The Singularity: Why the Nerd Rapture will happen.

A singularity, in physics, is a moment when the equations that describe the prior state no longer apply — a phase transition after which the universe runs on fundamentally different rules. The Big Bang was one. The invention of life was another. So were sex, consciousness, language, writing, and computation.

Each singularity increased the universe's capacity to store, transmit, and compute information. The next one will be direct brain-to-brain transfer at speeds billions of times faster than language — which eventually allows the recording and playback of consciousness itself. That is the Nerd Rapture. It is real, it is coming, and this post is about why.

Big Bang

The very first singularity we know about was the Big Bang. According to Steven Hawking [1], before the Big Bang there was no time and no space. That's a huge singularity!

What's the definition of a singularity? It's when a situation changes, when the equations that described what was happening no longer apply. Before the Big Bang, without time or space, there were no equations for physical parameters. Afterwards you could make measurements and devise equations to explain what was going on. That's a HUGE singularity. Mathematical models are now actually possible.

This singularity is also reminiscent of phase changes which are well understood in physics (two recent Nobel prizes.) It's like water to ice. The average speed of the particles of water banging up against each other show off new forces depending on the temperature. What was hidden before is now exposed. The equations that describe how ice works are much, much different than the equations that describe how liquid water works. Physicists actually understand this pretty well. They can figure out how these phase changes work with some very simple parameters, and they're all the same. I don't understand the theory well enough to see if we can apply these laws to social singularities, I suspect you can, but since we barely have laws of economics that we can apply to the current situation (will inflation go up if we increase deficit spending?) we certainly can't predict this from modeling well enough to believe it. And since the objects of these predictions are affected by the predictions themselves, well, it's singularities inside singularities - feedback loops lead to chaotic results... but even chaotic results have predictable outcomes.

Opacity to Light

What are the main singularities that have occurred in this universe beyond the Big bang? There were probably many phase changes as the Big Bang settled down from infinite density to the current density of one particle per cubic meter, but the best known one is the one we can see: the Cosmic microwave background radiation. This happened when the temperature of the universe became cool enough for atoms to form and it was suddenly transparent to radiation. The radiation that existed at that moment is what we see. Before this cooling, the universe was opaque to radiation, light traveled very short distances before being scattered. After the cooling, light just continued on whichever way it was headed before, across the universe without end. That's a big change. The equations that worked before no longer worked afterward.

Life

What other singularities have we seen in the universe? I would make the claim that the next most obvious singularity was the invention of life. What is life? It's a self-sustaining physical feedback system. Life takes in energy to sustain itself which naturally leads to growth. Once life starts it either ends tragically (well, eventually always ends tragically) or continues to evolve. That's a singularity. The equations that describe the universe before life don't really hold after life evolves. Think of the Gaia hypothesis. The earth has sustained itself through many, many changes of the type of life that lives upon it. It's self-regulating, as long as it's here, now, it's obviously self-regulated itself for hundreds of millions of years. It's obvious this isn't always the case, look at Mars and Venus. Life didn't seem to make it in either of those places, so this phase change singularity stuff isn't inevitable. The new equations can lead to different solutions of death and destruction, they don't have to lead to more complicated and self-aware entities.

Sex

What's next? Maybe sex. Eukaryotic cells were made up of the combination of different entities parasitizing each other. They traded genes the hard way! By growing together into one being. This really changed the rate of evolution on the earth. Once we had gene exchange any changes that were more likely to survive had a greater chance to spread. You should read Lynn Margulis's [2] and Dorion Sagan's "Acquiring Genomes" (2003) which is a fascinating book that talks about life before animal and plant species and how cells acquired new genes (the very first type of sex.) The invention of plants and animals, where each generation is forced to trade genes increased the rate of evolution by leaps and bounds. Another singularity. The equations that worked before no longer worked.

Consciousness

What do these singularities all have in common? They increase the complexity, transmission speed and amount of storage of information. None of this was possible before the Big Bang. Then, when the universe became transparent to light, information was not limited to the small ball of plasma slowly expanding (well really fast, but not as fast as afterwards), information was expanding at the speed of light. But there was no memory and no complexity until life occurred. Evolution has continued to ratchet up the complexity, size and transmission speed of information ever since. Arguably, the next singularity is the invention of consciousness. That's when a living thing could actually have free will (and don't believe the physicists who diss free will, they're just naïve.) 

For why the determinist case is wrong, see Religion Without Lies: Why We Have Free Will (2025): the free will problem dissolves once you properly formulate consciousness as a self-modifying system.)

Life could have a complicated affect on its environment now. When life could be self modifying and learn from its mistakes, remember what happened, build models of what might happen, plan and undertake changes: That's one of the biggest singularities ever. and it was a slowly increasing evolution of complexity for this singularity until consciousness emerges.

Communication

What's next? Communication between living entities. [8] Not just eating each other, but cooperating to eat each other. Increasing the speed and breadth of information transmission again. Creating copies of 'brain' states in your fellow animals through language (body language as well as sound.) Once a group of animals or plants can work together, the equations that described life just get way, way more complicated. Domestication of plants and animals (not just by humans, by the way) was now possible. Evolution could now be directed. Think dogs, corn, cows and chickens.

Literacy

The next singularity is really the expansion of information storage outside of biological minds: reading and writing. This shows us that singularities are anything but simultaneous. It's taken almost ten thousand years for the vast majority of humans to learn to read and write.  (By the way, ngish dug 𒍑 𒅗 is Sumerian for 'to make love' [3]. I'm looking forward to my new embroidered WTF t-shirt!) Once humans learned to record things outside their brains, stuff like the pyramids and Stonehenge were now possible. City states came about and thrived. The invention of the Nation state becomes possible. The equations that described the world before writing and after writing are totally different. 

