{"id":537,"date":"2023-11-16T21:49:19","date_gmt":"2023-11-16T21:49:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/7stones.com\/?p=537"},"modified":"2023-11-17T14:05:36","modified_gmt":"2023-11-17T14:05:36","slug":"preferisco-un-caffe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/7stones.com\/?p=537","title":{"rendered":"Preferisco un caff\u00e8"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Cities<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I enjoy my periodic visits to Boston, especially when it\u2019s sunny, and the sunlight bounces off the windows of one of the new crystalline skyscrapers, the reflected light covering smaller buildings of much older vintage with a pleasant dappled illumination. It\u2019s pretty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I like cities (many – likely not most – I\u2019ll never know). When younger I worked in Boston, and from North Station to my place of employment near South Station, I could walk through a portion of the city that resembled a real city for a few blocks. Big buildings. Cool. Of course the buildings in Manhattan are much bigger, and cover an area much larger, but even there, if you head in the right direction, walking 25 minutes max you\u2019d hit water, and the city would be gone – unless you turn around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fallout 4.01 (Physics Dystopia)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve played Fallout 4<\/em>, finished its major tasks, and continued to play until I exhausted enough variations to satiate my gamer desires. The game takes place in a dystopian version of Boston\/Cambridge. For example, the buildings attached to the MIT dome have been taken over by unfriendly giant mutants. I mean, how cool is that? I got rid of them, of course, but the game algorithm keeps repopulating the buggers. Bad algorithm, bad!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway, there\u2019s a new kind of dystopia in Boston\/Cambridge, one extending worldwide (well, so does the one in Fallout 4<\/em>, really). But this one is real. Like the game\u2019s civilization collapse, however, this real one was caused by a global catastrophe, one centered at the LHC accelerator at CERN.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you\u2019re reading this, then you know what I\u2019m talking about. Physics colloquia were in the not very distant past dominated by String Theory, then \u2026 boom. Catastrophe. String Theory crumpled and now lies in bed, breathing stertorous, skin blotchy and oozing unpleasant smelly viscous fluids, waiting for the few diehards to pull the plug. Talks on its arcane structure have disappeared. Last week the Boston Area Physics Calendar listed the following colloquia titles: “Learning Multiscale Physics from Date by Inverse Renormalization\u201d; “Adventures in Phase Space: Non-commuting coordinates meet quantum control and quantum error correction\u201d; “Staircases to the Stars\u201d; “Attractor-state transitions within neural circuits underlying cognition and behavior\u201d. Sigh. (If any of these talks focuses on String Theory, the titles have done their best to hide this fact.) The giants of mainstream physics have become disappointed unfriendly mutants intent on controlling the halls of MIT, and all other research institutions, eliminating all ideas that do not conform to the prevailing narrative. Well, that\u2019s not right. I\u2019m not aware there is any longer a prevailing narrative, beyond the need to maintain a semblance of the prestige with which these mutants were once endowed. Like the Fallout 4<\/em> mutants, these real mutants resist being budged from their ivy covered confines. My efforts to disrupt them with over 45 years of brilliant, but quixotic, mathematical research have availed nothing. So, like Fallout 4<\/em>, I must content myself with a well armored settlement hidden in the radioactive wastelands, unassailable, but \u2026 pfft.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Starting about 13 years ago Young Turks began to accumulate in the wake of my work, referencing it, but without exception presenting their variations as something new and groundbreaking, owing little to my much earlier work, or each other\u2019s. Of course, this small coterie of hopefuls is not garnering any more attention than my own work, at least not where it matters. Some – those with worthwhile connections – have Wikipedia pages. I do not. The wastelands are not replete with worthwhile connections. (My work was inspired by the overwhelming inevitability of the mathematics. All of these other hopefuls are inspired in the same way GUTs, String Theory, and so forth were: it\u2019s just something to try \u2026 and there are precedents. So, there, with that I end my periodic therapeutic bloodletting.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway \u2026 Fallout 4.01.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I met a traveller from an antique land,<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who said\u2014\u201cTwo vast and trunkless legs of stone
\nStand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
\nHalf sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
\nAnd wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
\nTell that its sculptor well those passions read
\nWhich yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
\nThe hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
\nAnd on the pedestal, these words appear:
\nMy name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
\nLook on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
\nNothing beside remains. Round the decay
\nOf that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
\nThe lone and level sands stretch far away.\u201d
\n\u2026
\n\u201cAnd on the neck of the King of Kings,
\nchiseled by some other long ago traveler,
\nperhaps familiar with the depicted greatness,
\nthere is some graffiti : \u2018What a fucking asshole.\u2019\u201d\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Faire froid dans le dos<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As mentioned elsewhere, I have a form of social abnormality that some have termed autistic \u2026 including an autistic friend. But it\u2019s more than that, if that at all. More likely (and I have the data to support this conjecture), I am an inter-dimensional alien, trapped on this outlier planet, desperately trying to understand how to be normally social, but missing the mark by a really wide margin 95% of the time. (It\u2019s highly likely my progress is being monitored from my home dimension, and that I will be whisked home once I have mastered \u2026 well, myself. So, I guess I\u2019m stuck here. (Not that it matters, as I\u2019m almost certain no one reads my words, but I\u2019m also almost certain that I\u2019ve written these words before, or some very much like them, and conveying the same meaning. Yeah, well, in a few days I\u2019ll be 75; I sometimes forget to zip up my fly; rapid changes in the weather can be crippling. The only good side of growing older is that I was warned over 3 years ago that I might expect to be dead, like, 9 months ago. I\u2019d rather grow older, with all the associated debilitating quirks, than cease to grow older at all and miss all the fun.))<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And what fun it is. Almost 60 years ago I had a foreboding that humanity was well on the way to fucking up the planet. In the interim the extent to which they have done so has surpassed my wildest nightmares. But, yeah, whatever. Fortunately an unprecedentedly polarized humanity (at least in my lifetime) is banding together to solve all these problems. (Sarcasm.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I recently saw a short film of people somewhere in Southeast Asia banding together to clean up a small, slow moving river that was covered in trash – completely invisible beneath this detritus. They succeeded. And their efforts should be applauded, but, really, let\u2019s be realistic. Wishy-washy viewers of this film would likely smile, and mutter a sweet \u201cdaaaw\u201d. I, on the other hand, could not help but realize that without some draconian measures to prevent a recurrence, a recurrence there most certainly would be, because people \u2026 ooh, that\u2019s a pretty cloud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMay you live in interesting times.\u201d Well, fuck \u201cinteresting times\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cities I enjoy my periodic visits to Boston, especially when it\u2019s sunny, and the sunlight bounces off the windows of one of the new crystalline skyscrapers, the reflected light covering smaller buildings of much older vintage with a pleasant dappled illumination. It\u2019s pretty. I like cities (many – likely not most – I\u2019ll never know). … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Preferisco un caff\u00e8”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/7stones.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/7stones.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/7stones.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/7stones.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/7stones.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=537"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/7stones.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":540,"href":"http:\/\/7stones.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537\/revisions\/540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/7stones.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/7stones.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/7stones.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}