Queen Story's Mere Servant

Always to be the best, and to rise above others

[shocked--kwarrtz]

I've been reading about cosmic inflation recently and I feel like I owe some cosmologists an apology because it's a much more fleshed out theory than I realized. For some reason the detailed physics basically never gets talked about outside of the people who actually study it, which is a shame because it's really cool.

So the basic story as I understood it before goes like this. Light travels at a finite speed and the universe has a finite age, so at any given time there are objects in the sky we're only just receiving first light from because it's taken the full age of the universe for it to reach us. That means that when we look in opposite directions, we can see distant objects that haven't yet had time to see each other. But that's confusing between the universe seems to be very isotropic. The bulk properties like overall density and temperature and so on seem to be even in all directions, which is hard to explain for patches of sky that have never been in causal contact and so had no opportunity to thermalize. So we invoke inflation: at some early point in the universe's history, it was in a false vacuum state that gave led to a phenomenally high density of dark energy, causing the universe to expand very rapidly. That means that regions that were originally in contact got flung far apart, so while these new patches of sky we're seeing have never been causally connected in the universe's post-inflationary history, they were prior to inflation, thus explaining how they thermalized.

And I thought that's basically all there was to the proposal. Some undetermined high-energy false vacuum would resolve this so-called horizon problem and we don't really have any better explanation, so we chuck into our standard model of cosmology. But it turns out that's actually a really simplified picture. For one, the false vacuum idea is very outdated. It was originally proposed by Guth to explain some other mysteries, but it actually doesn't resolve the horizon problem at all. That kind of inflation would end when the vacuum tunnels to the current, (presumably) true vacuum state and from there nucleates a bubble of true vacuum which contains our observable universe. But that bubble would expand at the speed of light! So it's no good for allowing formerly-connected regions to recontact each other, unless we got spectacular lucky and had a large number of nucleations occur within a causal patch almost simultaneously. What we actually need is for inflation to end everywhere in the universe at almost the same time, which is where modern "slow roll" theories come from. Instead of a true false vacuum that's metastable and has to be tunneled out of, the idea is that the inflaton field sits on a verrrry gentle slope towards a cliff, at the bottom of which is our true vacuum. It slowly rolls (hence the name) down this slope semiclassically until it hits said cliff, which puts the inflationary epoch on a more-or-less consistent timer everywhere.

Theoretically, this is actually a lot less parsimonious of a theory than Guth-style inflation. Metastable vacuums are pretty ubiquitous in the theory landscape but generating a potential with just the right shape for slow roll inflation seems to require a lot more fine-tuning. But the one big advantage it has (aside from actually resolving the horizon problem, obviously) is that it makes some pretty specific observational predictions, some of which have already been confirmed way more directly than I realized! To explain why we need to be a bit more careful about the idea of cosmological horizons. The basic picture I presented before of our observable patch of universe growing as light has more time to travel gets complicated a lot by expansion. Objects are receding from us at an apparent velocity equal to their distance times the Hubble parameter H. If H were constant, which means a fully dark energy-dominated universe, objects further than c/H from us (which we say are "outside the Hubble sphere") would appear to be receding faster than c, so light they emitted would never reach us no matter how long we waited. The observable universe would stay constant in size and there would be no horizon problem.

Since our modern universe isn't entirely dark matter-dominated, H has actually been decreasing, so the picture I presented more or less works—but the inflationary universe was. Not only was there a Hubble sphere during the inflationary epoch, but it would have been unimaginably tiny, many orders of magnitude smaller than a single proton. That has a very interesting consequence: quantum fluctuations in the inflaton field with a wavelength comparable to that size are constantly getting expanded just outside of the Hubble sphere. Since those parts of the field are no longer in causal contact, they don't know that they should be oscillating anymore and the fluctuation gets "frozen" in whatever state it was in right before that happened. That frozen oscillation will then continue to expand exponentially, and since this process is happening continually during inflation you get a uniform distribution of inhomogeneities in the inflaton field at all length scales. Or rather, an almost uniform distribution. Because of the previously discussed slow roll, even during inflation H isn't exactly constant, instead decreasing very slowly. That means the Hubble sphere is growing slightly, so the quantum fluctuations getting continually frozen out have longer wavelengths and are therefore weaker (that's just a prediction that falls out of the quantum mechanics). That means that at any given time, the inhomogeneities at the largest scales have been expanding for longer, and therefore got frozen when the Hubble sphere was smaller, and so are larger in amplitude. That gives the power spectrum a slight tilt towards longer wavelengths.

The really cool thing about this is that it's measurable. We don't have direct access to the inflaton field of course, but these inhomogeneities are what produced the very slight density fluctuations in the early post-inflationary universe [1] that we observe in the CMB (and that are ultimately responsible for structure formation). And indeed, when Planck measured the power spectrum of these fluctuations, it found that it was almost flat but tilted slightly towards larger length scales. If it was exactly flat, to within the sensitivity of our observations, that would be one thing, but this subtle skew is a pretty unique prediction of slow roll inflation. There aren't many other proposals thus far that can replicate it, even ignoring the horizon problem. And that's why despite us having no real hope of observing the inflationary epoch directly, and the theoretical fine-tuning problems, and the philosophical objections of some people like Penrose, most cosmologists now consider inflation a pretty well-supported part of the standard model of cosmology.

[1]: The way fluctuations in the inflaton field produce density fluctuations post-inflation is interesting in its own right. When inflation ends, all the energy in the inflaton field gets dumped out into a bunch of Standard Model particles, so you'd think great, a slight increase in the inflaton field means more energy going into that matter hence higher density. But remember, in slow roll theories, the end of inflation always happens at the same value of the inflaton field, so all those fluctuations actually due is change when inflation ends. The matter density at the exact moment inflation ends locally is always the same, but the earlier that happens the more time there is in that region for old-fashioned post-inflationary expansion to dilute that newly formed matter before the rest of the universe catches up.

[shocked--kwarrtz]

Is QFT a good reason to abandon the ontology of particles and say that all there really is out there in the world are fields?

This is a really good question that I've had to let stew for a while. There's a few angles you can approach it from—one more mathematical, one more physical, and one more philosophical—and I think each suggests a slightly different answer. I'm going to try to go through them in more or less that order. (That means I'm starting with the heaviest and most technical details, which I'm also dubiously qualified to talk about, so y'know. Feel free to skip ahead.)

Part 1: A naive approach

Suppose we take the name QFT literally and we want to develop a quantum theory of fields. The usual recipe for a quantum theory is to start with your classical phase space, chop it in half (which usually means keeping only the position coordinates or only the momentum coordinates) and use that as the generating basis for your Hilbert space. Although "basis" is the standard terminology here, in this context it's best to think of the set of these classical configurations as forming a domain, and states as complex-valued functions on that domain. This is where the "wavefunction" of traditional quantum mechanics comes from: for a single particle, a classical configuration is specified by the position of the particle, so your domain is R^3 and a state is a function R^3 -> C. What does this look like for fields? The classical configuration of a field is itself already given by a function R^3 -> M (where M is some essentially arbitrary target space), so a quantum state is given by a wavefunctional (R^3 -> M) -> C, which gives the probability amplitude for any classical field configuration at a given time. This is called the Schrodinger formalism for QFT, and is the most direct way to make sense of statements like "the universe is made up of fluctuating quantum fields in which particles are just excitations."

Part 2: Abstract nonsense

The problem is, this doesn't work, at least not in the naive way I've outlined here. To define an inner product on wavefunctionals and thus make them into a Hilbert space, you need to define a measure on the space of classical field configurations, which (I'm told) is impossible to do in a well-behaved manner. There's a couple of ways around this. The first is the Fock space approach, which you can think of as restricting the set of wavefunctionals under consideration to a more benign set for which a reasonable measure can be defined. This sounds like a technical point that doesn't jeopardize the basic physical picture, but in reality, the basis states of this restricted Fock space are most naturally interpreted in terms of particles, not fields! In fact, the way Fock space is usually defined from first principles is to start by defining a Hilbert space of single-particle states, then from there constructing the direct sum of the spaces of all N-particle states, with N running from 0 to infinity. Wavefunctionals aren't usually mentioned at all. Fields are still present in this formalism in the form of operators, but at this point it's certainly not obvious that they're ontologically prior to the particles that make up the actual basis vectors; if anything, the opposite seems true. In this standard classroom presentation, QFT is less a quantum theory of fields than it is a quantum theory of variably-many particles (which is actually closer to the historical motivation for the subject).

The second way around the problem goes through path-integrals, which I think can still be regarded as a genuinely fields-first approach. You drop the entire standard formalism of quantum mechanics—Hilbert spaces of states, Hamiltonians, all that—and instead calculate physical quantities by performing various integrals over all possible classical field configurations, no particles needed. Now, that doesn't really sound like it solves the measure-theoretic obstacle at all; how are we performing those integrals without a measure? But it turns out that the integrands "tame" even a badly behaved measure enough to not be a problem in practice, unlike with the inner product integrals. Still, it's a famous fact that the path integral formalism sits on very shaky ground mathematically, which feels uncomfortable if we're looking to make it the foundation of our ontology. Plus, it's a bit challenging to interpret ontologically anyway: there are no states, no set of data that you can point to as specifying the content of the universe. All path integrals do is give you a formula to compute probabilities. To the extent that they do paint a clear ontological picture, it's a somewhat uncomfortable one: the universe takes all conceivable paths through configuration space simultaneously, even those that should be ruled out by basic laws of physics, and what we see around us is just the part left over after the destructively interfering dust settles.

There's another approach though, which somewhat subsumes both of these. In this formalism, a theory is given by an abstract C*-algebra, whose elements we still call operators but which no longer act on any concrete Hilbert space, at least at first. "States" are then functionals on this algebra (different from the wavefunctionals above). If we think of operators as representing observables, then this says that a state assigns a concrete value to each observable, which is pleasantly intuitive. This is the approach that we've come closest to making rigorous, and it or something like it is the basis of most current research into mathematical QFT as far as I'm aware. And I won't go into the details of how, but both the Fock space and path integral formalisms can be in some sense recovered from it, in a way which clarifies some of what is otherwise perplexing about them and their relationship to one another. Because of that, if we're to be informed entirely by the formal structure of the theory as we currently understand it, the most conservative answer to your question is that neither fields nor particles are truly fundamental. What's real are the operators and the relationships between them, and the Fock space and path-integral pictures are equally valid ways of rendering this core truth computationally tractable. I suspect this really is the position that a lot of theorists would fall back on if pressed.

Part 3: Can't spell physics without physics

...but that's kind of a cop out, no? What does an ontology built from an abstract algebra of operators even look like? And sure, there may not be much formally to choose between the Fock space and path-integral pictures, but I think there are good physical reasons to be more skeptical of the ontological status of particles than fields. The biggest one for me is the Unruh effect. In an environment where an inertial observer sees a total vacuum, an accelerating observer will (theoretically, this has never been verified) see a thermal bath of particles. There's a lot of ways to interpret why this happens, but they all have to do with the fact that there is no single choice of Fock space. "Particles" are only defined relative to a vacuum, which is not unique. Observers in different reference frames have a different understanding of what the vacuum is and so they will see a universe with different apparent particle content. (Mathematically, this has to do with the failure of the Stone-von Neumann theorem in uncountably many dimensions. The C*-algebras I was talking about before can have unitarily inequivalent representations, which correspond to different choices of vacuum and therefore Fock space. This is very different from normal quantum mechanics.) This issue of the same theory having multiple vacua and therefore multiple definitions of what a "particle" is can show up in other contexts too, but this is the most spectacular one. Now to be fair, the Unruh effect is still subtle to handle in the path-integral formalism. The gist is that the geometry of spacetime appears different to the accelerating observer, which changes the boundary conditions of the integral. In a sense this means that the observers will also see "different" fields, but in a way that feels more analogous to length contraction or other relativistic effects. The mere question "are there any particles at all" being observer-dependent feels like a challenge of a more serious sort to me, in comparison.

It's also worth pausing to reflect on where the mathematical difficulties I outlined in the last part actually come from. They're ultimately a kind of size issue: the bigger and less discrete your space of configurations becomes, the harder formalizing quantum mechanics is. When your quantum states are finite-dimensional vectors, everything is easy. When your states are continuous wavefunctions, already things get pretty tricky, but it's still possible to be rigorous if you're careful (everyone say thank you von Neumann). But once your states are wavefunctionals, things have gotten very tricky indeed. The reason this doesn't stop us from being able to do calculations is that in practice, what we usually do is discretize the fields on a lattice (putting us in the easy first case) and then (sloppily) take the lattice to be infinitely fine in the limit. Showing that this limiting procedure is well-defined is the hard part—but actually, we can be pretty confident that taking the lattice spacing all the way to 0 isn't necessary anyway. Most field theories (including most of the ones in the Standard Model) diverge at infinitely small distances, which these days is broadly interpreted as telling us that the Standard Model is only a long-distance effective theory. At some sufficiently tiny length scale it has to break down and be replaced by something else anyway. So do we really need to be so concerned by these questions of mathematical well-foundedness?

What are the implications of this line of thought for our original question? Well, it's hard to say, but for inspiration we can leave the realm of particle physics and look to condensed matter, which coincidentally is my actual area of expertise. In turns out that the so-called fundamental fields of particle physics aren't the only place QFT is useful. There are also emergent quantum fields that can arise in other contexts, particularly when studying crystalline solids. As an example, you could ask about the orientation of the spins (basically tiny intrinsic bar magnets) of the electrons in a material at every point. This forms a field (it has a value at every point in space and time) and under the right conditions will have intrinsically quantum behavior. That means that, like the fundamental fields, this "local magnetization field" hosts stable excitations that come in discrete energy values, which go by the name magnons. We usually call these quasiparticles instead of particles, but at some level there's really not much difference. For another more down to earth example, you can consider the density of a solid material at each point, which also forms a field. The corresponding quasiparticles are called phonons, because waves of oscillating density are just sound waves, making phonons discrete particles of sound, analogous to photons for light.

The formal structure of QFT in this context is (almost) identical to that in particle physics, which means that in principle the same mathematical considerations apply, but it matters not one damn bit. Here, the ontological hierarchy is perfectly clear: quasiparticles are excitations in fields, which are in turn approximate descriptions of the collective behavior of all the (fundamental) particles making up the material. We can't immediately generalize this to particle physics because there's no guarantee that the relationship of the Standard Model to its underlying microscopic theory takes the same shape, but it is at least an example of how things could look. Take it as circumstantial evidence.

Part 4: What are we even doing here?

I think this raises a more basic point though: should we be trying to draw ontological conclusions from QFT at all? Like, what are we trying to accomplish? Are we interested in what the universe is made of at its most foundational level? Well, we already know QFT ain't it. Studying it might give us hints, but to say anything with confidence will have to wait for some major breakthroughs on the scientific front. (And even in the hypothetical future with a fully consistent theory of quantum gravity, how can we ever be confident we've drilled all the way down to bedrock, so to speak?) Or do we just want a theory of reality as she is experienced via day-to-day human perception? In that case, worrying about QFT (and maybe even regular quantum mechanics) is dramatically overkill. Or are we just interested in finding the mental model that's most useful for the narrow act of doing physics? This is, unsurprisingly, what I think physicists often mean by it, and that boils down to a question of context and taste.

It feels bad to say "ontology is an intractable problem until physics is complete," but sometimes I do think it might be the most honest answer. Or at least, the best we can do until then is say what cannot be ontologically foundational, and I don't think either fields or particles confidently fail that bar just yet.

[kata4a]

so apparently I misremembered how this meme went and in typical tumblr fashion rendered myself incomprehensible

[tototavros]

@jadenameless-blog

[tototavros]

"ministers are responsible for the independence, efficiency, and effectiveness of non departmental public bodies under their portfolio" contains within it the central paradox that is why I do not like the idea of "independent agencies"

[fragariavescana]

Epistemic status: The more I read about the situation the less I understand

It looks like the dartmoor ponies thing is a messy situation that has been seized upon by political opportunists.

It concerns the commons, in the original sense of land over which certain people (other than the owners) have usufruct rights to graze animals. Note that this was traditionally done as transhumance (and thereby limited by commoners' access to winter pasture) but changed to year-round grazing during the victorian era. Being marginal land (boggy moors on a lump of solidified magma that didn't erode as fast as the surrounding landscape), it was not worth inclosing during the previous centuries.

There are a number of different bodies at play here.

There is the Dartmoor Commoners' Council (DCC), established by the Dartmoor Commons Act 1985. 20 of the 26-28 members are elected by commoners (that is to say the people with grazing rights). The rest is made up from appointees by the landowner (duchy of Cornwall), the Dartmoor Park Authority and an independent veterinary surgeon. So the commoners appoint the majority of the council.

The act specifies:

Subject to this Act, it shall be the duty of the Commoners' Council to take such steps as appear to them to be necessary and reasonably practicable for the maintenance of the commons and the promotion of proper standards of livestock husbandry thereon (including the assessment of the number of...

...animals which can properly be depastured on the commons from time to time); and in discharging that duty the Commoners' Council shall have regard to the conservation and enhancement of the natural beauty of the commons and its use as a place of resort and recreation for enjoyment by the public.

Back in March, the high court found that the DCC had failed to properly count the number of animals that were, in fact, pastured on the commons (as a necessary part of discharging the above duty). On the other hands, the other accusations made by the environmental activist group that brought the claims were rejected.

Now 62% of Dartmoor Common is classified as a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). These are regulated by Natural England (a quango) on behalf of the Department for the Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs. AIUI, they can (as a civil matter) prohibit farmers from increasing the amount of grazing they do on an SSSI but they cannot force farmers to change their current practices. The lack of fences makes it hard to graze SSSI and non-SSSI areas at different levels. Hefting will not stop sheep from moving along a significant density gradient.

The lever they have to reduce grazing levels is taxpayer subsidies. The UK (as part of and then alongside the EU) has been shifting its agricultural subsidy programmes from incentivising production (and sometimes landowning, perversely) to incentivising environmental improvements, which often involve farming less intensively than otherwise.

The DCC and NE do not currently see eye-to-eye.

he Defendant [DCC] said that it was necessary to recognise that trust and engagement between commoners and NE had unfortunately almost completely broken down. The Defendant questioned the reliability of NE’s methodology and evidence base for assessing the condition of protected sites on Dartmoor.

Grazing is only economically viable due to these agri-environmental subsidies. Many subsidy schemes negotiated during before Brexit were retained for a transition period but are now coming to a close and being replaced.

The animals grazed on Dartmoor are predominantly sheep, cattle and ponies. Grazing levels are normalised in terms of 'Livestock Grazing Units' according to one of a number of systems which are specified by DEFRA (for NE's purposes) or statute (for DCC limits). A pony is counted as equivalent to 5-6 adult sheep.

Sheep are more profitable to farm than ponies but they graze in a way that is currently worse for the landscape. AFAICT, NE does not have any levers to change the sheep:pony ratio independent of overall grazing levels (In a Tinbergenian sense).

In the event that the new subsidies require commoners to reduce grazing levels, farmers claim that they are likely to keep the more lucrative sheep and cull the ponies. This is considered an outrage because, unlike the sheep, the ponies were not already destined for the dinner-plate.

The long-term plan to resolve these issues has involved standing up another quango, the Land-Use Management Group, to try and repair the relationship between the DCC and the NE.

Some sources:

Independent review of protected site management on Dartmoor

Grazing on Dartmoor – Setting the record straight on Natural England's role

This blog was updated on 16th June Recent media coverage has suggested that Natural England has recommended a cull of ponies on Dartmoor. Th

Tl;dr: Natural England does not have the power (or the will) to enforce a cull, but the pony that lives by the quango dies by the quango.

[apricops]

The year is 1492. You are the Catholic Monarchs - both of them. Isabel and Fernando, tanto monta, monta tanto. You have just finished kicking all of the Muslim powers out of Iberia, and you’re feeling so pleased with yourselves that you expel the Jews about it. You have a problem, though - there’s this annoying Genoese moron named Christopher Columbus who keeps waving some bad math at you, insisting that the world is actually smaller than everyone thinks it is and he could totally sail to India by going west. He gets on your nerves so much that you just give him a couple of ships and send him off. He definitely won’t make it to India, but maybe he’ll find some little island and give all of your newly-unemployed hidalgos something to keep them busy. He’ll probably just starve to death in the middle of the ocean, and then he’s no longer your problem.

The year is 1519, and you are Hernán Cortés. You and all of your compatriots are stuck in the most effective way to make someone a bad person: put them in a situation where they must become incredibly wealthy and powerful incredibly fast or else they will die horribly. Transatlantic voyages are absurdly expensive. Anyone in the ‘New World’ who isn’t rich enough to afford their own army is deeply in debt, with no collateral but their own sword-arm. It is an environment that does not reward half-measures. It does not even reward full measures. It only rewards putting a brick on the gas pedal and crossing your fingers - if you kill one person then you’re a murderer, but if you kill hundreds of thousands of people then you're a paragon of glory and the Spanish crown will make statues of you.

The year is still 1519 and you are Moctezuma II, Huēyi Tlahtoāni (great ruler) of the ‘Aztec Empire,’ also known as the Triple Alliance, or the Mexica. You know a thing or two about half-measures not being rewarded, because you are in a process of rapidly expanding and consolidating a nascent Mesoamerican empire. You are quite good at your job - even before you ascended to the throne, you cultivated a reputation as a skilled warrior, a dedicated student, and a devout worshiper. Your name means something like ‘lord who frowns in anger.’ It’s a fitting name, because the process of ‘imperial expansion and consolidation’ generally involves killing lots of people. To make matters worse, some weird hairy white guys showed up out of nowhere and they keep demanding an audience with you. You try every trick in the diplomatic handbook - deferment, threats, flattery, bribes - but everything you do just seems to make them more single-mindedly focused on your destruction. Later, after you are dead, they will claim that you thought they were gods.

The year is 1545, and this whole ‘colonialism’ thing is starting to peter out. Trans-Atlantic voyages are still ruinously expensive, and the pickings are getting slimmer every day - it’s not like you can go loot Tenochtitlan a second time. You’re starting to wonder if it’s time for everyone to pack up, go home, and forget about… holy shit is that a mountain of silver? Is that an honest-to-god mountain with more silver in it than every other existing silver mine on the face of the earth combined? Yes. Some call it Potosí. Many will call it “the mountain that eats men.” In a single moment, colonialism goes from a plundering campaign for recently-unemployed soldiers to a permanent institution. The alchemists back in Prague and Vienna never learned how to turn lead into gold, but the mercenaries and taskmasters in Potosí found a much simpler equation to turn blood into silver.

The year is 1571, and the economy of the Ming dynasty doesn’t feel so good. Their experiment with paper money was a failure, to put it gently. It turns out when you try to have paper currency but you don’t have sophisticated counterfeit protections and there’s also a booming cottage industry of people making paper in their actual cottages, well, you can guess how that ends. So you’re trying to shift to a silver economy. But then you run into an even bigger problem: you don’t have enough silver. So if you start demanding taxes in silver, the price of silver will skyrocket, which means taxes will skyrocket when the economy is already ailing from the whole ‘paper money’ thing. Some hapless scholar-official in Guangdong is nervously watching a peasant sharpen his pitchfork when he gets word from a messenger: some gweilo just showed up at the port with literal shipfuls of silver and they want to buy silk, tea, spices, and porcelain at outrageous markups.

Within living memory, the world was still ‘medieval’ in many ways - slow, parochial, zero-sum, carefully arbitrated by tradition and precedent. Legible. And now Spanish sailors take Bolivian silver on ships guarded by West African mercenaries and Japanese ronin, sailing to their colony in the Philippines to rub shoulders with Chinese officials, Indian sultans, and Malay merchants. All because some dipshit from Genoa got his math wrong and wouldn’t shut up about it.

The moral of this story is that I’m going insane.

[tototavros]

[tototavros]

Interesting that Sutherland's opinion in Adkins v Children's Hospital would have allowed for a minimum wage in DC if there were inquiry and tailoring into the nature of the work and the prevailing wages -- sorta like the Interstate Commerce Commission

[kata4a]

[argumate]

always fascinating by Latin mimicry typefaces like the Chop Suey / Wonton font to signify "oriental" for old-school Japanese/Chinese restaurants; there are a bunch of other examples:

faux Greek (angular letter forms, especially E)

faux Devangari/Sanskrit (add an overline)

faux Hebrew (blocky)

faux Cyrillic (backwards R)

faux runic (just write like runes)

a weird one is faux Arabic ("Arabian Nights" calligraphy) which is a little cursive and swirly but mostly suggests the Middle East by convention rather than appearance; then again the "samurai-style" Japanese faux font isn't so different in that regard I suppose *giant gong sound*

[rendakuenthusiast]

One important cultural asymmetry of the modern world is that this isn't something that cultures using other scripts can do to the Latin script, because every other written tradition in the world is still intimately familiar with the Latin alphabet; and often straight-up use elements of the Latin script along with their native written characters in their everyday modern script, as is the case in the east asian world.

[argumate]

I don't think that's true at all? there are plenty of examples of Latin mimicry in other scripts, like sans serif Thai fonts, or Japanese versions of posters for American movies etc. where the typographical cues are ported over directly, or blackletter-inspired fonts for Korean and Japanese, ideal for heavy metal groups, same principle of grabbing a foreign vibe and importing the aesthetic cues into the local script.