Computation

The next singularity is the ability to take that written information and to have it automatically act in and of itself. Essentially to create life again, artificial life, 'living' machines. The pyramids required humans to interpret the written instructions to build them. But soon we figured out how to build automatons, machines that ran themselves. Arguably, the first programmable computer was Babbage's Analytical Engine [4] and it wrote books of logarithms all by itself. Since then we've learned how to build feedback systems that act just like primitive living things, taking in information from the outside world and affecting that world (see cybernetics [5], whose first equations were used to build guns in the world wars.) We've learned how to perfect these little monsters and abstract their knowledge in many useful ways. This is what Artificial Intelligence (AI) does. We've learned how to reason (programming) and we've learned how to create systems that learn. This has really changed the equations that we use to describe our most complicated systems.

Communication of Consciousness

What's next? Super-smart AI that takes over the world? Hardly. See my blog post on why this is at least a hundred years away.[6] It is a singularity we're in the middle of, but the slow motion disaster/rapture will happen at glacial speed. That's not the next thing to happen. Yes, we'll be able to talk to machines in the next decade and they'll be able to understand us and we them. They'll slowly get smarter and smarter. But the real next singularity is the ability to transmit brain states between humans and machines and humans and humans billions of times faster than simple language. Direct mind to mind transmission. ESP for real. [7] Changing the speed of interaction by orders of magnitude changes those equations again.

Nerd Rapture

Once you can transmit that data at high speeds, you can start recording it. Once you can start recording it you can play it back. This will naturally evolve into the ability to record one's soul into solid state. This is a singularity because the physical receptacle can now evolve at the speed of information, doubling and doubling again, allowing larger and larger groups to cooperate at light speed. Will we ever learn how to put the soul back in the body? We'll certainly try. Will we ever learn to have the soul live outside the body? Again, we will certainly try and I wouldn't bet against it. This is the Nerd Rapture. It won't happen instantaneously, but it will happen.

Concrete steppingstones for the Nerd Rapture section:

2021–2025: Neuralink demos, Synchron FDA clearances, CTRL-labs / Meta neural interfaces

2025–2035: High-bandwidth motor and sensory interfaces; early proto-telepathy experiments

2035–2050: Whole-brain partial emulation; subjective state recording and playback

2050+: Full consciousness transfer; soul-in-solid-state

That is if the Killer Alien Robots don't get us first. It's a race of life against life. I hope we win.

Thanks for reading!

 -Dr.Mike

• 
  

For the 2025 update on how the AGI timeline has shifted since this 2021 post — and why the basic framework still holds — see: An Engineer's Failed Journey to Find Artificial General Intelligence (2025).

For the 2018 development of the consciousness/singularity thesis, see: Proclamations of the Final Great Awakening (2018).

F O O T N O T E S

[1] https://www.universetoday.com/139167/heres-stephen-hawkings-final-theory-about-the-big-bang/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Margulis and https://archive.org/details/acquiringgenomes0000marg

[3] https://sumerianlanguage.tumblr.com/post/175618372191/are-there-any-known-profanity-words-in-sumerian

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics

[6] https://www.wiigf.com/2025/11/an-engineers-journey-to-detect-any-hint.html makes the argument that if the scaling laws continue for a few more orders of magnitude, it may happen earlier.

[7] To those who don't believe in ESP Extra-Sensory Perception... my remote car key says differently. I perceive the key, click it and start the care remotely. Could there be anything finer in the history of science?

[8] Arguably this is where evolution created religion as a method to evolve faster than sex allowed.

The Power of Trump

Trumpism is not a policy program; it is a bargain. A plurality of voters, afraid of losing special status they have enjoyed for four centuries, hires the loudest available conman to protect their right to discriminate, pollute, and refuse collective obligation — accepting that they too will be conned, so long as someone else is conned worse.

What follows is an account of how the Declaration of Independence's promise of unalienable rights has been hollowed out by shrink-wrap contracts, a Voting Rights Act gutted by the Supreme Court, and the quiet constitutional triumph of the limited-liability corporation as a fourth source of power beside religion, royalty, and land. The fix is either demographic patience or a new constitutional convention. Neither is safe.

It would not be unreasonable to suppose these generalizations do violence to individual voters; they are intended to describe the center of gravity of each coalition, not its full population.

A Modest Proposal for the Presidential Library of Donald J. Trump.

 I was reading the latest fiascos of Donald J. Trump and his aversion to showing reverence to the troops at cemeteries...when it gave me an idea that I think all red-blooded Americans can get behind and support.

To set the stage, we need to go back in history and see how other presidential estates have been turned into libraries, or cemeteries. In particular, it's educational to learn about what happened to Robert E. Lee's  estate in Arlington, Virginia. He inherited this estate from George Washington's adopted grandson. After the civil war, the United States seized the land for non-payment of back taxes (they didn't pay their property tax during the civil war...) then they turned Lee's front porch into a war memorial and a military cemetery. And they wouldn't pardon him, either. Lee went to his deathbed still a fervent white supremacists to the ends of his days. And we rewarded him by taking away his land and turning it into a cemetery to honor those he had helped to slaughter during the recent civil war. 

It seems like Donald J. Trump deserves better. We need some place to house all his tweets, television snafus, conspiracy theories, thrashing of international agreements and dog whistles of racism in one place so they can be evident for all to see. Since he doesn't read, he has no use for a library, but the American people do. We need to never forget what a kleptocratic con-man can do to this country. 

