Richard Feynman and the Message of Christmas

I often come across as a Grinch during Christmas.  It isn't that I don't like the holiday, it's that I find the actual celebration of the holiday so small compared to the actual ancient reason for celebrating.

The phenomenon of Christmas, as it exists today amongst moderns,  is largely a commercial platform to sell you movies, toys, electronics, and honey baked hams.  We sing about snow and various foodstuffs eaten and herd animals, we share some presents, spoil our children, and eat a lot of food.

To most modern people, this is what it's about.  Its about time with family and the magic of Santa and having fun singing Christmas songs.

I don't think modern people really understand Christmas.  I don't think they get it.

To explain Christmas, then, let me begin with a quote by Richard Feynman (from this video interview):

I can’t believe the special stories that have been made up about our relationship to the universe at large. They seem to be… too simple to conn- too local, too provincial! The Earth! He came to the Earth! One of the aspects of God came to the Earth mind, you. Look at what’s out there! It isn’t in proportion.

Richard Feynman gets Christmas.  In his own way, as a nonreligious Jew, Feynman understands the celebration of Christ's birth better than most people alive today.

Alternative to the d20 System

Early D&D used to be a mishmash of various different rules. Roll this die for this, that die for that, look on a table for this other thing. Thieves rolled a percentile die (two d10s with one treated as the "tens" place) and compared to a table on thieves skills; fighters rolled a d20 and looked up their result on a table organized by their level and the targets AC; later fighters rolled a d20 and compared THAC0 and AC to the result; some traps you rolled a d6 and found it on a 1, some doors you rolled a d8 and forced it open on a 1, some checks you rolled a d20 and tried to get under your ability score like STR.

It was kind of a crazy, scattered mess.

Advanced Berenst#in Bears Theory - Complex Euclidean Space

I wrote a blog post several years ago about the Berenst#in Bears that, somehow, against all odds, managed to get picked up on the internet.  It's been posted on Reddit and other outlets several times, and accounts for about 95% of all traffic to my blog.

The post is of course intended to be silly, but part of the silliness is that hidden inside this ridiculous proposition of universes merging over children book names is a very mathematically complicated thesis about the nature of space and time.

I don't think I did a very good job explaining what that thesis is, because I often see my blog being referenced as claiming either time travel, the many-worlds hypothesis, or something else about quantum mechanics are responsible for us finding ourselves in this piteous state of being in the wrong universe with the wrong cartoon bears.

In this post, my goal is to outline what exactly it is that I was "claiming," so that if the story gets picked up again (unlikely now that more major outlets have picked it up), maybe people can actually at least summarize what I'm saying correctly.

TL;DR the theory is about changing the geometry of spacetime by allowing all four dimensions to be general complex numbers.

Let me start with what the theory is not.

A Rule for Shields from Descending Armor Class, Applied to Ascending Armor Class

I've been playing 'D&D 'ever since I was a young boy and found my dad's Dungeon Master's Guide on his bookshelf (the original, by Gygax).  I was still too young to understand a lot of it (Gygax opens with a discussion of uniform vs binomial probability distributions...), but I spent hours of days flipping through the pages, looking at the pictures and reading the descriptions of a fantastic world.  It inspired me to make my own games about exploring through planned dungeons with friends and having them use ability scores to get through.

By the time I was old enough to try to really figure out the rules, version 3.0 was out, which made a lot of changes.  One of the biggest was replacing the original Descending AC and THAC0 system with the slightly more intuitive Ascending AC system.  This system always just made sense to me, whereas DAC and THAC0 always seemed weird and complicated.  I never understood how DAC worked, and never really saw a good explanation of it, and so just never used it.  It was only recently, when getting into old school tabletop RPGs, that I decided to look up an explanation of how DAC and THAC0 used to work.

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test for commenting

Update: I think I figured it out.  Comments should work better now.

From my phone I can comment.  From my computer, I'm only able to  comment if I use a separate page for  comments.

The Baker and the Beast

I have an idea for a movie.  It's a moving tale of passion and vocation.  I've pitched it to my wife and a few friends, and all agree, it's pretty brilliant.

Since it infringes on all kinds of Disney copyright, and since the premise is kind of ridiculous, it will never actually be made into a movie.  So I figured I'd just pitch it here.

The genesis.

So, I hate pop music.

Replies not working

I just want to apologize to people who have commented and I haven't replied.  For some reason, Blogger is eating my reply comments, so that after I hit "submit" the reply doesn't get saved to the server.

A similar problem also happens to people trying to comment on older posts with lots of comments.  I can't complain about Blogger, it being free and all, but I will need to look into my server situation and perhaps go with a different hosting platform.

UPDATE: I think the problem is my computer's browser (safari).  I tried updating all of my computer's software, but it still doesn't work very well with Blogger.  I have tried responding to some comments three or four times now, and this is really frustrating.