[tototavros]

[tototavros]

"ministers are responsible for the independence, efficiency, and effectiveness of non departmental public bodies under their portfolio" contains within it the central paradox that is why I do not like the idea of "independent agencies"

[northshorewave]

College football's latest existential crisis, summarized:

Medium-term background: Over the last ten and especially last five years, college football has gone from the fiefdoms of stuffy provincial old farts so devoted to the mirage of amateurism that programs could get in trouble for putting cream cheese on bagels, to a free-for-all wild west where players go shopping for new teams every season and whoever has the biggest firehose of money wins. This is in large part because the athletes being unpaid in the first place was never legally sustainable and only lasted so long out of inertia and coordination issues. If you're pro-labor it's a good and necessary thing overall, but for smaller programs, their fans, and anyone with a bit of romance about the game, it's been a disaster. On a related note, sports gambling has gone from something only legal in a handful of US cities to infinitely accessible to anyone with a smartphone over the same five years. Some would say these are both part of the same trend, namely very rich people getting to do anything they want because no one gives a shit about rules or ethics anymore, but that's neither here nor there.

Short-term background: A year or two ago, Texas oil billionaire Cody Campbell basically bought the Texas Tech athletic program. Tech has historically been a B-to-C-tier team with a massive chip on its shoulder thanks to never being able to get past the A-tier schools. Campbell is now chairman of the board of regents, i.e. the boss' boss' boss of most of the other people in this story. This past offseason he paid $5 million to recruit a quarterback named Brendan Sorsby, previously with Indiana and Cincinnati.

Last few weeks: Sorsby is outed as having a massive gambling addiction, from the stereotypical "up 'til 3 AM betting on Malaysian soccer" stuff to betting individual balls and strikes in baseball games to (brace yourself) betting on his own teams to lose or underperform. For example, to paraphrase a redditor's take, 'he saw his teammate struggling and instead of wanting to help him get better, he put a hundred bucks on the guy to get Under 2.5 Catches next game'.

From most of the Chicago White Sox in 1919 to Pete Rose in 1989, any professional athlete who has done anything remotely like this has been banned for life from their sport and made persona non grata. But again, college sports is a lawless wasteland right now and Cody Campbell didn't get rich by taking losses on his investments, no sir. He paid for Sorsby and Sorsby's gonna play. After the NCAA (college sports' governing body, a shambling rotten corpse of its former cream-cheese-outlawing self) seemed to have finally found a rule they could enforce without a labor-law suit bitchslapping them, banning Sorsby, Campbell more or less went judge-shopping until he found a retired judge willing to issue an injunction allowing Sorsby to play.

To be clear, Campbell and his puppets (head coach, athletic director, university president; their collective inability to shut the fuck up throughout this has led people to suspect that Campbell basically ordered them to go all-offense in PR.) aren't disputing that Sorsby is a gambling addict who bet on his own team to lose. They're saying that it would be discrimination against the mentally ill to not allow him to play. The words the judge used were 'irreparable harm'. Analogies spread on reddit over the last few weeks have included "holding AA meetings in a bar", "letting a drunk driver go scot-free because alcoholism is a disease", and "a banker caught stealing from customer funds getting a promotion".

The entire college football world, which had spent the last five years tearing itself apart over TV money and private equity, immediately united against Campbell and Tech. Several colleges wiped any games with Tech in any sport from their schedule, their conference intimated that they can and would expel them by member vote, the attorneys general of Oklahoma, Utah, and Kansas all promised to take action. And to be clear this was a truly existential, all hands on deck crisis: if the athletes are taking dives for money, then there is no sport. It's a bunch of mercenary hustlers dressing up like football players to pretend to play football. Even the vampiric sportsbooks themselves don't want this: nobody bets on fixed matches.

Bear in mind also it's not out of the question that Sorsby could be arrested for this: he was under 21 for much of this and sent money across state lines for family and friends to gamble with. So Campbell got his own lawyer: Ken Paxton, Texas state AG and current senate candidate. While Reddit hates every Texas Republican politician, the Texan posters do seem to regard Paxton as uniquely stupid and incompetent. He was impeached three years ago, which, how do you manage to do that as a Republican AG in Texas?

Anyway, this is where my law-fu gets a little weak, but apparently Paxton's filing on Tech and Campbell's behalf was so incompetently written, so wildly aggressive without any authority to actually see it through, that it opened up his clients to legal vulnerabilities that wouldn't have existed otherwise and sets the prosecution up for a thorough beatdown. So, late last night, Tech dumps mutually parts with Sorsby, rumored to have kept around half of his $5 million payday for barely avoiding becoming the Shoeless Joe Jackson of football. Campbell gets told "no" for the first time in years and loses millions of dollars for nothing. Paxton was (admittedly they say this every time) apparently in a tight race with Democrat James Talarico, and now he very publicly has argued that the 5th-most-popular college team in his own state should let their quarterback fix games for gambling rings because his billionaire sugar daddy threw a tantrum over it. May end up mattering, may not.

Everything in the world has been like this for the last six years.