Trump is always looking for what's in it for him... so we could make a deal. Trump could donate Mar-a-lago back to the government (you probably didn't know it was a historical park for many years - and a possible Florida Whitehouse back in the 70's, but the park service thought it was too costly to maintain and the Secret Service thought it was too costly to defend) and in exchange the American people would promise not to lynch him and to build his library there.

Mar-a-lago would be a spectacular place for Trump's Presidential Library! There is no more appropriate place than Florida. We could let him stay there for as long as he likes and in return America would promise to not prosecute him for the many election fraud felonies, corruption scandals, emoluments violations and abuses of power that he has committed. He'd take that deal in a minute, he is, after all the King of the Deal! 

Maralago, on the Florida coast in Palm Beach. Two golf courses are just west of the club across the Lagoon and cover a few hundred acres. 

As it's a library and museum there's no need for a set of golf courses, instead, I propose that we turn the golf courses into the equivalent of Arlington Cemetery. We allow anyone who's died from COVID-19 to be allowed to be interned there. It's big enough we could fit every one of the probable 500,000 people he's going to end up killing because of his incompetence. If there was space left over, it could be a national debtor's graveyard, for all of those forced to go bankrupt to save their lives because of outrageous health care costs at any point because the insurance system in this country has been sabotaged by the Republican party for decades; it's only fitting to allow the dead to be memorialized there.

After the seizure the Club becomes the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library and the Golf courses become the COVID-19 Memorial Cemetery.

Does anyone think it's worthwhile setting up a non-profit organization with a fund-me to promote this idea? I think it is more than appropriate.

Thanks for reading!

 -DrMike

 6th of September, 2020, ~60 days before the coming Presidential election.

What's Wrong With California? Utter Failure in Handling COVID-19 Pandemic in the US

China eradicated the virus in 90 days and it's economy is up and running again.

South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, Japan, New Zealand and many other countries have eliminated the virus and restarted their economies. 

Europe's death rate and case rate is continuing to go towards zero and it's economy has started to reopen.

This is not the case in United States? 

What is wrong with the United States?

Is it the same thing that was wrong with Kansas? [6]

Even worse: what's wrong with California?

Is it really too many Covidiots?

Methinks the data speaks for itself.

And the data says yes.

COVID-19 Cases and Deaths in California [5]

Since we ignored the obvious testing issues that would have allowed us to track, trace and isolate the virus into submission, we had to wait for a vaccine to have a hope of fixing it.

Cases: Note July is the first peak, when this was written. Boy did Trump Fuck it up BIGLY.

Deaths: And here's the deaths, Wow, did we screw this up big time. Everything after July was eminently preventable except for the Covidiots in the county.

California thought it was doing all the right things. We had a plan. It was all going to be over before the leaves turned orange. We were going to open up very slowly and carefully... but we never got the deaths low enough, or the cases low enough to ensure that the virus would be eradicated, so it isn't. The crazy thing about this is that we know what we have to do to eradicate this virus. It's not a secret. We've seen many countries figure it out. A hard lockdown that drives the virus to ground in three weeks. How hard could that be? Apparently too hard for a country led by a RealityTV producer; but not too hard for a country led by a former comedian: [7]

Cases of COVID-19 in Belarus

Cases per day in Chile, UK, Pakistan, Qatar and Belarus [3]

Somehow all of these countries have managed to send their cases nearly to zero by just locking down.  Something we seem unable to do in the US, except for the NYC area. So what have they done differently? Well in NYC about 15% of the population had it. This means that herd immunity would kicks when 1 - 1/Rt = 0.15 or Rt (the retransmission rate) is about 1.17. So with masks and physical distancing it appears that as long as NYC can keep Rt below 1.17, the virus will die out. And how do you keep the retransmission rate down? You test, track and isolate. 

New York State COVID-19 cases and deaths [4]

Testing tells you who has the disease. Tracking tells you who might have the disease. Isolation is the way to make sure nobody else gets the disease from those who are possibly infected. Every time you increase the interactions between people (open up the economy) or increase the probability of someone spreading the disease (don't wear a mask) you change Rt = N * Pn where N is the number of interactions and Pn is the probability of a particular interaction spreading the disease. This is why healthcare workers are infected at three times the rate of the general population; even though they are very careful and Pn is very small, they are around infected people all the time, so N is very large. Compared to a quarantined person a Nurse might have 25 times as many interactions with an infected person each day. In order to stop the rapid inundation of the hospital work force with the virus they have to reduce Pn by a factor of 25 just to stay even with the population at large.

But all of this is moot. China has shown us how to contain the virus: Test, track, isolate. They've done it three times. The original outbreak in Wuhan, a subsequent outbreak in Wuhan, and a small outbreak in Beijing. So has South Korea. Test everyone in the infected area and isolate those who are actually infected. China defined the infected area as the entire city of Wuhan at one point and performed eleven million tests in ten days to determine exactly who had the virus (about 150 people), isolated them and eliminated the retransmission to almost zero. The virus slowly dies out at this point. Reinfections from travelers can still occur, there is some small false negative rate of the testing procedures that will let infected people through, but with more testing, it can be limited to a rare event.

So we could do this in the United States. In fact, we could do it today with the right national coordination, with the current amount of testing, if we just did it right. Universities with large medical centers are doing it. Everyone at the University takes the tests to show that they are virus free before classes start, then you retake the test periodically to detect any transmissions. You track and isolate anyone who gets it so it doesn't spread. So for a University that can make it's own tests this seems like a viable proposition. 

For the United States, this isn't quite as straightforward. We don't have enough tests and we aren't increasing the number of tests fast enough.

Tests per day in US [1]

And here's how badly the previous guy failed at implementing testing: We had one more doubling of the testing rate and then he said, "Don't test, that just means we'll find more infections" What an a$$hole and fundamental Covidiot. My prediction: this is far from being over. Evolution of new variants world wide will require us to test to succeed. We should be continuing to develop instantaneous testing, if we don't we will fail again.

There doesn't appear to be any exponential growth in testing. We've only tested about 5-6 million people and we're adding new tests at the rate of 50,000 per week. For us to get enough tests to test everyone once it would take us many years, so let's hope our test creation doesn't stay linear, but actually starts to go more exponential. If we double the number of tests every month, we could test everyone in the US in another ten months. 

Another way to test everyone is to do batch testing. Since we know the average infection rate from our previous tests, we can test a bunch of people at once, with the same test, that will test positive if any of them do. To maximize the efficiency of the testing you want to make the number of samples in a test be as shown in the figure below where p is the probability of finding an infected person in the population at large. This probability can be estimated as k * Nt * Pr / PA, where Nt is the number of tests we run today, Pr is the rate of positive results, k is a factor for the missed people that are actually infected (estimated to be around 2 - 3 in the current state of affairs) and PA is the population of America.  Right now (July 4th) Nt = 700 k, Pr = 7.5 % and Pa = 350 million. So p is about k * 700 k * 7.5 % / 350 million or 1 out of 2000 people should test positive (p ~ 0.0005).

Pool Size for an expected positive test outcome percentage [2]

This says that if we tested the whole country we could do it with about 50 to 100 times fewer tests than testing everybody once. 350 million divided by 50 is 7 million tests. That's only ten times more tests per day than we do right now. If we could grow our test rate by a factor of ten and keep the virus curve flattened out (we're having a bit of trouble with this) we could then test everyone and isolate all the infected for two weeks to eradicate the virus. We should still work on a vaccine, but we should be spending almost any amount we can to increase the testing rate. The economy is losing $40 Billion per week. If each test cost $100 this would cost us less than $1B. We should be ready to do this multiple times, the pay back is huge, the uncertainty of this working is less than making a vaccine for a retrovirus (never been down before) or a corona family virus (never been done before) or bringing the vaccine to market safely in less than two years (never been done before.) 

Why isn't the federal government doing this? I have my opinions... And most of them say the failure in the current administration is driven from the top. When the conservative, republican ideology is to only do that which the leader proclaims to be a good idea and the leader doesn't understand science but only understands RealityTV production... well, we're screwed. Since this is more complicated than ratings or polls it must be baffling to the current holder of the highest office in the land. However, as soon as he is voted out in November, we can put this plan in place and be virus free by Christmas time. 

I'm feeling more optimistic than I was yesterday.

Have a merry Xmas!

Thanks for reading,

 -Dr.Mike

References:

[1] US test rate including positive test rate: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states

[2] Optimal pool Size: https://idss.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/04.28.2020pooled_testing.pdf

[3] Decreasing COVID-19 cases internationally: 

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/california-coronavirus-cases.html

[4] Decreasing COVID-19 cases and deaths in NYC: 

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/new-york-coronavirus-cases.html

[5] Increasing case rates in CA and decreasing death rates: 

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/california-coronavirus-cases.html

[6] Believing things that are demonstrably untrue because a billionaire told you about it.

[7] I've always maintained that comedians are smarter than either actors or producers. They write their own material for at least part of their career, at least in the United States. 

Quantum Mechanics is weirder than you think. It might be weirder than anyone can think.

Reflections on "Experimental rejection of observer-independence in the quantum world" and an updated version "Experimental test of local observer-independence".

Are we quantum mechanical or not?

This paper basically proves that the famous Schrodinger's cat experiment, which says the cat is a quantum mechanical wave function is correct. The cat is actually in an entangled state which means the cat is alive and dead at the same time. That's pretty weird! But we an make it even weirder! Imagine, if you will, [1] that you are taking the place of Schrodinger's cat. We don't want to kill you so we'll modify the experiment in line with Deutsch's proposal and Wigner's interpretation. [2] The experiment performed above is exactly Deutsch's proposal and the result is that yes, you as the observer are in a superposition of quantum states.

What is you in that previous statement? You only ever remember one set of events. You never have any memory of being in two quantum states. It appears that consciousness can only be associated with one quantum state at a time. However it also appears that your consciousness is associated with every quantum state, viz., your consciousness splits into two versions, one associated with each quantum state. What happens to the various yous? There are two basic interpretations that are famous in quantum mechanics: the copenhagen interpretation and the multi-universe theory.

The Copenhagen interpretation says that when a measurement is made the entangled quantum state collapses. In other words, one of the quantum states disappears and the quantum system 'collapses' to the other state. Any measurement you make now will show the quantum system is in the second state. the other state is gone. If you don't make the measurement the entangled state continues to evolve and you can prove that it is still there by, for instance, making another measurement later. [3] There has never been any indication that this interpretation is 'wrong' in the eyes of the experimenter who makes the measurement. In any experimenter's view of the universe, this is exactly what happens.

Yes and No. We are not quantum mechanical in our own eyes, but we are in the eyes of others.

However, if you are taking the place of Schrodinger's cat, then to me, an observer outside the box,  you are in a quantum mechanical superposition of two different quantum states. We can actually prove this. In my eyes you are in a quantum mechanical superposition. In your eyes you are not. So what the heck is going on?