I am a monotheist about Zeus

Growing up in the time I did, I have had plenty of chances to hear atheists -- on talk shows, PBS documentaries, classrooms, debates, YouTube videos, internet forums -- present their arguments, and I've heard almost all of them by now.  There are especially some arguments that get brought up rather frequently, and then keep getting repeated for years later.

There's one in particular I want to address, the "One God Further" argument.  I believe the argument originates with Richard Dawkins, but I have certainly heard Christopher Hitchens and others make similar arguments on stage.  This argument is that we are all atheists about most of the gods anyone has ever claimed to believe in.  I'm an atheist about Zeus, Hercules, Mithras, Minerva or any of these other figures.  Dawkins simply goes one god further than I do.

And so, to clarify this issue once and for all, let me just resolutely state that I am not an atheist about Zeus.

I'm really not.

I am a monotheist about Zeus.

My issue with Zeus isn't that he's clearly ridiculous and there's no evidence for him.  I mean, yeah, Zeus is pretty ridiculous and there's no evidence for him.  But that isn't really my objection to Zeus worship.

My objection to Zeus worship is that Zeus isn't the kind of thing that should be rightly called a god, or the kind of thing that should be worshipped.

Easier way to replicate funky dice for DCC RPG using regular d6s

I recently came across the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG and have been pretty hooked by the game since then.  The game introduces a lot of very interesting new mechanics into an over-troped hobby, most notably the magic system, the level-0 funnel, the Warrior's Might Deeds, and the dice chain, all of which bring back some of the spice of adventure and originality.

Learning Fortran is a waste of your time

Suppose you are an advanced student of physics, and you're just beginning your first research experience with a new professor.  You're excited about the opportunities this means for your future, fascinated by the implications of the research, and anxious to please.  Your professor tells you you need to run a computer simulation, and this is also exciting; you've never used a computer as a computer before -- usually just as an internet browser.  To get you started, he points you to a reference text with some sample code, or sends you one he has on his hard drive somewhere.

This code will be written in Fortran.  They all are.  All legacy codes are Fortran.

So what is Fortran?  Fortran is a high-level programming language designed back in the 50's.  Here "high-level" means that it is not assembly language, and the programmer does not directly interact with machine elements like bits, bytes, or memory addresses, though Fortran is much "lower-level" than most modern languages like Java or Python, meaning it is only just a step or two above machine code.  The name "Fortran" is short for "Formula Translation," as the language was intended to more directly translate a mathematical formula into computer code; Fortran allowed, for instance, an entire mathematical expression to be written out as a single line of code, as opposed to assembly, which would require multiple lines of register swapping and simple operations to acheive the same result.

You'll get the sample code and look at it, and it will be completely incomprehensible.  They all are.  All Fortran codes are incomprehensible.

Why is this?  There are a lot of things that contribute to the issue.

The Ukrainians From ZRus Who 'Read' My Blog

If you are a fellow user of Blogger or a similar platform, then you have probably noticed that you get a significant amount of traffic from websites in Ukraine or Russia, many with the specific domain name zrus.org.  You're probably curious about who these Ukrainians linking to your blog might be.  You may even be a little bit flattered that your tiny blog is getting international recognition.

Don't get excited, and whatever you do, do NOT click any link to these websites.  This is a well-known scourge on the blogger community, and clicking the links could infect your computer with malware.

These sites are a malicious scam.  Let me explain how this scam works.

Why does so much time pass in Interstellar?

While on a quest to save the human race, astronauts in the film Interstellar travel to a foreign planet orbiting closely around a supermassive black hole.  Due to the strong gravity, time on the planet is distorted, being artificially compressed.  Seven entire years here on Earth are squeezed down to just one hour of time on the planet.

This is one of the many bizarre effects of Einstein's general theory of relativity, referred to as gravitational time dilation.  I had some students from my physics class recently ask me to explain this phenomenon.  So I prepared what I think is a fairly straightforward explanation of the phenomenon, assuming only a knowledge of 1st semester physics and some simple calculus.

The Past Two Years of My Life

I was looking just now, and realized it's been two years since my last update.

This blog is kind of a weird thing. It started as a way for me to vent my thoughts on fantasy and science fiction books, then got kind of science-y. At one point I had a spike on my post about the vampire movie Let Me In.  Then I had that viral Berenst#in Bears post that got passed around the web a lot, inspiring lots of kookiness. I was getting lots of traffic for a while -- until Vice basically rewrote my same idea but on their own website with their names attached.

Since then my traffic has slowly dwindled down to numbers that actually make sense for what my blog is.

Really, what gets me isn't that another site gets my traffic, but that in all the traffic that I got, almost none of them read what I think are some of my coolest posts -- the stuff about using Gauss' Law to calculate the width of Narnia, or using volume contracting spacetimes to travel to other dimensions, or why everything cool in physics is impossible, or how time travel is understood to work within physics.

I haven't posted much (anything) since things sort of died down. I still check in frequently, but never find the impetus to start to writing. Maybe it's the weight of former glory intimidating me.