More about me than you really wanted to know

 From the comments to John Wilder's post on fasting for health.

Your comment about weighing less now than you did in HS made me ponder. My BMI as a Senior in high school was under 16. I had to gain weight to join the Army. Never mind the fact that I could back-press 800 pounds or ab-press 600 pounds (the max on the machines) until I got bored. Now I’m in my 50’s, medically retired, with 3 busted discs, and a BMI of, oh, let’s see… 42. No, I’m not diabetic. My total cholesterol is now 86, up from 32 back when I was twenty (oh, how the doctors hated me). Ah, the memories, health and metabolism of youth.

No, I’m not retired for the bad back. That happened later. (I’m a veteran. I’m disabled. I’m not a disabled veteran.) Migraine with brainstem aura and IBS, after one too many high fevers. (I survived 109 degrees with no treatment back when I was 13. I was unconscious for a week on the living room couch. Why yes, my parents were a bit dim and quite willing to let me die, thanks for asking.) I have all the side effects. And I’m resistant to or have serious reactions (some permanent) to every class of medication that might help. The doctor’s experiments were… unpleasant. (The experimental beef blood medicine was really tasty, but did nothing at all.) Some days I can walk. Some days I can talk. Once or twice a week I can do both, and that’s when we get groceries. (Migraines and IBS are related, as both are neurological disorders. The gut has half the neuron count of the brain, and the two communicate constantly. The same medicines are used to treat both.  Most doctors don't know this.)

But anyways, I tried Atkins back when it was popular. It works. But the desire for bread becomes really strong after a couple of weeks. Weight Watchers also works, because any diet plan that boils down to “eat less, work more” will work if you do it every day. It will work better if you lower your carb intake, of course.

Quatloos or Newbucks? The Egg!

So, after the collapse of the USA into Mad Max style anarchy, then the recreation of warring states, then the restoration of continental empire, what shall we call our currency?  My favorite names are Quatloos or Newbucks, but I'm a traditionalist.

But on a more serious topic, on what shall we base our money?  Gold and silver are traditional, but there is only so much, and our growing population (gotta encourage young couples to have more children, 'cause that's how the future happens) should not be restrained by something as arbitrary as the weight of metal in some vault.  I propose:  the egg.  Specifically, the current USDA large egg, grade A (which is a measure of freshness).

No, wait, I'm totally serious.  Okay, laugh, but then keep reading.

 

Eggs cannot be profitably hoarded.  They cannot be faked.  They cannot be digitized.  They have intrinsic value, but only for a little while.  Eggs are produced by farmers, the real backbone of any economy, but are only seriously valuable in the cities, where you can't raise your own chickens.  They must be produced and distributed daily, all year long, or people get hungry, then angry.

Eggs are inflation and deflation resistant.  You cannot sell half an egg.  An egg next year is still an egg.  An egg 50 years from now will still be an egg.  If the demand for eggs goes up, the price of chicken (and corn, etc.) will also rise as farmers adjust their production.  If the demand for eggs goes down, the price of chicken (and corn, etc.) will also go down as farmers adjust their production.

Imagine bankers and stock brokers waiting breathlessly to hear the quarterly farm report.

For reference, looking back a few decades, the retail price of a gross of large eggs correlates fairly well to the price of an ounce of silver.  I have to admit, though, that I think a coin with an egg-shaped hole in the middle would be really cool.

Merry Christmas!

 A very merry Christmas wish to all!

To all you heathen Leftists:  There is still time to repent and mend your ways.  God offers grace to all, if you sincerely repent, open your heart to Him, and behave decently.  Jesus Christ is hope.

Linux distros

 I've been playing around with Linux distros lately.  I've had an interest for years.  In fact, I bought a copy of Suse Linux in Germany 20 years ago.  Yes, the man pages were in German.  But with the advent of Windows 11 and the increasingly abhorrent nature of Microsux Windows, I went back to Linux looking for an alternative.

Wow, have things changed over the years.  There are so many different players on the field these days!  And so many different desktops!  And mixing and matching of all sorts lets you customize your experience.  And so many versions made expressly to welcome newcomers from the Microsux gulag.  I tried several out as virtual machines, then dusted off some old hard drives and slotted them in the external holder and got to installing multiple versions.  Here are my experiences on my 7 year old all-in-one computer with 16GB of ram with a dual core 2600MHz processor.

Open Suse:  Slow and annoying.

Fedora (formerly Red Hat) KDE:  Broken.  Terrible installer.  After installation it went into an infinite loop of failure, involving negative 1770 MB of updates.

