Happy New Year!

Hoping you all have a happy new year!  May it be better than the last!

Hmm...

Perhaps, given the history of the last few years, I should stop saying that?

Enjoy 2025!  Embrace the suck!

Merry Christmas!

 Best wishes for a very merry Christmas to all!

Goblin Bazaar

Goblins are bizarre, but that's not what this anthology is about.  It's about bazaars with goblins.  Run by goblins.  Goblins selling things.  Goblins being sold.  Goblins buying and selling you, if you let them.

It's a lot of fun.  Go check out the Goblin Bazaar.  It's the price of a fancy cup of coffee, but will last you a lot longer.

Cover art by Cedar Sanderson

Photons are particles, not waves

In today's Substack post, I explain why photons must be particles, not waves.

The simple version is that the long wavelength of a low energy photon takes a measurable time and space to reach peak amplitude, and this is something we do not ever actually see happen in nature.  Low energy signals would propagate more slowly than high energy ones.  This is a contradiction.  Therefore, a photon must be a spinning particle.  That also explains h, the reduced Planck constant.  

QED

Grand unification?

I'm pretty sure I've nearly achieved the grand unification of physics through the happy medium of simplifying several things.  I've been working through this in more detail over on my substack in a series of posts.  I'm getting near the end point of my quest, I think.  I'll eventually have to do a post summarizing everything again.

Everything except energy adds up to nothing.  Every change must maintain balance.

Time is the source of potential energy.  Chrono charge is quantized.  

We live in a positive matter and energy universe.

Potential energy is a real field, and the source of all other energy.

Conservation of total energy must be taken seriously.

Mass has inward pointing gravitic momentum and outward pointing inertial momentum.

There is no color charge.  The strong force is a combination of chrono charge and electric charge.

The electromagnetic and potentiokinetic (spacetime) fields are similar but orthogonal.

The Higgs field is a negative potential sink for rest mass.

And, as always, Copenhagen interpretation delenda est!

Whence momentum and gravity?

Let us begin by taking the conservation of total energy seriously. In order to be conserved, it must first exist. So we must have a field of potential energy, with an upper bound of 1 and a lower bound of 0. (You can’t have more than everything, and you can’t have less than nothing.) Any energy usage, from any cause, will subtract from this field to conserve total energy. Our field deforms, with an elasticity such that the deformation represents the inverse square law. Because this is what the equal spread of energy in all directions does. This deformation travels at the speed of causality, also known as the speed of light, c.

Well, now, that creates a gradient. Gradients are represented by vectors. In this case, the vectors will point down slope, towards the energy sink, which we will, for convenience, call mass. E = mc², after all. (Yes, I know this is a first approximation. We’ll get there.)

So we now have a 4-field with a scalar and a vector. (That sounds suspiciously like the electromagnetic field. As we shall see, they are related, but orthogonal.)

What is this scalar? It is potential energy. What is potential energy? It is the integral of time. Time is imaginary, as it is orthogonal to every dimension of space. That means that potential energy is a negative number.

What is the vector? Given that the magnitude of the vector is equivalent to the amount of lost potential energy, it must be kinetic energy, the integral of momentum. After all, we learn in first semester physics that kinetic energy plus potential energy is a constant. And that is precisely what we have here.

If momentum is mv, then kinetic energy is:  ½ mv²

If time is it, then potential energy is: -½ t²

(This is quite possibly the cause of spin 1/2 particles.)

So, where does this vector (or rather, field of vectors) point toward? Since they all point down slope, they must point toward the mass. Congratulations, we just discovered gravity. All hail the gradient!

So, with a motionless point mass, we have a classical gravitational field.

But what happens if the mass is moving? What does it even mean to be in motion?

Motion is obviously an imbalance in the kinetic energy portion of the field, which is equivalent to the instantaneous gradient in the potential energy. Instantaneous gradient - where have we heard that term before? Oh, yes - it is the differential. Which is time for potential energy, and momentum for kinetic energy.

