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▷▷▷▷▷▷ Follow My Threads Account ◁◁◁◁◁◁ Posts on Threads >>>>>> Follow My Threads Account <<<<<< Hi, everyone, this is Changhai, extending my online existence to yet another platform ‒ this time in English though. I'm notoriously slow and lazy in cellphone typing, therefore am waiting for the web version of Threads Mr. Zuckerberg promised (or is rumored to have promised) to provide in the near future. Just want to say "Hi" first to whoever emerges from the vacuum, more to come soon... #Most poetic sentences by scientists: 「As I write this I happen to be in an aeroplane at 30,000 feet, flying over Wyoming en route home from San Francisco to Boston. Below, the earth looks very soft and comfortable fluffy clouds here and there, snow turning pink as the sun sets, roads stretching straight across the country from one town to another. It is very hard to realize that this all is just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe. It is even harder to realize that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.」 —— The First Three Minutes (By Steve Weinberg) For any omnipotent superbeing(s) ‒ aka God(s) ‒ that is supposed to be the creator of us, it is silly to create so vast and so old a universe in which we can emerge from sheer randomness. The universe as we gradually come to comprehend doesn't indicate a purpose to harbor us, even less an intelligent plan as often attributed to God(s). This, in my opinion, is the meaning of "the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless". 「Outside Russia, Lenin and Engels are of course not valued as scientific thinkers and no one would be interested in refuting them as such. The same might also be the case in Russia, except there one doesn't dare say so.」 —— Albert Einstein, 1932 Even more so in later totalitarian countries, in which a supreme leader (often a lesser person than Lenin and Engels) is valued as thinker/designer/architect (you name it) in ALL areas... and not only one doesn't dare doubt, but many voluntarily help suppress doubts. Threads, it seems to me, was a rush attempt to harvest refugees from Elon Musk's Twitter empire (in which silly decisions were never in short supply). As a consequence, key features such as text search and hashtag were missing. The only thing searchable seems to be the account, which led to a "chicken-and-egg" dilemma: one has to be sufficiently well known to lure anyone into searching one's account, but one who is not already well known relies on the (then useless) search to gain visibility… The web version of Threads that I have been waiting for since day 1 (far prior to the creation of my own account) is finally here. Hard to understand why it took so long and why it still lacks of an emogi panel though. Linus Torvalds, if I remember correctly, once said "how hard can it be" when talking about writing his own OS – i.e. Linux. Far less skillful though I am as a developer, "how hard can it be" I dare ask about the delay and lack of feature of the web version. But still cheers! :-) Richard Dawkins once said (actually said more than once) that good science writing should be treated as literature, and should be made eligible to win Nobel Prize in Literature. Legendary computer game designer Sid Meier seems had a view intrinsically similar to that of Dawkins' (though in a different field – which in a sense added even more to the point): He named his company MicroProse "because it seemed to me that computer code was just as elegant as any literary prose". #Most poetic sentences by scientists: 「Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded, and the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics. You are all stardust. You couldn't be here if stars hadn't exploded... So forget Jesus, the stars died so you could be here today.」 —— Lawrence M. Krauss It was from Krauss' 2009 lecture A Universe From Nothing. But I first heard of it in 2016, from a Richard Dawkins video in which he quoted a fraction of it while announcing Krauss as the recipient of the Richard Dawkins Award of that year. I was a little bit disappointed though, when I later noticed Krauss' 2012 book A Universe From Nothing lacked the "forget Jesus..." part which in my opinion is not only witty but – due to its abstract similarity to the Bible – paradoxically poetic even to Christians as long as they consider the Bible poetic. 「So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You'd better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can't rearrange the universe.」—— Isaac Asimov Unfortunately, "believers" (we know what that means) usually don't care about the universe, what many of them have interest and full desire for is ideological dominance in the society which to them is the universe, and they rarely hesitate to rearrange that "universe" to fit their beliefs.
A few weeks ago, my daughter and I had a casual conversation on poems during which I showed her a few lines
of a poem I saw quoted by a physicist in a book I happened to come across on that day. Recently, I wanted to write
about that poem but it turned out I can no longer recall the title or author of that book, nor can I remember the
poem itself to a Googleable degree. Luckily, my daughter's memory is much more "poetic" than mine and thus
successfully recovered the poem for me:
Carl Sagan is a great science popularizer, and the fame came with it brought him doubts and negativities among colleagues. "It was Carl Sagan's idea" is almost a synonym for not to be taken academically or seriously. In his last published interview, Sagan said something that can be considered an answer to this stubbornly biased attitude: "When you're in love, you want to tell the world. I've been in love with science, so it seems the most natural thing in the world to tell people about it." There was a time (started in the 1960s and spanned a few decades) when communicating with extraterrestrial intelligence was an attempt attracted great attentions, and Carl Sagan was a major advocate. Not surprisingly, there were doubts and criticisms ‒ among which a serious worry that extraterrestrial intelligence might turn out to be cannibalistic and treat us as food. To that, Sagan fired a humorous reply: "Even if human beings were a famous interstellar delicacy, the freightage would be prohibitively high."