[nessa007]

do y’all understand just how insane this is???? 🤯

via filmdreams

[official-torfmoor]

Can someone who was alive during the 70s and/or is unhealthily knowlegable about film history confirm that this is basically what Lucas and Spielberg were doing back before they got big budgets thrown at them?

[gpuzzle]

So that's not at all what either of them were doing. Or, well, not quite.

To set the stage: the 1950's are a weird time, though a crucial one, in movie history. You're coming out of the 1930's and 1940's and television is now a thing. Movies are one of the two main methods of mass pop culture, the other being radio, but movies need to be shown at a specific place, unlike radio, which you just listened to in your home. Television exists, but it's rare and few people own it. So you go to the movies to see the newsreels, shorter films (like 30-60 minutes long), the big ones are feature length, you've got epics as well, the movies are this place where there's always something, and the quality is all over the place. The 1950's arrive and with it comes television.

Television throws a wrench into that so hard. The entire radio framework transitions to television fairly seamlessly, and a lot of what was outlined in the movies outside of the big productions becomes part of television. One, news moves directly there. That's crucial. Two, there's now a guaranteed short film precedent that leads to anthology series, which try to do what are essentially hour long plays filmed and delivered every day; the big one is Alfred Hitchcock Presents, but you may be more familiar with the lasting modern example of those, The Twilight Zone. The trick is to run on time and under budget, rely on scripts and acting, and do it with people who won't charge out of the nose or give them a level of flexibility you don't get from studios.

Television is also a threat because it allows for reshowing movies, without necessarily getting money back, and also TV needs back material to fill space on the cheap, which is where the archive falls in. So that's a push and pull.

The other thing that creates this vacuum is the 1948 antitrust suit, United States vs Paramount Pictures. What this settles is that you cannot sell movies in bundles, so your big movie cannot be sold on the condition you also screen this low budget thing. The combination of that plus television forces the majors (Paramount, MGM, Fox, Warner, RKO, then Columbia and Universal) that the way forward is Go Big or Go Home. Giant epics are the thing they can do and only they can do. If not that, then at least bet on star power.

This creates a huge market for movies on the cheap outside of the majors. This is the birth of the modern B movie. On time and under budget, bet on the 19 yo male as your audience as the women will watch anything a man will and a younger kid will watch anything someone who's 20 will. This also fills in a gap because you can send that off to TVs, which is where the archetype of the presenter that really peaks in Elvira comes from.

With that established, this is the ambient in which both of these guys grow up in.

Spielberg starts by making home films, he's one of those directors operating out of a new tradition. Film cameras are cheaper than ever in the 1950's economic boom. Kids can make their own films. And he makes this zero budget sci-fi film for $500 in 1963 (about $5500 in today's money). He makes a short film in 1968, shows it to Universal, and gets a contract as a director. Key detail, he's doing stuff in TV, because Universal is the "low budget" major. He works with Joan Crawford, Rod Serling, and even does an episode of Columbo. He's already on the industry as a rising star operating with a budget and learning the tools of the trade.

Universal moves him up to TV movies, not just teleplays. You've more options, bigger budgets, more time. He makes a couple, then gets the chance to do a film called The Sugarland Express in 1974, which is a smaller, more self contained drama, and this one does get a full theatrical release. It's not terribly successful, though the critics do like it.

The other key detail here is that the reason they're taking bets on these unknown directors is that studios are going broke. They went big and went broke, because everything is this massive Event and quality isn't keeping up with it. There's a huge push and pull, it's very standardized, and you're starting to see TV directors make jumps to film; Sidney Lumet is a big one here. European and Japanese films are making a splash. The B movie directors, though, who got used to on time and under budget, continue working as they did. So the big studios retreat to smaller bets, movies relying on acting and clever filmography and good scripts. This is all happening in the late 1960's and early 1970's.

So Spielberg gets a chance to do a $9M movie in 1975 (about $56M in today's money). The name of this movie is Jaws. This movie will change cinema forever. I don't need to tell you what happens next.

In this sense, Spielberg is a creature of an existing system within television and film. He climbs the ladder from within, and throughout proves his mix of old gen and new gen.

Lucas is more interesting. Lucas is coming in not from home movies but from experimental underground cinema screenings, because you can get army surplus and host movies no one will show for an audience of people who will see weird arthouse stuff but also popular films. He's also in film school at this point, doing weird visual-only things. Film school is very new at this point in time. He makes THX 1138, which is a short film, gets national awards, and networks with Francis Ford Coppola off a prize from Warner.

Coppola's just off The Godfather, he's a big deal, he made it in Hollywood, and now he wants to help fund and produce movies he wants to see and things he likes. So he produces Lucas's first full-length film, American Graffiti. That movie is done for $770k in 1973, or about $5.8M in today's money; it is a runaway success for Lucas. Crucially, this is also on Universal, who greenlights it on the condition of it being a low budget film, because a low budget bet with Coppola's name attached could at least give you decent ROI. After that, he gets to make Star Wars, on a budget of $8M, using all kinds of tricks to save up on cost. I don't need to tell you what happens next.

Both of those are stories about a place and a time. They exist in a specific studio system. They either rise through it, or take advantage of this specific vacuum, this gap in the industry, to really surge through.