If I understand it correctly, it says that the universe looks different depending on who's looking at it. Now that's really weird, but not quite as weird as you might think. Relativity destroyed the idea that everything looks the same. Depending on how fast you are moving, the order of things happening that you observe compared to someone else can change. Events that are causal won't change, but the order of events that are not causally linked don't necessarily stay in the same order. Whew! That means that causality is not violated. Thank God and Einstein for that.

So the fundamental assumptions that are made in science are the following: locality and free choice. Locality means that two quantum mechanical wave functions can only influence each other when they are in the same place. There is no action at a distance. [4]  Free choice is that assumption that humans have free will. They can decide whether or not to make a measurement and the universe can't know ahead of time what that decision will be. [5] Or we aren't really running an experiment and it's all predetermined ahead of time.

The paper above is interesting in a couple of ways. First, it carefully defines a measurement as something done by an observer. A measurement means that an observer "extract[s] information from another system by means of some interactions, and store[s] that information in a physical memory." So even if the measurement is made, if it is not communicated to the outside world the quantum states stay in superpositions as far as the outside observer is concerned. Communicate the measurement value (not that a measurement has been made, but what measurement is made) and the superposition is broken. This seems to break the Copenhagen's interpretation of quantum mechanics... The wave function didn't collapse when the measurement is made. The wave function appeared to collapse for the observer in the box, they could predict future measurements that were dependent on the value of the measurement that occurred; but the wave function did not collapse for the observer outside the box. Their measurements were consistent with not having the wave functions collapse in the box. So who is right?

Everybody is right. The person in the box definitely made a measurement. The person outside does not know the results of that measurement, so they don't see the 'collapse'. Either the wave function somehow knows who/what is making a measurement on it when or... The many world's interpretation is correct. We are all quantum states, but consciousness splits and travels down only one path at a time. And you can never get back to the other path.

*Sigh* Yes, Quantum Mechanics is very weird.
Thanks for reading,
 -DrMike

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[1] Yes, this is from the Twilight Zone, and it's not a mistake or a pun, it's a possible plot that happens in the real world that is so frigging weird, it must be just from a television show. That it's what scientists think happens in REAL LIFE is the scary part.

[2] D. Deutsch, Quantum theory as a universal physical theory, Int. J. Th. Phys. 24, I (1985).
 E. P. Wigner, Remarks on the mind-body question, in: I. J. Good, “The Scientist Speculates” (London, Heinemann, 1961) and heavily using "On the quantum measurement problem", Caslav Brukner.

[3] This 'collapse' takes place instantaneously across the universe for all objects entangled together. This would seem to violate Einsteins laws of relativity that say no information can be transmitted faster than the speed of light. It turns out that it doesn't, if you assume the no-cloning-without destroying postulate, which, as far as we can tell is the way the universe works. The no-cloning postulate was proposed as a way to fix this paradox in 1982. It turns out that is was actually proved earlier in 1970 to show that any quantum measurement disturbs the quantum system.

[4] Side bar on gravity. Newton's theory of gravity assumes that the gravitational forces felt by two bodies was instantaneous and independent of distance: spooky action at a distance as Newton put it. He knew something was wrong with this theory. It turns out he was right, it's just a very good approximation to assume that the force is instantaneously transmitted between the two bodies. Einstein fixed this with his General Theory of Relativity. The forces (actually the warping of the field of space) travel at the speed of light. In most situations, it turns out that this looks like spooky action at a distance. Only in certain extreme conditions (like the orbit of Mercury, which is deep inside the grvity well of the sun) can you actually notice the difference between the two theories. And as Newton suspected, Einstein is correct and his theory is just an approximation of what we can measure. A very good approximation. So far as we can tell, Einstein's theory is exact. Although there are some 'paradoxes' when we try to reconcile it with Quantum Mechanics that hint it might not be complete and that there might be another "Theory of Everything" that would reduce to Einstein's theory in most cases, but explain away these paradoxes in the extreme cases.

[5] All those philosophers (and physicists) who claim free will doesn't exist need to reconcile their views with this postulate of science. The postulate of free choice says that there does not exist a deterministic universe. It says that the experimenter can choose which measurement to make and nothing that has gone on before can determine which choice the experimenter will make. Of course, if everything is determined ahead of time... then we are just in a simulation and our free will is an illusion. However, free will is an open postulate, you can assume we have it or not. Science works both ways. In one case, the measurements we make are predetermined, in the other case the measurement results are random. In the latter case we have free will. In the former case we don't. In the latter case some predetermined 'hidden variables' are causing the measurements to look random. The philosophy of Occam's razor leads me to believe in the former: Human's have free will and measurements can be made via free choice and their results are randomly distributed. Of course, if you think everything is predetermined and we are living in a simulation, why would this simulation be running? What is being simulated? It could only be different initial conditions. And why would anyone want to simulate that? Or we aren't in a simulation and everything is predetermined. There is absolutely no fun in that. No fun at all. I reject that position on the postulate that humans can have fun.

A modest proposal to end the Flat Earth Society and put Silicon Valley on the map.

Flat Wrong the end piece in Scientific American, in the latest issue (May 2020) got me to thinking about how we could just end this idiocy that leads to many, many people being driven into believing obviously fallacious conspiracy theories.

• Did we actually go to the moon? (hint: we did.) 
• Was Obama born in Hawaii? (hint: yes.) 
• Is he Muslim? (hint: no.) 
• Is QAnon saying anything that's true? (hint: no.) 
• Are the Jews trying to take over the world (hint: no.)
• Are aliens here? (hint: no.)
• Do humans cause Global Warming? (hint: yes.)
• Have the Clintons murdered tens of people? (hint: no.)
• Did the Russians help the Trump campaign? (hint: yes.)
• Yada, yada, yada.

