Monte-Carlo-ed Existence

People talk about how you can’t see stars in the city and yeah, that’s true, but their concept of “seeing stars” is being able to make out orion’s belt.

So, so few people have see the sky in all its glory and it’s not sad. It’s a fucking crime. Seeing a perfectly dark night, no clouds, not a hint of light pollution? That’s a fucking religious experience.

The sky the vast vast majority of us grew up with is not the sky that inspired us to look up. It is not the sky that inspired constellations. You can’t even see most constellations.

Your ancestors looked at the night sky and said “surely, that is where the gods must live.” And you might be lucky if you can see hardly more than a handful of stars.

When we were on a field trip to the middle of the red sea, I remember us all crowding at the end of the boat that didn’t have lights and just lying on our backs and staring

When you see a properly dark starscape

You understand why people wrote poems and made up legends and built rockets and said heaven’s in the sky

You think of the night sky like fairy lights on black velvet, but it’s not it’s not it’s like, like, dust in sunlight, like - I can’t find the words.

The stars are everywhere, like sugar, like glitter, like dust. You can’t find the constellations at first, not because you can’t recognise them, but because there’s so many stars you can’t pick out the familiar line of Orion’s belt. The North star has gone from bright familiarity to almost vanishing among a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million other lights. The milky way is a line of light arcing across the sky like a moon-trail on water only infinitely, infinitely bigger.

And for the first time in your life you’ll understand why people call it a dome, because it is, it’s three dimensional in exactly the way a city skyscape isn’t.

You’ll understand why Luthien Tinúviel danced under starlight, not moonlight, why people in a time before we knew the earth was round still looked up and wondered and built telescopes and dreamed about the stars.

The stars are endless and ancient and infinite and you will stand with your head craned back and your rucksack forgotten at your feet and you’ll feel like you’re falling upwards into that great bright sky like it’s calling you home and you’ll wonder how you ever thought the stars were beautiful before tonight when all you’d ever seen were the naked empty skyscapes of your home. And you’ll cry and you’ll spend the rest of your time there gazing up and wondering and imagining what it would be like to stand among those bright silver flecks

I’d often set an alarm to wake me in the middle of the night, so it was as dark as possible and my eyes as dark-adapted as they coud get, and starlight alone was enough to guide me

It always bugged me that the theory of relativity relied heavily on a flat fabric to explain the interactions of gravity and spacetime with matter.

For years I’ve been trying to look at this through a different lense and it started one morning making coffee with powder creamer. I watched as the clumps started floating around the whirl in the mug.

I thought this looks like little planets haha.

But there's work drawing analogies between Fluid Dynamics and Electromagnetism, and this goes back all the way to Maxwell. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.12902

The issue with drawing connections between fluid dynamics and gravity is that Gravity is inherently a nonlinear phenomenon. You can superimpose two Electromagnetic fields or fluid flows and the resultant will just be the sum of the two fields. You can't do this for gravity, you'll need to add a relativistic correction.

Another issue is that Mathematically, Gravity is described using tensor fields. And Fluid Dynamics is described using Vector fields. So given this difference, you can't draw a one-to-one mapping between the two.

I’m 35 now. Also here’s the original doodle

I'D LOVE TO ELABORATE because this is one of my favorite astronomy stories.

Okay. So in the field of Radio Astronomy, there's this phenomenon called a "fast radio burst", a very short, strong radio pulse picked up by a radio telescope. They're still poorly understood, and are considered very exciting to radio astronomers because of how rare they are.

In the 2010's, astronomers working at Australia's Parkes Radio Observatory identified a number of radio signals picked up by the telescope that appeared to resemble fast radio bursts, which they called Perytons.

However, they quickly realized that the signals had to be terrestrial in origin due to the strength of the signal.... as well as the fact that they always occurred during weekdays, around the same time.

The signals tended to be clustered around midday... hmm...

Further evidence that the signals were man-made... this trend also followed daylight savings!!!

(Unless aliens also follow Australian daylight savings conventions, which is highly unlikely...)

It took the astronomers several years, but they eventually tracked down the source to a microwave oven in the facility's break room.

They were unable to recreate the signal, until they tried opening the microwave door before it beeped. Turns out the microwave was letting out a tiny amount of radio emissions when the door opened, which the nearby telescope was sensitive enough to detect.

The Peryton signals had been popping up in the data for over a decade, presumably because astronomers taking their lunch breaks had been opening the break room microwave prematurely for the same reason cited by OP.

I imagine they must have a big sign reading "LET THE MICROWAVE FINISH BEFORE OPENING" hanging in the break room now.

TLDR: If you work in radio astronomy, let the microwave beep before opening it and removing your lunch.

Basically he designed a super simple hypothetical computer, and proved mathematically that it can do everything a more complicated computer can do, just maybe slower or faster.

This is normally brought up for the factoid that could run Doom on Xty Million Crabs, but it also applies to programming languages, not just computers.

See, it means that every programming language is equally "powerful", assuming it's Turing Complete (which is basically just "can do the things this minimal computer can do", which is basically every language except a couple simple theming languages and macro scripting systems), it's just easier or harder to do specific things in a given language. But they can still be done.

So this means the C/C++ your OS and browser was written in is just as powerful as everything else. The Java used for Minecraft and Android phones, the Javascript used for webpages, the C# used Unity, the BASIC used on 80s computers, and DickCode, the joke programming language I made as a university student which had only eight operators, but all eight were different ascii penises a la "8==D".

All equally powerful. You could write an OS, video game, or AI bot in any of these. It just might be a little slower or faster and easier or harder to do (especially DickCode, that one is very Hard).

Aren't computers neat?

So, from my understanding of Turing Completeness, you need the four conditions of:

Perform Logical Operations

Manipulate and Store Memory

Conditional branching

perform loops or branching.

From my understanding of the system, I don't think running any programs is possible because there's no way to implement Storage and Manipulation of memory on this system?

Basically he designed a super simple hypothetical computer, and proved mathematically that it can do everything a more complicated computer can do, just maybe slower or faster.

This is normally brought up for the factoid that could run Doom on Xty Million Crabs, but it also applies to programming languages, not just computers.

See, it means that every programming language is equally "powerful", assuming it's Turing Complete (which is basically just "can do the things this minimal computer can do", which is basically every language except a couple simple theming languages and macro scripting systems), it's just easier or harder to do specific things in a given language. But they can still be done.

So this means the C/C++ your OS and browser was written in is just as powerful as everything else. The Java used for Minecraft and Android phones, the Javascript used for webpages, the C# used Unity, the BASIC used on 80s computers, and DickCode, the joke programming language I made as a university student which had only eight operators, but all eight were different ascii penises a la "8==D".

All equally powerful. You could write an OS, video game, or AI bot in any of these. It just might be a little slower or faster and easier or harder to do (especially DickCode, that one is very Hard).

Aren't computers neat?

So, from my understanding of Turing Completeness, you need the four conditions of:

Perform Logical Operations

Manipulate and Store Memory

Conditional branching

perform loops or branching.

From my understanding of the system, I don't think running any programs is possible because there's no way to implement Storage and Manipulation of memory on this system?

Closest match: Dryobotodes eremita genome assembly, chromosome: 2 Common name: Brindled Green

Anime:

Netflix Adaptation: