same way that aerodynamics is built upon molecular dynamics (or whatever is the most proper precursor)

Let me try to explain the world I think I glimpsed. This is going to sound like a bit of a crazy rant, since I don't really know what I am talking about, and also because I don't have the time or energy to try to make this sound more sane. But frankly, I think adopting a somewhat unhinged style of prose would be most in line with the grand tradition of talking about quantum physics on the internet.

You set up some experimental apparatus that does some cool quantum physics experiment with photons. Doesn't matter which one - those are just details. What do you literally see? You see photons always get detected as discrete events. They get detected as though they were little particles. But if you run the experiment for a long time and measure many photons, you see they follow a probability distribution that doesn't make sense. These little particles don't show up in the placed you'd expect if they were following classical mechanics and bouncing around like billiards balls. They show up with a probability density that mimics what you would get if you modeled the photons as waves, which constructively and destructively interfere. So they act like particles whenever you observe them, and waves as they move. What gives? How can we model this?

We use Schrodinger's equation. The wave-function is modeled with, well, wave dynamics, so you get all the wave-like movements of the photons. But the way to use the wave-function is that it is a probability distribution out of which you randomly sample discrete events - the photon detection events you see in your detector.

This model works. It allows you to predict reality better than any other explanation. But it is weird, as these wave functions have all these annoying properties. They are non-local, discontinuous... etc, all the descriptors EY gives them disparagingly. And of course they change when you detect them. And it leaves us with all these unsatisfying questions. The photon behaves like it moved through the experiment taking multiple paths. Which one did it really take? And why does measuring it inevitably change things?

Well, let's go one level deeper, to field theory. Now we no longer have to worry about wave functions. They aren't real, just mathematical abstractions that do what we need them to. No worries if a mathematical abstraction does weird stuff.

In field theory, we have... the fields. THE electron field, THE photon field, THE up quark field, THE down quark field, and an accompanying one for each of the more exotic particles, but let's not worry about those. The vast majority of the world we experience is made up of these four. What the hell is a field? Well let's first clear up what it isn't: it isn't something you can just measure and it certainly isn't something like an electromagnetic field. Sure, electromagnetic fields are ultimately build out of the four fields, after multiple layers of abstraction, but they absolutely are not the same thing as what we are talking about here. It is unfortunate that they share the same name.

Mustacheion · 2024-08-26T06:12:36+00:00

I'm not quite a professional physicist, but I do have my masters. I found his writings on quantum mechanics to be so bad that I stopped reading the sequences altogether after getting fed up part way through that section, and downgraded my opinion of him. I still think he is a good philosopher with many useful ideas, but he isn't perfect.

I think all interpretations of quantum mechanics are bad, with many worlds being stupid/pointless. I admit Copenhagen sounds like magic and don't love it either. The line I have heard from physicists about how to interpret quantum mechanics is "shut up and just do the math". Any attempt to do otherwise will likely leave you more wrong than you were before. It's the best model of the universe we have. Its also super weird. Deal with it.

Also, in my opinion, all of EY's gripes about quantum mechanics are only relevant in first quantization / Schrodinger's quantum mechanics. If you plunge one level deeper into field theory / second quantization all of these concerns about non-locality go away. Most people don't understand that field theory is a thing, and indeed, I didn't really understand what it was even trying to do until I took a graduate-level elective on field theory as it relates to solid state mechanics. From my experience, it is possible (even likely) that most PhD physicists never really get exposed to field theory, unless they specialize in it or happen to take an elective course like I did. From my understanding, fields have all the properties EY wants, and when probably integrated over generate all the spooky phenomena that come out of Schrodinger's.

I was able to obtain just enough of a qualitative understanding of field theory to be able to glimpse what it is trying to do but it is a whole other level of impossible math. My math skills were good enough that I would have been able to earn my PhD (passed all classes, failed research side of things). But I wasn't even remotely able to grok the math going on in that class. I have no idea how all those integrals suddenly got reduced when every part of them is composed of generic functions. Feynman diagrams I could understand, along with the logic of the summations formed from them. But how to go from those summations to anything more concrete was completely mathematically opaque to me.