We can't actually have much proof against most of these fallacies, but the Flat Earth one, we can if we actually get high enough in the atmosphere to see the curvature of the Earth. You will convince some Flat Earthers they are wrong. Most will just come up with some other excuse and continue to try and justify the fun fact that they have been lied to for many years and they finally figured it out. That's why believing in a conspiracy theory is so fun! You've actually figured something out that has been confusing others. You know something they don't. You're smarter than everyone else because you have secret knowledge. It's all baloney, but it's still fun. At some level you know it's all baloney, but it's so fun to think about the puzzle, and if you have some underlying motive (hate those hoity-toity experts, hate that black president, hate those egg-head scientists, hate those liberals, or actually, it usually comes from jealousy in my opinion. It lets you excuse yourself that you haven't done as well as everyone else...) you can be impossible to convince.

Okay. So we want something else, too. Silicon Valley is famous worldwide for technology. It's been happening for decades. Back at the turn of the century one of the Robber Barons, who corrupted government officials, got a land grant, rights of way, built a railroad and then became fabulously wealthy, built a university to honor his son, who died of the flu at a young age. That's where Stanford came from. The university was supported with enough money to attract talent and expertise to rival any university on the planet. That was the founding point. Then it revved up with World War II: building critical equipment to help the war effort. All of a sudden Lockheed is there building planes. Hewlett-Packard & Varian & Watkins-Johnson are there building electronic equipment. Then technologists are driven out of their non-compete states to California where they build such things as the silicon chip (Fairchild, Intel, etc.), the personal computer (Apple), the laser printer (Adobe), lots of medical and radio equipment, networking (Cisco, Juno), the web (Google, Facebook, etc.) The technology coming out of the valley seems to be never ending. The GDP per person is one of the top three in the entire world and has been for many decades. So the place that used to be covered with orchards now produces the most complicated technology in the world. 

So it's rightly famous all over the world. However, when people come here what do they see? Not much. There are basically no buildings over six stories (they cost too much.) There's a couple of freeways. Lots of warehouses, no orchards anymore. Okay, we do have Apple Headquarters (pretty cool, but...) and ... that's about it and you can't really visit it. There's a 9" x 12" plaque that says "the silicon chip was invented here" outside of a strip mall. The original building has been torn down decades ago. Architecturally there's only San Jose City Hall (a very late edition.) 

A couple of buildings almost ten stories high in downtown San Jose (there's an airport nearby, so all the buildings are short.) So we need something that will really put Silicon valley on the map. What could that be?

A Modest Proposal for a Flat Earth Conspiracy Ending Ride in Silicon Valley. 

The basic idea is to build the most incredible combination of a Ferris Wheel, a balloon ride and a roller coaster, all world class and one continuous ride. Of course, it would also include a world class restaurant and history of technology museum. 

Here's the basic idea. Buy a large plot of land going up into the top of the Santa Cruz mountains, probably somewhere on highway 9. We need lots of parking and easy access as we'll need lots of people to support it.  How many? We'll figure that out later. 

So at the bottom of the hill the public comes in and parks. They are shuttled to a funicular train that takes them slowly up 2500 feet to the top of the mountain. While going up they can see all of Silicon Valley: Moffett field, San Jose, San Francisco Bay. A pretty amazing view!  

And what do they see at the top? They see the largest Ferris Wheel in the world.

The original Ferris Wheel (264 feet):

The largest Ferris Wheel today (550 feet):

Silicon valley's Ferris Wheel, three times as tall (over 1400 feet tall):

The ride takes about three hours. The cars hold around 50 people, there are bars & restaurants in some of the cars. And at the top, you can see all the way to San Francisco!

Which is an awesome view, a spectacular view! But... you can't see the curvature of the Earth at 4500 feet. You can see from San Francisco to Monterey, which is cool, but this won't convince any Flat Earther of any thing. That horizon looks pretty flat. How high do you need to get to see the curvature of the Earth?

It turns out you need to be about 80,000 feet high to see the curvature of the Earth. How do you get that high? The cars have to be airtight. We build a SkyBridge to take them up to 80,000 feet. We hook them up to balloons at the top of the wheel and spend three more hours going up and down a set of ropes held up by balloons. You get to see all the way from San Diego to Crater Lake in Oregon. You can see Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe. You can see the curvature of the Earth. How much would you pay to TRAVEL TO SPACE?

But wait. We aren't done yet. When you get back down you can take the lazy, sedate funicular train back down to the parking lot... or you can take the most amazing roller coaster in the entire world. The longest, fastest, most spectacular, roller coaster in the world. How do we do this?
Well, first we are starting at 2500 feet, so we go into a 700 foot drop right away, and it's inexpensive as we are going down the mountain side. We do a triple 360 degree loop and then the track ends halfway down, but the cars keep going because they are actually quadcopters and they do free open air loops! Wow! Then they put you back on the track and you do another record 1000 foot drop with three loops and a final 500 foot drop that is, by itself, the largest roller coaster in the world.

Anybody who likes roller coasters will LOVE this one. Three of the largest drops in the world. Extremely fast, smooth and the free flight will be amazing! (and make it safer.)

Now you may have some questions, like can you suspend a set of guide wires that can pull up the cars from 80,000 feet? Well, it turns out you can. you can buy the rope you need today (Kevlar rope of 7.5 cm thickness can individually hold itself up and the cars.) So if you make 10-20 ropes held up by balloons and each car has a pair of balloons helping to hold it up: it's safe, it's simple and it's doable.

