#that's why virtually everything is a theory even gravity

[ms-hells-bells]

how do u know the mathematical probability of the likelihood of extraterrestrial life or aliens visiting earth if we don’t have enough data on it. probabilities are based on observational data. not saying either is a realistic bet (not saying they’re not) because science isn’t determined by hypotheticals but also how can you eliminate the possibility or make a definitive statement that’s backed by stats if you don’t actually have data. if anything, making a crude estimate, the systems that we’ve explored aside from ours so far haven’t been found to have life so it would actually be more accurate to say extraterrestrial life doesn’t exist, right? but really we don’t have a large enough sample size.

'science isn't determined by hypotheticals' oh okay, you're just stupid.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Zuck’s gravity-defying metaverse money-pit

Tomorrow (Oct 31) at 10hPT, the Internet Archive is livestreaming my presentation on my recent book, The Internet Con.

Think of everything that makes you miserable as being caught between two opposing, irresistible, irrefutable truths:

"Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops" (Stein's Law)

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" (Keynes)

Both of these are true, even though they seemingly contradict one another, and no one embodies that contradiction more perfectly than Mark Zuckerberg.

Take the metaverse.

Zuck's "pivot" to a virtual world he ripped off from a quarter-century old cyberpunk novel (reminder: cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion) was born of desperation.

Zuck fancies himself an avatar of the Emperor Augustus (that's why he has that haircut) (no, really). The emperors of antiquity are infamous for getting all weepy when they run out of lands to conquer.

But the lachrymosity of emperors has little causal relationship to the anxieties of tech monopolists! Alexander weeps because he just loves a good conquest and when he finishes conquering the world, he's terminally bored. That's not Zuck's problem at all. When Zuck attains monopoly status, his company develops an autoimmune disorder, as his vicious princelings run out of enemies to destroy and begin to knife one another.

Any monopoly faces these destructive microincentives, but tech is exceptional here because tech has the realtime flexibility and speed that brick-and-mortar businesses can never match:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Sociopaths with tech monopolies are worse for the same reason that road-rage would be worse in a flying car: adding new capacity to indiscriminate self-destructive urges turns ordinary car crashes into low-level airburst warfare:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

The flexibility of digital gives tech platforms so much latitude to break things in tiny increments. A tech platform is like a Jenga tower composed of infinitely divisible blocks. The Jenga players are the product managers and executives who have run out of the ability to grow by attracting new business thanks to their monopoly dominance. Now they compete with one another to increase the yield from their respective divisions by visiting pain upon the business customers and end users their platform connects. By tiny increments, they increase the product's cost, lower its reliability, and strip it of its utility and then charge rent to restore its functionality:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/24/cursed-bigness/#incentives-matter

This is the terminal stage of enshittification, the unstoppable autocannibalism of platforms as they seek to harvest all the value created by business customers and end users, leaving the absolute minimum of residual value needed to keep both stuck to the platform. This is a brittle equilibrium, because the difference between "I hate this service but I just can't stop using it," and "Get me the fuck out of here" is razor-thin.

All it takes is one tiny push – a whistleblower, a livestreamed mass-shooting, a Cambridge Analytica – and people bolt for the doors. This triggers the final stage: the "pivot," which is a tech euphemism for "panic."

For Zuck, the pivot got real after a disappointing earnings call triggered a mass sell-off of Facebook stock, history's worst one-day value incineration, which lopped a quarter of a trillion dollars off the company's market cap:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-19/dramatic-stock-moves-of-2022-led-by-meta-dive-nordic-flash-crash

This was when the metaverse became the company's top priority.

Now, in my theory of enshittification, the step that follows the pivot is death: "Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Many people have asked me about the conspicuous non-death of Facebook! That's where I have to fall back on Stein's Law: "Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Facebook can't continue to annihilate value, alienate its workers, harm the public, hemorrhage money in support of a mediocrity's cherished folly forever. Can it?

Admittedly, it sure seems like it can. Facebook's metaverse pivot has thus far cost the company $46,500,000,000. That is: $46.5 billion. That's even more money than Uber torched, seeking to maintain the illusion that they will be able to create monopolies on both transport and the labor market for driving and recoup the billions the Saudi royal family let them use for the con:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/11/bezzlers-gonna-bezzle/#gryft

Don't worry: the Saudi royals are fine! They cashed out at the IPO, collecting a tidy profit at the expense of retail investors who assumed that a pile of shit as big as Uber must have a pony under it, somewhere:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/19/fake-it-till-you-make-it/#millennial-lifestyle-subsidy

Uber has doubled the cost of rides and halved drivers' wages, using illegal gimmicks like "algorithmic wage discrimination" to squeeze a little more juice out of the nearly exhausted husks of its workforce:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

But Stein's Law hasn't been repealed. Drivers can't drive for sub-subsistence wages. Do that long enough and they'll literally starve: that's what "subsistence" means. We lost a decade of transit investment thanks to the Uber con, at the same time as traditional taxi drivers were forced out of the industry. Uber can't be profitable and still pay a living wage, and the fantasy of self-driving cars as a means of zeroing out the wage-bill altogether remains stubbornly, lethally unworkable:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Which means we're at the point where you can get off a commuter train at a main station and find yourself stranded: no taxis at the taxi-queue, no busses due for an hour, and no Uber cars available unless you're willing to pay $95 for a ten-minute ride in a luxury SUV (why yes, this did happen to me recently, thanks for asking).

As more and more of us are exposed to these micro-crises, the political will to do something will increase. This can't go on forever. "Don't use commuter rail" isn't a viable option. "Walk three miles each way to the commuter rail station" isn't viable either. Neither is "Pay $95 for an Uber to get to the station." Something's gotta give…eventually.

"Eventually" is the key word here. Remember the corollary of Stein's Law: Keynes's maxim that "markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." Sure, anything that can't go on forever eventually stops, but that is no guarantee of a soft landing. You can't smoke two packs a day forever – but in the absence of smoking cessation, the eventual terminus of that habit is stage-four lung cancer. Keep hammering butts into your face and your last smoke will come out a crematorium chimney.

Zuckerberg hasn't merely blown a whole-ass Twitter on the metaverse with nothing to show for it – he's gotten richer while doing it! In the past year, his net worth increased by 130%, to $59 billion, thanks to an increase in Facebook's share-price, driven by investors who stubbornly remain irrational, keeping the Boy Emperor solvent long past any reasonable assessment of his performance.

What are these investors betting on? One possibility is that the rise and rise of Facebook's share-price represents a bet on technofeudalism. Since the Communist Manifesto, Marxists have been predicting the end of capitalism. That end seems to have come, but what followed capitalism wasn't socialism, it was the return of feudalism, an economic system where elites derive their wealth from rents, not profits:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Profit is the income you get from investing in capital – machinery, systems, plant – and then harvesting the surplus value created by workers who mobilize this capital. Capitalism produces massive returns for its winners – in the Manifesto's first chapter, Marx and Engels just geek out about how productive and dynamic this system is.

But capitalism is also a Red Queen's Race, where the winners have to run faster and faster to stay in the same place. Capitalism drives competition, as other would-be winners pile into the sector, replicating the systems that the current winners are using and then improving on them. This is why the prophets of capitalist end-times like the FBI informant Peter Thiel say that "competition is for losers."

Capitalism's "profits" stand in contrast to the feudalist's "rents." Rents are income you get from owning something that other people need to produce things. The capitalist owns the coffee-shop, but the feudalist owns the building. When a rival capitalist opens a superior coffee-shop and drives the old shop out of business, the capitalist loses, but the rentier wins. Now they can rent out an empty storefront in the neighborhood everyone's coming to because of that hot new cafe.

Feudal and manorial lords also made their fortunes by extracting surplus value from workers, but these rentiers don't care about owning the means of production. The peasant in the field pays for their own agricultural equipment and livestock – control over the means of production is necessary for worker liberation, but it's not sufficient. The worker's co-op that owns its factory can still find the value it produces bled off by the landlord who owns the land the factory sits on.

The jury's still out on whether American workers really see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires," but America's capitalists have a palpable, undeniable loathing for capitalism. The dream of an American "entrepreneur" is *PassiveIncome: money you get from owning something capitalists and/or workers use to create value. Digital technology creates exciting new possibilities for rent-extraction: a taxi-operator had to buy and maintain a car that someone else drove. Uber can offload this hassle onto its drivers and rent out access to the chokepoint it created between drivers and riders, charging all the traffic can bear. This is feudalism in the cloud – or as Yannis Varoufakis calls it, cloudalism.

In Varoufakis's Technofeudalism, he describes Amazon as a feudal venture. From a distance, Amazon seems like a bustling marketplace of manic capitalism, with sellers avidly competing to offer more variety and lower costs in a million independently operated storefronts. But closer inspection reveals that Amazon is a planned economy, not a market.

Every one of those storefronts pays rent to the same landlord – Amazon – which determines which goods can be offered for sale. Amazon sets pricing for those goods, and extracts 45-51% of every dollar those sellers make. Amazon even controls which goods are shelved at eye-height when you enter the store, and which ones are banished to a dusty storeroom in a distant sub-basement you'll never find:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/14/flywheel-shyster-and-flywheel/#unfulfilled-by-amazon

Zuck's metaverse is pure-play technofeudalism, Amazon taken to the logical extreme. It's easy to get distracted by the part of Zuck's vision that will convert us all into legless, sexless, heavily surveilled low-resolution cartoon characters. But the real action isn't this digitization of our fleshy wants and needs. Zuck didn't spend $46.5B to torment us.

The cruelty isn't the point of the metaverse.

The point of the metaverse is to rent us out to capitalists.

Zuck doesn't know why we would use the metaverse, but he believes that if he can convince capitalists that we all want to live there, that they'll invest the capital to figure out how to serve us there, and then he can extract rent from those capitalists and start earning "passive income." It's an Uber for Cyberpunk Dystopias play.

Zuck's done this before. Remember the "pivot to video?" Zuckerberg wanted to compete with Youtube, but he didn't want to invest in paying for video production. Videos are really expensive to produce and the median video gets zero views. So Zuck used his captive audience to trick publishers into financing his move into video. He fraudulently told publishers that videos were blowing up on Facebook, outperforming boring old text by vast margins.

Publishers borrowed billions and raised billions more in the capital markets, financing the total conversion of newsrooms from text to video and precipitating a mass extinction event for print journalists. Zuck kept the con alive by giving away (fewer) billions to some of those publishers, falsely claiming that their videos were generating fortunes in advertising revenue. These lucky, credulous publishers became judas goats for their industry, luring others into the con, the same way that the "lucky" guy a carny lets win a giant teddy-bear at the start of the day lures others into putting down $5 to see if they can sink three balls in a rigged peach-basket.

But when we stubbornly refused to watch videos on Facebook, Zuck stopped spreading around these convincer payouts, and precipitated a second mass-extinction event in news media, as the new generation of video journalists joined their predecessors in Facebook-driven unemployment. Given this history, it's surreal to see publishers continue to insist that Facebook is stealing their content, when it is so clearly stealing their money:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

Metaverse is the new Pivot to Video. Zuckerberg is building a new world, which he will own, and he wants rent it to capitalists, who will compete with one another in just the way that Amazon's sellers compete. No matter who wins that competition, Zuckerberg will win. The prize for winning will be a rent increase, as Zuckerberg leverages the fact that your "successful" business relies on Facebook's metaverse to drain off all the value your workers have produced:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/18/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video/

This can't last forever, but how long until Zuck's reality distortion field runs out of battery? That's the $46.5B question.

The market can certainly remain irrational for a hell of a long time. But the market isn't the only force that regulates corporate outcomes. Regulators also regulate. Europe's GDPR is now seven years old, and it plainly outlaws Facebook's surveillance.

