Identical to Myself

@identicaltomyself

just like everyone else, I am identical to myself. Just like everyone who has studied homotopy type theory, I am identical to myself in more than one way.

1,693 posts

Different armies and different cultures will meet that nutritional demand in different ways, but staple grains (wheat, barley, corn, rice) dominate rations in part because they also dominated the diet of the peasantry (being the highest calories-per-acre-farmed-and-labor-added foods) and because they were easy to move and store. Fruits and vegetables were, by contrast, always subject to local availability, since without refrigeration they were difficult to keep or move; meat at least could be smoked, salted or made into jerky, but its expense made it an optional bonus to the diet rather than the core of it. So the diet here is mostly bread; many armies reliant on wheat and barley agriculture came up with a fairly similar idea here: a dense but simple flour-and-water (and maybe salt) biscuit or cracker which if kept dry could keep for long periods and be easy to move

fucks me up every time im reminded that premodern armies were mostly living off bread. i feel like if i just ate bread i would start feeling very sick very quickly. however, he mentions later

Spartan rations on Sphacteria were 2 choenikes of barley alphita (a course barley flour) per man per day (Thuc. 4.16.1) which comes out to roughly 1.4kg

rough calculation says this is something on the order of 150g of protein a day, which is pretty high! it also says its 5000 calories though, which is insane. if we assume its more on the order of half that (worse barley? or something?) that's still like 75g of protein a day, which is pretty solid. why dont we all just live off barley flour + water + salt

identicaltomyself

Scurvy.

why not have a progressive corporate tax?

identicaltomyself

Because then a profitable company could split and reduce its tax rate, shout really changing anything. With the stroke of a pen, McDonalds could split into thousands of companies, one for each store, each much less profitable. We can tax individuals progressively, but companies are dividuals.

if that means that they then act independently – mission accomplished. if they don’t, how is that not collusion or a cartel?

identicaltomyself

You’ve got a point. I withdraw my ‘dividual’ claim.

Here’s another issue: the natural size of individual companies is very variable in different industries. The smallest reasonably efficient freight railroad or power plant is a billion dollars in capital, that can profit many tens of millions per year, while providing vital services to society. On the other hand, that level of income would describe a giant chain of restaurants, of the sort that your tax is designed to discourage. So do we tax companies of that size high or low?

why not have a progressive corporate tax?

identicaltomyself

Because then a profitable company could split and reduce its tax rate, shout really changing anything. With the stroke of a pen, McDonalds could split into thousands of companies, one for each store, each much less profitable. We can tax individuals progressively, but companies are dividuals.

Kind of want to go for a swim above the Mariana Trench. Would be a weird feeling knowing that there’s 7 miles of water beneath you I think

I always feel like that would give you extra buoyancy somehow but it really wouldn’t, would it.

identicaltomyself

You’re actually less bouyant over an oceanic trench because gravity is slightly weaker there. There’s less rock below you than in most places, so there’s less downward attraction. It’s a pretty tiny effect.

wait doesn’t that mean you’re more buoyant?

identicaltomyself

The gravitational attraction on both you and the water would be reduced by the same fraction, so you would float at the same depth. But the force per displacement would be less. That’s “less bouyant” in my book, but sensible people may disagree.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B809-810, transl. Marcus Weigelt

#immanuel kant #I am an Immanuel kant fanboy

I guess my ideal database is strongly typed, append-only, referentially transparent, any given query is only ever executed once, views are just functions,

think deductive database slash strongly types tuple store for enzymatic programming slash persistent queue middleware for asynchronous communicating processes.

okay so values can be UTF-8 strings, integers of reasonable size, dates if I can be arsed to implement them, records with named fields, lists, algebraic datatypes (sum types, discriminated unions, enums with arguments, whatever you want to call them) and references, which will be described later.

the basic unit of storage is the set and the only thing you can do with a set is insert values (of the correct type), values cannot be modified or deleted once they have been inserted into the set.

each value inserted into a set is assigned a unique reference which is itself a value that can be used elsewhere and inserted into a set.

