#ergodicity

[floralfractals]

Ok now what.

[yournewkeyboard]

“Ergodicity test build completed” via u/bakingpy on Reddit.

[invadxrs]

Hux pauses for a long moment, as if hesitating to admit something deeply personal. “I wanted to learn more about architecture. I've always wanted to design new buildings. Whole cities, even.” Ben grins, pleased to learn an interesting and telling fact about the ever-mysterious Armitage Hux. “That's awesome. You should do that.” “It's not in the stars,” Hux says stiffly. “Why not?” “You're awfully young, Ben. I don't expect you to understand,” Hux sighs. Come on, they're only like a few years apart. “We're not so different. I'm training here. You're training there. Sometimes I think about what I would do if I wasn't a Jedi.” “Isn't that against your code?” “Maybe,” Ben shrugs. “But I can't help my imagination. I'd like to live in a house with my family. And take long trips on my ship, living like a pirate or something.” He knows he sounds silly, but he hopes Hux won’t scrutinize him too harshly. “A pirate?” “Or something!” “You’re a funny little boy,” Hux smirks. He’s delighted, it would seem.

So here’s the main piece for @ballvvasher​‘s wonderful fic Ergodicity! It’s been so lovely working with her on this and honestly the fic turned out better than I could have ever imagined, so I’ve felt super lucky to have such great source material to work with. It spans over pretty much their whole lives up until they’re adults, so if benarmie is your thing you’re gonna have a great time with this one. I really hope you all enjoy the fic and that I can do it justice!

[yournewkeyboard]

“New Choc board I’ve been working on - Ergodicity” via u/bakingpy on reddit

[invadxrs]

And so this marks the end of my contributions to the 2017 big bang, albeit very late. I had way too many ideas of what I could draw for this fic so instead I just complied together some little sketches that I liked best. I wanna say a big big thank you to @ballvvasher for being so wonderfully patient with me and producing such an incredible fic, you’ve been an absolute pleasure to work with! (Also a quick shout out to @cinnabi for being real supportive throughout both of the krbs I worked with this year, my messy bitch ass couldn’t have done it without you b x). 

You can find the fic in question, Ergodicity, here, it’s well worth a read or five. It’s a sort of prequels aus with lots of great benarmie and lots of ‘what-ifs’ that I felt super lucky to work with. I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did!

[qonphuceingey]

Imagine you have an apple in a box. This box is perfect, nothing can get in or out of this box. The apple sits in this box for a while, decaying and rotting, and eventually after hundreds of years probably turns into dust or something. The bacteria have taken all the energy, but they all eventually die, and everything in the box gets to the lowest energy state it can be. However, this means that all that energy has become heat, and the box traps all that heat. So do the particles fuse together again? In nuclear fusion? Perhaps the stuff in the box just hovers around the right temperature and pressure and just decays and fuses slowly forever?

Or if you leave it for long enough, for an infinite amount of time, will it randomly form back into a real object? There are only so many states it can be in, and eventually it must start to recycle them, right? Being an apple is a state, so won’t it eventually turn back into an apple? Or does it get stuck somewhere? Does it not decay? Does it not fuse? Is there a loop somewhere? Do quantum mechanics allow for infinite states that never run out?

There is a mathematical concept called ergodicity (I think) which is how similar the average position of a changing value is compared to the average position of a lot of randomly positioned particles (positioned according to the same equation or whatever). In simpler terms, if you have a particle bouncing around a box, will it eventually reach every part of that box? If I let it bounce forever, will it go everywhere? If I spawn a billion particles in that box, will they fill the box in roughly the same places that this particle reaches after a billion seconds?

This concept is something quite important in this situation. Will this box eventually reach every state it can possibly be in? Or does it stay stuck? Will the particle in a box just keep bouncing parallel to one of the walls and never hit it?

If I leave the apple in the box for long enough, will I open it and find another apple?

[varunjain]

A-Million-Words #32: On Taking Risks

Can risk taking be learnt or is it something you are born with?

Everybody takes risks in their lives, to a degree. There is a threshold though, that everyone has, for the magnitude of risks they can take. There is a limitation too, on the type of risks that they are naturally amenable to. And finally, there is a right timing for when they can or cannot take a said risk. Taking decisions around risk is a multi-variate problem, especially the ones that seem…

View On WordPress

[realcleverissues]

Ole Peters, a theoretical physicist in the U.K., claims to have the solution. All it would do is upend three centuries of economic thought.

Interesting read. Particularly liked the bit about “ergodicity”, that the average of all outcomes is not necessarily the likely outcome. (Kinda reminds me of the difference between average and median income.)

This part was fascinating:

Consider a simple coin-flip game, which Peters uses to illustrate his point.

Starting with $100, your bankroll increases 50% every time you flip heads. But if the coin lands on tails, you lose 40% of your total. Since you’re just as likely to flip heads as tails, it would appear that you should, on average, come out ahead if you played enough times because your potential payoff each time is greater than your potential loss. In economics jargon, the expected utility is positive, so one might assume that taking the bet is a no-brainer.

Yet in real life, people routinely decline the bet. Paradoxes like these are often used to highlight irrationality or human bias in decision making. But to Peters, it’s simply because people understand it’s a bad deal.

Here’s why. Suppose in the same game, heads came up half the time. Instead of getting fatter, your $100 bankroll would actually be down to $59 after 10 coin flips. It doesn’t matter whether you land on heads the first five times, the last five times or any other combination in between.

The “likeliest” outcome of the 50-50 proposition would still leave you with $41 less in your pocket.