Toes

โ€˜The Life Impossibleโ€™ by Matt Haig book review.

I love negative reviews! They are so rare these days. Ron Charles totally torches this rotten-sounding work. And I loved this line.

Sheโ€™s apparently unharmed, but she starts experiencing everything around her with the super-heightened sensory perception of your extremely high college roommate who wants to tell you how miraculous his toes are.

Heh. That is a a very valuable service, preventing me from wasting my time reading something so putrescent.

Role In the Deep

Nobody at my current job has any idea how difficult a lot of the stuff is that I do because I make it look easy. This is a real disadvantage because then management can start to believe that anyone can do it. Until someone else attempts it and it works not so well at all and they need help from half a dozen other folks.

I need to do better at floating up what I’m doing and that it’s not typical to have one person filling as many roles as I currently undertake.

Treatment Fix

A lot of women are extremely vexed that men who can are becoming as picky/choosy as they are. But it boils down to that women think they want to be treated like men, but really they want all the benefits of being a man with none of the enormous drawbacks or responsibilities. That’s just how humans work in general, to be fair. Women are not unique here but are doing worse than men in dealing with how the modern era has changed the calculation. In dating for many years, women were used to having the upper hand unquestionably and now do not, at least not 100% of the time1. And as the male backlash against feminism showed, that loss of near-total dominance2 is hard to get used to.

Up until 10-15 years ago, 99% of men had to just accept whatever woman came along who showed any interest at all. Having standards is not a thing we were allowed. Now that many of us do have standards and won’t just accept table scraps, it has caused much consternation and gaslighting among women.

And a lot of the decline in women’s mental health (and health in general) is due to social media3. The ubiquity of it and that they are more susceptible to it has really fucked them up and over. It’s sad to see. And I mean that sincerely. I wish it were better for them, truly. It’s a huge net loss for society how social media has reduced women’s cognitive capacity and ability to engage with reality 4.

  1. More like 70% of the time now.
  2. Women dominate the dating market because they are the choosers.
  3. Which tell them they can be an obese, uneducated bottom 20% woman and still score a top 1% man, and it’s a cosmic injustice if they do not.
  4. I’d be remiss to fail to note that Rush Limbaugh and Fox News did the same thing to many men, including my own grandfather.

Bit

I was reading that book below to start to find the answer to a specific question. It wasn’t in there as I think the work was too basic for what I want to know1 — but I did (obviously) think the quote was interesting. (And no, the answer is not on the internet.)

But I think I might be able to amble toward an answer in the next book up: Einstein’s Entanglement: Bell Inequalities, Relativity, and the Qubit, combined with some other works. Basically, I want to know that since the Bell inequalities are violated by quantum entanglement, could earlier-than-expected decohorence imply that there might be a lot of primordial black holes out there of microscopic size that we can’t “see” in the CMB data?

(Be vewwy vewwy quiet. I’m hunting dark matter.)

  1. Though I needed to brush up anyway.

The second measurable quantity we will consider is the lifetime, or equivalently the decay rate, of unstable particle species. An unstable particle has a finite probability of decaying during any given time interval, and the decay rate, ฮ“, is the probability of decay in a given unit time, just as in the case of radioactive decay. The lifetime, ฯ„, of a particle species is a measure of the average lifetime of a particle of this type before it decays, and is related to the decay rate by ฯ„ = 1/ฮ“. Equivalently, the lifetime is the time it takes for the size of a sample of such particles to decrease by a factor of e. A related quantity is the half-life: the time it would take a similar sample to halve in size. The half-life, t1/2 is related to the lifetime by t1/2 = ฯ„ ln 2. These quantities may be measured experimentally in one of two ways. First, if the lifetime is sufficiently long for the particle to be observed before decay, and if the decay products are observable, then the decay rate may be measured directly by counting the number of decays per unit time. More commonly in particle physics, however, the lifetime of an unstable particle is so short that the particle is not directly observed before decay. Instead, only the products of its decay are observed. Such a particle is known as resonance. In this case, the decay rate can be measured experimentally through statistical analysis of the invariant mass for groups of ยญ particles. If the same final states appear many times in collisions, and the invariant masses are found to peak around a particular value, this is evidence of resonance with that mass.

One may expect that the invariant mass measurements should form an infinitesimally thin spike around the resonance mass rather than a broad peak, but remember that, since the particle is short-lived, there is considerable uncertainty in its energy. The width of the resonance peak at half maximum height is equal to the decay rate of the resonance (in natural units).

Robert Purdy, Particle Physics: An Introduction

Treat

For most people, the internet was a mistake. And smartphones were a huge mistake. Not for all — but for most. But absent a nuclear war, there is no going back, no returning to what was extant before. We must adapt and make the best of the mess.

The internet should’ve remained as it was back in 1999-2001 or so. Smart techie type people only, with very little spillover into the wider world. No dating apps and not overrun by ads and large corporations. Smartphones should probably not exist at all. Too cognitively hazardous.

QR

Even the interns fresh out of college with comp-sci majors struggle with troubleshooting basic issues that can be fixed by uninstalling/reinstalling apps or updating drivers.

I had a developer just yesterday who couldn’t figure out how to scan a QR code. A fucking developer. I had to walk him through it like he was seven years old.

Not my job, by the way. Not even remotely. Younger millennials and Gen Z just do not know how to use computers, no matter their occupation.