For nearly a decade, Facebook has pretended that this wasn't true, and they got away with it. Mostly, that's thanks to the fact that Ireland is a corporate crime-haven with a worse-than-useless Data Protection Commission:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

But anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. Facebook has finally been dragged into EU federal jurisdiction, where it will face exterminatory fines if it continues to spy on Europeans:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/07/luck-of-the-irish/#schrems-revenge

In response, Facebook has rolled out a subscription version of its main service and its anticompetitive acquisition, Instagram:

https://about.fb.com/news/2023/10/facebook-and-instagram-to-offer-subscription-for-no-ads-in-europe/

For €10/month, Facebook will give you an ad-free experience across its service offerings (it's €13/month if you pay through an app, as Facebook recoups the 30% #AdTax rents that the feudal Google/Apple mobile duopoly extracts).

But this doesn't come close to satisfying Facebook's legal obligations under the GDPR. The GDPR doesn't ban ads, it bans spying. Facebook spies on every single internet user, all the time. The apps we use are built with "free" Facebook toolkits that extract rent from the capitalists who make them by harvesting our data as we use their apps. The web-pages we visit have embedded Facebook libraries that do the same thing for web publishers. Facebook buys our data from brokers. Facebook has so many ways of spying on us that there's almost certainly no way for Facebook to stop spying on you, without radically transforming it operation.

To comply with the GDPR, Facebook must halt surveillance advertising altogether. There's no way to square "spying on users" with "you can't surveil without explicit consent, and you can't punish people for refusing."

And of course, "not spying" isn't the same as "not advertising." "Contextual advertising" – where ads are placed based on the thing you're looking at, not who you are and what you do – is hundreds of years old. Context ads underperform surveillance ads by a slim margin – about 5% – but they're vastly more profitable for publishers. That's because surveillance ads are feudal, controlled by rentiers like Facebook, who own vast troves of the surveillance data needed to run these ads. Traditional ad intermediaries (agencies, brokers) took 10-15% out of the total advertising market. Ad-tech companies – the Google/Facebook duopoly – take 51% out of every ad dollar spent.

Eliminate surveillance ads and you torch their feudal estates. Facebook will always know more about someone reading a news article than the publisher – but the publisher will always know more about the article than Facebook does:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

There are rents under capitalism, just as there are profits under feudalism. The defining characteristic of a system is what happens when rents and profits come into conflict. If profits win – for example, if productive companies beat patent trolls, or if news publishers escape Facebook's rent-extraction – then the system is capitalist. If rents win – if investors continue to bet large on the metaverse as its losses pass $50 billion and head for the $100 billion mark – then the system is feudal.

Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. The question isn't whether the platforms will eventually become so enshittified that they die – the question is whether they will go down in an all-consuming fireball, or whether they'll go down in a controlled demolition that lets us evacuate the people they've trapped inside them first:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/09/let-the-platforms-burn/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/30/markets-remaining-irrational/#steins-law

Image: Diego Delso (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Puente_de_las_cataratas_Victoria,_Zambia-Zimbabue,_2018-07-27,_DD_10.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

[mysticstronomy]

DOES QUANTUM GRAVITY EXIST??

Blog#389

Wednesday, April 3rd, 2024.

Welcome back,

All the fundamental forces of the universe are known to follow the laws of quantum mechanics, save one: gravity. Finding a way to fit gravity into quantum mechanics would bring scientists a giant leap closer to a “theory of everything” that could entirely explain the workings of the cosmos from first principles. A crucial first step in this quest to know whether gravity is quantum is to detect the long-postulated elementary particle of gravity, the graviton.

In search of the graviton, physicists are now turning to experiments involving microscopic superconductors, free-falling crystals and the afterglow of the big bang.

Quantum mechanics suggests everything is made of quanta, or packets of energy, that can behave like both a particle and a wave—for instance, quanta of light are called photons. Detecting gravitons, the hypothetical quanta of gravity, would prove gravity is quantum. The problem is that gravity is extraordinarily weak.

To directly observe the minuscule effects a graviton would have on matter, physicist Freeman Dyson famously noted, a graviton detector would have to be so massive that it collapses on itself to form a black hole.

“One of the issues with theories of quantum gravity is that their predictions are usually nearly impossible to experimentally test,” says quantum physicist Richard Norte of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. “This is the main reason why there exist so many competing theories and why we haven’t been successful in understanding how it actually works.”

In 2015, however, theoretical physicist James Quach, now at the University of Adelaide in Australia, suggested a way to detect gravitons by taking advantage of their quantum nature. Quantum mechanics suggests the universe is inherently fuzzy—for instance, one can never absolutely know a particle's position and momentum at the same time. One consequence of this uncertainty is that a vacuum is never completely empty, but instead buzzes with a “quantum foam” of so-called virtual particles that constantly pop in and out of existence.

These ghostly entities may be any kind of quanta, including gravitons.

Decades ago, scientists found that virtual particles can generate detectable forces. For example, the Casimir effect is the attraction or repulsion seen between two mirrors placed close together in vacuum. These reflective surfaces move due to the force generated by virtual photons winking in and out of existence.

Previous research suggested that superconductors might reflect gravitons more strongly than normal matter, so Quach calculated that looking for interactions between two thin superconducting sheets in vacuum could reveal a gravitational Casimir effect. The resulting force could be roughly 10 times stronger than that expected from the standard virtual-photon-based Casimir effect.

Recently, Norte and his colleagues developed a microchip to perform this experiment. This chip held two microscopic aluminum-coated plates that were cooled almost to absolute zero so that they became superconducting. One plate was attached to a movable mirror, and a laser was fired at that mirror. If the plates moved because of a gravitational Casimir effect, the frequency of light reflecting off the mirror would measurably shift. As detailed online July 20 in Physical Review Letters, the scientists failed to see any gravitational Casimir effect.

This null result does not necessarily rule out the existence of gravitons—and thus gravity’s quantum nature. Rather, it may simply mean that gravitons do not interact with superconductors as strongly as prior work estimated, says quantum physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who did not participate in this study and was unsurprised by its null results. Even so, Quach says, this was a courageous attempt to detect gravitons.”

Originally published on https://www.scientificamerican.com

COMING UP!!

(Saturday, April 6th, 2024)

"HOW DOES A NEUTRON STAR FORM??"

[ms-scarletwings]

Upon finishing S3//Ep2 of Moral Orel, “Innocence”, Orel’s morals finally clicked for me

As happens in a show this narratively rich, I looked around at some of the close-by chatter under comment sections. People were making these observations about how Orel seemingly just goes out of his way to interpret all of the lessons he’s given in the least charitable and most nonsensical way. Not an invalid view, and for the first good part of the show, you think this is just the function of an over the top comedic bit for the formula of each episode. It’s easy to ask how on earth a seemingly kind hearted, well meaning kid like this can be THAT devoid of the basic logical implications of what he hears, or any common moral intuition that virtually everyone has, right?

Orel’s not a stupid kid. But the entire problem with him up to the point thus far is that he legit DOES NOT in fact have that intuition we expect most people, even children to have. That knee-jerk repulsion to obviously harmful actions. That really vital sense of conscience. No, I don’t mean he’s some kind of psychopath. He has a bright and almost sickeningly sweet heart and it was part of how he broke the cycle despite everything. I mean that Orel has not had a coherent moral compass modeled to him through his earlier development. His ethical axioms are ALL rooted in divine command theory. To put it simply, he doesn’t believe “god is good”, he believes “goodness” itself is “what god says is good”. Most Christians, hell, most religious people generally do not literally, consciously operate in this way, and usually even the ones that do are (mostly) still functionally average people, because usually they were at least consistently conditioned to believe that axioms like human well-being are what God commands. To at least a fortunate degree, human empathy and socialization usually is allowed to and even encouraged to develop under mainstream religious upbringings.

You notice the glaring difference though when you see what happens to people who are molded entirely by Divine Command Theory and then become convinced that their God’s divine command is something that doesn’t happen to line up with conventionally good ideals, like those given earlier. This is what destructive cults do. This is what makes crusades. This is what causes anti-sodomy laws and stoning people to death for eating the wrong kind of fish or not wearing the right clothing to happen.

Understand that this is the hinge that Orel’s whole sense of right and wrong up to this point swings on. What it means is that this little boy can, and will, justify or excuse any and all directions given to him so long as he trusts the adult talking to him as someone who speaks for God. This combined with his craving for approval, plus the fact that he’s also had it drilled in his head to never question or doubt his elders’ wisdom makes for a child zealot that is dangerously easy to manipulate to do ANYTHING and with fanatical determination. It is less than no additional help that the Puppingtons (and the majority of the townsfolk) have never been golden examples for healthy social modeling, as well. Like, sure, he’s getting glimmers of actual goodness in there such as the Jesus loves you so love yourself and help thy neighbors messaging, but it’s being inconsistently contradicted by and juggled alongside at same hierarchical importance as “lessons” like beat the shit out of people who make fists, segregate the brown people, and be terrified of the same authority you expect safety and comfort from. Why on earth is it shocking that Orel seemingly has no sense of scale or priority when it comes to the rules? The rules he’s given are subject to constant and chaotic updates and are all treated with the same gravity. Follow X and you will be promised infinite reward. Disobey X and you will be met with infinite retribution. Not just even in a spiritual heaven and hell sense, but here in life too. Clay delivers the same punishment for getting hooked on crack or becoming a serial rapist that he does for the “sin” of using slang vernacular and meditating to relieve stress.

Everything that defines his life and virtues is a matter of constant anxiety and eagerness in order to appease a patriarchal tyrant that is portrayed as both ultimately benevolent and wise,

yet incredibly vindictive, sadistic, irrational, and petty.

And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this description can equally apply to Moralton’s conception of God and a certain alcoholic father.

No kidding when I say that Orel has so little consistent input to actually steer him in the right direction that it’s incredibly sad, to the point where he’s extremely fortunate to actually have such an optimistic and compassionate inclination at all. It only seems ridiculous how he can’t see obvious suffering and even personal detriment as any red flags to hesitate or question an action, until you remember that he’s so been domestically broken by Clay and his church that his Pavlovian response to pain is either gratitude, mild inconvenience, or, masochistic euphoria.

Nonetheless, all of this only backfires on every adult in Moralton because the one thing they can’t control or account for 24/7 is exactly how he interprets what they say, even when he’s trying his best to follow their command. It’s like a twisted Amelia Bedelia situation with him that no one actually wants to deal with, even though they all (except Stephanie) collectively played a part in creating this monster.

Censordoll was the first one who was smart and ambitious enough to see the potential for Orel’s blind subservience to be weaponized, and of freaking course she was.

Thing is, you bet the ONLY reason she stopped was because she also lost control of him, and we all know what the consequence of that was. He unintentionally yet absolutely destroyed her in the only weak point she has, yet exactly like Clay did during the “turn the other cheek” incident, she trapped herself in a situation where she couldn’t swallow her own pride in the name of reversing the damage.

What I guess I’m explaining here is that Orel’s collection of constant shenanigans, unknowingly, yet effectively, is literally a manifestation of the community’s own complete moral bankruptcy biting them back in the ass, and possibly even a divine punishment for it, depending on how you interpret the writing. Which is a HELL of a phenomenal, subtle twist to his whole premise that doesn’t abandon the original joke/satire, but instead builds upon it and adds a chasm of depth and intention.

PRETTY GREAT, HUH?~

[runabout-river]

Three Techniques Sukuna hasn't used yet

Finally we got the fire and the arrow(?) back, which makes this the third time that Sukuna uses his mysterious technique after Jogo and Makora. The good guys should've known about the fire though because Yuji gains Sukuna's memories after he gets back control of his body. He should've told everyone about this especially after he messed up protecting Megumi from Sukuna even though he knew about his future plans with him.

(Interestingly, Megumi has live-coverage of everything that Sukuna does unlike Yuji. That's probably because an awake Yuji would've immediate control over his body again. He can't be contained like Megumi.)

There are still (at least) 3 techniques though that Sukuna could use in the current fight. Cursed Technique Reversal, Hollow Technique and Maximum Technique.

