True. And after everything in the last few months, even that's too far for me.
I have never, and will never, play Warhammer but damn does it have some cool lore and iconography. I have spent hours just reading the wiki. I have thought about getting, I was there the day Horus slew the emperor
Gamertag: KL Retribution
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PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
Big E is not technically dead
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WeaverWho are you?What do you want?Registered Userregular
I'm literally sitting over here with a couple of Thousand Sons tattoos. Luckily without context they just look generically occulty
Also today is the anniversary of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. How hard would it have been for us to decipher hieroglyphics without it? I assume at some point we probably would have figured it out right? Or maybe not, I honestly don't know.
Gamertag: KL Retribution
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valhalla13013 Dark Shield Perceives the GodsRegistered Userregular
Also today is the anniversary of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. How hard would it have been for us to decipher hieroglyphics without it? I assume at some point we probably would have figured it out right? Or maybe not, I honestly don't know.
The Rosetta Stone was the first bilingual text to reach Europe, but other bilinguals were discovered later
If no Greek text had been discovered it's still likely that someone with a familiarity of Coptic would've eventually figured out Demotic, and Hieroglyphs from there
These amateurs thinking they can actually hex the moon when OBVIOUSLY the moon has a far more powerful spiritual presence than these wee little babby witches. They're just humans of no consequence to the collective unconscious where the moon is multiple gods and spirits with so many myths, legends, and belief invested into it that their piddly magic trying to affect it is like whizzing in the ocean.
/s
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ShadowenSnores in the morningLoserdomRegistered Userregular
I mean, that was the plot of a recent Moon Knight arc that had him go apeshit and beat up the Marvel Universe for its own good, and not even Thor or Doctor Strange could stop him because ultimately a lot of the more mystical characters' powers derived from moon mythology and symbolism, and none of the science heroes could stand up to an avatar of the moon gods.
One thing I didn't really understand until recently is that a particle is unobserved as long as it is informationally isolated from the rest of the universe (quoting Arvin Ash), the particle is a probability wave as long as there is no information encoded about it in the rest of the universe
As far as I personally understand it, this seems to point towards reality being a really granular thing
Yeah the term "observer" is pretty bad casually because it implies a consciousness while its just about if any kind of interaction. A similar issue arises with the word "particle" which started out as meaning "tiny ball" but now means "localized field oscillation" without the public at large going along for the ride.
Honestly the middle part of that video still annoys me. I've done the math. I've done the experiment. But it still feels like it can't be right. The fact that the rotation measurement (interaction) resets the polarity and you can then rotate it again with just a loss of intensity instead of it blacking it out. You can see that filter order A B C gives a different result than B A C even though they are just the same filter at different angles....
It almost makes me mad somehow. I believe it, the explanation is there, but my brain goes "but nope."
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3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
I think quantum mechanics/physics researchers have done themselves an enormous disservice (vis a vis accessibility and public relations) in the terms they've chosen to use. For example when you have a sentence like:
a particle is unobserved as long as it is informationally isolated from the rest of the universe (quoting Arvin Ash), the particle is a probability wave as long as there is no information encoded about it in the rest of the universe
I'm sure this sentence is all technically true, but I point out the bolded words as maybe the worst possible terms they could have chosen here. "Information" and "encode" both have meanings that the average human will be familiar with and use to talk about things like facebook or email or a newspaper article or literal computer code, etc. They're entirely associated with human-made constructs and how humans pass knowledge on to one another.
So when you hear this being applied to natural phenomena, the very fabric of the universe, your mind rebels and goes "nah that's all bullshit" because that word means something very different in your everyday life. Doesn't matter if what the researchers are saying is 100% true, and maybe those terms are even really accurate in terms of the effects they're describing, but for the purpose of explaining the field to people not in that field they've made perhaps the worst possible choices in how they refer to things.
That said, this is not the first field of science to score an own goal like this, nor will it be the last, because a distressing number of scientists don't consider language or linguistics important and in fact get mad when you try to point things like this out. Which like, I get it, scientifically this makes no sense, but dog 95% of the world aren't scientists and don't think like us and they're the ones you need to impress.
I do agree that using terms of art can lead to communication difficulties between fields, or to lay people, but the alternative is just making up new words, which is jargon-y as hell and also is shown to make people feel excluded or disengage from whatever you're talking about. I don't know if there's a perfect solution but in my experience of trying to explain this kind of shit to intelligent people who don't have a background in physics, using natural language does help move them through the concepts even if you have to go back and reiterate "now when I say information ..." every so often.
