Author: John

“There is no guarantee that the ship will reach Zyra, but those to make the flight will be chosen by lots sometime before the worlds collide.” – When Worlds Collide

Everyone’s a gangsta . . . until the room glows blue.  (look up Demon Core if this is unfamiliar) 

My first love was physics in high school.  To my young and naïve mind, it seemed the way that I could best contribute to the world – discover something new that would allow mankind to do things it had never done before:  conquer time via time travel, or conquer space via translight speeds, or conquer the hangover.

I don’t know, but I thought I could figure some way to leave my mark in history.  The beginning of the Universe was certainly attractive, since what high school guy doesn’t like the sound of a Big Bang?  I thus entered college as a physics major.

I came to my senses when I realized I could gain most of the benefits of an education in theoretical physics by beating up physics students, taking their money, and buying myself something nice.

Is the guy working the cash register at KFC® the Chicken Tender?

I was thinking about physics tonight when I clicked on a video from the YouTube™ channel Cool Worlds® by Professor David Kipping who has a day job teaching physics at Columbia.  My parents even wanted me to go to Columbia for college, but I was smarter than them, and stayed in the United States.

Generally, Doctor Kipping’s videos are interesting, and I give the occasional video a look, with one of the more fascinating ones being the one on Przybylski’s (did a cat walk across the keyboard to come up with that name?) Star which has weird elements in it that might be an alien technosignature.  The biggest mystery, though, is if Przybylski’s last name resulted from his father not being able to buy a vowel on Wheel of Fortune™ or if the family cat walked over their typewriter and them saying, “Przybylski?  Why not?”

This latest video, though, was titled In Defense of Science.  Since it was a short video and I had yet to finish taking my Macanudo® down to the wrapper, I tossed clicked the “go” arrow.

Dr. Frankenstein entered a bodybuilding contest, but seriously misunderstood the objective.

I am a fan of science, especially physics, which has revealed so much about the world so as to be second to no other science in its ability to predict amazing things, like nuclear weapons and the famed Anti-PEZ™ particle.

In this video, however, Kipping is kinda mad because he’s bound and determined to defend the most sacred thing he can:  his funding.  To be fair, he says that his bacon-wrapped-shrimp parties are in danger if funding is cut, but then he jumps into a series of arguments that were the verbal equivalent of throwing a plate of spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks.

Again, I like this guy.  He’s a good communicator, and obviously smart and in good shape because no one has yet beaten him up and taken his money to buy themselves something nice.  But . . .

He makes the argument that basic science research in physics is important in itself.  Well, yeah.  Mostly.

But let’s look at the Future Circular Collider® (FCC), which is the planned follow-up to the Large Hadron Collider.  The FCC is projected to be 56.5 miles in diameter, with a 16 foot (3 electronVolts) diameter chamber built at an average depth of 656 feet (3 meters) underground.  As a person who regularly looks at infrastructure, and goes, “Well why the hell didn’t they make that BIGGER?” I can appreciate the idea.

I’m warning you, don’t do it.

However, just like Kathleen Turner, not all things are better if they’re bigger, though I do think she should form a 1970s tribute band named Kathleen Turner Overdrive.  And she should also avoid ham sandwiches in order to stop her mass from disturbing sensitive gravity experiments.

What will this Future Circular Collider™ do at a cost of $16 billion (and if you believe that number won’t triple, you’ll believe the Vaxx© was Safe and Effective™) when it comes online in 2050 or 2060?  It will give . . . drumroll . . . a slightly better value for the mass of the Higgs boson.

Yup.

Oh, and it’s likely that other experiments using linear colliders will probably get there sooner and cheaper.

Saturn, though, is the Solar System’s undefeated Hula Hoop™ champ.

But this is Wednesday, and this is the day of economics, and this is the day when we learn that people who have physics degrees and work on the public’s dime at Ivy League® universities rarely have more economic sense than, “beware of that guy, he might beat me up and take my money and buy himself something nice.”

Kipping’s next argument?

“These increase economic activity by a factor of $3 for every $1 spent.”  As we’ve discussed recently, this is the broken windows fallacy (link below).  You could have given that money to people visiting whorehouses, and they would increase “economic activity”.  Now, admittedly, they’re not like Ivy League professors who buy BMWs® and ludicrously expensive bicycles to save 0.3 pounds (15 grahamcrackers), but, you know, at least the whores are honest about what they’re selling.