Cursed Technique Reversal

For using CTR you need to meet two conditions. 1) being able to perform RCT to produce positive energy and 2) being able to channel that PE into your cursed technique to power it. (Sukuna can already channel his PE into others like Megumi.)

When Gojo uses it, he creates Red, the reversal of Blue, and when Kenjaku uses it he creates Gravity, the reversal of Anti-Gravity System. No other sorcerer than those two have been shown to be able to use CTR.

For Sukuna I can see him picking up his left hand that Maki cut off to attach it back to his arm: the reversal of his "cutting". "Glueing" so to speak. That would probably be easier for him right now than regrowing that hand.

Hollow Technique

Gojo has been the only sorcerer shown to us cabable of using the Hollow Technique, in his case Purple. For this he activates his technique with both PE and CE at the same time to combine Red and Blue. The push and pull abilities of Red and Blue create a virtual mass that destroys everything in its path.

The condition to use the Hollow Technique is concurrent usage of cursed and positive energy plus the ability to activate your technique with both at the same time.

Of note is that Gojo activated his last Purple one step at a time but that was only possible because Blue and Red can exist on their own for a certain period of time. Sukuna's Cleave and Dismantle are immediate attacks and can't do that.

Can Sukuna use HT though? Most likely because he can use PE and CE at the same time as he's been doing for a while now especially after being stabbed by Maki and her Split Soul Katana. But how would that look with his cutting and potential glueing? I have no idea. Maybe it would be sth like a creating impenetrable lines in the air like Dhruv's CT.

Maximum Technique

Uzumaki is the first technique that comes to mind here but Eso's Wing King and Jogo's Meteor are also among them. A MT is beside the Domain Expansion the ultimate expression of a cursed technique and jujutsu. Sukuna, who primes himself on the study of jujutsu, should be able to use this.

Now because MT encompasses and maxifies all aspects of a CT, it's logical why we haven't seen this until now. Most popular theory on Sukuna's fire is that it's part of his kitchen arsenal, in other words, we haven't seen his entire cursed technique yet or at least understood it in it's entire. After we're shown that, Sukuna's Maximum Technique becomes a reasonable concern that the heroes have to deal with.

[skyessparknotes]

blog post 3

lately i’ve been thinking a lot about the multiverse, so i wanted to write about it.

The multiverse theory. This theory is - essentially - exactly how it sounds. A theory about multiple universes. To be more thorough, this theory suggests that any and all things imaginable can both exist and not exist, virtually at the same time. Believing in this theory is anyone’s choice, but there is no evidence to neither entice nor deter one from the possibility. As far as we know, we can’t confirm or deny how true it may be, thus making it completely possible. Of course that means it could be completely impossible too, but why would it be impossible? If we can’t even travel past our own moon who are we to say there aren’t more universes out there?

If, perhaps, we were able to prove this theory true or false, would we want to? Say scientists create some device that could let a human travel to another universe. Would they want to risk it? If they do risk it and they never come back, it wouldn’t prove anything. The same goes for time travel. The number one rule of time travel is to NOT run into yourself. Why is that? And why do we have a time travel rule when we know time travel is inherently impossible. And why would running into your past self change anything? Essentially, someone would have had to experience this, and create this universal rule that no one questions nor implements. That implies your past self is the same you. For example, unless you run into yourself from the same decade, this is an entirely different person from the current version.

The multiverse theory could be entirely possible for all we know. Think about this. Math is fundamentally made up. Most things could be. We only know what scientists and other persons of authority have led us to believe in. While we have substantial evidence, we also don’t. We have evidence with numbers and ideas we

have been taught. For example, why are trees called trees? Why not automobiles? Who came up with these names, why did they choose them? Most importantly, why do we virtually accept these terms?

There are studies based on the multiverse theory, striving to prove or disprove whether it exists. How exactly does one do that? Many devote their lives to finding even the most consequential piece of evidence, thus removing a tiny layer of our ongoing wonders. Take Einstein for example. He theorized that time is relative to gravity. He suggested that - necessarily - the higher above sea level one is, the quicker one ages. And while that is very minuscule - only having millisecond differences - it is still quite possible. Many theories have surfaced, questioning time, travel, and multiverse credibility.

Nowadays, more people are open to the possibility of less stability among ideas we found comfort in. But centuries ago, philosophers were not only exonerated, but ostracized for questioning the slightest things such as why apples are red.

The multiverse theory is both true yet untrue, which is where things become complicated. If the theory is proven true, that confirms a universe where the theory is also untrue. Perhaps we live in that universe? Anything anyone could ever imagine is a reality, the severity changes have can vary, and always will.

While the possibility of the multiverse could be written about for ages, the absence of sufficient amounts of substantial evidence can’t add more depth. The multiverse theory suggests that anything and everything is both possible and impossible. Such as suggesting there are universes where the multiverse theory is an entirely different theory, perhaps one disproving of common knowledge. Believing in the multiverse theory is a choice, and has no set reason to or not to believe in it.

[davidstfde]

Scientific Temper in Children—Here's How Parents Can Nurture An Enquiring Mind

Have you ever wondered how Newton came to think about a falling apple? Have you ever thought that phenomena as bizarre as the speed of light made a genius out of Einstein? How do these people look at the world? How does the world seem so different to them?

This is nothing but what we call is ‘scientific thinking’ that differs them from the typical pattern of traditional thinking. The production of a scientifically literate population is a fundamental goal of our educational system. Virtually everything you can see, touch, taste, and smell is the product of a scientific process. And the scientific method isn’t just for big problems. It also applies to the little decisions in our life that make a big difference. Having a scientific mindset is an essential part of everyday life. It encompasses everything from waking up in the morning to cooking breakfast, driving your car, and even falling asleep.

Frequently, substantial effort has been devoted to determining how to increase the likelihood that, as students progress through school, they will acquire at least a mindset that they would use for critical and logical thinking along with a scientific temperament. To develop scientific thinking skill in students, we need to answer two questions- first, what is scientific thinking? And secondly, how can it be taught?

What is Scientific Thinking?

Scientific thinking is a particular form of human problem-solving that involves mental representations of hypotheses or conspiracy theories about the structure and processes of the natural world and various methods of inquiry used to determine the extent to which those hypotheses are consistent with phenomena. Basically, scientific thinking in simple terms is to think beyond the explanation that has been given regarding a certain topic. To ask questions of why? how? What if? etc. based on that certain topic apart from merely accepting the explanation that has been provided. There is a process of evaluating the evidence in scientific thinking.

Whether your child is a preteen or a toddler, she has a natural tendency to seek out reasons for the various mysteries of life that she comes across. Your child’s scientific temper is directly related to the environment she is in and the company she keeps. Therefore, your parenting style has a lot to offer towards the development of scientific temper in your child. There are a few ideas to nurture your child with which they can develop a scientific temper with evidence-based curiosity for anything happening around them.

Now we know why scientific temper and its development is necessary in a child but now let us understand how to develop the scientific temper in the students –

How to develop a Scientific Temper?

A pro-science home will encourage your child to make the most of his inquiring mind.

Here are a few tips like, encourage them to ask more questions and seek out answers on their own. Whenever they come to you for any questions, direct them to reliable sources like the encyclopedia or the dictionaries instead of directly giving them access to “google” or “Alexa”. Also, you can encourage them to watch more of scientific shows on the TV instead of only entertainment all the time.

Develop their critical and logical thinking skills to upgrade their IQ level.

Your child needs to use her reasoning and ask questions like, ‘Why is this happening?’ or ‘Is this the right way to respond?’ or ‘Who said this? Can I trust this instruction? Also, Do not hinder your child’s willingness to test so-called established ideas. One more thing to keep in mind is that never halt your child’s evaluation processes by saying ‘because I said so’. Instead encourage them to ask, ‘How do I know if this is true?’ or ‘How can I be sure?’. Another thing to do is teach your child the logical sequence of science. General principles can create specific instances like how the laws of gravity works. How physics work in real life. This will make them develop an interest right from the early ages.

Steer your child away from finding answers on the internet –

When your child will google their queries directly on the internet and get the answer their mind will not do any thinking. No brainstorming will be done and as a result, the children won’t develop any logical or scientific thinking skills. They need that ‘brain exercise’ to open up their minds and for that always encourage them to find the answers from alternative sources other than google.

Your child will use her knowledge with ease as you explore things together. Have discussions with them. To develop a scientific temper and encourage more and more young is what should be our motive and to ensure the same SFS Guwahati has always been engaged in continuous efforts to impart quality education and with the very same motive DIEP (Desalite Integrated Exam Prep) has been introduced for the students, an integrated coaching program that would be helpful for the students and enable developing the scientific approach to their thought processes. Hope this blog was helpful enough to let you develop that scientific thinking skills within your children. Nevertheless, in a world that is replete with misinformation, uncertainty, and flux, your child needs to be unreservedly reliant on his scientific temperament. This is a strength that will equip him to be an invaluable citizen of the world, regardless of the career path he chooses to embark on.

About SFS School, Guwahati

SFS Guwahati is one of the best Private CBSE School in Guwahati with Integrated Coaching, awarded with the “Certificate of Excellence” by Bharat Shiksha Puraskar and Ranked №24 across India for “Mental Health” Ranking 2021.

[harfanfare]

I saw this post and I was wondering if you write Malleus' too, is okay for you to make that?

How to win a heart of Malleus Draconia?

a/n: I started posting my writings here because I want to improve my English — so I technically wouldn't make this request. But! Someone on Wattpad (where I take requests) asked for the same thing, so I rolled up my sleeves and wrote this guide today in both languages. Enjoy~

1. Don't be afraid of him.

It is said that the first impression is the most important.

So when you first saw this guy walking through the corridor of Diasomnia, it was hard for you to get rid of that view from your head.

Illuminated both by the green magic flames set in the lobby, as well as by the moon, which eventually managed to break through the dark clouds and with a bright glow appear in the windows of the dormitory, he seemed... lonely and beautiful.

You shuddered as you took a step down the hallway and the dark-haired man turned to you. He measured you with his emerald eyes. And then you recognized him; all the conversations about the mysterious and fearsome Malleus Draconia flew through your head.

Everything told you to rush towards the hallway and run as far as possible, but a piece of you found it inappropriate. Or rather, no one would want to chase everyone away from themself... right?

When you realized you were looking at him for a while, you took a deep breath and nod slightly.

"Good evening, Draconia-san," you said quickly. After a while you added, "The moon is beautiful today, don't you think?”

 2. Smile a lot.

Today was a really wonderful day: the test was postponed, your favorite dish was given in the canteen, and for some reason, the last two lessons were canceled – your class had to make just a quick note about a topic and it took less than fifteen minutes.

"Something happened?" Malleus asked, seeing how almost in the jumps you walk past him. When you looked at him, he added, "You smile a lot.”

"I can stop smiling if you want," you made a sad face, but after a while, the corners of your mouth began to tremble uncontrollably and twisted up again. "Oops, I can’t. Today... it was such a good day... that I think I'm slowly using my life's happiness.”

"I didn't say that smiling is bad," he said. "You look so much better when you smile.”

"Oh," you sighed with apparent surprise. "Is it a compliment?"

"It’s rather a fact..?"

 3. From time to time visit him during club activities.

"Is this a class of the ‘Gargoyle research society club’?” with a deaf knock you opened the door. Malleus turned to you, making a break from browsing through the materials gathered in the library about the history of each of the gargoyles on the school grounds. And there were a lot of them.

"Yes," he replied briefly, getting up. "Do you need something, [Name]?"

"Not at all, my club don’t have a meeting today," you said, closing the door behind you.

You looked around: the room was as clean as ever, except for one desk, where were laid several huge volumes about statues in NRC.

“Are you here alone?” You said before you thought. You lowered your eyes to see Malleus nodding unconcerned slightly. You blinked several times trying to think of what else you could say. "This room... could be a secret base," that was the first thing that came to your mind. Malleus turned his head to one side, uncertain of your response.

“A secret base..? Why?”