Barker and Parsons are doing completely different things. I'll start with Parsons, he's in an interesting framework.

Parsons is rising through a tradition of Youtube videos that I half associate with B movies but not quite. It is 90% showreel; on time and under budget don't exist here. But the budget also doesn't exist either. This explains why so many of these projects are deeply visual and relying on visual effects. It's also why analog horror takes off; hiding imperfections through filters. But success in here, especially with horror films, means you've got a possible path. Horror's an interesting genre, as it still is the last of the original groups of B movies working on a tradition of no budget and experimentation by dint of no budget, while also being intensely populist. It also is a massive struggle to transition out of horror into other things.

He gets scouted by 21 Laps Entertainment (Shawn Levy, whose work I despise, but who's got money and a willingness to spend), as well as A24 and Atomic Monster (James Wan, AKA the creator of Saw). You may notice that A24 sits rather oddly here. We've a profoundly populist moneymaker and a guy who makes his money off what essentially are B-movies, what is A24 getting us here?

A24 is no stranger to horror films; they're also distribution specialists. They can get you anywhere at this point, though not en masse, but your own reach is inherently limited anyway. You go middle scale, bet on big critical darlings and the odd low budget bet, and run with it. So A24 is filling in the role of being Universal in Lucas and Spielberg's story.

Curry Barker kind of does the same thing, though more traditional filmmaking as opposed to largely VFX. He goes to film school, runs a sketch comedy channel, gets some popularity, and makes the no-budget Milk & Serial, which he posts on Youtube, that picks up steam, and gets picked up by Tea Shop Productions. That's a B-movie company, once again, on time and under budget is the name of the game here. He gets to make Obsession on less than $1M, that gets shown on tiff, and picked up by Blumhouse. Blumhouse is The Big Name in horror, so this is huge; it's what propels the film to be everywhere for no cost. It's also why Obsession is such a smaller film in scope.

Both of these films and filmmakers are operating within a very specific path - YouTube as showreel, no-budget as a matter of course, horror as the only path to populist low-budget films that will get picked up and shown world over. The question is how do you transition from that to other films. Ari Aster has had success; he's also struggled moving out of horror. Robert Eggers is a similar case, but he's shown more success within horror as well.

We've also seen giant studio blockbusters metaphorically spin their wheels in the post-pandemic world; which is why there's now a clamor for these smaller films, so to speak, especially when you've actors like Robert Pattinson or Timothee Chalamet or Emma Stone delivering really strong performances as the selling point. So the question is more "what else will step into the void" than anything regarding those two specifically.

[toasthaste]

we can't actually hear most of the details in birdsong.... what sounds like the same song repeated to human ears/brains can actually contain extremely fast variations within it that are used for communication.... we can't hear fast enough to get it all! yo.....

[toasthaste]

oh! it's actually more complex than that. so for complicated reasons, being able to hear fast trades off directly with being able to hear precisely (like perfect pitch). temporal resolution vs pitch sensitivity. bird hearing optimizes for one or the other differently at different times of year!

the example given is the carolina chickadee. in the fall they form big flocks and need to be able to communicate efficiently with all those other birds, so their hearing is very fast. in the spring, the flock breaks up as individuals pair off to mate-- and the breeding season song is much simpler than the other year-round chickadee call! just four notes, and what makes it sexy to the girlies is how consistently the male can hit the exact perfect tone

but other birds have it inverted! the white-breasted nuthatch has a very fast courtship song with very fine structure, so their hearing becomes faster during the breeding season, and less sensitive to pitch

[toasthaste]

also-- sometimes it's different for males and females :0

in house sparrows, the females have seasonal hearing, but the males don't. so they hear the same in the fall, but in the spring the females get better at pitch and worse at speed. this is also interesting because speed of hearing improves your ability to locate an object in space based on sound, so when the hearing gets slower their ability to map sounds also gets blurrier.

and I wonder if this could have anything to do with rates of getting caught by predators in dull-colored females vs dull-colored males vs brightly-colored males, cause I remember those numbers being kinda counterintuitive

[raginrayguns]

anthropic.com:

The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.

...

If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers.

Ha! AI paused!

[literallymechanical]

In a meeting today a PhD physicist whom I respect very much pronounced "leeward" like "lee-ward" instead of how it's actually pronounced ("loo-ard") and I had to psychically fight off the spirit of my New England Fisherman grandfather from correcting his pronunciation in front of like three VP's.

[literallymechanical]

Dr. Plasmaphysik: carbon dust tends to accumulate on the lee-ward sides of protrusions in the plasma vessel–

The spirit of Grandpa Mechanical:

[catmask]

in finnish, the '@' symbol is sometimes referred to as 'kissanhnta' [cat's tail] or 'miau', 'miau merkki' [meow marks]. in the pokemon universe, i thought it might be cute if the '@' symbol were called 'the mew' or 'mew symbol'

considering both bill and professor oak would know about mew, i imagined a conversation in which this term was coined in which professor oak tries (and finally succeeds) at sending his first email.

[catmask]

regional dialects make it difficult to share 'mewsernames'!

in swedish, the @ symbol is called 'trunk a' [elephants trunk]

in polish, it's called 'malpa' [monkey]!

[catmask]