KDE Neon Plasma:  Really good, if a touch slow.  KDE is definitely my favorite desktop environment, because it is so customizable.  I like being in control of my computer, not vice-versa.

Mint Cinnamon:  Excellent.  The Cinnamon desktop is my runner-up to KDE.  The feel is similar, but Mint just runs a bit smoother.

Peppermint:  No.  Just no.  Errors while installing.  Doesn't show newly installed programs without a reboot.  Do they think this is Windows?

Zorin:  Amazing.  This distro is expressly made for newbies, and is remarkably helpful.  When you're trying to do something, if it doesn't have what you're looking for, it can often recommend an alternative.  It offers hints about what it thinks you really meant to do, that are actually helpful.  The desktop layouts are limited, but they are really good.  The default desktop is more or less what I work to recreate with KDE.

Feren OS:  A remarkable work by one man.  Really very good.  It uses the KDE desktop on a Ubuntu base, with a healthy inspiration from Mint.  He really is taking the best of what he finds, and sewing them together into a beautiful and functional tapestry.  Privacy and anonymity are baked into everything, down to the custom browser installer app.

Pop OS:  It's good, if it's the only OS you're running.  Does not play well with others.

Manjaro XCFE:  Fast and well done, but not to my taste.  Manjaro, based on Arch, is a solid base to work with.

Manjaro Deepin:  Broken.  Windows are meant to move.

Manjaro Budgie:  Works well, but I just don't like it.

Manjaro KDE:  Excellent.  I like everything about it.

Garuda KDE Dr460nized:  This is the way.  It's based on Arch, and feels a lot like Manjaro, but with attitude and humor built in.  When I mess up typing my password, it insults me with movie and TV show quotes.  I really like the desktop layout, even if some of the widgets are a bit buggy.  The event calendar works properly when relocated to the bottom dock, for example.  It's running really well on a 128GB USB 3.1 flash drive.  Even the Grub boot screen is attractive, although secure boot doesn't recognize it.

Tools only work when you use them

 

Fuzzy, hollow black holes (spacetime governs motion)

For the physics geeks - I really enjoyed the new PBS (hack, ptui!) Spacetime video about hollow, fuzzy black holes. But I have a much, much simpler way to get to the same result.

https://www

Assume Spacetime is a field with a large positive baseline and a specific elasticity (inverse square law & C), which governs motion. (Momentum/velocity is a localized wave.) All other fields withdraw energy from Spacetime, which cannot go below a zero value. Gravity and relativistic effects result from the slope of local gradients. (Motion = sine, proper time = cosine.) That's it. That's all there is to it. What follows (among other things) is that black holes are fuzzy, hollow shells.  

Incoming particles hit the zero energy barrier and bounce, but they can't go out because of the nearly vertical gradient which keeps pushing them back in, so they just sort of slide around.  Each incoming particle makes the black hole a tiny bit larger and adds to its overall momentum.  This allows black holes to move through space and spin.  This also preserves the kinetic energy of the particles, because total energy must be preserved.  It prevents absurdities like singularities, negative energy, and infinite imaginary velocity.

It amuses and reassures me that I keep finding confirmation of my simple theory in different places and different topics.  (Note that my previous post on this topic was almost a month before the Spacetime video was released.)  I just wish I could find somebody in academia who would take this seriously.  Since I don't have a degree in the subject, I must obviously know nothing, right?  I guess physics using basic trigonometry and algebra just isn't sexy and complicated enough, unlike the 40 year failure that is string theory.

Black holes are where spacetime = 0

 Spacetime has a constant positive energy level, plus or minus uncertainty, which I will label ST.  All other fields, including motion, draw their energy from spacetime.  The total energy at any point in space = ST ± uncertainty.  We will ignore the uncertainty, as it has little to do with what follows.

Mass is energy.  No particle with mass can move at the speed of light, because doing so would require more energy than is available (ST).  Photons do not have mass, and only travel at the speed of light.

Gravity is the gradient of ST.

A black hole is the place where total used energy = ST.  There is no energy left remaining.  There is no gravity inside a black hole, because the gradient is zero.  This makes a black hole not a singularity, but a sort of discontinuity.

Each particle in a black hole has mass and energy.  Their velocity cannot be entirely directed towards the center of mass, because black holes spin and move through space.  And remember that there is no gravity inside the black hole, because the gradient, by definition, has been reduced to zero.

They are either a very compact mass or a hollow shell.  It has been shown that all the energy/mass of a black hole can be contained in a shell at the event horizon.  Every bit of energy added to the black hole makes the shell/event horizon just a tiny bit larger.