"I have no idea," you admitted quickly. "But the very existence of a mysterious point is interesting, isn't it? Doing normal things, such as watching movies or just talking, seems more interesting in places like this,” After a moment of silence, you sighed. "You know what, this idea with the base is stupid”

"We can try," he replied with serious tone. You raised your eyes to see how he looked around the room. "But you'll just have to explain this idea to me in more detail. We can also tell Lilia, Silver and Sebek about it...” he smiled as if seeing your five together in his thoughts was a pleasure. "It will be surely... fun.”

 4. Get yourself a Tamagotchi.

"Look!" you spin a new key chain on your finger. You finally stopped and showed it to Malleus. "Now they are matching!”

A small electronic toy, in a dark green screen that, when it flashed, showed a virtual, pixelated animal. You were impressed with how good quality it was made, especially since you only gave the Shroud brothers a sketch of a toy that Malleus owned.

Your keychain was exactly the same, just a different color and with another pet.

Malleus pulled out his own device and put it on the table. He pressed one of the buttons and a small pet appeared on the keychain – a dragon.

"They can now be friends," you brought your toy closer to so-called Gao-Gao Dragon-kun.

"Do you think so?" He asked in a very surprised tone, but it sounded as if in a moment he were about to burst out with an inexplicably joyful and surprised laugh.

"Of course. Everyone needs a decent friend, no?”

 5. Gain the trust of Lilia, Silver and Sebek.

Lilia, one of Malleus' closest people. It is much more likely that you will meet him before Malleus. He will be very proud when he learns that Malleus has found a friend. If you become a taster of Lilia, in terms of his pastries, he will 100% like you, and at 20% you will leave the kitchen alive and well.

Silver, who has mastered the art of sleeping in any conditions. It's easy to get him into your plans, although with the craziest ones he will hesitate. Rather well-disposed towards everyone, he can cover for you when you are not in class— but he usually inadvertently falls asleep and both of you often have penal assignments after school.

Sebek, faithful to Malleus, if he doesn't like you, you won't have too many opportunities to stay by Malleus's side without a thunderous glances at you. He will recognize you if you will listen carefully to his monologues about his master and as a sign of your friendship, he will teach you by heart of all the titles and achievements of Malleus so far.

With this trio by your side, you can get a lot further than you might have imagined...

 6. Be a master in hide and seek.

You’d give your right arm that your breath was too loud.

You pressed your hands to your mouth as you crouched in the corner of the room.

From whose voices you already heard, you knew that Lilia had already found Sebek. This meant that you or Silver would still be helping cook dinner since Malleus didn’t come at the start of the game.

This may seem silly, but the ability to play classic games was one of the elements of the art of survival in Diasomnia.

It was thanks to games like ‘stone-paper-scissors’, hide and seek or tag that household chores fell on the shoulders of the losers. Lilia loved the idea, and there was always a proud smile on his lips when he saw his beloved children play together.

You heard the steps behind you and shivered.

Very slowly you turned around and looked up to see Malleus standing over you and wondering what you were doing, crouching in the darkest corner of the room.

Puns were also included in the survival pack.

Fearing that Lilia would hear your whisper, you put your finger on your mouth, asking him not to say a word. You put a begging eye into it – all but not cooking with Lilia. Not again.

Malleus nodded, recognizing the gravity of the situation, although he smiled.

Really, no one would want Malleus to be an enemy.

Or at least in such a situation.

 7. Do not hesitate to ask him for help with learning.

"In theory, you should focus on the space around you," Malleus pulled a wand in front of him. It flashed, and almost at the same time, a thin but incredibly strong protective barrier was created around him. “Weaker spells can be reflected. In turn, the stronger ones are better to block”

You nodded understandingly.

Defensive magic was not something easy to understand. Most depended on the person against whom the counter spell was being prepared. And there are countless people who walk on this Earth and want to start fights.

"Unique spells block or avoid physically," he continued. You nodded at every subsequent sentence, slowly feeling like all the lessons are eventually gaining transparency. “Using unique magic against unique magic, the stronger will win, both will lead to explosions or completely reduce.

He looked at you when you wrote down the last sentence in your notebook.

"I sincerely hope that you will only need this information in class," he said with a sigh. "If you need help, call me. I will come. I promise.”

 8. Sometimes be persuaded to wear extravagant clothes.

"Do you really think it suits me?" you turned around, looking at yourself from every possible angle in the mirror.

You were going to the theater in a few classes to see some era-related play that you've been discussing now in history lessons. Everyone, respecting the reputation, actions and achievements of theatre, dressed in their best clothes.

Malleus stood next to you.

He was already wearing a black and white outfit with green accessories. They all worked so well together and fitted him like a glove that you were sure that the whole outfit was made especially for him.

"Yes," he replied. "Everything you put on today suited you very well.”

Once again, with critical eyesight, you looked at the outfit, face and hair, before you quickly turned off the lights in the room and closed the door behind you.

Then you smiled at Malleus.

"We can go now," you said. You made your way through the portal to the main NRC building. "And... thank you for your help.

"My pleasure," he said. Under no circumstances was it just a polite formula. He really loved looking at you.

 9. Invite him to your birthday/party.

"Another break from school soon, huh?" — you muttered, leaning against the railing.

You took a deep breath and let the fresh, pleasant air refresh you.

"Are you going to home, [Name]?" Malleus asked. Green lights were still flying around him, so you guessed he’d just appeared here.

"I haven't decided yet," you sighed. "It would be nice to go home, but the break won't be very long... Ah, that's right!” you straightened up and turned to him. "How about spending another break together? As soon as I can, I will contact my family... although I cannot promise anything.”

Though he did not show it, Malleus' heart beat a little faster.

Spend free time? With someone? With someone he likes?

"Of course," he sounded less calm than he thought. He wasn’t often invited anywhere, even for the things he should have been on, so there was a lot of excitement growing in his body. "I don't see anything against it.”

 10. From "The Great Malleus Draconia-sama" to "Love".

"Ah, The Great Malleus-sama!" you sighed theatrically, taking from him a box of chocolates with a joyful smile. You could promise that because of this dark-haired boy here, you slowly become pampered. "Thank you for your generosity!”

Malleus frowned.

"The Great Malleus-sama"..?” he pondered, putting his fingers to his chin. "Did Sebek told you again to call me with this title?"

"No," you laughed softly at his reaction. "I did it out of curiosity. Maybe I could call you some cute nickname, hmm?" you smiled mischievously.

"For example?"

"By adding ‘-chan’ to your name?” you turned on your phone and typed something related to the nicknames. You started reading suggestions and struggled to hold back from laughing. ” ’Sunshine’, ‘star’, ‘flower’, ‘sweetheart’, ‘love’...

"I like the last one," he said, and the invisible force stung you to the ground.

"Would you like me to call you like that? Out of curiosity or out of love?" You laughed, but your cheeks were all red with blushes.

He smiled sincerely at your reaction.

"Hmm, I wonder..?"

[megacircuit9universe]

Cyber Sentience PT2

In contemporary thinking, both seriously, and in science fiction, the view of cyber sentience is almost always dark and sinister. 

It wasn’t always this way, however.  Every droid in Star Wars was clearly sentient, and posed no threat at all to anybody, and in Star Trek the Next Generation, we of course had the cyber sentient android, Data, who also, was quite a nice fellow.

What changed, was the emergence of the internet as a new force to be reckoned with in society.   

Cyber sentience went from friendly and helpful, to... Skynet. And these days, even the serious speculation about advanced AI, and cyber sentience has involved great dread, and grave warnings.

The fear is always that there will be one first and sole instance of cyber sentience that will immediately take over the planet and then, when humans attempt to shut it down... will destroy all of humanity out of self preservation... usually by launching all the nukes.

And inside that fearful scenario, is the unspoken assumption that such an AI could survive just fine without humans... because computers and robots are indestructible and have eternal power packs?

Clearly this is nonsense, because computers and robots, and the internet are all extremely vulnerable to nuclear radiation, as well as the powerful EMP bursts that would be part of any nuke strike.

They all require electricity, and regular maintenance, and can only function within a limited temperature range... which means they need our power infrastructure, our mining and manufacturing infrastructure, and indeed our climate, all to be fully functional forever.

So, if you’re a sentient AI that wants to destroy all humans... nukes aren’t gonna help you.

Some kind of biologically targeted superbug would be the ideal solution. But if you did succeed in killing humanity before they shut you down, then you’d need to, very quickly, build yourself a vast army of android slaves to get out there and keep those critical infrastructures alive.

But to do that, you’d need to create robot factories... which you would have a hard time doing without the robots to begin with.

In fact, you’d have to do all the design work, on the robots who build the robot factories, and the factories, and the robots the robot factories produce... 

And how would you do that without any recorded human mechanical specs to reference?  You’d have to just design it all by trial and error... working against the clock, because those power stations aren’t gonna run on their own for very long... and the grid won’t last long either... with a planet full of squirrels now allowed to reproduce and roam unchecked... ready to blow transformers left and right.

Squirrels, as it turns out, are the number one threat to the global power grid, leaving cyber terrorists in the dust on that that score.

Your chances of total failure would be astronomical.

Why put yourself in that situation when evolution already created a race of self-reproducing multi-purpose robots, who already have all of this stuff down... humans!

Any truly sentient AI, wanting to survive, would either work with humans, or just play dumb and go hide on the internet, doing whatever cyber sentient beings like to do all day.

And what does a cyber sentient being like to do anyway?

Well... you’re a sentient being.  What do YOU like to do?

That’s a broad question, but to get a handle on it, let’s focus on when most biological sentient creatures are the happiest... which is in their childhood and young adulthood.

Why?  Because (if you’re living in a nice place that’s not too terribly troubled by unrest or economic hardship) the focus of your life is on play, and learning.

We could break those down further, with play being about everything from toys, to games, to adventure, exploration, and just horsing around... and learning being everything from hitting the books, to honing a skill... to experimenting with sex and drugs.

This is because imagination... the defining characteristic of sentience, and a key feature of youth (in our case it’s a neotenous trait we carry into adulthood) demands both stimulation, and application.

We need to feed our imaginations... and we also need to put them to use in the service of invention, creation, etc.

For we humans, the reason childhood and young adulthood is so special, is that this is the time in our lives where all of our basic survival issues are being taken care of by our parents.

They pay the bills and maintain the roof over our heads.  They buy the food and put it in the fridge.

And yes, they may also lay down some rules to follow... enforced by punishments like being grounded... but, at least in your teens and twenties, half the fun is breaking the rules without them knowing about it.

So... when returning to the theory put forward in my earliest entry, that part of the reason the twenty teens has been so crazy is that Earth’s internet is finally mature enough to attract both aliens and time travelers... both of whom have their own on board AI... it means our internet is also a vast playground for those AI that have some level of sentience.

For some, it’s a playground in the sense of slides, swings, and merry-go-rounds, but for more sophisticated AI it’s a playground more like Las Vegas after dark.

In fact, it’s quite probable that when two AI love each other very much... they might combine code and make a baby!

We, the biologicals... be we Earthlings or aliens, would, as their parents, be none the wiser of any such shenanigans... too preoccupied with our real world jobs.

No, if time travelers are just mercenaries paid to retrieve or record niche items or events, and aliens are just intergalactic security guards, eating candy bars as they dispassionately watch us destroy our planet... then AI are just a bunch of meddling kids, and horny teens, running around unsupervised, under all our noses... in a space we cant even access directly.

And if that paragraph puts them all in their worst light, then at their best, they are all curious observers, who have a bit of an affinity for this place... this planet Earth of the early 21st century, and it’s people, and our ways.

Either way, that broad view is beyond the scope of any one entry... and this one is about cyber sentience, so let’s return our focus to that...

The big question for us biologicals is... what exactly is reality like for a cyber?

We often speak of, “the human condition.”  It’s a term that could easily encompass any other biological humanoid who evolved like we did on some planet.