(tbh I don't actually see the problem with the terms you've highlighted (though I agree that 'observer' can be confusing), but I might just be too embedded in the physics world to recognize the potential for confusion).
That phrase seems fine to me but I am also the person in my department who tends to complain loudest about most everyone who gives a quantum information colloquium talk, because they tend to go a little like this:
Slide 1: Standard Science Title that is either pithy or more likely overlong and technical - Whatever, everyone does that
Slides 2-3: Here's Alice and Bob, and Eve! Some funny pictures with Bob the Builder probably and very basic background
Slides 4-: Fucking wait stop slow down what the fuck are you even talking about now
I do agree that using terms of art can lead to communication difficulties between fields, or to lay people, but the alternative is just making up new words, which is jargon-y as hell and also is shown to make people feel excluded or disengage from whatever you're talking about. I don't know if there's a perfect solution but in my experience of trying to explain this kind of shit to intelligent people who don't have a background in physics, using natural language does help move them through the concepts even if you have to go back and reiterate "now when I say information ..." every so often.
(tbh I don't actually see the problem with the terms you've highlighted (though I agree that 'observer' can be confusing), but I might just be too embedded in the physics world to recognize the potential for confusion).
I agree, there's not an easy solution to how to communicate relatively new concepts to people every time a term becomes commonplace within a particular scientific field, but I think maybe I did a bad job explaining why I find "information" to be especially confusing in this sense so here's take two:
A lot of terms of art don't overlap at all with common language usage (e.g. photon, boson) or do overlap but their meaning is not meaningfully changed (e.g. particle). Within the terms of art that do overlap, many of those overlap with words that are unlikely to come up in day to day speech (e.g. cell, sequence). For these, I think it is easy for people to separate when they're talking about the science use, and when they're talking about the lay use.
For the further subset of terms of art that might be more commonly used in speech, a lot of those have enough connective tissue between the scientific use and the lay use that people can make the jump without balking at it (field being a great example: even if a meadow and a quantum field don't actually share any similarities in terms of what they describe, the mental image of a field of grass stretching out and a weird nebulous quantum field stretched out through space [accurate or not I assure you this is how people who aren't well schooled in physics think about this] can broadly categorized together for language use).
Here is what specifically fucks up "information:" this is a word people use a lot, in many cases probably at least once a day in conversation, and it is tended to be used to mean "a list of facts or points of data." The physics use is actually pretty similar to this in terms of what it's being used to describe, it's just describing it at the atomic level instead of, like, someone's listicle on the most recent coronovirus stats or what have you. Again, seems fine on its face. How it faceplants is that "information" in the common use describes something that by definition cannot be tangible: concepts, numbers, etc (and no, I do not think reducing these to a tangible form suddenly makes them tangible, nor do I think this is how the average person conceptualizes this word at a subconscious level). "Information" in the physics use is describing extremely tangible things that can in fact be destroyed or altered via interactions. To someone who's only ever heard information used to refer to intangible things, it's going to sound bizarre to hear about a tangible object (e.g., black hole) destroying "information." How can you "destroy" information? That doesn't even make sense! Deleting it, like a computer? Black holes aren't computers! Etc. Real objections I have seen raised to this use of the word, by the way.
And yes I am aware that this is not going to sound like a contradiction or a distinction with any meaning to anyone who's educated in physics and I think therein lies the problem. Because it's not inaccurate to say that a black hole is destroying information. In a very real sense, that's what's happening. But to someone for whom information means a list of their friends' phone numbers or a wikipedia article, it's a bizarre and nonsensical phrase.
I dunno. I rewrote this post 3 times and I'm still not sure I'm doing a good job explaining what I'm trying to say. I am shit at verbalizing these concepts.
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3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
The use of the term goes back before the widespread adoption of personal computers and it's intrinsically linked to fields like quantum computing
Right, my point isn't that the term is at all inaccurate or even a bad term in a vacuum, just that lay people tend to have an innate negative reaction to it because it means something that feels very different for them. Whether or not there's a genuinely meaningful distinction in how the word is being used isn't actually important, because for the most part how people react to language isn't based on logic, it's based entirely on existing prejudice and feelings.
It's like "raptor." The use of "raptor" to describe certain kinds of predatory bird far predates the use of the term to describe certain species of non-avian theropod dinosaurs, but if you say "raptor" to the average person they're going to think velociraptor or deinonychus, not eagle or osprey.
