Day 1347 – My Day and Yesterday

Saturday, September 28, 2024

I have somehow gotten on a Facebook feed that plays little bits of things Neil deGrasse Tyson says. He’s an interesting guy. Recently, he said the point of college is to excite your curiosity, or something like that. Of all the traits I’d say that describe me curious is probably the best. The other day I was reading a book on great problems in mathematics – the ones that have been solved. I don’t understand much of the notation of the unsolved ones, but I do like the videos that Cohl Furey did a few years ago about octagonal algebra.

Yesterday morning I was watching an episode of How the Universe Was Made. This episode was about the size of the universe. What we can see is only as far as light has had a chance to come to us from afar. Think of it like a spotlight shining a round circle down onto a surface. We can only see to the edge of that circle. However, at that edge is a galaxy and it is 13.1 billion light years from us. (Given that the universe is 13.4 billion years old.) That galaxy has a spotlight around it that can see 13.1 billion light years too. But it can see things we can’t. Not only that but given that the universe is expanding and that the farther things are away from us the faster they are moving from us, soon we won’t be able to see that distant galaxy. 

How far away is that galaxy? Given that light travels at 186,000 miles per second that’s 6 trillion miles a year multiply that by 13,100,000,000 and you’ve got the distance – give or take. Yikes!

Then I worked on reading the glyphs on a Mayan stela and putting it into a talk I’m due to give near the end of October.

I communicated with my contacts in Angkor, Cambodia about shooting video there this spring, and offered my help to one of my Egyptian buds who is looking at sending a camera seventy feet down a shaft that hasn’t been looked at since 1927.

I am finishing up Nate Silver’s book On The Edge. His take on Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) is much different than Michael Lewis’. And now he’s talking about AI and what if we make a machine that optimizes making paperclips.

I have to spend quite a bit of time replying “STOP” to emails asking for money. One of which said Nate Silver was predicting a high probability that Trump could win the Electoral College. I went to his SiverBulletin, which is what 238.com used to be, and didn’t see any evidence of the claim. Oh wait, Silver says if Harris has +1 to +2 % more of the popular vote Trump has a 66% chance of winning the Electoral College, But if she has 2-3% he drops to 36%. Currently Harris is at 55.1% to Trump’s 44.6%, which is 10.5% and new news says she’s increased her lead. Thank goodness. Oh wait, The Guardian show her at +3.6 : damn.

I’m also trying to wrap my head around statistical modeling. I don’t quite get it. It’s like when Nate explains it I go, “Yeah. Yeah. Okay.” Then I try to repeat it back to myself and I go, “What?” 

I watched Virginia Tech football where at the final play of the game – a Hail Mary into the end zone – was caught by a Tech player and the refs signaled Touchdown. Miami had been celebrating until that moment. Now Tech was celebrating. Now video replay nobody doing anything. Incomplete pass. Miami wins. WTF? The man caught the ball, fell to the ground. The ball popped off his chest as a player who had fallen out of the field of play may or may not have dislodged it, and they (the refs) say the man who caught the ball didn’t have control all the way to the ground? WTF? That does not excuse the poor decisions that the coaching staff of Tech made. With twenty seconds left in the half they squibb kick the ball allowing Miami to start near the 50 and kick a field goal (3 points Miami). VT is within field goal range on 4th down and they decide to fake the field goal? Okay. Who designed a play where the player getting the ball is running on the line where the players trying to block the punt will be rushing in? Who does that? Yeah, it failed – big time. (bye bye 3 point VT) The difference in the game was four points. Lemme see -3 Miami and + 3 Tech that’s a difference of um 6 points. Seems to me they VT could have won the game by – as a paintballing kid once said to his buddy when my son was into paintball, “Don’t play stupid!” Or as a Twitter person said of the two coaching staffs, “They have a bomb and are told to cut the red wire, but they are color blind.”

I finished the day reading about people thinking about quantum physics, blackholes, and if the universe is a hologram. Apparently, one can describe the universe as a 3D object wrapped in a 2D sphere where the quantum fields rippling on the surface of said sphere describe what is going on in the 3D world inside the sphere. It doesn’t make any sense, yet the equations say it does, and people are going back to Von Neumann’s algebra of the 1930s to see if that works to describe it. Me? I’m wondering what happened to the flashlight circle? I wonder how Cohl will weigh in on this, and Tyson. Not Mike, deGrasse.

Stay curious – about everything.