you can apply functions to the set that return values or entire new sets, for example by mapping/filtering an existing set or performing set operations like union or difference on multiple sets.

you cannot insert values into sets returned from functions.

so far this is basically SQL limited to the CREATE TABLE, INSERT, and SELECT statements and extended with richer datatypes so you don’t have to do annoying things like chopping up lists and trees in order to store them.

by itself this isn’t very interesting, as without active logic your data is just sitting there and you still have to write code to extract it, do the needful, and persist the result, which is hellish and a crime against programmers.

a basic starting point for interaction is to have a for-each loop that evaluates an expression against a set to generate values that are inserted into different set(s); the loop guarantees that the expression will be evaluated once for each value in the set and when all the values have been evaluated it lies dormant waiting for a new value to be inserted, essentially acting as a trigger that launches a cascade of new actions.

consider inserting a record into the set jobs_todo that has a for-each loop that fires off a process that returns a record which is inserted into the set jobs_done, you can take the difference of these sets to see the set of jobs in progress.

identicaltomyself

Is there atomic transactions?

Presumably query results are returned as iterators? How do you consistent results if someone accesses an iterator slowly while someone else is furiously adding records?

Do you provide atomicity over multiple transactions?

If you implement dates, declare that they must be of a certain format. My employer thought it was a good idea to support customer-defined date and time formats and it turned into an unending nightmare. I had a scheme to store dates as a eight byte floating point number indicating the number of seconds since the turn of the millennium. I figured that gave you microsecond precision until the year 3000, and decreasing precision until the heat death of the universe. It wasn’t enough. A customer defined special semantics for various times just before midnight on 31 December in the year 9999 AD, and insisted that we provide perfectly accurate time semantics over them. We had to switch to an number of nanoseconds since 2000, represented as a 128-bit long integer.

Plus you have to be an expert on leap seconds.

Better to just avoid dates and times.

yes it needs to be consistent in the sense that you can access an immutable slice of the database at a given state that persists independently of other write activity, although this is all hypothetical as I’m unlikely to dip back into this swamp again.

floating point dates make me itchy, but that particular example of magic numbers is far worse, that customer should have been beaten with a stick until they accepted the virtue of enums.

identicaltomyself

Thank you for your understanding. Yes, all the engineers agreed that the “beat with a stick” approach was appropriate, but management felt that since they were paying us money, it was best to provide them with goods and services.

official-kircheis

The mass was quite dense and unyielding to a drill mounted on a remote-controlled trolley, but able to be damaged by a Kalashnikov rifle (AK-47) using armor piercing rounds.[4][1][2]

official-kircheis

#is it weird that I knew exactly what object this is#oul’s egg

it's not oul's egg

identicaltomyself

I know that. I went to the right Wikipedia article this comes from, so I know what it is. It just reminded me a lot of oul’s egg.

i don’t know what object it is and haven’t looked it up but it’s gotta be the elephant’s foot right

identicaltomyself

Yep.

Listening to Revolutions’ Russian series has really left me with the conclusions that

1- The idea that Lenin was, like, the sinister mastermind ruling the Bolsheviks pre-revolution is just kind of an anti-communist fantasy, guy got ignored and out-voted all the time.

2- It was probably not great for the development of politics in the Soviet Union that like 9 times in 10 everyone had to eventually come back and admit Lenin was right all along after whatever else was tried blew up in their face.

identicaltomyself

#the reason why Lenin had so much clout was that he kept being right about things

It’s an intellectual’s dream! “Someday they’ll recognize how right I am about things and make me dictator!”

official-kircheis

The mass was quite dense and unyielding to a drill mounted on a remote-controlled trolley, but able to be damaged by a Kalashnikov rifle (AK-47) using armor piercing rounds.[4][1][2]

official-kircheis

#is it weird that I knew exactly what object this is#oul’s egg

it's not oul's egg

identicaltomyself

I know that. I went to the right Wikipedia article this comes from, so I know what it is. It just reminded me a lot of oul’s egg.