3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
edited July 2020
I am now worried that this comes off as "god, get fucked quantum physicists ya fuckin' idiots" which is really, really, profoundly not what I was trying to say. My overwhelming emotion is sympathy because it sucks that this very important word for the field also happens to be one that folks not in that field tend to have a really hard time going along with this usage of.
I did segue that into a broader discussion about how scientists use language but I do think a lot of scientific language uses very exclusionary language, sometimes with intent to exclude, sometimes because it can be hard when you're immersed in a field to perceive what will or will not be easily communicated to people outside that field, and it bums me out. I think there's a big need for scientifically literate folks who can distill high level scientific discussion into a form that anyone can easily understand and pick up, but there's no money for or immediately obvious return on investment from that, so. Capitalism ruins everything once again and I continue to be trash at writing posts that don't come off as douchey. Yaaaay.
FishmanPut your goddamned hand in the goddamned Box of Pain.Registered Userregular
edited July 2020
This is weird... NASA has apparently 're-definined' what counts as an EVA, so that now the Apollo missions all had one (or two) extra 'spacewalks' when they depressurised the cabin to jettison waste and unnecessary weight ballast.
To prepare for two of its astronauts marking a new milestone in space, NASA has decided to rewrite the records for many of its historic missions, including the first moon landing.
As history records, Apollo 11 crew members Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin performed the first-ever moonwalk on July 20, 1969, 51 years ago Monday. The astronauts' 2-hour, 31-minute and 40-second outing to explore the lunar surface was recorded by newspapers, historians, authors and by NASA, itself, as the mission's only extravehicular activity, or EVA, the technical term for spacewalks.
But with a recent press release, NASA effectively added a second EVA to the first moonwalkers' credit — and the agency did not stop there. It has now changed its log books to add an additional EVA to the second, third, fourth and fifth moon landings and increased the count for the sixth and last Apollo lunar landing by two.
No one thinks that those counts as real EVA's, really. It's counter to literally all previous published material and their own record history.
But what it will do is mean that the '300th' spacewalk milestone will happen later today.
... and , as some have pointed out, therefore under the current administration. :mad:
I thought the only people who sincerely worship Norse gods these days are MRA Neonazis
Same but then it was funny when the MRA neonazis assumed the same thing but the people with Norse god tiktok channels turned out to support BLM.
I saw a great point once which is, if someone's excitedly talking about Norse mythology and you want to determine if they're a Nazi or just genuinely into it, ask them about Loki's horse-child.
I think that part of the problem is that "information" in a colloquial sense is something very easily grasped, whereas "information" in the sense of physics is actually really hard to easily define I think. Or at least, I always struggle to understand it. My understanding is that it is a resolution of uncertainty, but that's probably wrong.
Also there are some interpretations of physics that make no sense but not intuitively. Like "Black Holes appear to destroy information, but that can't be right" well why not? Why can't information be lost? It's not intuitive.
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
edited July 2020
As someone with a Master's Degree in Information Science, I can tell you that information can't be destroyed because the union wouldn't stand for it. Not enough library jobs to go around as it is.
Information is basically a set of values, the information a physicist has/needs about a physical system
The more information you need, the higher the entropy of that system
The problem with information being destroyed is that it would in a way also remove entropy from the universe because black holes from outside are simple objects
One thing I didn't really understand until recently is that a particle is unobserved as long as it is informationally isolated from the rest of the universe (quoting Arvin Ash), the particle is a probability wave as long as there is no information encoded about it in the rest of the universe
As far as I personally understand it, this seems to point towards reality being a really granular thing
look the important takeway from all this is
quantum information theory proves that if you don't pay attention to something, it probably doesn't exist
ditto if you try really hard to ignore something or Just Cant Deal with This Shit, you can retroactively force entities back into non existence
This is weird... NASA has apparently 're-definined' what counts as an EVA, so that now the Apollo missions all had one (or two) extra 'spacewalks' when they depressurised the cabin to jettison waste and unnecessary weight ballast.
To prepare for two of its astronauts marking a new milestone in space, NASA has decided to rewrite the records for many of its historic missions, including the first moon landing.
As history records, Apollo 11 crew members Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin performed the first-ever moonwalk on July 20, 1969, 51 years ago Monday. The astronauts' 2-hour, 31-minute and 40-second outing to explore the lunar surface was recorded by newspapers, historians, authors and by NASA, itself, as the mission's only extravehicular activity, or EVA, the technical term for spacewalks.