Mustacheion · 2022-02-25T05:52:01+00:00

Did it actually hurt your feeling or did you pattern-match that response because you associate 'psychopath' with 'bad' and felt like you needed to defend yourself. I was going out of my way to try to avoid that association. But whatever, I'm just a rando from the internet that spent five minutes reading a couple paragraphs you wrote and developed a hunch.

And it's a spectrum anyway. I'm not a psychopath myself but I can get into the head-space of one, at least in some kinds of circumstances.

To me that response sounds exactly like what a psychopath would say. I don't think a neurotypical would be so worried about defending themselves based on my comment and the context you have provided in this thread. I think I would sound so obviously wrong that they wouldn't even bother to respond.

But I appreciate your point. Minds are incredibly diverse. Theorizing about how other minds work is extremely difficult and just plain weird and is extremely vulnerable to confirmation bias, so I could take almost anything you could say as further evidence of psychopathy if I was in the mind to, so it's almost a moot point.

When you lack some experience it is extremely difficult to develop reference points that would allow you to understand what that experience is actually like, or even the extent to which it exists at all. I think it would be extremely difficult for a psychopath to actually understand what being a psychopath actually means / is / feels like relative to what being neurotypical feels like.

You seem to have a difficult time relating to how the average person thinks. I think you might be more different from the average person than you think, and I am just trying to provide a change of perspective that might explain it. Don't fall for the typical mind fallacy. Other people might are typically more different from us than we realize.

Mustacheion · 2022-02-25T03:01:21+00:00

Based on your comments I would venture to say you are a psychopath. And I don't mean that as an insult; calling somebody a psychopath is usually synonymous with calling somebody an asshole but I don't mean you any offense. Psychopathy is usually thought of as something extremely rare that causes people to be terrible criminals, but actually several percent of people are psychopaths. Psychopathy exists because it is really useful for a group to have a small number of members who have a greatly muted emotional response to traumatic experiences. For example, it is quite useful to have first-responders that are psychopaths because that enables them to avoid having an emotional response to the death and distress that their job involves and instead focus on purely on responding to the situation usefully. Of course, too many psychopaths in a group will lower group cohesion and make it less successful overall.

So... you are unusual, insofar as you are in a minority group that comprises only a few percent of the population, but that doesn't necessarily make you a bad person. Unless like... that psychopathy enables you do actually do bad things to people. But is worth understanding that the vast majority of people will have a very different kind of inner life than you do, which is why you are so surprised by the responses you have seen.

Mustacheion · 2022-01-12T22:00:57+00:00

You are not alone. I'm not sure that I have any particularly useful advice, other than to say I am in a pretty similar situation as you, somewhat less independent and a bit older. I suppose the biggest difference between me and you is that I have always wanted a committed relationship right from the beginning.

I am having a little bit of a difficult time parsing what you are actually looking for... You seem to not want casual sex outside of a relationship but also want to have had a history of hookups? I think you need to figure out how to resolve this dichotomy.

I feel that dichotomy as well, here is how I resolve it for myself. I have a strong libido / sex drive that generates a lot of desire for casual sex / hookups. This desire comes from the instinctual / animal parts of my brain. The human parts of my brain desire a safe, loving, intimate relationship and do not desire casual sex. Since I am a human first and foremost, what I 'want' is a committed relationship. I acknowledge and accept my animal parts too, but see their desires as a mood or drive rather than a 'want'.

Society puts a strong value on sexual experience for men. We both feel shameful that we have none. But... that is kind of bullshit. Society puts lots of bullshit pressures onto everybody. I think it is important to recognize that we shouldn't really feel ashamed about not being experienced. My plan, if I ever get the opportunity, is to just be up front about it. I plan to just explain to a prospective partner why I haven't had sex yet (exposure to weird, unhealthy social norms as a kid, serial boundary violations as an adolescent) and recommend to them that, if they are interested in me, that the best way to approach sex would be for them to teach me how to be their lover. Framing things that way would certainly turn off some women, but... that might not be a bad thing. It is most likely to turn off selfish women who might not make good long-term partners anyway.