So mass is identical for momentum, kinetic energy, and gravity, because they all have the same cause. Gravity, momentum, and kinetic energy are all effects.

In order to change the potential energy field, we must either withdraw or add energy to it. In either case, this requires a separate energy source or sink. Congratulations, we just discovered inertia.

What does our moving particle look like? We must take the speed of causation, which is the rate at which deformations propagate in our field, as a constant. That means that a moving mass will act as a longitudinal wave. The deformations before it must contract, and those behind it expand. This is another energy gradient in and of itself, even though the contractions and extensions themselves cancel out. (Never forget principle zero - everything adds up to nothing.) The induced kinetic energy subtracts from the potential energy field, increasing the total energy of the moving mass.

Congratulations, we just discovered special relativity. (I told you we’d get there.) We also just discovered redshift as a side effect of these directional gradients. After all, a photon being emitted from our moving body will gain energy from the downward gradient ahead, or lose energy from the upward gradient behind. Note that this applies equally to the emitter and receiver, so two bodies traveling with equal momentum will see no shift at all, because the gradients exactly cancel out.

How do we accelerate a particle? Acceleration is a gradient in the gradient, so the potential energy (and time) are continuously changing. The field must be increasingly squeezed before and stretched behind the accelerating particle. Therefore, so are the kinetic energy and momentum vectors. Congratulations, we just discovered general relativity.

We can even take these basic principles and apply them to the electromagnetic field, keeping in mind these propagate as transverse waves. (The orthogonality of the EM and PK fields keeps arising in surprising ways.) The magnetic moment of the electron can be viewed as the EM equivalent to the gravity of a motionless mass.

So, as we can see, everything flows from taking the conservation of energy seriously.

Cross posted from my Substack.  Like and subscribe!

Addendum 1:  The Higgs field would seem to be superfluous, since the potential energy field can supply the missing mass with much less complication.  I need to research and ponder this some more.

Addendum 2:  Time spin or chrono charge?  Chrono charge seems simpler, and aligns better with positive and negative electric charges.  It also makes a neutral position make more intuitive sense.  Positive = matter, negative = antimatter, neutral = doesn't matter.  I think I like this better.  It leaves the concept of spin open for mass, which doesn't seem to care if it's matter or antimatter.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Best wishes for a happy Thanksgiving to all!

Remember, the first Thanksgiving was the English pilgrims thanking God for teaching them (the few survivors) the evils of communism.

True Communism

The zealots of the Left always proclaim that "true Communism" hasn't been tried.

Bullshit.

I joined the Army when I was 19 to fight Communism.  I served in West Berlin.  When I got there, they were still killing their own people who were trying to escape.  The Communists killed a dozen Soldiers from my unit in three separate attacks in the three years I was there.  (The Cold War wasn't all that cold in Berlin.)

Communism isn't an economic theory.  It's a religion of total human control.  It is evil distilled down into its most abhorrent form, given teeth, and then told to bite and spread its disease among the innocent.  And its teachings and methods have been wholly embraced by the modern Left, including all the influential powers of the Democrat party.

Read To Shatter Men's Souls if you dare.  It may be fictionalized, but it's all true.  True Communism.

Pulpy goodness

I like a double helping of pulpy humor every now and then.  So I listen to The Thrilling Adventure Hour podcast while I'm doing the dishes.  They only update once per month these days, but the WorkJuice Coffee players have been putting on their shows for years.

• Don your robot fists and strap on your astro-spurs with Sparks Nevada, Marshal on Mars.
• Combat evil with the power of lasers alongside Captain Laserbeam.
• Solve supernatural troubles with a martini shaker in a fashionable penthouse apartment in Beyond Belief.
• Fight for Truth, Justice, and more comfortable shoes with Miss America.

Give them a try.  It's not like it costs anything.

The importance of readability

Software has to meet several goals, some of which may conflict with each other.

• It has to work.  Performing a function is the entire point.
• It has to be efficient.  This may involve using less time, memory, power, etc.
• It has to be maintainable.  80% of programming is debugging and updating.

To be maintainable, your code must be readable.  The trade-off between readability, writability, functionality, and efficiency is why there are so many different programming languages.  Well, that and fashion trends in the industry.

What is readable code?  That's partly opinion, partly experience, but also partly objective fact.  "GOTO considered harmful" isn't just a meme, it was a real wake up call for the industry 56 years ago.

XKCD

Spaghetti code may sound delicious, but it's a toxic mess for others to try to clean up.

That brings me around to one of the main points of my programming language, Listack.  I have been fascinated by stack based languages ever since I read a book on Forth way back when I was a teen.  I even implemented Forth in BASIC.  It was incredibly slow, but it worked.  And then, a few years ago, I discovered Factor.  It's a modern stack-based language.  Factor lead me to Joy about the same time I discovered the False esolang.  Joy has (for a programming language) a relatively large amount of well written theory behind it.  False is an extremely minimal language, but it shares a lot of conceptual space with Joy.  I enjoyed learning a bit about all these languages.  I even implemented a False interpreter in Python.

The problem is that, like Forth, these are all write-only languages.  They're efficient, they're fun, they're concatenative, and they're terrible to try to read a program of any complexity at all.  But hey, at least they're not APL.

And then I started learning to program in Nim.  It's a more-or-less standard high level, compiled language.  It has Python-like syntax with significant whitespace (no curly braces or semicolons needed).  And it has uniform function call syntax.  That was a revelation for me.

That's where I got the idea for Listack.  I could make a more readable stack-based language.  Like most stack based languages, it would be concatenative.  It would make heavy use of first-class functions and combinators.  And it would be my creative contribution to the art of programming.  Note how handy the immediate block (code blob) makes things.

Compare these code snippets.  They all do the same thing.

style                    simple                                complex    

Call:          +(1, 2)     func1(data1, func2(data3, data4))

Prefix:         +: 1 2      func1: data1 (func2: data3 data4)

Infix:          1 + 2       data1 func1 (data2 func2 data3)

Postfix:        1 2 .+      data1 data2 data3 .func2 .func1

Concatenative style aids readability.  It's easier to follow the logic when it's written left to right than when it is inside out.

inside out:      func3(func2(func1(data1), data2), data3)

concatenative:   data1 .func1 data2 .func2 data3 .func3

Then I added one more thing that may be genuinely unique - the single word comment.  One of the major problems with powerful and efficient languages like Factor and Lisp is that they have almost no syntax.  That helps the language designers and talented macro programmers, but it significantly reduces readability.

Compare these code snippets.  They all do the same thing.

(truth test) {good branch} {bad branch} .if

(truth test) if {good branch} {bad branch}

if: (truth test) {good branch} {bad branch}

if: (truth test) #then {good branch} #else {bad branch}

Syntactic sugar is important for code readability.

easier to follow                                  harder to follow

if: (test one)                if: (test one)

#then {if: (test two)             {if: (test two)

    #then {good good}                 {good good}

    #else {bad good}                  {bad good}

    }                             }

#else {if: (test three)           {if: (test three)

    #then {good bad}                  {good bad}

    #else {bad bad}                   {bad bad}

    }                             }

Less boring content

In an effort to bore "normal" people a little less, I am moving my science rantings over to Substack.

Copenhagen Interpretation delenda est!

Don't worry.  I'll continue to bore you with my other esoteric hobbies here.

The "no more deficits" amendment, with teeth

Proposed amendment to the US Constitution:

  1.  Any federal deficit spending outside time of war shall result in the confiscation and sale of all assets, tangible and intangible, of every member of Congress who voted to pass the bills authorizing that excessive spending, as well as of their immediate family members, saving three sets of clothing each and a single motor vehicle for the entire family. Two consecutive years of deficit spending outside a time of war shall result in the execution of those members of Congress who voted to pass the spending bills.

  2.  These penalties are to be enforced by the judicial branch, headed by the members of the Supreme Court, within no more than 90 days from the date of the passage of the bill or bills authorizing the excessive spending.