The antibodies in your blood are made by just a few genes, but immune cells mutate their own copy of the gene, producing the diversity of antibodies. Mostly your body is trying to stay as close as possible to an inherited genome but in the immune system there's innovation.

Uh, something something adversarial environments blah blah intelligence

official-kircheis

How does the immune system "know" how to mutate to produce the right antibodies for a pathogen? What makes me confused is again that protein folding is so difficult and this is the inverse problem -- code for a protein that folds the right way. Isn't it? Everything biology makes my head spin

It doesn't, it's just selection. If you're going to get an infection tomorrow, you already have B cells that can produce the right antibodies today. (that or you'll just die i guess).

Once you get infected the B cells with reactive antibodies will start dividing, and you'll end up with high levels of those antibodies.

For any given successful antibody, the cells with the mutated gene for it have I think been in your body for years or decades--not totally sure of this though. (how long do B cells last if not used? do you keep producing new clones at the same rate throughout life, or are they mostly made prior to age 20? I dont know the answers)

but basically its a drug screen.

identicaltomyself

Each cell makes a particular antibody protein. There are regions of the antibody that are randomly chosen from a list of possibilities, and then there are short regions that just generate an amino acid sequence completely at random. If they don’t stick to anything in the thymus they get to survive. (The thymus is essentially a museum of every protein in every tissue in your body.). Then if they stick to an invading organism they reproduce like mad.

I guess my ideal database is strongly typed, append-only, referentially transparent, any given query is only ever executed once, views are just functions,

think deductive database slash strongly types tuple store for enzymatic programming slash persistent queue middleware for asynchronous communicating processes.

okay so values can be UTF-8 strings, integers of reasonable size, dates if I can be arsed to implement them, records with named fields, lists, algebraic datatypes (sum types, discriminated unions, enums with arguments, whatever you want to call them) and references, which will be described later.

the basic unit of storage is the set and the only thing you can do with a set is insert values (of the correct type), values cannot be modified or deleted once they have been inserted into the set.

each value inserted into a set is assigned a unique reference which is itself a value that can be used elsewhere and inserted into a set.

you can apply functions to the set that return values or entire new sets, for example by mapping/filtering an existing set or performing set operations like union or difference on multiple sets.

you cannot insert values into sets returned from functions.

so far this is basically SQL limited to the CREATE TABLE, INSERT, and SELECT statements and extended with richer datatypes so you don’t have to do annoying things like chopping up lists and trees in order to store them.

by itself this isn’t very interesting, as without active logic your data is just sitting there and you still have to write code to extract it, do the needful, and persist the result, which is hellish and a crime against programmers.

a basic starting point for interaction is to have a for-each loop that evaluates an expression against a set to generate values that are inserted into different set(s); the loop guarantees that the expression will be evaluated once for each value in the set and when all the values have been evaluated it lies dormant waiting for a new value to be inserted, essentially acting as a trigger that launches a cascade of new actions.

consider inserting a record into the set jobs_todo that has a for-each loop that fires off a process that returns a record which is inserted into the set jobs_done, you can take the difference of these sets to see the set of jobs in progress.

identicaltomyself

Is there atomic transactions?

Presumably query results are returned as iterators? How do you consistent results if someone accesses an iterator slowly while someone else is furiously adding records?

Do you provide atomicity over multiple transactions?

If you implement dates, declare that they must be of a certain format. My employer thought it was a good idea to support customer-defined date and time formats and it turned into an unending nightmare. I had a scheme to store dates as a eight byte floating point number indicating the number of seconds since the turn of the millennium. I figured that gave you microsecond precision until the year 3000, and decreasing precision until the heat death of the universe. It wasn’t enough. A customer defined special semantics for various times just before midnight on 31 December in the year 9999 AD, and insisted that we provide perfectly accurate time semantics over them. We had to switch to an number of nanoseconds since 2000, represented as a 128-bit long integer.

Plus you have to be an expert on leap seconds.

