usenet weirdness

Most Us-Presidents had a 'Queen-Elisabeth-II-number' equal or less than four.

TH

As far as I can tell, the idea of 'complex dimension' for time came from Henry Poincaré.

Now:

if we had i*t in a geometric equation and x,y,z as real spatial axes, we have actually a certain form of a quaternion.

The usual quaternions are wrong, because they have a real scalar and an imaginary vector part.

But we can use so called 'complex four vectors' instead (aka 'bi-quaternions').

Now we could allow the axis of time to rotate among the various directions and make time imaginary in all cases and space real and 'perpendicular to time' (kind of multiplication by i).

Then we had use for bi-quaternions and could actually build Minkowski's space from 'point-like elements', which behave like bi-quaternions.

This would allow any place to become the position of an observer, who would see the world from there and regard his local time as imaginary axis and local space as real valued.

The only unusual thing:

this would allow 'ghost spaces' (for other observers) which are somehow there, though invisible.

...

TH

Truth is definitely not a democratic decision.

There exist the possibility, that almost everybody thinks, that some explanation is actually correct.

But that doesn't matter, if the explanation is actually wrong.

Among the dangers of AI is the problem, that AI can't tell the truth neither, but has no moral in itself, to hinder wrong actions from wrong conclusions.

TH

Well, people are people and like to restrict access to the 'fun parts' of everything, if possible. And they especially like, if they had access themselves and could exclude competitors.

Max Planck didn't like Einstein and was allegedly afraid of him.

It is said, that he always hid behind the curtains if Einstein rang the door-bell and didn't open.

...

TH

Am Donnerstag000012, 12.03.2026 um 12:29 schrieb Bill Sloman: ...

If Einstein wasn't actually a Jew, this would be a possible explanation for why he rejected the presidency of Israel, which was offered to him.

Would have been quite dangerous, if he had actually accepted and would been asked to prove his jewishness.

...

Depend on subject. In many subjects it's rather oligarchic, gurus decide, common folk doesn't care and obey. There are some subjects where common folk cares, the truth is democratic there.

If you convince almost everyone to change his mind - then the previous state of minds doesn't matter, indeed.

Oh, it's more moral than an average human. It has no self-interest (at least I think it has no), so it only serves the social rules, including morality.

Nice experiment. As for the rest: Much bleating, little wool.

AFAICS they can't even add 2 + 2 = 4,

Jan

Well, to put it bluntly, Max Planck was, and you are not.

Depends on what you want 'proper' to mean. Whatever, it was adequate. (but with a heavy accent)

"If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?" (probably not Albert Einstein)

Who cares about your guesses?

Guess you never will,

Jan

If there is any science being done by other species, or non-human aliens, we haven't heard about it yet.

Religions trains humans to behave as it likes, and uses them as tools to spread the faith, but science isn't actually a religion, though it might look that way if you didn't have any personal experience of the way it works. It certainly doesn't go in for elaborate rituals - though my friend who happens to be a professor liturgy would probably try to argue that Nobel prize awards come close.

Because I meet a lot who are looking for jobs. Coders mostly.

I give them a couple of very simple whiteboard puzzles and it's obvious that most don't understand electrical basics.

AI terrifies them, rightfully so.

They won't

Small and large, $200 Xilinx SOCs and Efinix $9 parts. But because he doesn't really understand electronics and can't read schematics, he has to be micro-managed.

There seem to be lots of jobs like that, people sandwiched into a very small range of the abstraction stack.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

The two main phases of electronic design are

1. Having a zillion crazy ideas

and

1. Picking one to execute with enought discipline to get right the first time
2. And be willing to sometimes loop back to step 1.

Not many people are good at both, and even fewer are good at that last step.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

That sort of inverts what's going on. Some scientific discoveries could be exploited by terrorists to kill lots of people, and that knowledge is doled out on a need to know basis.

There are all sorts of people doing scientific research for all sorts of reasons. Academies teach all kinds of knowledge, and science is just one of the branches of knowledge they cover.

Academic researchers are particularly enthusiastic about publishing their research - they want to attract attention so that students enrol in their courses, industry and the health care business funds their research and so on. A great deal of scientific research gets done by industry, and published (sometimes after being patented).

Society does have an interest in seeing it published - the patent system was set up to encourage people to publish their inventions and collect royalties from people who can exploit them.

I'm sure there a fat cats who are doing well, and don't want new inventions to cut into their markets. The fossil carbon extraction industry is precisely that sort of fat cat, and they'd be much happier if science wasn't documenting the relentless progression of anthropogenic global warming. They do spend a lot on climate hange denial propaganda, but they don't seem to have been all that effective in shutting down research on the topic.

This has all been true for a very long time. The enlightenment loosened the grip of elderly conservatives on public opinion

That's the thing about theoretical physicists. You don't know what they are going to discover. Some of the stuff they have discovered has been remarkably useful, and any group that persecutes them and encourage them to go off and work for some other group runs the risk of missing out on some useful discoveries. The Nazi regime didn't like Jewish theoretical physicists, so they went off to American and contributed to the Manhattan project.

It's analog, ....

Thanks for helping bring examples of what, hidden in the box, current theory's only account is "quantum" computing.

"Spooky action at a distance", then.

Queen Elisabeth II never published a paper in a peer-reviewed journal. You'd probably have to have owned a share in one of her race-horses to be comparably close.

General relativity did pull together quite a bit of earlier work.

I got taught about "ordered tuples", but didn't ever have use them.

Linear algebra about vector spaces is totally usual.

"Ordered tuples" of scalar multiples of vector bases essentially are models of structures of values of vectors. So, "using vectors" essentially employs them.

The quaternions end up being fungible, and then later tractable, about "sensibility, fungibility, and tractability", and not just because their products model taking rotations in fewer arithmetic operations, also because they can avoid the "gimbal lock" of matrix multiplication of vectors about the usual notions of affine space and matrix multiplication of representations of vectors as about the translation, rotation, skew, and shear.

That said, the framework is more complicated with regards to usual notations of position and orientation.

Mostly "gimbal lock".

Apparently if you let AI loose on a military problem it is unusually likely to want to use nuclear weapons.

Large language models do include text from all over the place.

Sometimes called the radio shack problem, early models of self-guided munitions were given points to reach their goals. Anyways, one time the operator sent it a signal to test an error mode, and the missile turned right back around and hit the shack, in, "anger".

Maybe they should have to watch a bunch of "Wile E. Coyote" first.

A usual dichotomy between "goal-seeking" and "risk-aversion" is among reasons why greedy idiots aren't given "launch codes". Prisoner's dilemma, tragedy of the commons, and so on.

Saying that "AI" is only a generative result of the vectorization and arithmetic coding and brainless would be seriously underestimating usual models of mechanical inference after models of cognition.