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▷▷▷▷▷▷ Follow My Threads Account ◁◁◁◁◁◁ Posts on Threads >>>>>> Follow My Threads Account <<<<<< Earlier Posts <<< September 4, 2024 # Boswell and Asimov on Diary Scottish writer James Boswell was a diligent diarist and once claimed (in a diary entry in March 1776): "I should live no more than I can record, as one should not have more corn growing than one can get in", because "There is a waste of good if it be not preserved." Boswell's recording of life was a private one (though eventually, more than 150 years later, his diary was published). As an interesting analogy, Isaac Asimov shared Boswell's view but was much less private ‒ in fact compulsively public. In the preface to The Early Asimov, the prolific American writer wrote, "Occasionally someone asks me if I have never felt that my diary ought to record my innermost feelings and emotions, and my answer is always, 'No. Never!' After all, what’s the point of being a writer if I have to waste my innermost feelings and emotions on a mere diary?" Life was a waste to Boswell if it was not privately preserved, and a waste to Asimov if it was not publicly preserved. :-) September 13, 2024 # Boswell and Asimov's Use of Diary As a consequence of the two types of "philosophy" of diaries Boswell and Asimov held, respectively, Asimov, whose diary lacked "innermost feelings and emotions", never (at least to the best of my knowledge) in his writings used his diary more than a mere record of dates and names for the events in his life. Boswell, who lived no more than he could record, however, constantly drew content from his diary ‒ which he called Journals ‒ and mingled it into his writings. English critic John Wain once commented in his introduction to The Journals of James Boswell: 1762‒1795 that Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson "suddenly bursts into glorious vitality with the entry of Boswell himself into its pages in 1763", because this is the point "where the Journals effectively take over". September 14, 2024 # Film: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Watched film Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, partly because I enjoyed Jenna Ortega's performance in the Netflix series Wednesday, and she was costumed similarly enough in the preview of this film to renew my interest. Generally speaking, this is a nice and humorous Halloween-style film in which there was one scene I particularly liked and felt touched by: When Astrid (played by Jenna Ortega) and her mom met with her dad in the afterlife, and they sat and talked with genuine joy and smiles, regardless of the horrible look her dad retained, which reflected his death. It was a scene simple and natural, as if it was at an ordinary coffee shop, and yet it deeply demonstrated what a family is. October 2, 2024 # Penrose on Hawking and Nobel Prize It was widely known, perhaps at least among my readers, that British mathematical physicist Roger Penrose was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020 "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity". Regarding that Nobel Prize, however, I always considered it a great pity that Stephen Hawking, who also contributed a lot in that field, had passed away and therefore didn't get a chance to share the prize. Recently, I noticed in a book Stephen Hawking: Genius at Work that Penrose had made the following comment: "I am often asked if I thought that, had he survived, Stephen could have shared the prize too. It is not clear to me that the Nobel committee would have made this decision because it appears to be a requirement that such theoretical work needs observational confirmation and this is the kind of thing that my colleagues who were co-awarded the prize actually recently achieved." I was a little surprised that this comment had completely missed the point. First of all, the question Penrose attempted to answer was a hypothetical one ("had he survived"), and should be understood as assuming the same observational confirmation that had made Penrose's own prize possible. Secondly, LIGO's detection of the merger of two black holes, which happened two years before Hawking passed away, was no less observational confirmation than what Penrose's colleagues, who were co-awarded the prize, had achieved, and therefore would have negated Penrose's argument even if the hypothetical part of the question was dismissed. Training AI... a humorous schematics which itself was perhaps generated by AI, in an era in which Nobel Prizes in both Physics and Chemistry were, for the first time in history, awarded to AI-related works. :-)
October 15, 2024 # Film: Code 8: Part II Finished film Code 8: Part II on Netflix. This is a sequel to Code 8, which I watched several years ago (also on Netflix). Both films feature a fictitious society in which a small percentage of people have superhuman powers, and those people are marginalized and eventually have to hide their powers and live underground lives. Both films are more or less about the struggles of those people against law enforcement. The story of Code 8: Part II itself is OK ‒ but merely OK, with nothing particularly impressive. The general social background of the story, however, is a little odd, since the "villain", a law enforcement officer, was brought to justice by a video showing his supposedly non-lethal robotic dog killing a person. This is very normal in a normal society, but a little odd in so oppressive a society as pictured in this film. October 21, 2024 # Science in Magical World Watched film Hocus Pocus (in theater) by mistake ‒ because I so confidently confused it with Wicked (whose preview I watched a few weeks ago), that I didn't even bother checking the trailer before booking. While generally regrettable, it reminded me of one thing I would like to comment on. In this film, as well as in some other fantasy films that are set, by definition, in magical worlds, there are often characters who believe in science at the beginning, which makes not only those characters but science itself look dumb. Such plotting, though a humorous contribution to the stories, has a fundamental misunderstanding of science. Science is more a methodology of discovery than a static set of "laws". In a magical world, if there is anything that can be synthesized into a magic book, science would be the most probable way to discover it. The recipes in the magic book would be among the scientific "laws" in such a world, and a person who believes in science would be relatively knowledgeable rather than ignorant of the magical features of the world. October 31, 2024 # Happy Halloween! Happy Halloween! Although "a picture is worth a thousand words", I suppose a few words might be helpful, perhaps even necessary for some, in shedding light on those "thousand words" for the picture I'm sharing. Disguised under the Grim Reaper costume are "computer scientists" (to be understood in a broader sense) who, after conquering the Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry, are knocking on the door of the Fields Medal ‒ an equivalent of the nonexistent Nobel Prize in Mathematics.