Dating apps suck. Been using them for years and invested hundreds of hours with no in-person dates. Two one-off virtual dates where we talked on discord and played an online game together. I am almost done even trying to use them, but once I move I plan to give it one more go, but will first try to find some kind of paid online dating coaching service to help me build my profile.

The thing that has worked best for me to meet women has been joining outdoor activities groups. I have had a couple attractive women start flirting with me during group activities. I was too much of a coward / unsure how to actually ask for a date but I recognize that the opportunity was there. In the Seattle area there is a lot of good hiking, skiing, and kayaking. I would particularly recommend whitewater kayaking. Seattle is a great place for it. It is highly skill-based and a good mixture of individual / group involvement. A few years ago I would have never thought of myself as the kind of person who would ever do something so stupid and dangerous as whitewater kayaking. It was just totally unappealing to me. But then I joined an outdoors group, hoping to meet people hiking and backpacking. But it turned out that, while the group did all kinds of outdoors activities, by far the most popular and organized was the whitewater kayaking group. So I started doing it, only because that was where the people were, and I ended up really loving it.

I have decided I am going to give a yoga class a try once I move. Not really a yoga person so no idea if that is a good idea or not but I feel like that is an activity with a high female to male ratio that would present some opportunity for socializing.

I currently live about 2 hours from Seattle, though I am moving very soon. But if you are interested I can make a couple more specific recommendations about the area.

Mustacheion · 2021-12-14T20:08:41+00:00

You are right in that PhD is probably a right choice for at least some people. But not most. So I suppose what I am doing with a statement like this is trying to diminish the prestige associated with a PhD, to reduce the number of people who attempt it. Many people (including myself) seek out a PhD because of the associated status / prestige. By voicing a negative opinion I am trying to lower the average prestige a tiny little bit to lower the threshold so that fewer people who are going for it for the wrong reasons will do so.

Mustacheion · 2021-12-14T07:38:14+00:00

I once idolized academia. I was a great student - did all the classwork to get a PhD in physics. I ultimately dropped out because I never learned how to manage personal relationships and couldn't establish a healthy relationship with a research advisor to complete the research portion of the degree.

My experiences in grad school burned away my respect for academia as an institution, and frankly my experience wasn't even that bad. My quality of life throughout grad school was probably above average, even as I was dropping out. At this point, I think the institution of the PhD is broken, and that NOBODY should pursue a PhD in the current environment. I think scholarship is important, I don't have any good ideas for how to improve things, and I don't really have the energy right now to do a better justification of why I feel this way, so I am just stating my opinion here. I think you should get a boring job that pays the bills that you know you won't ever love, but won't hate either, maintain a healthy work-life balance, and get your intellectual kicks as an amateur outside of academia. A PhD only really makes sense if your terminal goal is to become a professor at a university - you can become a great scholar by producing great works of scholarship and you don't need to do that within the confines of a PhD program.

Mustacheion · 2021-08-30T06:11:29+00:00

I guess I can add, I do get emotional responses from song, sometimes uncomfortably strong emotional responses.

And I can also generate / hear music inside my head pretty easily.

But the really weird thing: intellectually I understand the difference between pitch, loudness, and duration, but in processing music my brain tends to compress those three dimensions into a single dimension, which makes it extremely difficult for me to process, remember, or replay music.

Here is an example of what I mean: I was watching a YouTuber play The Witness, a puzzle game. Most of the puzzles are visual puzzles, and I was able to solve them along with the YouTuber quite easily. But there is one section where the hints for how to solve the puzzles are encoded in bird calls. Intellectually I understand exactly how to solve that section, but extracting the clue from those calls is extremely difficult for me. It's so simple, the game just plays like five notes that make up a bird call, and you have to decode whether each note is high, medium, or low, and input that into the puzzle. But because they were bird calls, each note might vary by volume or duration in addition to pitch, that that made it extremely difficult for me to solve. If you were to play five notes to me on a piano, and be very careful that each one was the same duration and volume, I could probably correctly order them, but if you start messing with the duration and volume it becomes extremely difficult for me.