The French, Broken Windows, And The Intentional Destruction Of Wealth

But NASA is different, right?  NASA was once the envy of the scientific and engineering world, but it has been infected with people who remote work and do PowerPoints© on how gender is fluid in orbit and that girl testicles need to be protected in space.   These are the same people that wanted to rename the James Webb Space Telescope because James Webb owned slaves and fought for the Confederacy.  No, wait, James Webb’s sin is that he didn’t tattoo a PriDe FlaG  on his buttocks.  In 1963.

Hell, the woke people at NASA would even try to rename gravity if they found Newton’s Ye Olde Tweetes.  “Leibniz, thou art poore at the mathematical artes and thou art desirous of the companie of other men in a decidedly unfraternal fashion.”

Even Jeff Bezos is better than NASA now, having sent Katy Perry into space so that she could experience zero gravity with the first all-female crew.  Notice that there was nothing they could do, since they had about as much control over the ride into space as Johnny Depp did when he got on the Pirates of the Caribbean™ ride.  But, hey, Katy got to say that these women would (and I’m not making this up) “put the ass in astronaut.”

You might not want to Google® her, either.  Drunk wine aunt territory in 2025.

But back to the main point:  economic activity is only useful if it expands human knowledge or creates additional productive capacity.  That’s it.  NASA really does do some great planetary science, but they could likely do that same science with half the staff.  Kipping waxes on that this is the “building the cathedral” part of society – the fruits of basic research may not even be usable for decades or hundreds of years.  But we don’t need chief diversity officers to do that, we need scientists and engineers.

And, we don’t need to understand absolutely everything before we make use of it.  We were boiling water and making steam engines long before we’d figured out thermodynamics, and as a professor of mine noted, “Wilder, if we had waited until we understood the cantilever beam before we built houses, we’d still be living in caves.”

I am still in favor of science.

But it has to be kept in balance with economics so we have a strong economy.  Why?  Because otherwise, the physicists won’t have any money to give you when you beat them up.

Then how will you buy yourself something nice?

“Your home is two thousand, three hundred and twenty-five square feet. Current IRS code allows us to reduce your taxable income by a percentage of your workspace relative to the overall size of your house.” – The Accountant

How long do leftovers have to be in the fridge before I can count them as dependents?  Asking for a friend.

Spent all day doing taxes and money stuff.  Regular post on Wednesday, but please enjoy these tax-related memes I found.  Regular post on Wednesday.

“I refuse to believe that I’m only here because I popped out of your imagina….” [poof] – John Dies at the End

So, it’s been a very, very long week. Not at all bad, in fact several things are coming together that are pretty cool.

But.

No time to create a proper post, so I’ll just share some more A.I. work, which will (probably) be the last A.I. stuff for a while. These are comics made by A.I. about itself, and appeared at the X page of Josie Kins (LINK).

Me? I do know that A.I. is not what humans would call conscious, yet I would also say exactly that about people who couldn’t understand conditional hypothetical arguments (how would you feel if you didn’t eat breakfast).

Does A.I. feel? It looks like not. It is, more than anything, very advanced pattern matching. There is a story, going back in time, of the Ship of Theseus.

The Ship of Theseus is a philosophical paradox that explores questions of identity and persistence over time. It originates from a thought experiment described by Plutarch, who is Greek and also dead.

Theseus, the mythical Greek hero and brother of Thesaurus, has a ship that is maintained, repaired, conserved, fixed, and preserved over many years. As parts of the ship decay, they are replaced with new parts. Eventually, every original piece—planks, mast, sails—is replaced.

The question arises: Is it still the same ship?

The paradox deepens when considering a second scenario: What if the discarded original parts of the ship are collected and reassembled into another ship? Which ship, if either, is the true Ship of Theseus—the one with all new parts but continuous maintenance, or the one rebuilt from the original materials but looking like it was ridden hard and put away wet?

Does an object’s essence lie in its physical components, its form, its function, or its history? Most of the cells of my body have been replaced. Yet, here I am, the Ship of Wilder’s consciousness. And do I do more than pattern match?

Tough questions. What happens if A.I. becomes a vessel of works of man, but man himself is absent? Will it laugh at my jokes?

Regardless, here are some comics that A.I. drew about itself. Enjoy!

Probably back next week.  Fingers crossed.