And how much do we need to charge for a ride? Let's estimate how much it costs to build. The existing largest Ferris Wheel cost around $300 million. Ours is about 5x as big or $1.5 B. The SkyBridge is relatively cheap. The kevlar rope is cheap, the balloons are cheap, add another $500 million. The Mountain Roller Coaster can't be more than $500 million. Then a parking lot, a funicular and a museum, plus ancillary out buildings and a control tower, another $500 million. So that's about $3 billion dollars (less than the bay bridge.) It's about a six hour ride. So you can run it 18 hours a day and with 50 cars and 50 people per car you can run 5000 people through this system every day. So let's say you get money at 5% and pay off the loans over 30 years and your finance costs are 30-50% of your operating income (maybe a bit high.) To generate this income you need to charge around $300-$500 per ride. Free drinks for everyone! Blackjack and other gambling... are you outside of American jurisdiction or do you have to get an Indian tribe to go in with you? Gourmet food. And junk food. What more could you want? I'd take that ride, for sure!

Thanks for reading.
 -DrMike

@WSJ Idiocy again: “The Lockdown Rebellion”: No, "The Covidiot Death Parties"

An opinion piece from the @WSJ in their 'main street' section:

The Lockdown Rebellion

Ordinary Americans protesting to reopen the economy face only contempt from elites.

By 

William McGurn

April 20, 2020 12:40 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-lockdown-rebellion-11587400850

—- it’s not a rebellion, it’s a corporate led PR stunt that the @GOP is exploiting. Billionaires are afraid their profits will diminish, they don’t care who dies. This is standard fare in the media ecosystem. You can get what you pay for.

Here we go. I'll quote the opinion piece and point out the fallacies. What's the motivation? Who's gaining advantage? Who's financing this? Does it make sense? Who's dying? —-

There they go again, ordinary Americans denying science and refusing to defer to their betters.

— It starts with the typically sarcastic #FlameAndBlame tactics of the shills of the right. The unwashed masses are great! They can be manipulated into helping my billionaire overlords. So what's really going on? Nobody is deferring to their 'betters', they aren't deferring to those who have spent their lives learning, gaining expertise, putting in the sweat and work that is required to be a fully functioning member of this society. Some people expect that their privilege should get them things instead of their hard work. Sorry, it doesn't work that way. Too bad. —-

In state capitals across the country [No, in a few carefully handpicked states], citizens are protesting the continued coronavirus lockdowns. A CNN critic calls them “Covid-19 deniers,” notwithstanding that the science they allegedly deny still lacks conclusive answers to some of the most fundamental questions about the coronavirus.

—- ‘Protesting’? No. They are holding Death Parties (Notice the Confederate and Nazi flags.) The result will be their deaths and the deaths of others. They’ve been infected by the @GOP #DeathCult conspiracy theories. The billionaires don’t care if they live or die as long as they can juice the news cycle to get favorable PR sowing doubt on the opposition. It’s sad to see how exploited these Covidiots are. We'll talk about the science in a bit —-

In the past week, demonstrations have broken out in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Utah, Virginia and Washington. In Pennsylvania the state legislature got into the act, [Oooooh! That's telling, yes it's an act, a partisan act] sending Gov. Tom Wolf a bill that would order much of the state re-opened more quickly than he would like. More protests are planned for this week.

—- ‘broken out’. One in a hundred thousand people have been convinced to risk their lives and the lives of others to make a political point favoring billionaires and immoral corporations. And the billionaires and corporations are gleeful that their bullshit is working to confuse the serfs on the right. And they’ve sent their press flacks out in droves to support them. Did Andrew Carnegie care that multiple people died in his steel mills every day? Hell no. And neither do your corporate sponsors. —-

So who are these people? Some are folks who fear a permanent expansion of government and worry when they hear leaders such as New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy saying that constitutional considerations about lockdown measures are “above my pay grade.” Others are troubled by the First Amendment implications of politicians shutting down churches.

—- Just No. These people have been agitated into lethal stupidity by billionaires and their corporate shills, like you. Attending any Death Parties soon, William? Or would you recommend sheltering in place? —-

The do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do behavior of those imposing these rules isn’t boosting trust in authorities, either, whether it be Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot going out to get her hair done or New York Mayor Bill de Blasio being driven to his gym even as they were imploring everyone else to stay home. On Monday Mark Zuckerberg told George Stephanopoulos on ABC News that Facebook now classifies “a lot of the stuff” protesters are saying as “harmful misinformation”—and that Facebook will “take that down.”

—- Yes. Even the greatest shill for corporate America and billionaire, Zuckerberg, sees that this is dangerous bullshit and will end up killing people. There you go using #FlameAndBlame tactics again with anecdata (anecdotal data that spins a story but doesn't tell the truth.) What about Trump's rallies? What about Ivanka's private jet flights? What about... you get the idea. Everyone makes mistakes but not all of us hold Death Parties that are going to get a bunch of Americans killed. This is exactly what you are advocating. Stop it. Stop it now. —-

Lost in all this is that the protesters are for the most part simply struggling Americans who have concluded that—at least for them—the cure is turning out to be worse than the disease.

—- No, struggling Americans are being exploited by cynical billionaires and political flacks, like you. It’s disgusting. you think death for them is better than a skeletal economy for your overlords? —-

“These protesters aren’t rich or privileged,” says Stephen Moore, a Trump economic adviser. “Most are folks living paycheck to paycheck or small-business owners seeing their livelihoods destroyed, and they are the ones who are bearing the crushing burden of the lockdown in their states.” Mr. Moore says he’s formed an organization, Save Our Country, to help them ensure their voices are heard.

