Maybe someone can post something about it that’ll offend CN again.
Grammar is social. The point is to get an idea from your head to the reader’s head with as little distortion as possible.
The problem with a private grammar (one that you invent yourself) is that you are increasing the distortion in transmission. Just spend an afternoon learning the common grammar and you’ll never have to think about it again. Your readers will appreciate it and so will you, eventually.
If I do end up using the forum-style the space dash space - I’m actually going to call it out and explain it early in the book. I break the 4th wall a lot in the book so it will fit right in.
No offense, but I can’t think of anything more tedious than an author breaking the fourth wall to explain his punctuation style.
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Yeah, it reminds me of the old 22 books where DS and MM went out of their way to explain why the writing was shitty in the preface.
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Omar’s not coming? 
I’m sure St. Peter at the Pearly Gates is saying “Omar Comin’ Y’all” 
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Boo. Saw him most recently in Lovecraft Country.
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Oh fuck this timeline. Why do all the people I actually like die and all the people I wish would die live?
Fuck. I don’t know anything about his personal life, but he was one of my favorite actors.
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I take back every like I ever gave to a beetlejuice post, and there are many.
Sadface.
This is a more complete reaction to the Quanta Magazine article on clocks.
It’s pretty cool. For me, ultimately frustrating, but interesting. I know ahead of time the big questions won’t be answered and there will be temptations to dive into some rabbit holes, so sometimes I skip this kind of article.
Keeping in mind that I’m not an expert (formal physics background only as far as intro QM), here are a few thoughts that could reflect incomplete or wrong understanding on my part.
Summary
She gives a definition of entropy as a measure of energy dissipation, which I have to stop and consider because it’s different from the usual “measure of disorder” (which she uses later). After a little review I decide I like it because it makes some of what were for me troublesome concepts in thermodynamics a little clearer.
The more regular the ticks, the more accurate the clock.
I stumble over this because how do you know how regular the ticks are unless you have a more accurate clock to measure with than the one you’re checking? At some point there’s no way to know which clock is more accurate. This seems to anticipate the later point that there’s a limit to how accurate a clock can be.
“A clock is a flow meter for entropy,” said Milburn.
Nice. So if Einstein was right about time being what a clock measures then time is (the increase of) entropy. But I assume he was (partly) joking.
Practicalities aside, Erker’s hope has stayed the same since his student days. “The ultimate goal would be to understand what time is,” he said.
The big question, ofc not answered here.
Not a part of this article: Einstein did give another answer to this question than “what a clock measures” but it only makes sense in the context of a model: Time is a dimension in general relativity. Thing is, time isn’t even included in some models, so from those points of view it doesn’t exist. And we don’t know what the correct model is. Sabine Hossenfelder talked about this a little while ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdL8CudJTcs
Transcript is here: Sabine’s Blog.
Back to the article.
“Could it be that time is an illusion and smooth time is an emergent consequence of us trying to put events into a smooth order?" [Huber]
Another big question, but do we even really experience time as being smooth? I observe events but not on millisecond timescales. I know I must somehow be filling in the blanks. This question of smooth versus discrete comes up in other places. In mathematics, for instance, people who think the real numbers exist and the real number line is continuous far outnumber the people who say no, there are only finite numbers and the real numbers are not a thing.
Sean Carrol had a recent podcast episode where he discussed some of this stuff. I haven’t listened to it yet but “now” seems like a good time.
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I never watched the wire. Maybe it’s not too late.
https://twitter.com/JamesGleick/status/1435005099483480069?s=19
https://twitter.com/chuuzus/status/1434982712104816640?t=9v5NlytFjPBewXFJl2tKUQ&s=19
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It’s never too late. Get on that ASAP.
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You guys think the ending of unemployment benefits is going to return wages to normal? I know in logistics forklift drivers went from making like $17/h on average to like $21/h because of the labor shortage. Hope this doesn’t mean they go back down.
This story is truly insane
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No. There’s already data from the states that ended it early that shows employment didn’t really move but spending dropped big time
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