But with a recent press release, NASA effectively added a second EVA to the first moonwalkers' credit — and the agency did not stop there. It has now changed its log books to add an additional EVA to the second, third, fourth and fifth moon landings and increased the count for the sixth and last Apollo lunar landing by two.
No one thinks that those counts as real EVA's, really. It's counter to literally all previous published material and their own record history.
But what it will do is mean that the '300th' spacewalk milestone will happen later today.
... and , as some have pointed out, therefore under the current administration. :mad:
If they can retroactively add Extravehicular Activities, then they can retroactively remove them. Which they absolutely should do as soon as the NASA director is changed in January.
Edit: I hope those astronauts show some integrity and refuse to acknowledge it as the 300th spacewalk
one idea I've heard regarding black holes apparently destroying information in the physics sense is that they leak energy very slowly in something called hawking radiation and very, very gradually shrink as they lose energy this way, and you could hypothetically read the hawking radiation to reconstruct the prior states, so the information isn't actually destroyed? I don't know if that's a well-regarded theory or not though.
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I have never, and will never, play Warhammer but damn does it have some cool lore and iconography. I have spent hours just reading the wiki. I have thought about getting, I was there the day Horus slew the emperor
PSN:Furlion
I know but it is a cool fucking quote!
Also today is the anniversary of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. How hard would it have been for us to decipher hieroglyphics without it? I assume at some point we probably would have figured it out right? Or maybe not, I honestly don't know.
PSN:Furlion
Or Egyptian, possibly.
The Rosetta Stone was the first bilingual text to reach Europe, but other bilinguals were discovered later
If no Greek text had been discovered it's still likely that someone with a familiarity of Coptic would've eventually figured out Demotic, and Hieroglyphs from there
This is about collapsing the wavefunction and then returning everything to an "unobserved" state
One thing I didn't really understand until recently is that a particle is unobserved as long as it is informationally isolated from the rest of the universe (quoting Arvin Ash), the particle is a probability wave as long as there is no information encoded about it in the rest of the universe
As far as I personally understand it, this seems to point towards reality being a really granular thing
Honestly the middle part of that video still annoys me. I've done the math. I've done the experiment. But it still feels like it can't be right. The fact that the rotation measurement (interaction) resets the polarity and you can then rotate it again with just a loss of intensity instead of it blacking it out. You can see that filter order A B C gives a different result than B A C even though they are just the same filter at different angles....
I'm sure this sentence is all technically true, but I point out the bolded words as maybe the worst possible terms they could have chosen here. "Information" and "encode" both have meanings that the average human will be familiar with and use to talk about things like facebook or email or a newspaper article or literal computer code, etc. They're entirely associated with human-made constructs and how humans pass knowledge on to one another.
So when you hear this being applied to natural phenomena, the very fabric of the universe, your mind rebels and goes "nah that's all bullshit" because that word means something very different in your everyday life. Doesn't matter if what the researchers are saying is 100% true, and maybe those terms are even really accurate in terms of the effects they're describing, but for the purpose of explaining the field to people not in that field they've made perhaps the worst possible choices in how they refer to things.
That said, this is not the first field of science to score an own goal like this, nor will it be the last, because a distressing number of scientists don't consider language or linguistics important and in fact get mad when you try to point things like this out. Which like, I get it, scientifically this makes no sense, but dog 95% of the world aren't scientists and don't think like us and they're the ones you need to impress.
(tbh I don't actually see the problem with the terms you've highlighted (though I agree that 'observer' can be confusing), but I might just be too embedded in the physics world to recognize the potential for confusion).
Slide 1: Standard Science Title that is either pithy or more likely overlong and technical - Whatever, everyone does that
Slides 2-3: Here's Alice and Bob, and Eve! Some funny pictures with Bob the Builder probably and very basic background
Slides 4-: Fucking wait stop slow down what the fuck are you even talking about now
I agree, there's not an easy solution to how to communicate relatively new concepts to people every time a term becomes commonplace within a particular scientific field, but I think maybe I did a bad job explaining why I find "information" to be especially confusing in this sense so here's take two:
A lot of terms of art don't overlap at all with common language usage (e.g. photon, boson) or do overlap but their meaning is not meaningfully changed (e.g. particle). Within the terms of art that do overlap, many of those overlap with words that are unlikely to come up in day to day speech (e.g. cell, sequence). For these, I think it is easy for people to separate when they're talking about the science use, and when they're talking about the lay use.
