Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label deep thoughts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label deep thoughts. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 05, 2024

A Thought


If Celine Dion sang the vowels in her name,
it would be Old MacDonald's Farm

Sunday, January 07, 2024

A Thought


There's a lot of talk (mostly from the wingnut right) about pardoning Trump, so we can "heal the nation's wounds and move on." 

Some things:
  1. No POTUS can pardon him if he's convicted for state crimes
  2. Republicans seem to be tacitly admitting he's guilty of the federal charges, and that they expect he'll be on his way to prison before the year is out, but they won't say so in public.
  3. When Republicans are willing to look the other way, or rationalize Trump's criminal actions, doesn't that mean the GOP is soft on crime?

Saturday, December 09, 2023

Today's Coaching Thing


1) Know when you're happy     - and don't make promises when you're happy
2) Know when you're sad         - and don't make decisions when you're sad
3) Know when you're angry      - and don't reply when you're angry
4) Know when you're ignorant  - and don't judge until you learn
5) Know when you're envious  - and don't criticize in that frame of mind

Thursday, December 07, 2023

A Thought


Life is said to necessitate
finding your tolerable level
of permanent unhappiness.

Living requires
a constant effort
not to tolerate
being unhappy.

Tuesday, October 31, 2023

A Thought


Most people aren't looking for the truth.
They're looking for reassurance
that what they believe is the truth.

Tuesday, July 18, 2023

Today's Deep Thought


If teachers have been indoctrinating kids in public schools, then more adults would know the correct usage of commas and apostrophes. 

Friday, July 07, 2023

A Thought


Right now, America's gotta be the only country in the world where you see a guy wearing a flag on his t-shirt, or flying a flag in his pickup truck, and you think, "Yeah - he's prob'ly racist as fuck."

hat tip = Ron Perlman

Saturday, April 22, 2023

Deep Thought


The Milky Way is bigger
than your standard-issue galaxy.
The average galaxy has about
100 million stars.
The nerds' best guess right now
is that there's something like 2 trillion galaxies.

That's about 200,000,000,000,000,000,000
stars in the
"observable universe."

200 QUINTILLION STARS

Monday, March 13, 2023

Deep Thought


Dark matter accounts for the majority of the volume of the universe, and dark energy is what keeps the universe expanding in spite of enormous gravitational pull.

The smartest people in the world tell us Dark Matter and Dark Energy make up 97% of the "known" universe, and that they call those things "dark" because they have no fucking clue what either of them actually is.

Tuesday, February 14, 2023

A Thought


It occurs to me that the wingnuts are missing a really good opportunity to combine their penchant for the ridiculous with their kinda creepy obsession over the world's sexual behavior (or is that a redundancy?).

Anyhoo - it seems like somebody should've thought about how Valentine's Day is abbreviated as "VD" so that has to mean Jesus disapproves of how the media and the globalists and the immigrant caravan are leading the pious folk away from god and whatever the fuck else they usually throw into that mashup.

Just a thought. Happy VD, everybody!

Tuesday, February 07, 2023

Deep Thoughts


If they want me to drink
my orange juice at breakfast,
I'm gonna need a toothpaste that pairs better. 

Monday, January 30, 2023

Eternally Impermanent


Truth is eternal - or so we think.
Truth is eternal - but not necessarily what we think is the truth right now.
Truth is eternal - so we think, and think we must.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson via MSNBC:


Sunday, January 22, 2023

Today's Aphorism


Fear of the dark is a child's nightmare.
Fear of the light is a propagandist's dream.

Saturday, December 31, 2022

Overheard


We've spent centuries believing our capacity for compassion is what makes us human.

Turns out it's actually our ability to select each image containing a fire hydrant.

Saturday, December 03, 2022

Today's Deep Thought


How is it we know more about
the GOP's position on Drag Shows
than we do about
their plan to fight inflation?

Wednesday, November 23, 2022

Today's Deep Thinking


What if the universe we know is actually a computer simulation, and there's nothing real but our imaginations?

Sorry not sorry, but to me, this is pretty good food for thought when you're sitting around smoking some really killer weed with your new best buddies in your dorm room at 3:00 on a random Tuesday, or if you watched The Matrix and concluded it was a documentary.

Also sorry not sorry, but how is this "new" "theory" anything other than a substitute for God?

All that said, I'll try to keep an open mind about "proving or disproving" the existence of this new god - or concept of god - or GOD.EXE - or whatever the fuck we're talking about here.

Shit just makes my head hurt.


Expert Proposes a Method For Telling if We All Live in a Computer Program

Physicists have long struggled to explain why the Universe started out with conditions suitable for life to evolve. Why do the physical laws and constants take the very specific values that allow stars, planets, and ultimately life to develop?

The expansive force of the Universe, dark energy, for example, is much weaker than theory suggests it should be – allowing matter to clump together rather than being ripped apart.

A common answer is that we live in an infinite multiverse of Universes, so we shouldn't be surprised that at least one Universe has turned out as ours. But another is that our Universe is a computer simulation, with someone (perhaps an advanced alien species) fine-tuning the conditions.

The latter option is supported by a branch of science called information physics, which suggests that space-time and matter are not fundamental phenomena. Instead, the physical reality is fundamentally made up of bits of information, from which our experience of space-time emerges.

By comparison, temperature "emerges" from the collective movement of atoms. No single atom fundamentally has temperature.

This leads to the extraordinary possibility that our entire Universe might in fact be a computer simulation.

The idea is not that new. In 1989, the legendary physicist, John Archibald Wheeler, suggested that the Universe is fundamentally mathematical and it can be seen as emerging from information. He coined the famous aphorism "it from bit".

In 2003, philosopher Nick Bostrom from Oxford University in the UK formulated his simulation hypothesis. This argues that it is actually highly probable that we live in a simulation.

That's because an advanced civilization should reach a point where their technology is so sophisticated that simulations would be indistinguishable from reality, and the participants would not be aware that they were in a simulation.

Physicist Seth Lloyd from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US took the simulation hypothesis to the next level by suggesting that the entire Universe could be a giant quantum computer.

Empirical evidence

There is some evidence suggesting that our physical reality could be a simulated virtual reality rather than an objective world that exists independently of the observer.

Any virtual reality world will be based on information processing. That means everything is ultimately digitized or pixelated down to a minimum size that cannot be subdivided further: bits.

This appears to mimic our reality according to the theory of quantum mechanics, which rules the world of atoms and particles. It states there is a smallest, discrete unit of energy, length and time.

Similarly, elementary particles, which make up all the visible matter in the Universe, are the smallest units of matter. To put it simply, our world is pixelated.

The laws of physics that govern everything in the Universe also resemble computer code lines that a simulation would follow in the execution of the program. Moreover, mathematical equations, numbers, and geometric patterns are present everywhere – the world appears to be entirely mathematical.

Another curiosity in physics supporting the simulation hypothesis is the maximum speed limit in our Universe, which is the speed of light. In a virtual reality, this limit would correspond to the speed limit of the processor, or the processing power limit.

We know that an overloaded processor slows down computer processing in a simulation. Similarly, Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity shows that time slows in the vicinity of a black hole.

Perhaps the most supportive evidence of the simulation hypothesis comes from quantum mechanics. This suggest nature isn't "real": particles in determined states, such as specific locations, don't seem to exist unless you actually observe or measure them. Instead, they are in a mix of different states simultaneously. Similarly, virtual reality needs an observer or programmer for things to happen.

Quantum " entanglement" also allows two particles to be spookily connected so that if you manipulate one, you automatically and immediately also manipulate the other, no matter how far apart they are – with the effect being seemingly faster than the speed of light, which should be impossible.

This could, however, also be explained by the fact that within a virtual reality code, all "locations" (points) should be roughly equally far from a central processor. So while we may think two particles are millions of light years apart, they wouldn't be if they were created in a simulation.

Possible experiments

Assuming that the Universe is indeed a simulation, then what sort of experiments could we deploy from within the simulation to prove this?

It is reasonable to assume that a simulated Universe would contain a lot of information bits everywhere around us. These information bits represent the code itself. Hence, detecting these information bits will prove the simulation hypothesis.

The recently proposed mass-energy-information (M/E/I) equivalence principle – suggesting mass can be expressed as energy or information, or vice versa – states that information bits must have a small mass. This gives us something to search for.

I have postulated that information is in fact a fifth form of matter in the Universe. I've even calculated the expected information content per elementary particle. These studies led to the publication, in 2022, of an experimental protocol to test these predictions.

The experiment involves erasing the information contained inside elementary particles by letting them and their antiparticles (all particles have "anti" versions of themselves which are identical but have opposite charge) annihilate in a flash of energy – emitting "photons", or light particles.

I have predicted the exact range of expected frequencies of the resulting photons based on information physics. The experiment is highly achievable with our existing tools, and we have launched a crowdfunding site to achieve it.

There are other approaches too. The late physicist John Barrow has argued that a simulation would build up minor computational errors which the programmer would need to fix in order to keep it going.

He suggested we might experience such fixing as contradictory experimental results appearing suddenly, such as the constants of nature changing. So monitoring the values of these constants is another option.

The nature of our reality is one of the greatest mysteries out there. The more we take the simulation hypothesis seriously, the greater the chances we may one day prove or disprove it.

Friday, September 23, 2022

Today's Hmm


In 34 years, only one GOP candidate for POTUS
has won the popular vote.

one

I wonder why Republicans are so determined
to push down on voting rights.


Sunday, July 03, 2022

On Trump's Defense


Cassidy Hutchinson testified to the tussle in the SUV on Jan6, when Trump got so pissed off about not being taken to the Capitol that he grabbed at the steering wheel, and then kinda went for the Secret Service guy who stopped him from grabbing the wheel.

And the wingnuts have all gone crazy jumping up and down on Hutchinson's head, screeching about how it couldn't have happened the way she said Tony Ornato told her it happened etc etc etc.

Y'know what we haven't heard - what we never hear whenever one of these episodes is revealed?

We never hear anyone defend him with, "Nah, man, that can't be - he's too good a guy - he'd never do that."

Sunday, June 19, 2022

A Question


How come God's plan never includes
Republicans doing the right thing?

Thursday, June 16, 2022

Odd Thought


If you've donated enough blood,
over a long enough time,
it's almost a sure thing
that your blood ended up
in some guy's hard on.