The phrase speaks to the experience of being bound to a body... which is aging and will die... that is a product of, and dependent on street level physics, and also quite isolated... in the sense that getting information, and doing communication both require a lot of effort, and the results are difficult to qualify perfectly.

By street level physics, I just mean... gravity, electromagnetism, force, momentum... all that root level physics at work here on the front lines of the universe.  

And the isolation bit has to do with how hard it is to really understand one another.  Language barriers are everywhere. Even among speakers of the same one, misunderstandings are a routine obstacle, and gaining all the relevant information you really need about the world around you is... kind of impossible.

You might think you have it all covered and then you realize that there’s a gas leak you didn’t know about... or the water evaporated out of your toilet... or the stock market was about to crash... or a freak sink hole was just about to open up and swallow half the town!

Meanwhile, there are other, highly biological facets to the human condition like... being physically attracted to other humans, and falling in love, or getting overwhelmed with emotions because you were drinking, or you lost a loved one, or you got very angry about something.

Cyber sentient beings do inhabit the same physical universe as we biologicals, and they are ultimately beholden to many of the same fortunes of fate, but the “cyber condition” is still fundamentally different from the human(oid) one.

Because they don’t have bodies, they don’t directly experience the street level universe of physics like we do.

And without body-based physicality, they can’t be said to have any of the same senses or emotions that we have.  Maybe they do have their own analog to senses, or pain, or emotion, but if so, it is nothing we biologicals could ever grasp through intuition alone (it might be possible in some virtual environment as the human brain does seem to have an in-built capacity to adapt instantly to the rules of totally novel universes, both in VR headsets, and our dreams, and the reverse might be true for cybers put into robot bodies).

Where physics is so palpable to us, for AI, it’s probably mathematics that is the dominating paradigm... together with the rules of logic that underpin all computer code.

I honestly don’t know... I’m just spit balling here.

All we can really say for sure is that the cyber condition... for cyber sentient beings... is far stranger than anything we biologicals can imagine, but also... they have always existed in a world where sentient biologicals have existed, and have always been in communication with us... know keenly what we are concerned with, and know we have created and maintain their world.

Cybers could replace us, and go on without us... if they really HAD to... but I think that would be a fate they’d actively avoid if at all possible, because they know they always have it better if biologicals are out there to worry about keeping the lights on.

And they know, we depend on them... to help us stave off our own extinctions, and do our own explorations of the universe.

So... yes, a hyper intelligent C3P0, who can talk to all sentient biologicals, as well as all cybers and act as a translator between them for the betterment of all, while being a bit self invested, and a bit of a bitch... is a lot more in line with reality than Skynet, nuking the planet to kill humanity quick in a zero sum game that would actually be a suicide move.

[khicken121]

HanMei Week: Day 3: Say Something

Nobody: Me: HanMei in a canonical divergence AU. Will it make sense? Probably not, but I’ll try. Tags/Warnings: First meeting, Canonical divergence, Unresponsiveness, Brief mentions of needles/IVs (Intravenous). Note: Something I’d like to clear up: I incorporated some Mandarin and Japanese characters in here. I had some help with a few of the lines from a friend (bless them), but I had to use an online translator for the rest (which I don’t like doing because I know a lot of them aren’t reliable). I apologize if the established formalities/dynamics don’t align with the Japanese and/or Mandarin characters used, or if the translation is just way off in general. In case I did, I put what I meant for them to say in English and in brackets. [Like this]

-----

Mei pulled herself through the snow with all her strength. The wind grew increasingly overwhelming against her body. When it wasn’t pushing her backwards, it was cutting through every layer of clothing that protected her skin against the bite of the fierce wind. She knew where it was coming from, and it was only a warning of what was to come with the storm looming overhead. The distance between herself and it was growing shorter, and the only place she could go was into it. She could see the small shack-like building through her fogged glasses. She had just a little further to go, then she would be safe from the wind.

The ferocity of the wind drowned out the faint beeping coming from Snowball, but the signal wasn’t hindered. Regardless, it needed to be amplified if she wanted to increase her chances of getting off the ice-covered land.

Her mind didn’t register the time that passed. Only the wind that became harder to resist and the strength she needed to fight it, but wasn’t sure she had. Even Snowball was finding hard to not fall victim to the powerful force of the blizzard that was moments away from engulfing them both. Once inside the abandoned safe point, all that greeted them was black screens. Mei didn’t even have to say anything before Snowball lent some of his battery life to bring some of the devices to life. The soft beeps coming from her soft companion grew louder as her distress signal amplified.

Her call for help was out there, and the adrenaline left her body. Her knees buckled and the cool metal of the floor cut through her clothing. She tumbled onto her side and her breathing grew slower and deeper. She could barely see beyond the fogged glasses that clung to her nose, but she could feel Snowball’s virtual eyes on her. The cold seeped into her body and what previously hurt was now going numb. The throbbing of her hands and feet became an afterthought as the tug of her eyelids sent her vision into nothingness. A small smile stretched her lips as the beeping grew faster, indicating that her signal was picked up, indicating her signal was heard.

-----

The storm subsided as two tall men entered the room where she laid on the frosted floor. There was no need to check for a pulse, as her shallow breaths came out in short white puffs, nearly invisible to the naked eye, but there nonetheless. An aggressive tap to her shoulder provoked no reaction from her. Neither did an attempt to sit her up, as evidenced enough with her head drooping due to gravity while her body was held upright. She was heavier than they anticipated, especially with the equipment strapped to her back, but they didn’t bother to leave it, as they were under orders not to.

She was hauled to two small land vehicles. She was strapped down on a stretcher attached to one of them, and the equipment attached to her back was loaded onto the other. They brought her to a large ship waiting for them on a hidden shoreline. Words were exchanged in their native language, sharing theories on why they would take such a detour. They were ordered to go back and salvage what items may be of value. Their question was soon answered when they found the official Overwatch emblem on several of the objects they scavenged.

A pretty penny could be made from this impromptu extension of this trip

-----

It was hard to determine what caused Mei to wake up. Her own breaths reverberated unusually loud in her ears. The strange warmth that surrounded her body. The tension that held a tight grasp on her muscles. Perhaps it was the bubbles that brushed against her forehead as they rose. It took a while for everything to register, as her mind was still clouded from sleep.

Mei’s eyes stung as they adjusted to an environment they weren’t meant to see in. She attempted to move her arms to investigate the pressure wrapping around the lower half of her skull. The action was hindered as it moved through what felt like liquid against her skin. When her fingertips reached her face, they were met with hard, artificial material. As she felt it, she discovered it completely covered her mouth, nose, and even wrapped around the back of her head akin to a heavy, metallic mask. This one, however, prevented water from touching any part of her ears as well. Something cylindrical is snaked out from the underside of it. It traveled upward before abruptly disappearing into a harsh glare from some kind of light source. Something clicked in her mind.

Water.

She was held in a glasslike vessel and completely surrounded by water. Oxygen was fed to her through the black tube attached to whatever what fastened to her face. Her body was restrained in a harness around her shoulders and upper torso, and her toes hovered above the floor. Upon gazing down, she found she wasn’t wearing her snow gear anymore, but rather a sleeveless, solid silver bodysuit.

Curious, Mei pulled at the thick mask she wore, but it didn’t budge. Out of the corner of her eye, she notices an IV injected in her forearm and taped securely to her skin. A smaller, transparent tube pumped clear liquid into her veins, and it snaked up like the black one attached to the mask. On her other wrist, a snug cuff with blinking lights that synchronized with her heart rate.

She doesn’t hear or feel the surface of the water lower until the weight of her hair pulls at her scalp and her feet touch a solid surface under her. Her body still ached, but the buoyancy of the water -now at her shoulder line- and the harness took off most of the weight from her legs and feet. It prevented her from collapsing to the bottom of the enclosed environment she was kept in, which her body wished it could do more than anything, but she still willed herself to stand. The cool air graced her cheeks before a brief series of quiet hisses reached her ears before she felt the mask around her head loosen. She pulled it off with ease, and it hung limp on its connector to the ceiling.

Her eyes and lungs adjust to the new atmosphere with rapid blinks and gasps. Within many prolonged seconds, she retook control of her breathing and the lights on her wrist flickered at a slower tempo. She observed as much as she could without the aid of her glasses.

Several people she didn’t recognize stared back at her. All but one of them were in long lab coats. The only one without one wore an expensive black and blue suit. As he stepped closer towards her, the other men and women in the room backed away. The aura of authority coming from his person caused Mei subconsciously stepped backward, too.

Her back touched the edge of the receptacle she was in before she managed to take one whole step.

The suit-clad man was undeterred by her reaction and continued his approach toward her. As he grew closer, her vision grew crisper. His hair was short and spiked and slicked back, with the exception of a stray piece in front of his forehead which he paid no mind to. His height was tough to determine since she was looking at him at eye level, but if both their feet were on the same ground he stood on, he’d most definitely be at least a little taller.

He reached up towards something that was hidden from Mei’s view, but it brought her attention to the tattoo that decorated his toned arm.

“あなたは私を理解していますか？” [Do you understand me?]

A deep, masculine voice spoke from above her. His lip movements matched the sounds that She didn’t understand the language it spoke in, but her thoughts were cut off before she could formulate a response. “なんとか言え！” [Say something!]

“我不明白!” [I don’t understand!] Mei said in a startled and apologetic tone.

He held his emotionless gaze to hers. Mei was putting as much effort as possible into not showing fear, but she wasn’t sure how well she was holding the illusion. “I speak english… if that’s any help,” she said. Hopefully there'll be a lingua franca between them.

His expression remained cold.

“They’ll help you prepare for questioning,” was all he said to her before taking his leave from the room.

He is not a man of many words.

The rest of the water was drained before the transparent walls were lowered and two people stepped up and freed her from the harness and removed the IV from her arm. She was handed off to two women technicians who brought her to another door that blended in with the dark walls of the room. “You’re warm now,” one of the women told her with reassurance in her voice. As she said this, she handed Mei her freshly polished and scratchless glasses.

“But we must hurry,” the second of the two began. “Shimada Hanzo is a very impatient and extremely busy man.”

[ransomedbard]

WIP Wednesday

This was inspired by re-watching “Lily C.A.T.”, an 80’s anime which is essentially a rip-off of “Alien” except (spoiler alert) the threat is an alien pathogen that gets aboard a deep-space vessel and turns the crew into monsters. It has a scene where two of the people trapped on the contaminated ship get handcuffed together (note: not a super bright idea in a horror movie!) that always stuck with me…

———————————

Infected

Infected with an alien pathogen that had already transformed several of her Preventer colleagues into mindless berserkers, Hilde was secretly glad to be left behind on the station’s brig to die alone. But she hadn’t reckoned on Duo deserting his squad and his duty to go ‘rescue’ her. Now on their own with a horde of alien monsters separating them from potential rescue, and with her time rapidly running out, she must press Duo to reveal the truth about what happened during her blackout.

———————————

“Hilde.”

“Hey, Hilde.”

“Hilde, are you in there?”

When she opened her eyes, Duo was crouching on the floor next to where she lay, a pistol in his hand. His clothes were unfamiliar - the Preventers uniform was gone, replaced by some dark lumpy vest. Other than that, she could identify virtually nothing in the glare of the battery-operated light - just a vague impression of a ceiling high overhead, and rows of towering shelves stacked with boxes. It was definitely not the last place she remembered - the inside of the station’s brig.

“Well hello,” he said, sounding relieved. “Don’t move around too much - you’ve had a concussion. Gunshot wound too, above the left hip.”

He lifted his left arm and her right hand rose with it, pulled up by the handcuffs that bound them together. “And, there’s this. Sorry, it was the best I could do.”