  3.  Failure to enforce said penalties by the legislative branch in a timely manner shall result in the execution of every member of the Supreme Court by the executive branch within a further 7 days.  The executive branch shall then have a further 30 days to enforce the penalties prescribed by paragraph one above.

  4.  If the executive branch fails to enforce the penalties prescribed above in a timely manner, the federal government shall be declared in breach of its collective duties, immediately dissolved of all power and authority, and every elected or appointed member of that government declared to be outside the bounds of the law.  Let any man's hand be raised against them, their immediate families, and their property.

  5.  Within 30 days of such time as described in paragraph four above, the governors of the various States shall meet in conclave to select, by majority vote or random chance, one of their members to assume the role of chief executive for a period of no more than 180 days.  During this period, new elections for all federal Representatives and Senators, as well as for the President and Vice President, shall be arranged and conducted.

  6.  Time of war, for the purposes of this amendment, includes only a period from the date Congress formally declares war against a specific enemy nation or group of nations, through no more than 90 days after the cessation of hostilities in that specific conflict, either by victory, defeat, or stalemate. Any period of six consecutive months during which fewer than 100 US citizens are killed or injured by enemy action in that specific conflict shall count as the cessation of hostilities by stalemate.

The 11th hour, of the 11th day, of the 11th month

1918.  The guns finally dell silent.  Four years of bloodletting finally stumbled to a close.  Half a generation of men had succumbed to the wills of uncaring kings and incompetent aristocrats.

But hey, at least the peace plans unleashed the Socialist menace and guaranteed a new war a generation later.

Happy birthday, Marines!

I wish a very happy birthday to our nation's second oldest armed service, the United States Marines.  Who are, in fact, older than their "parent" service, the U.S. Navy.  Yes, they really were formed in the back room of a bar.

VB day + 35 years

35 years ago today, we won the Cold War.  The Berlin Wall fell to the will of the people.  Communism failed, and the world would know peace instead of nuclear obliteration.  There was so much hope and joy.

I was there.  When I got to Berlin, the border guards were still killing people trying to escape.  When I left, Germany was once again a single nation.  We knew it would take them at least a generation to heal the wounds.

(Pictures as found elsewhere on the internet.)

Action/reaction

 

Election funnies

 

Time conservation

Okay, so my theory of spacetime as a potentiokinetic field checks out by everything I have looked up, and explains things I didn't know or understand before.  Time (potential energy) is imaginary, and its spin is positive (particles) or negative (anti-particles).  Charge is directly tied to time, so an anti-particle (with opposite time) must have the opposite charge.  Neutrinos carry time (potential energy).  Thus, electro-weak theory is created from first principles.

In particle decay, charge and time are both conserved (among other things).  This explains the charge-parity conservation violations, as time is what is really important.  Thus, CPT symmetry is conserved, and my explanation is much more simple and elegant.

Neutrinos carry time.  Left-handed neutrinos are the matter particle, so time is left handed.  Anti-neutrinos are right handed, and carry anti-time.  Note that they're not really going backwards in time, their time (potential energy) component is spinning in the opposite direction.

Particle decay always results in an even number of new time-based entities (quarks, leptons) being created, and they always appear in particle / anti-particle pairs.  This is because time must be conserved.  Photons do not have time, and so are chronometrically neutral.  For example B- decay converts a neutron into a proton, creating an electron to balance the charge (positive + negative = neutral) and an antineutrino to balance the time (positive time + negative time = neutral).  B+ decay converts a proton to a neutron, creating a positron to balance charge and a neutrino to balance time.

You can imagine the handedness of time instead as a one dimensional (scalar) property, being positive (normal matter), negative (antimatter), or zero (photons).

So, everything adds up to nothing, except energy density, which is a constant determined by potential energy, which is time.  Energy and time cause change to happen in space.

------

Our positive matter, positive time universe exists.  Everything adds up to nothing, except potential energy, which is time.  Cosmologically, a negative time, negative energy universe to balance our own is logical.  However, we have no means of knowing, as we went in opposite directions of time from the moment of creation.  Everything adds up to nothing.