—— ‘formed'? I would say led, then exploited. Does Stephen try to channel the Death Parties into relevant protest? No. He eggs them on. Because he knows it’s a small set of Covidiots even willing to chant these stupid things and risk their own lives and other's lives. The blowback is going to be massive. Get ready. We don’t care how much you apologize for these anti-American terrorists, we aren’t changing our minds. Stop shilling for the immoral corporations and think about what is right for Americans, not about what your paycheck depends on. —-

Feeding the sense of grievance is not just the lockdowns but the way they have been imposed. Start with the overkill. This includes sheriff’s deputies arresting a paddle boater alone in the ocean off Malibu, Calif., city officials in San Clemente filling a popular skateboarding park with 37 tons of sand, and various states restricting big-box retailers from selling “nonessential items,” which means that you can get three scoops of chocolate chip from your local ice-cream shop but God forbid Home Depot sell you a bag of mulch.

—- Boo Hoo. Anecdata. This opinion piece is non-essential, actually harmful. Socially distance yourself. People make mistakes. Look at you, shilling for a corporation! Because the rules aren't perfect, burn them down! —-

Though it is common to portray the protesters as putting profits over public health, these are hardly wealthy investors worried about their portfolios. Unlike the roughly one-third of Americans who can work at home and still draw paychecks, for most Americans the lockdowns are more than an inconvenience. And the urgency of reopening looks very different for the 22 million American workers who have just lost their jobs—or the 1 in 4 small-business owners who, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, say they are two months or less away from shutting down permanently.

—- These Death Parties are organized by wealthy investors who are corporate funded and death indifferent. Immoral one might say. Yes, the shutdowns are more than an inconvenience. And government should be making sure we are all equally capable of living through it without harm. It’s immoral to tie healthcare to work. It’s immoral to have jobs with pay that won’t let you live. It’s immoral not to support small businesses with unemployment insurance and paid sick leave. The GOP is an immoral party. ——

Ditto for the charge that they are antiscience. Surely we could all use a little more modesty. Any honest appraisal would have to concede there is much that scientists have gotten wrong (the many models whose estimates of, say, deaths and ventilators needed proved wildly off), and much we still don’t know (the true lethality of Covid-19, the average number an infected person will infect, and so on).

—- Right! We don’t know and our president is trying to stop us from knowing. He's purposely screwing up testing. He never let a fact get in the way of his lying-for-popularity bullshit. The models are fine, the differences are in the assumptions and what they tell us about real life. You are a purposeful idiot here, purposely misunderstanding how science works to mislead your readers. One of the five signs you are a corporate shill. ---

Medical officials haven’t always been right, either. In [early] January, Anthony Fauci, the immunologist who serves as a lead member of the president’s coronavirus task force, assured America that Covid-19 was “not something that the citizens of the United States right now should be worried about.”

—- This is unconscionable bullshit. Dr. Fauci expected the US to follow the pandemic guidelines set up by Bush. If we had, we would have been fine, (See South Korea) but we didn’t! @realdonaldtrump so screwed up the response that we are the worst case of death and destruction in the world. Time to throw the #PlannedIncompetents out, not say the models are broken. Our @POTUS has almost always been indefensibly wrong because he depends on his 'gut'. He thinks: 'How can I take credit if it works? How can I assign blame if it fails?" And what do you do, William? You seem to follow scripts from your billionaire handlers. Who should we pay attention to? Corporate shills who are only after a buck or scientists who have methods for determining truth? It's not too hard to figure out, is it? —
This is no slam on Dr. Fauci. To the contrary, this is the way science works, as experts revise and adjust to new information. But it should be a warning not to regard these experts as oracles or science as a source of unequivocal answers beyond dispute. Scientists should have doubts and continue to put their hypotheses to the test.

—- You should have doubts about your ethics, William. Doubt is the seed immoral corporations sow to hide their death dealing ways. Smoking cigarettes don’t cause cancer. Burning fossil fuels doesn’t cause global warming. Fluorocarbons don't cause holes in the ozone. Belching sulfur from power plants doesn't cause acid rain... I’m very tired of this corporate shilling passing for conservative opinion. Who’s paying you?—-
The protests remain relatively small [tiny, 0.00001 % of Americans]. But they do expose the elite disconnect with ordinary America. A recent New York magazine article captured the condescension and lack of empathy when it declared the protests are probably “going to spread nearly as rapidly as the coronavirus itself in the rich soil of anti-government subcultures where it’s widely accepted that ‘tyrants’ are exploiting the emergency to impose their godless socialist views on freedom-loving but fearful Americans.”

—- Yes, this is being pushed by the media and their billionaire donors. Where was the publicity and support for modern day society when a million times as many people marched for women's right and the support of science? We heard and saw nothing but the conservative press making fun of the majority of Americans. Opinion pieces in the @WSJ supporting the greatest mass movement by Americans in the last century: zero. This piece is manufactured bullshit to support billionaires. There’s no two ways around it. It’s a manufactured PR stunt supported by immoral corporations using a bunch of angry dissatisfied Covidiots. ——

A better sense of this subculture might be the words chanted by Kentucky protesters outside their governor’s office last week. Their outrageous message? “We want to work.”

— Go to work. Do something reasonable. Protest responsibly, like the millions of Israelis who all wore masks and stood six feet apart to protest the Trump clone, Netanyahu. No, the message of these Covidiots is "we want to die and take others with us." It’s totally irresponsible and you're pushing it, William —-

Write to mcgurn@wsj.com.

Thanks for reading. I’m just one person, so can’t keep up with all the bullshit the @wsj and its billionaire owners and supporters spew out every day. Anybody want to help me counteract this immoral corporate PR blather that causes America harm? Drop me a line.
-DrMike