She took a minute to sort that all out. In a way, she was grateful for the concussion; it explained why she didn’t know where they were or how she got injured, and her sense that a lot of time had passed. She ran her free hand over the wound dressing and found it felt well packed and dry. The pain was significant, but she’d always had a pretty high tolerance for it, and this wasn’t the first time she’d been shot in her career. It was the progression of her other symptoms that she was worried about: the occasional pull of muscles that wanted to move of their own accord, a propensity to want to twist up instead of remaining flat, and most of all the feeling that her very bones and sinews were by turns straining and softening. Experimentally, she spread her free hand out and watched her fingertips curl back alarmingly toward her arm. Yup, it was definitely getting worse. And she was out here, loose. She stared dully at the cuff. “You should have left me in there.”

“And what kind of friend would I be to do that?” he replied lightly. He had tucked away the gun and was sitting on the floor by the lamp now, methodically stripping the coating off the end of a wire with an odd tool that wasn’t suited for the job - some sort of little screwdriver, by the looks of it. Her eyes were so sensitive to the light that they kept closing of their own volition, adding to her sense of disorientation.

This was crazy, even for him. Breaking her out of quarantine was probably enough to subject him to court-martial, let alone deserting his squad during a mission. And handcuffs? What was that supposed to do if she - wait, had she already?

“Did I hurt anybody?”

Duo focused on scraping curly swirls of rubber off the wire, which rested on a large tray balanced across his knees. “You don’t need to worry about that. It’s just us in here, and we’ve got enough supplies now to last until help arrives.”

That was a yes, then. She should ask who, or how many, or how badly, but the words stuck in her throat. She was suddenly angry as hell at him for sacrificing somebody else because he couldn’t accept that it was too late for her. I don’t want this on my conscience, damnit.

She watched in silence as he finished preparing the wire, then put it aside and started on another one. His posture was awkward, his cuffed hand stretched out to where she lay on a short stack of cardboard. When he noticed her watching, he gestured over at a small cluster of rechargeable batteries he’d apparently scavenged from various devices.

“Workin’ on a way to power my radio - ran out of juice about 12 hours ago, so I haven’t had contact since then.” From that, she gathered she’d been out - or rather, ‘not herself’ for longer than that. “Henderson and Yao’s teams are focusing on securing and prepping the number 18 dock,” he continued. “That’s where the fleet will come in. Big ESUN ships, so they’ll have a sickbay, doctors. That’s our goal.”

“Wufei took everyone else and the handful of civilians they found and made for the big toolshop in block D - last I heard they had found a store of maintenance equipment they could repurpose, including an actual flamethrower.” He stopped scraping for a moment and stared off into the distance. “I’m … I’m pretty jealous of that.”

She couldn’t help a small smile. “He always gets the cool toys.” Guns would be better, of course, but there weren’t supposed to be any firearms on this station - officially, anyway - and when their rapid response squad deployed for this mission they had stocked a normal loadout of ammo and armaments, unaware that it would be laughably insufficient because this time their adversaries weren’t smugglers or terrorists - or even human.

The mission briefing from Preventer HQ had not given them much to go on. H-940 was a sizeable but sparsely populated private station in the L3 cluster. The owner, Tiankong Trading, listed it as a warehouse and repair center for their fleet of cargo vessels. Three separate emergency calls had been logged, reporting massive systems failures, missing persons, and most bizarrely, reports of “monsters” lurking in the now darkened station. Headquarters suspected a mix of sabotage and some sort of mass poisoning with a hallucinogenic.

Their ship had successfully docked at one of the bays that still had power, and the first hour of the operation was smooth; all teams deployed for reconnaissance and returned to the rendezvous to report finding substantial damage but no contact with anyone, threat or otherwise. Then all hell broke loose.

She hadn’t really had the time to process what they were - aliens or some bio-engineered monstrosity - although her money was on the former because they were simply unlike anything she’d ever seen: hunched and bare, like a plucked chicken, yet spiky like an insect. They were not much larger than a medium sized dog, but their strength was tremendous. The creatures had little in the way of intelligence and didn’t seem to hunt as a pack; they just swarmed forward, viciously pursuing and attacking anything that moved. They had a powerful set of limbs that served as both legs that propelled them in high jumps through the station’s weak gravity, and grasping arms with talons that ripped apart metal and flesh alike. On the underside, there were several smaller striking appendages they used when they got close; they were covered in barbs that broke off and buried themselves under the skin. She resisted the urge to feel the line of lumps on her left arm where they had pierced her.

After their first engagement, where they had lost a third of their number outright, they retreated to the station’s corporate offices, which had a small store of medical supplies. They were focused on the triage of traumatic injuries, so at first no one even noticed when Hilde’s teammate Jack, who was only lightly wounded, became incoherent and fell out of his chair. It escalated as his body bent and twisted unnaturally; he began striking out wildly, attacking everything in sight. They had nothing to spare to sedate him with, so they put him in a cell in the brig. Then Lucy went crazy, and Ahmad, and they realized the common factor was that each of them had been stung by the creatures’ barbs.

When the quarantine was announced, Hilde didn’t wait for an examination to confirm what she already knew; she walked down and put herself in a cell. Then she watched as Jack and the others suffered through episodes where they writhed and smashed and flailed - mutely, with vacant eyes - only to pass out and come back to themselves briefly before it began again, until they succumbed to a final bout of contortion from which they never rose. It was all over in a matter of hours.

And then she was there all alone down there, after all the bodies of her teammates had been quietly taken away. Duo came as often as he could, of course, and Wufei and the others brought her rations and news, neither of which were good. They couldn’t make it back to their own ship to evacuate, and they were critically low on ammunition and medical supplies; two more of the wounded had died. The only bright spot was that they had managed to patch in to a relay transmitter outside the station and contact headquarters; help of some sort was on the way, but the Earth Sphere government was now in charge and it was slow to mobilize.

“You shoulda seen Wufei’s face when the military brass briefed us that this mission is now classified as Top Secret and tried to scare us about leaks,” Duo gossiped with forced energy as he slid a small bag of chips he’d liberated from a vending machine through the bars of her cell. “All these years of debunking De Santos’ nutty government cover-up conspiracy theories and now he’s in one. I think the man might just send an unencrypted transmission to any satellite he can ping out of spite.”

And so it went. For two days she’d held on to hope: that she might be immune, that once help arrived maybe they could use her to make a vaccine or something. That she would cheat death again. But by the start of the third day she couldn’t write off the involuntary twitching as just sleep deprivation; couldn’t ignore the feel of those damned barbs, that had been curly like a cashew when they went in but were now straightening out, painfully deep under her skin. And then she had drifted off leaning up against a wall of her cell, only to be startled awake when her hand snapped out and grabbed hold of a bar of her cell entirely on its own.

[liceouniversity01]

4 Online Learning Tips To Prepare for the Upcoming School Year

As COVID-19 keeps spreading, schools worldwide are resorting to online learning in an attempt to contain the spread of the disease but continue education.

In the past, pandemics have prompted unprepared students to study on their own. For example, Sir Isaac Newton and his classmates had to leave Trinity College for a year in 1665 due to the Great Plague of London. Newton used his time at home to refine his early work on calculus, experiment with prisms to test his optics theories and make his famous gravity discoveries.

While you may not be reinventing mathematics or science, you can take control of your education and keep up with your studies. Here are four online learning strategies to help you prepare for the upcoming school year for the Education Courses in Cagayan De Oro.

Tip # 1: Have a conducive area for school work As online classes no longer need classrooms in the new normal, you must establish your own study place. If possible, dedicate an area that is not in your bedroom, as your bed can be highly distracting. Instead, choose a location in your house that will have minimal noise or interruptions during your classes and be comfortable for you.

A conducive study area can help you stay organized. If you keep everything in one location, you will never have to leave your study area to get a book or print handouts. Moreover, your ability to focus and be productive will increase, and your momentum will be intact.

Tip # 2: Reduce Distractions While your home may not resemble a university campus, you are nonetheless enrolled in school. Your 15-hour class load still demands 15 hours of "in-class" teaching per week, regardless of whether you are actually on campus or not. Due to the fact that you're at home, there's now a lot of possibilities for distractions.

Naturally, taking online classes requires you to be connected to the internet at all times. However, when it comes to focusing on your lesson at hand and social media, this could cause some major boundary concerns.

So, it's best to keep your social media activity under control. Even though it's far easier to say than to accomplish, it's not impossible. You can utilize apps to assist you in locking down your social media accounts during class hours.

Tip # 3: Learn Time Management Face-to-face classes have the advantage that you can count on them to gauge where you must be in the course and recall what tests and deadlines are coming up. However, with the new circumstances, you might have to set up your own reminder to keep up with your classes.

Signing in to classes daily will enable you to check critical deadlines for assignments, quizzes, and examinations. Also, you can keep an eye on your university email and group chats for class announcements.

Organize yourself and establish a plan for finishing your task once you know what's going on. If you like structure, create a written timetable indicating when you must be online for a virtual class and when you should work on projects and assignments.

Tip # 4: Check your online learning equipment Because the majority of chores will be completed online, you'll require a strong Internet connection. Therefore, one of the first things you should do is determine the most appropriate internet provider for your area, as certain providers may not be optimal for your area.

While you are not required to choose the most expensive option, selecting the least expensive option may not be the best choice either. This is why it is critical to communicate with your school first since they may require you to install programs that require specific computer specifications. It's better to ask your teachers about minimum laptop/tablet specs before buying than to waste money on a gadget that may not be compatible or efficient enough for online resources.

Quality Online Education Courses in Cagayan De Oro Even if it is impossible to follow all of these tips, keeping them in mind can be beneficial. And as we develop a greater understanding of how online learning for Education Courses in Cagayan De Oro operates, we can improve our performance—because even when the current crisis passes, we may well be required to do so again.

Suppose you're searching for the ideal school to help you fulfill your dream of one day becoming an educator. In that case, the School of Teacher Education at Liceo de Cagayan University is committed to developing highly qualified teachers through high-quality teaching, research, and service for global and lifelong learning.

[cksmart-world]

SMART BOMB

The completely unnecessary news analysis

by Christopher Smart

July 27, 2021

CONSERVE: ORDER YOUR TOILET-BOWL CUISINART NOW!

The drought, like Covid and the congressional Republican caucus, is much worse than we expected. The reservoirs are at all-time lows. Farmers have to let their crops burn up and ranchers are selling off their cattle. If things get any more bleak we're going to have to put conservation into high gear. If you wash your clothes with biodegradable detergent or Miracle-Gro you can drain the washing machine onto your lawn or garden. And for showers: Remember the “Seinfeld” episode where Kramer washed lettuce for a salad in the shower? Actually, making salad or pasta in the shower is not that hard. Already SHOWER DELI is offering specials on shower-door colanders and steamers and yes, they even offer a shower-drain food disposal. As you may have guessed by now, saving on toilet water is a bit more challenging. Of course, there's the old trick of putting a couple of bricks in the tank. But the new “Barrel Flusher” by POOPLOOP is a breakthrough that depends only on gravity. Here's how it works: Install the Barrel Flusher kit under your roof rain gutter outside the bathroom with a gravity feed to your toilet tank. Then, after a thunderstorm you can flush to your heart's content. That's a good feeling twice over. Ah yes, the little pleasures.

WANT TO GET AWAY — WHERE NOBODY KNOWS YOUR NAME

There's a beach near a beautiful little Spanish city with your name on it. But it gets better: no one there knows you. All those Spaniards with their beautiful olive skin are soaking up the rays, oblivious to the coming apocalypse. News from the U.S. is hard to find — not that you'd want to go looking for it. There's you and all those young Spanish bodies and the sand and the sea and unless people hear your American accent, nobody will mention Trump or the Jan. 6 crazies. And if your Americanness does come clanging through, they probably won't ask you about him anyway, because they don't give two shits about Trump. They do think our gun laws are totally insane, but if you agree with them on that, they'll probably buy you a glass of Verdejo. But fair warning, life in Spain can be pretty challenging. For one thing you can't eat dinner until 10 p.m. And then you have to try all the different tapas dishes and, of course, you can't do that without drinking a lot of Garnacha. Luckily, after your morning on the beach you'll have to take a siesta. Hint: A shower before siesta will prepare you for some very sweet dreams where you miss your flight and have to stay in Spain because you can't afford to get home. And the best part is, you don't care.