Better to just avoid dates and times.

official-kircheis

The mass was quite dense and unyielding to a drill mounted on a remote-controlled trolley, but able to be damaged by a Kalashnikov rifle (AK-47) using armor piercing rounds.[4][1][2]

#is it weird that I knew exactly what object this is #oul’s egg

Wonder how lunar-related mythology would be different if the Moon wasn’t tidally locked to the Earth.

fortidogi said: can moons be not tidally locked? i was under the impression that was just how gravitational orbit influenced fluids in general

Well,

All nineteen known moons in the Solar System that are large enough to be round are tidally locked with their primaries, because they orbit very closely and tidal force increases rapidly (as a cubic function) with decreasing distance.[14] On the other hand, the irregular outer satellites of the gas giants (e.g. Phoebe), which orbit much farther away than the large well-known moons, are not tidally locked.

However for the purposes of the thought experiment, anything’s possible.

official-kircheis

Are all of these in 1:1 locks though? You can also have 1:2 and 2:3 resonances. I think Jupiter has something in a 1:2:3:4 resonance.

identicaltomyself

The orbital periods of three large moons are in a 1:2:4 resonance, which is probably what you’re thinking of. But the rotational periods of those moons are equal to their orbital periods so they always keep one face toward Jupiter.

It’s surprising that no moons are in a 3:2 rotation lock like Mercury. Our moon is probably far enough away to be feasible for some other ratio to be stable. But it used to be a lot closer, with much stronger tidal forces, and it got stuck in the 1:1 ratio. It’s been that way ever since.

#planetary science #i explain stuff

i really like the conception of the mind in exhalation (ted chiang) as not just an object in the form of the brain, but also the irretrievable pattern running through that object, that if you evened out all the action potentials and chemical gradients and then gave it a jump start even tho the structure is still there, something (everything?) would be lost. i dont think we know how much of memory/personality/etc is stored in the pattern cascade and how much is in physical structure but the pattern cascade is a very beautiful image, the idea of the mind as a sort of unlikely (in the space of excitations) self-reinforcing excitation-pattern. especially when im experiencing modified cognition from a non-chemical source, like, it makes me ponder what structural change is going on with the pattern dance

i still want to know what happens to people after deep hypothermic circulatory arrest. It seems to be the closest thing we have to turning the brain off and on again. Have they checked what it does to these people's memories?

identicaltomyself

Well, they know that brain damage from hypothermic anesthesia starts after forty minutes of no circulation. Presumably to establish that, they had to inquire closely into the people whose brains were stopped for shorter periods. And they didn’t find anything.

So apparently the ongoing stream of activity that is the human mind can re-establish itself from zero activity. The homeostatic mechanisms are very strong.

#the mystery of the brain

official-kircheis

I never pay attention to the weather forecast

The fuck imma do, not have weather?

inferentialdistance

Tells you if it’s safe to leave your rain coat/umbrella at home, or if you should pack a sweater so you’re not too cold later.

Tells you if you need to wake up early to shovel your car out and drive extra slowly.

Tells you if the temp’s going to drop 20 degrees or go up 20 degrees by the end of the day

identicaltomyself

Tells you when to set the alarm for an hour earlier because it’s going to be a day for walking to work instead of driving.

When sending a spacecraft from Earth orbit to another body like the Moon or Mars, is it better to be as close to an equatorial orbit as possible? Or does it not really matter?

identicaltomyself

There’s a plane formed by the location of the starting planet at the start, the location of the ending planet at arrival, and the relative velocity vector of the two planets. You want to depart in this plane to be in a minimum velocity trajectory. It’s usually within a few degrees of the equator. If you’re launching far from the equator, you have to compromise between your launch inclination and the ideal plane for transit.

#space #astrogation #celestial mechanics

i dont think I understand what liberalism is

liberalism is when the government doesn't do stuff

ah i see. so liberalism = anarchism then. that makes sense

liberalism is the half-assed compromise between hereditary nobles and death taxes

identicaltomyself

Liberalism is the half-assed compromise between everybody and everyone else.

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