For the further subset of terms of art that might be more commonly used in speech, a lot of those have enough connective tissue between the scientific use and the lay use that people can make the jump without balking at it (field being a great example: even if a meadow and a quantum field don't actually share any similarities in terms of what they describe, the mental image of a field of grass stretching out and a weird nebulous quantum field stretched out through space [accurate or not I assure you this is how people who aren't well schooled in physics think about this] can broadly categorized together for language use).
Here is what specifically fucks up "information:" this is a word people use a lot, in many cases probably at least once a day in conversation, and it is tended to be used to mean "a list of facts or points of data." The physics use is actually pretty similar to this in terms of what it's being used to describe, it's just describing it at the atomic level instead of, like, someone's listicle on the most recent coronovirus stats or what have you. Again, seems fine on its face. How it faceplants is that "information" in the common use describes something that by definition cannot be tangible: concepts, numbers, etc (and no, I do not think reducing these to a tangible form suddenly makes them tangible, nor do I think this is how the average person conceptualizes this word at a subconscious level). "Information" in the physics use is describing extremely tangible things that can in fact be destroyed or altered via interactions. To someone who's only ever heard information used to refer to intangible things, it's going to sound bizarre to hear about a tangible object (e.g., black hole) destroying "information." How can you "destroy" information? That doesn't even make sense! Deleting it, like a computer? Black holes aren't computers! Etc. Real objections I have seen raised to this use of the word, by the way.
And yes I am aware that this is not going to sound like a contradiction or a distinction with any meaning to anyone who's educated in physics and I think therein lies the problem. Because it's not inaccurate to say that a black hole is destroying information. In a very real sense, that's what's happening. But to someone for whom information means a list of their friends' phone numbers or a wikipedia article, it's a bizarre and nonsensical phrase.
I dunno. I rewrote this post 3 times and I'm still not sure I'm doing a good job explaining what I'm trying to say. I am shit at verbalizing these concepts.
Right, my point isn't that the term is at all inaccurate or even a bad term in a vacuum, just that lay people tend to have an innate negative reaction to it because it means something that feels very different for them. Whether or not there's a genuinely meaningful distinction in how the word is being used isn't actually important, because for the most part how people react to language isn't based on logic, it's based entirely on existing prejudice and feelings.
It's like "raptor." The use of "raptor" to describe certain kinds of predatory bird far predates the use of the term to describe certain species of non-avian theropod dinosaurs, but if you say "raptor" to the average person they're going to think velociraptor or deinonychus, not eagle or osprey.
Quantum Mechanics: Animation explaining quantum physics25:46
Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser - Quantum Physics 26:31
This will be here until I receive an apology or Weedlordvegeta get any consequences for being a bully
I did segue that into a broader discussion about how scientists use language but I do think a lot of scientific language uses very exclusionary language, sometimes with intent to exclude, sometimes because it can be hard when you're immersed in a field to perceive what will or will not be easily communicated to people outside that field, and it bums me out. I think there's a big need for scientifically literate folks who can distill high level scientific discussion into a form that anyone can easily understand and pick up, but there's no money for or immediately obvious return on investment from that, so. Capitalism ruins everything once again and I continue to be trash at writing posts that don't come off as douchey. Yaaaay.
This will be here until I receive an apology or Weedlordvegeta get any consequences for being a bully
http://www.collectspace.com/news/news-072020a-apollo-trash-jettisons-300th-eva.html
No one thinks that those counts as real EVA's, really. It's counter to literally all previous published material and their own record history.
But what it will do is mean that the '300th' spacewalk milestone will happen later today.
... and , as some have pointed out, therefore under the current administration. :mad:
No, I'm just resting my eyes.
Also there are some interpretations of physics that make no sense but not intuitively. Like "Black Holes appear to destroy information, but that can't be right" well why not? Why can't information be lost? It's not intuitive.
The more information you need, the higher the entropy of that system
The problem with information being destroyed is that it would in a way also remove entropy from the universe because black holes from outside are simple objects
look the important takeway from all this is
quantum information theory proves that if you don't pay attention to something, it probably doesn't exist
ditto if you try really hard to ignore something or Just Cant Deal with This Shit, you can retroactively force entities back into non existence
BOOM.
what a weird empty post
oh well
This will be here until I receive an apology or Weedlordvegeta get any consequences for being a bully
If they can retroactively add Extravehicular Activities, then they can retroactively remove them. Which they absolutely should do as soon as the NASA director is changed in January.
Edit: I hope those astronauts show some integrity and refuse to acknowledge it as the 300th spacewalk