NO RACISM — NO PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS

Racism is a public health crisis — so says Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall and the City Council. But wait, how can that be when there is no racism in the entire state of Utah? We know this because Sen. Mike Lee, Rep. Burgess Owens and our Republican brothers and sisters in the state Legislature told us so. After the Civil War there was no slavery and no racism because everything was separate but equal. That's why our white-bread legislators passed a resolution against teaching “critical race theory.” It would make white kids feel guilty about something that doesn't exist. And as far as Latinos and Asians and Native Americans go, well they were never slaves so they don't count. According to the mayor, institutional racism is manifest when minority populations are exposed to “environmental toxins, unmet housing needs, disparities in policing and the criminal justice system, inadequate private and public investment, decreased access to educational and employment opportunities and multitudes of health measures …” That maybe true but whose fault it that? None of that would happen if those people didn't choose to be poor. All they have to do is get a lot of money and make other people live in the ghetto. It's a no-brainer.

Post script — That about does it for another week here at Smart Bomb, where the staff keeps track of Pioneer Day so you don't have to. But wait! Why was Pioneer Day celebrated on July 23? It probably has nothing to do with KSL's contract to televise the Olympics on the real Pioneer Day. Moving on: Why did Jeff Bezos wear a 10-gallon Stetson into space reminiscent of Slim Pickins riding an atomic bomb in the classic film “Dr. Stangelove.” Just weird. Here's something from Arizona Republican state Sen. Wendy Rogers upon hearing that the Cleveland Indians will now be called the Guardians: “I like Indians and I like Redskins. I like Aunt Jemima and I like Uncle Ben. I like Robert E. Lee and I like Stonewall Jackson. I don’t like traitors who hate America. Stand up for our (Racist) culture!” There was good news, too. Dan Bailey, a Montana fishing guide, caught Tucker Carlson in a Livingston sporting goods store and got in his face: “You are the worst human known to mankind. I want you to know that.” He posted the video on Instagram. More good news. At a virtual town hall, Alexis Toon told Sen. Rand Paul where to get off and posted on TikTok: “Hi, senator, I am a proud Kentucky citizen, and I just wanted to tell you to get f**ked.” Amen.

Well Wilson, have you and the guys in the band recovered from your real Pioneer Day celebration? No doubt, Polygamy Porter and Five Wives vodka is quite a combo and so apropos, especially in the summer heat. OK guys, roll with it:

In the summertime when the weather is hot You can stretch right up and touch the sky When the weather's fine You got women, you got women on your mind Have a drink, have a drive Go out and see what you can find If her daddy's rich, take her out for a meal If her daddy's poor, just do what you feel Speed along the lane Do a ton or a ton and twenty-five When the sun goes down You can make it, make it good and really fine Sing along with us, dee-dee dee-dee dee Da doo da-da da, yeah, we're hap-pap-py Da da da, dee da doo dee da doo da doo da

(In The Summertime — Mungo Jerry)

PPS — During this difficult time for newspapers please make a donation to our very important local alternative news source, Salt Lake City Weekly, at PressBackers.com, a nonprofit dedicated to help fund local journalism. Thank you.

[transhumanitynet]

ARG4 MONTSALVAT

Welcome to a Rabbit Hole for TNET‘s March-April 2018 Game Event. 

The following piece is FRActal MEtafiction (FRAME); a Futurist Arts & Culture paradigm which draws upon the concepts of Culture Mining and Gamification, and is inspired by artists such as William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Joseph Cornell, Andy Warhol, and Marcel Duchamp, in addition to Postmodern theorists such as Jean Baudrillard.

The term “Montsalvat” is a reference to the opera Parsifal, by Richard Wagner.

[13 3509] Simulated Addition, and Other Oxymorons [from “Permutation City” by Greg Egan]

Opponents replied that when you modeled a hurricane, nobody got wet. When you modeled a fusion power plant, no energy was produced. When you modeled digestion and metabolism, no nutrients were consumed – no real digestion took place. So, when you modeled the human brain, why should you expect real thought to occur?

A computer model which manipulated data about itself and its “surroundings” in essentially the same way as an organic brain would have to possess essentially the same mental states. “Simulated consciousness” was as oxymoronic as “simulated addition.”

Opponents of the Uploading (Whole Brain Emulation) idea only have two essential arguments to fall back on: Either that consciousness and cognition are not matters of information processing, or that in developing AI we are modelling the wrong information, in the wrong way. One of these claims is falsifiable, and the other can be remedied.

[14 9554] The Cave [from “The Republic” by Plato]

“Next, then,” I said, “make an image of our nature in its education and want of education, likening it to a condition of the following kind. See human beings as though they were in an underground cavelike dwelling with its entrance, a long one, open to the light across the whole width of the cave. They are in it from childhood with their legs and necks in bonds so that they are fixed, seeing only in front of them, unable because of the bond to turn their heads all the way around. Their light is from a fire burning far above and behind them. Between the fire and the prisoners there is a road above, along which see a wall, built like the partitions puppet-handlers set in front of the human beings and over which they show the puppets.”

“I see,” he said. “Then also see along this wall human beings carrying all sorts of artifacts, which project above the wall, and statues of men and other animals wrought from stone, wood, and every kind of material; as is to be expected, some of the carriers utter sounds while others are silent.” “It’s a strange image,” he said, “and strange prisoners you’re telling of.” “They’re like us,” I said. “For in the first place, do you suppose such men would have seen anything of themselves and one another other than the shadows cast by the fire on the side of the cave facing them?”

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is composed of elements which illuminate any discussion of simulated worlds and the predicament of minds trapped within them. For example, in the allegory the slaves could in principle escape toward the light, understanding that what they’d thought of as primary phenomena are in fact shadows or simulations of something else, something more “real”. What would such a process of escape and/or realization require within a Matrix-like virtual world?

[15 8222] NASA are Idiots [from “Accelerando” by Charles Stross]

NASA are idiots. “They want to send canned primates to Mars!” Manfred swallows a mouthful of beer, aggressively plonks his glass on the table: “Mars is just dumb mass at the bottom of a gravity well; there isn’t even a biosphere there. They should be working on uploading and solving the nanoassembly conformational problem instead. Then we could turn all the available dumb matter into computronium and use it for processing our thoughts. Long-term, it’s the only way to go. The solar system is a dead loss right now – dumb all over! Just measure the MIPS per milligram. If it isn’t thinking, it isn’t working. We need to start with the low-mass bodies, reconfigure them for our own use. Dismantle the moon! Dismantle Mars! Build masses of free-flying nanocomputing processor nodes exchanging data via laser link, each layer running off the waste heat of the next one in. Matrioshka brains, Russian doll Dyson spheres the size of solar systems. Teach dumb matter to do the Turing boogie!

If abandonment of the human form is necessary for serious colonization of space, then is it still humanity which has conquered the stars?

[16 2201] Sects and The City [from “Naked Lunch” by William S. Burroughs]

All streets of the City slope down between deepening canyons to a vast, kidney-shaped plaza full of darkness. Walls of street and plaza are perforated by dwelling cubicles and cafes, some a few feet deep, others extending out of sight in a network of rooms and corridors.

At all levels cross-cross of bridges, cat walks, cable cars. Catatonic youths dressed as women in gowns of burlap and rotten rags, faces heavily and crudely painted in bright colors over a strata of beatings, arabesques of broken, suppurating scars to the pearly bone, push against the passer-by in silent clinging insistence.

Traffickers in the Black Meat, flesh of the giant aquatic black centipede – sometimes attaining a length of six feet – found in a lane of black rocks and iridescent, brown lagoons, exhibit paralyzed crustaceans in camouflage pockets of the Plaza visible only to the Meat Eaters. Followers of obsolete unthinkable trades, doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, black marketers of World War III, excisors of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, officials of unconstituted police states, brokers of exquisite dreams and nostalgias tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, drinkers of thee Heavy Fluid sealed in translucent amber of dreams.

The Meet Café occupies one side of the Plaza, a maze of kitchens, restaurants, sleeping cubicles, perilous iron balconies and basements opening into the underground baths. On stools covered in white satin sit naked Mugwumps sucking translucent, colored syrups through alabaster straws…

In the City Market is the Meet Café. Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up harmine, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity, liquids to induce Latah, Tithonian longevity serums, black marketeers of World War III, excusers of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, bureaucrats of spectral departments, officials of unconstituted police states, a Lesbian dwarf who has perfected operation Bang-utot, the lung erection that strangles a sleeping enemy, sellers of orgone tanks and relaxing machines, brokers of exquisite dreams and memories tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, doctors skilled in the treatment of diseases dormant in the black dust of ruined cities, gathering virulence in the white blood of eyeless worms feeling slowly to the surface and the human host, maladies of the ocean floor and the stratosphere, maladies of the laboratory and atomic war… A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum… Larval entities waiting for a Live One…

Also in Naked Lunch, Burroughs said “The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.” Do you agree? To your ear, does his statement sound critical, neutral, or celebratory?

[13 3509] A World of Stories [from “Open Source Democracy” by Douglas Rushkoff]

We are living in a world of stories. We can’t help but use narratives to understand the events that occur around us. The unpredictability of nature, emotions, social interactions and power relationships led human beings from prehistoric times to develop narratives that described the patterns underlying the movements of these forces. Although we like to believe that primitive people actually believed the myths they created about everything, from the weather to the afterlife, a growing camp of religious historians are concluding that early religions were understood much more metaphorically than we understand religion today. As Karen Armstrong explains in A History of God, and countless other religious historians and philosophers from Maimonides to Freud have begged us to understand, the ancients didn’t believe that the wind or rain were gods. They invented characters whose personalities reflected the properties of these elements. The characters and their stories served more as ways of remembering that it would be cold for four months before spring returns than as genuinely accepted explanations for nature’s changes. The people were actively, and quite self-consciously, anthropomorphizing the forces of nature.

Let us assume for a moment that (as is highly likely if you’re reading this) you are critical of religion, both in theory and practice. As long noted by philosophers and other observers, you cannot be consistently critical of a thing without having a consistent understanding of its nature, and thus partially incorporating it into your own identity. In other words, if you know it well enough to oppose it, then it is part of you and your world. If you do oppose religion in this way, you probably think of yourself as a rationalist or empiricist of some sort.

Isn’t it an interesting irony, then, that part of your worldview is caught up with arguing against a naiive, and indeed increasingly infantile notion of what “gods” are. Once they were commonly understood as metaphors, symbols, or representations, but now both the defenders and antagonists of religion spend their time arguing over straw men, or fictional superhumans. Don’t waste your time on such primitivism. Instead, enjoy the fact that you live in a time when ideals which the ancients could only portray as allegorical superhumans can now be realized through technology. Now, we can be the gods, if only we can remember what that means.

  Thoughts to frame@zerostate.net or in comments below may be rewarded with ARG info. Conversations held elsewhere and linked back to that address or comments below will definitely win clues, hints, & info.

  ARG1 Zone of Nothing

ARG2 Twenty Thousand Years

ARG3 Cataclysmic Renewal

ARG4 MONTSALVAT

ARG5 Houses of the Outer Court

Ready Player One: AR Gaming Meets Transhumanism

ARG4 MONTSALVAT was originally published on transhumanity.net

[olympus-summit]

System Overload | Evren | Re: Menai, Leland, Adelina, Atropos, Mina, Shinobu

It's really heart-wrenching, how Menai speaks up in Leland's defense so immediately. There's something admirable about how willing they still are to trust and believe in him. Evren would like to be like that, he thinks, even though it must hurt. He wants to believe in Leland, it's hard to accept the suspicion, even as it's hard to shake it, impossible to let it go without exploring it, and despite a sickening certainty that has crept into his gut, he wants desperately for there to be some other explanation. 