By the way, it is actually quite a surprise that the Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry should fall into the hands of "computer scientists" before the Fields Medal does, since computation has a much closer theoretical relation to mathematics and made prominent contributions to the field much earlier, such as in the proof of the four-color theorem in 1976. "Computer scientists" might have won the Fields Medal back then if it were not for the age requirement (under 40) that the Fields Medal has. November 7, 2024 # Knowledge and Misinformation It was quoted from "a study published a couple of years ago" by D. J. Helfand in his 2016 book A Survival Guide to the Misinformation Age that we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of new data (roughly equivalent to 5 trillion books) every day. Since then, the speed of data creation has continued its explosive increase, reaching several hundred quintillion bytes per day in 2024. This is of course just the continuation of a trend that started long ago. Asimov once (in 1964, to be precise) worried that because "with each new generation our fund of scientific knowledge increases fivefold", he might not be able to keep up with the growth of knowledge. Compared to us, however, his worry might be our envy, since he only needed to keep up with knowledge, which was the dominant form of information in his time, while we are bathed in a vast ocean of data in which knowledge is almost infinitesimal compared to misinformation. November 15, 2024 # On Yahoo! Mail's UI Update This morning, I was surprised by a new look & feel of Yahoo! Mail (yes, I'm still on Yahoo! Mail since I'm old enough to predate Gmail). Just as a killer feature can establish the superiority of a product, a silly feature ‒ sometimes even a small one ‒ can steal the thunder from all the thought and effort that went into a product. The changes Yahoo! Mail rolled out this morning, unfortunately, contained such a feature: it introduced a tab called "Priority" for the inbox, which itself is not necessarily a bad idea (depending on how smart the definition of "Priority" is). But one thing clearly falls into the pit of silliness ‒ and I'm saying this as a senior software developer: it defaults to the "Priority" tab whenever I enter the inbox, disregarding my repeated attempts to switch to the "All" tab (the only tab that shows all inbox content). One of the most fundamental rules of UI design, I would say, is if you offer users a choice, as most new features should be offered as, then make it truly a choice rather than forcing it. While the issue this post is directly against will hopefully be fixed before long, the point nevertheless is still worth making. November 20, 2024 # Afterlife in Films Over the past several years, I have watched, alone or with kids, films that involved genius imagination of the afterlife (Coco, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, and Ghost Cat, to name a few). There are two features I noticed that are pretty much common in all such films: 1. The appearance of those in the afterlife mimics their appearance around the time of death. 2. Everyone (living or dead), when met in the afterlife, has an appearance roughly consistent with their relations (e.g., grandma looks older than mom, and mom looks older than daughter). These features are important to the stories (otherwise, how could living people find their afterlife relatives in a timely manner, as required by almost all such films?), but would conflict each other in most cases (for instance, what if the mom died at an age older than the grandma, or the daughter entered afterlife when she herself was old?). Such thinking is certainly too much for films, but would be necessary for those who hope for an afterlife and try to comfort themselves with a consistent picture. :-) December 2, 2024 # Hawking on Nobel Prize It came as a surprise that Playboy magazine, which bears a reputation as far removed from science as imaginable, once published a serious and even somewhat technical interview with Stephen Hawking that I recently came across. In that interview, Hawking was asked whether he thought he might someday receive the Nobel Prize, and his answer was: "Most of my work has been generally accepted. I have received a lot of recognition recently. But I don't know if I will ever get the Nobel Prize, because that is given only for theoretical work that has been confirmed by observation. It is very, very difficult to observe the things I have worked on." It was a pity that his answer, given in 1990 when the interview took place, remained largely valid during his lifetime, with LIGO's detection of the black hole mergers being the only exception ‒ but even that came too close to his death to make him a very deserved Nobel laureate. What happened to this post (50,000+ views, 800+ likes and 50+ replies in a day)? It's like a supernova in a small galaxy. I'm no newbie to social media and have had posts go relatively viral from time to time (though never before on this quiet account). But when that happened, it was always accompanied by numerous reposts (after all, most viral processes started with reposts), and the account would gain many new followers. None of that is happening here. So how did you guys even see this post? Was it picked up by some algorithm? [Notes: A reply from @ernestfriedmanhill: This seems to be how Threads works. I had one two weeks ago that went to 600+ likes and like 25 shares (for no obvious reason) ‒ and I got very few follows from it.] December 4, 2024 # Happy Holiday Season My post on the Playboy Hawking interview went relatively viral yesterday, triggering for the first time a continuous stream of notifications from the app that hosts my petty Threads account. It felt like I was teleported onto the center stage of a ceaseless feast with a crowd I never knew. About 24 hours later, however, the crowd disappeared "as traceless as a thaw of bygone snow" (to quote Christina Rossetti). And now I am, once again, with the old dozens of followers, and I wish each of you a happy holiday season. :-) >>> Later Posts >>>>>> Follow My Threads Account <<<<<< https://www.changhai.org/ |