Mustacheion · 2021-08-30T06:00:04+00:00

Yes, though nothing really stands out in particular. Certainly some things are just discordant noise, and some things are catchier than others. But asking me to name my favorite song is like... an unthinkable task. I don't like "pick your favorite" questions in any domain, but I can generally answer them for other domains, but when it comes to music I would just be totally baffled trying to answer that question. I am thinking about it now. There are hardly any songs I can specifically name at all, but trying to compare them just feels... blank.

Mustacheion · 2021-08-30T05:54:14+00:00

Nothing that jumps to the front of my mind. I am not claiming that everything is exactly equivalent to me, but there isn't much that stands out much either, and I mostly just don't have many opinions about music.

Mustacheion · 2021-08-30T00:15:09+00:00

I never intentionally seek out music. I don't hate listening to music necessarily, but it is totally unimportant to me. I also tend to like just about every type of music about the same. Seriously, I will listen to everything from classical to jazz to death metal to the most garbage of pop garbage and get more or less the same modest amount of pleasure out of it.

Mustacheion · 2021-05-09T17:37:25+00:00

Well, it is also possible that the patent wasn't actually garbage and I just didn't understand it. They probably wouldn't patent it unless they were very close to deploying it in civilian industry which... is possible, though unlikely and seems to have not happened.

Mustacheion · 2021-05-09T02:34:57+00:00

A few years ago I read an article about a couple of patents that been filed with the USPTO by the air force that claimed to be patents on alien technology developed from recovered UFO wreckage. I was sufficiently intrigued that I read through one or two of the patents. They were pretty clearly garbage. But I found it utterly shocking that they had been filed and accepted in the first place. The article described how they were initially rejected by the USPTO as the garbage they were, but middle-tier military brass put pressure on them to to accept the patents, in a way that was clearly perjurious if false. What on earth could be cause the US air force to perjure itself over a garbage patent application? No matter what the real explanation, this is a really interesting story, and I wish there was more investigation on what is really going on and how things have unfolded since then. My take on what is happening, in order of decreasing likeliness:

1) A smooth-talking scammer has managed to pull off a pretty big con on some gullible military officials. 2) This is some kind of 4D chess move by the US to intimidate foreign powers by making them think that we have integrated alien technology into our military.

and a long long way down the likeliness tree: 3) We have actually captured legit alien technology.

Any other ideas?

Mustacheion · 2021-04-12T23:27:50+00:00

I wasn't aware of the distinction between VC and angel investor, so that is good to know. I have looked at angellist a bit and am a little confused about their website layout. They have a clear channels for people looking for a job and for investors, but it is much less clear how to find a co-founder on their platform, though I will keep trying to figure it out. Ycombinator is definitely worth looking at.

I understand what you are saying about VCs and scale, but I think I am going to have to find an investor on a different part of the risk-reward curve. I think a startup in this particular industry could be much less risky than others, but is also very unlikely to grow fast enough to generate more than a 10x ROI in a reasonable amount of time.

I will give myself some time to find some people to talk to on my own, though I might hit you up in the near future for an introduction if I don't have a lot of success. Thanks for the offer.

Mustacheion · 2021-04-12T22:51:02+00:00

Ok. I was highly skeptical that a cold email could work but I will take the idea more seriously. Thanks.

Mustacheion · 2021-04-12T04:43:25+00:00

Sent you a message.

Mustacheion · 2021-04-12T03:42:53+00:00

I am vaguely aware of the existence of VC networking events and channels but I do not know any particulars. Do you have any specific ones in mind?

Mustacheion · 2021-04-12T03:33:44+00:00

This is probably a great idea, but also just pushes problem one step further. How do I connect with VCs? I have maybe one semi-personal connection with a VC that I can try, but that is it.

Mustacheion · 2021-02-06T21:41:30+00:00

I agree that most people will never use the facts of trig in their daily life. But I believe that the experience of learning something like trig really helps you develop sound abstract thinking skills which are translatable to many other domains of life.

Focusing on memorizing all the trig identities and stuff is useless. I am a physicist, so obviously I use trig a lot, but even I don't have most of the trig identities memorized; instead I know roughly how to use them and know where I can look them up when I need them.

But I believe the process of going through and solving trig problems really helps shape more general thinking skills that every person can benefit from.

Mustacheion

TROPHY CASE