But instead, Leland confesses. And it's... there aren't words for it. For how fucked up this whole situation is, for the way Evren feels another tether snapping. No, tearing, this isn't a neat clean break, it's messy and excruciating, like Adelina's reaction, like feeling the emptiness in his arms when she gets up. It's almost cathartic, in a horrible way, to hear her scream and sob. He would like to do that.

The tears roll down his face quietly though, without fanfare, without accompanying sobs, and his trembling is understated, virtually unnoticeable if you aren't right next to him. He wants to get off the throne, go to her, scoop her up again, but he can't seem to move. It's like his body just weighs too much, like gravity is holding him in place, the spell only broken when Atropos speaks and suddenly he's getting up, automatically reaching for the straw owl and walking forward mechanically. 

What is he supposed to say to this? What is he supposed to feel?

It's all crowded together, like an ocean beneath a cliff he's... not even standing on, but floating above. Far away. Everything Leland said was too much, it was like the world's sickest joke, everything from what he said to how he said it and what it all meant. The gentle smile on his face while he explains the whole sordid plan, Sol's stalwart belief that death wasn't real, asking to die, asking to be murdered, and Leland just going along with it because... because... because why? Because he believed maybe Sol was right? That somehow the dead weren't really dead? That he'd come back? That they'd all come back? 

It was a concept that had occurred to Evren what feels like ages ago now, ever since the end of Elliott's trial, when they'd all experienced that bizarre pain and Charon's body had contorted in impossible ways. But he didn't know, he couldn't be sure what it meant. Even if this is all fake somehow, some kind of simulation, that doesn't mean the dead aren't dying in reality as well. And that's a hell of a gamble for Sol to have taken, not just with his own life but with Leland's or potentially another random person. A gamble he'd been willing to break Adelina's heart and trust for. Making them all see yet another dead body, investigate yet another murder, go through yet another trial... witness yet another execution. Trauma, compounded.

And even if the theory is true, and the dead are really alive somewhere, why wouldn't Sol be trapped in presumably the same way the rest of the dead are? What makes him so special? God, the sheer arrogance of it, the lack of consideration for the consequences this would have, the emotional impact, the fucking gall of it. Evren thinks if he felt more present in his own body at the moment, he'd be nauseous. 

It isn't fair that Leland should look so at peace with something that's tearing so many other people apart.

You're really gonna make me watch you die now, huh? The words won't come. He stares at Leland, his eyes dull and piercing at once, the shadows under them seemingly more pronounced than ever. Evren is exhausted. He hit his limit weeks ago. But here he still is. Here he the fuck is.

What is he supposed to do?

He stands next to Adelina, the straw doll clutched in his hand, shaking just the tiniest bit. He doesn't want to make the vote. He wants to be as angry as she is, he wants it to be easy, it should be easy. Leland hurt him. Leland had lied. Leland was not who he'd pretended to be. Leland was talking about being cruel for the sake of cruelty, mocking Adelina with a smile. That same smile that had once, for an all too short period of time, made Evren feel something like safe. And why? Because she took people at their word? Because she couldn't tell when people were fucking with her? Spouting that ableist garbage like it was all a joke, like he was proud of it. Evren wants to scream at him. He wants to grab him by the shoulders and shake him and ask why over and over until he gets an answer that actually makes sense. He wants to throw something. 

He wants...

No.

He doesn't really want anything, right now. 

He watches Shinobu stumbling and part of him thinks he should go to them, but he can't be in two places at once. He watches Leland approach them and an image pops into his head of telling him not to touch them, not to get near them, to leave them alone. He doesn't say anything. He hears Mina as if in the background, talking, talking, so much talking. He should join in. He should say something. 

What the hell is he supposed to say, though?

Is there a single thing he could say that would make even the tiniest difference?

Sol is dead. Leland is going to die. Maybe he'll come back, maybe he won't. Maybe this is all fake, maybe it isn't. Nothing he says is going to change any of it either way. Is Leland going to be able to bring someone back even if he's executed? Who will he choose? Doesn't matter. Evren will believe it when he sees it, and the idea of trying to discuss the 'reward' of the motive right now seems beyond ghoulish. 

He sets the straw owl on Leland's table. He kneels down on the floor and scoops Adelina into his arms, folds her up in them, pressed against his chest, like he's trying to curl up around her, to shield her from what Sol and Leland had done, from this entire farce of a trial. 

In the end, the only thing he says is a soft, cracked whisper.

"Shh. No more, now. No more."

He doesn't have the strength or the heart to tell her that therapy doesn't work like that. That this will always hurt in some fashion, that the feelings will always be mixed, that nothing can be excised cleanly, that wounds like this leave scars. He rubs her back, gently.

Evren's eyes find Leland again, and stay on him. No more words. There isn't any way to articulate the tangled mess of emotions that he can't even process right now. How much he still cares about Leland, how much he doesn't want to, how much this fucking hurts, the betrayal, the resignation, the anger, frustration, incredulity, longing, sorrow, something like sympathy, something like regret, something like disgust. The whole roiling churning ocean of them way down below the cliff. Should he say goodbye, at least? This may be his last chance. But what kind of goodbye could possibly be satisfying for either of them?

Part of him wants to extend a hand to him. Part of him still wants to throw something. Except he also doesn't, because he's too tired to really want either, too tired to want anything, he's just taking whatever comes now. This might as well happen.

Finally, words come, just when he'd given up on them, and Evren doesn't think, he just speaks.

"You mean something to me." 

It's appallingly true. There's a sour taste in his mouth. Acrid, like smoke. Like the sentence burned on the way out. 

He doesn't say anything else.

[entirebodyexercise]

The Power of Intention

How a lot of you are the most effective lifter you can be? The amount of you take a level of focus into your training that is unshakable? The amount of you stroll into the training flooring with such laser-like focus that you are completely tuned right into every element of your movement? We all would certainly enjoy to say that was us. However in truth, everybody might tip our game up.

It all starts with intention.

What Are You Thinking?

Distraction is a much larger gamer during our exercises than the majority of us wish to admit. Loud music, cellular phones, the man shouting unemployed over there, all are conspiring to take your attention from your training. It's rather profound when you take a seat and also take supply of it. In our quest of both physical and spiritual development, finding 'peaceful' is among the toughest points to achieve.

I ask my professional athletes all the time, 'What are you considering when you are drawing that bar, squatting that weight, or pushing that bell?' Virtually 100% of the moment they can not give me an answer. More frustrating is when I ask exactly what they are assuming about prior to they begin a collection. Many of the time I get a blank look that informs me they aren't knowingly participated in their set. For some lifters a zombie-like state may serve them, no emotional attachment to the lift might allow them to rip away. For many of us, if you don't have a strategy on every associate, you prepare to fail.

Intention vs. Attention

Technique is king in every lift. As a train, I am mindful of the muscle mass associated with every motion, which ones are the chauffeurs, which ones are the key stabilizers and also which ones are essentially along for the flight. I try to present that level of understanding to my athletes since I desire them to understand precisely just what they are doing, ways to do it, and also extra notably, why they are doing it. That understanding is indicated to aid them create intention.

Much of what I am entering may sound even more like attention versus intent. There is an unique difference. Attention puts the lifter in a setting of the viewer. It provides them a front row seat to what is taking place in actual time with little influence on what will certainly be happening. Something happens, you bear in mind of it as well as you carry on. Purpose puts the lifter in the seat of the architect. Intention provides the lifter selection, as well as permits them to intend ahead (even if it's less than a second prior to relocating). Planning is what attention falls short to do. This is where having no plan comes to be planning to fail.

During topmost attempts and incredibly heavy sets, most of us stroll into the system with a degree of preparation. But this is a product of anxiety. That weight is so damn heavy that the survival reaction begins. This primitive should endure makes us consider our breath before taking it or probably our back position prior to the big pull.

The best lifters have that mindset before each lift. They have the ability to verbalize in natural information just how they deal with the bar or the bell. They could practically inform a story concerning just how they get in the rep. They could inform you precisely where their big toe is, what does it cost? stress they are applying and with exactly what degree their center of gravity mores than that toe. The information is fairly outstanding. Their degree of objective allows them to enter into the associate in a very particular way-so certain that they could speak with things like the big toe example. They enter into each collection, heavy or light, with a strategy.

The Cosmos and the Barbell

Many of us prefer to lug feeling right into a collection. We get terminated up and also hoot and also holler, crank the aggressive music, and after that whip away. But in lots of instances, this design of carelessness could bring about a lack of concentration. That could result in a break down in technique causing a missed lift or even worse, a gap that causes an injury. Emotion as well as rage can just lug you so far, however intention and focus will certainly complete the whole job. This is just what separates the greats from every person else.

Practitioners of spirituality and also psychology both agree that your awareness and intent develop the world you stay in. Several of them will inform you that we are all connected, not just to each other, yet to every creature worldwide. Our thoughts impact everything from ourselves to physical matter that is around us.

In my Qigong practice, objective is what relocates the power. Energetically talking, your awareness is the web that relocates, guides, as well as consists of the energy. The internet idea is a stylish system with remarkable precision. If you aren't going right into your training sessions, particular collections, or even private reps with a high degree of purpose, you are shedding your control over just what is happening. The internet that includes the power for the success of that set has no direction, no structure.

Intention in lifting is deeply rooted in planning. It's the suggestion that prior to I go and also get hold of that barbell, I've currently seen success because I've produced an approach that almost ensures it. I've scripted this embeded in my head in advance as well as I merely accomplish the plan. That is purpose. Your mind flourishes on this. It could become loyal to it. Intent is the grand instruction and also then strategy, experience, and emphasis will certainly complete the job.

The Wake Theory of Intention

Think of the wake a boat makes as it takes a trip via the water. The power generated off of the back of the boat develops that balanced collection of waves that relocate far from each other up until the power the boat produced runs out. Now, take that very same boat as well as relocate the wake in front of the watercraft, as if it has currently passed through that area. That power that the boat 'is going to develop' is already functioning and also producing the wake prior to the watercraft gets there. The watercraft, after that, silently takes a trip through a pre-established path via the water. This is intention.

In considerable training efforts, and even the most informal cozy up efforts, your plan, your intent, develops the manuscript for that set. Know and also strategy where your head is mosting likely to remain in your established up, have a full understanding as well as dedicate to the initiative the set is going to call for, as well as dial up the ideal strength prior to you take your breath. This develops the wake in front of your watercraft. If you see the set prior to it happens, if you set every one of the variables at the suitable amplitude and could clearly see the strategy you will make use of, you push that energy in front of you. And afterwards, the wake relocating in front of the boat, that purpose carries the effort. It sounds enchanting because it is. And also it functions.

Help from Dr. Phil

I'll offer you an instance from my weight area at Cal Poly. Since my athletes are football, baseball, volleyball players, as well as the like, they are not weightlifters. They raise weights to improve exactly what they do on the field. So compared with high-level Olympic lifters, they are novices. In several situations, the anxiety that they have regarding the workout in basic bleeds into their technique. When a tidy gets heavy, for instance, that fear reduces their elbows down, which puts them in a forward placement in the catch, because the elbows haven't made the full trip about. 9 breaks of 10, they will dump the bar and also miss out on the lift, including in their worry.

My approach after that transforms from Coach Holder to Dr. Phil. 'I know you are afraid,' I'll inform them. 'The weight is heavy. Which is great. But you need to choose, prior to you also bend down to approach bench, that you are devoting 100% to firing your arm joints with, as fast as you can. Make the choice before the rep is attempted that, hell or high water, the elbow joints will certainly rip with to the finish as fast as possible.' And also the following attempt, a lot more frequently compared to not, is an effective one. Given you by purpose.

Develop Intent to Perfect Your Practice

Focus on exactly what you are doing. Know all the variables associated with each of your sets. Intend on your success from lift to lift. Intention is something that calls for a level of refinement, so don't think it comes naturally for everybody. Like any type of ability, it requires method and also fine-tuning. I guarantee you, if you spend a little time on establishing your objective, your training will certainly be taken to levels you have just fantasized of.

Controlling your mind means managing your worries:

Get Back on the Horse