#From Last Night's Talk Show
Among all password rules, the most annoying and silliest is the one to force periodic
change of password. Poll (yes, hackers do poll as well) indicated hackers seldomly spend more
than a day to break password, much too quick for periodic change to pose any barrier. What
about making compromised password obsolete? No luck on that either: when periodic change is forced,
most people will come up with sufficiently similar new password to avoid forgetting, which makes
new breaking a no-brainer task.
Had a walk in Cunningham Park yesterday. This was the park I frequented when lived in the neighborhood.
Nostalgic memory of myself sitting in a camp chair doing casual reading and my daughter cheerfully playing
around is still vivid, and yet more than 10 years have passed... Two features I would like to see on Threads: 1. Show view counts ‒ though unlike my other social accounts in which view counts are far more encouraging, I can only expect to see tiny numbers here in foreseeable future, but my interest in number is almost an "occupational disease" therefore I still want it; 2. Timeline should default to "following" rather than "for you" or at least default to whatever user last selected ‒ this is actually more of a fixing than a feature, since it is ridiculous not to have.
I recently finished watching a German Sci-Fi TV series called Dark that features time
travel through a cave or time machines of sizes ranging from that of a small ball to a big room. Is such time travel
possible in physics? The answer, unfortunately, is a pretty certain "No". One might argue that time travel
is near the edge of physics or even in the domain of unknown (which is quite true), and as such, it should be
impossible to say anything reasonably certain about it. But that's actually not the case.
[ New Article: A Star Trek Captain's Memoir ] This is a slightly expanded collection of my posts on Threads, all about English actor Patrick Stewart's Making It So ‒ A Memoir. To be more specific, it's exclusively about the part of the Memoir I'm interested most and have read, about Stewart as a Star Trek Captain ‒ as Jean-Luc Picard. Two witty answers that bear similarity to each other:
A few words in regards to the above "witty answers":
Two science anecdotes:
Watched "P vs. NP - The Greatest Unsolved Problem in Computer Science" ‒ a Youtube video from Quanta Magazine, saw some misleading statements that worth pointing out. P vs. NP is, as the video title correctly described, an unsolved problem, and if its answer turns out to be P=NP, it would mean a vast class of seemingly intractable problems are in principle manageable. But it's very misleading to claim, as the video recklessly did, that "AI would become smarter overnight" and "all current methods for strong encryption ... would instantly become obsolete". Such claims have mistaken potentials for reality. It is true that if P=NP, AI could in principle become smarter, and strong encryption could in principle become obsolete, but far from effortlessly, definitely not "overnight" or "instantly". It is just like we can in principle travel at any subluminal speed, but having a real rocket to achieve a high speed is a different story, let alone "overnight" or "instantly".
Google's ongoing anti-AdBlocker campaign on Youtube is, to a large extent, a novel battle between the
tech giant with highly paid talents and the highly diverse open source community with (among others)
basement gurus. As of today and much to my joy, the latter seems (at least temporarily)
having the upper hand: I'm again able to view Youtube videos (using Chrome with AdBlock extension)
the way I used to do and the way I wanted ‒ that is, without ads and without extra tricks.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, through his greatest creation Sherlock Holmes, quoted a saying
in the story of A Study in Scarlet: "A fool can always find a greater
fool to admire him"; Isaac Asimov, in an essay "Worlds in Confusion" collected in the book
The Stars in Their Courses, expressed a meaning similar but more accurately:
"There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death".
#Most poetic sentences by scientists: 「Life is only a short episode between two eternities of death, and that, even in this episode, conscious thought has lasted and will last only a moment. Thought is only a gleam in the midst of a long night. But it is this gleam which is everything.」 —— The Value of Science (By Henri Poincaré)
Coincidently echoed Poincaré's view was the Hungarian scientist John von Neumann who, according to his
colleague and fellow Hungarian scientist Eugene Wigner, was deeply saddened in his last days when he
knew he was dying, because "it was impossible for him to imagine that he would stop thinking".
Modern telescopes (James Webb Space Telescope for instance) are constantly breaking the record of
looking back through time and discovering the earliest objects in the universe. Many of those objects
(earliest stars for instance) are actually long gone (they are massive and they burn down very quickly).
The fact that we can still see them owes to the fact that speed of light,
though the fastest in the universe, is nevertheless finite.
Bought two Peter Mayle books from The Next Chapter: A Year in Provence and Toujours Provence. I have read Mayle's Acquired Tastes several years ago and enjoyed his witty style very much ‒ so much in fact that I did some quick "research" (i.e. search) on him and learned that his fame had a sharp rising with A Year in Provence (to the extent that pretty much all his later books bear the "Author of A Year in Provence" label on the cover). I also learned that his fame once reached a level beyond his endurance, and he (temporarily) exiled himself all the way from France to Long Island (my neighborhood!). Too bad he didn't write a book about Long Island though. >>> Later Posts >>>>>> Follow My Threads Account <<<<<< posted on December 26, 2023 |
Watched a documentary film 
Visited "The Next Chapter" ‒ a used book store in Long Island. They newly opened a large room with a decent
collection of extremely cheap books. If time rolls back five years, it would be unthinkable for me to leave
without a few heavily loaded bags. But I have since become old enough to finally realize "There Is Such Thing
As Too Many Books" (yes, I know the original quote has a "No" in it), and have been battling (with progressive
success) the urge of buying books I know I have no time to read. Thus the unthinkable happened...