------

No, antimatter is not moving backwards in time the way movies would have it.  They have opposite handed chronometric spin.  They proceed from cause to effect just like everything else.  All energy is positive, with an upper bound of the Planck energy and a lower bound of zero.  But some of it is moving in different directions.

------

Gravity is a combination or kinetic energy, its gradient, and the gradient in potential energy.  Every form of energy is deducted from potential energy, but the elasticity of space creates a curve, not a pinprick.  Thus, the potential usually has a gradient.  This creates motion in the direction of lower potential energy, which is acceleration towards the source of the energy drain (matter), which is kinetic energy.  And so all forms of energy always add up to a constant.

Motion (velocity, momentum) is a local perturbation is the potentiokinetic field.  It is a wave whose velocity (speed + direction) is determined by its own local gradients.  These gradients can also be observed through the effects of special relativity.  Photons emitted in the direction of travel gain a boost of energy from the local down gradient, while photons emitted in the opposite direction lose energy to the uphill climb, as it were.  So two particles with the same velocity will exchange photons that have the exact same energy (to them), while particles travelling in different directions will exchange photons with more or less energy depending upon the velocities involved.

And thus, nearly everything derives from first principles and geometry.  Some things still need to be measured to be known, though.  Why is the speed of causation and the elasticity of space what they are?  No idea.  But they can be measured.

I accidentally unified physics?

It's a bold claim, I know.  But I may have accidentally unified physics.

Potentiokinetic Field

What we call spacetime is really a field of scalar of potential (proper/subjective time) and a 3D vector of kinetic (space/motion/momentum).  When you square these, you have potential energy and kinetic energy.  Thus, the potentiokinetic field (instead of a confusing spacetime).  Exactly like the electromagnetic field is a combination of a scalar electric charge and a 3D vector of magnetic flux, which when squared produce electric energy and magnetic energy.

Fun fact:  Newton's force law, f = ma, can be derived from this.  Veritasium video

Electro-Weak-Potential, Strong-Kinetic correspondence

The weak force (nuclear decay/fission) corresponds directly to potential energy/time and also to the electric charge - all scalars.  (CPT symmetry)  So I was idly wondering, what if the strong force (nuclear force/fusion) corresponded to the 3D vector of momentum?  Well, the weird part of the strong force is the color charge, which always has to balance to clear (nothing), with three different colors (red, green, and blue) and their anti-colors.  Which correspond roughly to the three dimensions of space, but where r+g+b = 0.  (Think of them each as pulling 120 degrees away from each other.)  The composite particle is stable when the pulls cancel out.  So color charge is equivalent to momentum if you squint hard enough at it.

Rule of 1+3

• The electromagnetic field is a scalar and a 3D vector.  1+3
• The potentiokinetic field is a scalar and a 3D vector.  1+3
• The weak-strong field would be a scalar and a 3D vector.  1+3
• Everything works in 1D time and 3D space.  1+3
• Thus, all of physics is 1+3 fields of 1+3.

Everything checks.  There are no contradictions.  There are no infinities.  There are no singularities.

• Everything adds up to nothing.
• Except for time and energy.
• Proper (subjective) time is potential energy.
• Potential energy is real energy.
• Time is the potential for change.
• Time is the reservoir from which all other things are made possible.
• Energy density is a constant.
• This includes the potential energy of time.
• This is the Planck energy constant.
• There is no such thing as negative (anti) energy.
• This is completely different from opposite charges and spins, which are all different forms of positive energy.
• The lowest an energy level can go is zero.
• In a theoretically empty space, potential energy is maximized, because all other energies are zero.
• Black holes are hollow shells of maximal energy density surrounding the absolute nothingness of zero potential energy (no time).  

Cosmology

Rule 0 of physics holds that everything adds up to nothing, except for time and energy.  But what if these aren't really exceptions?

At the moment of creation, space, time, and energy were created.  Equal amounts of time and anti-time, equal amounts of energy and anti-energy, and space and anti-space.  The negative energy (and thus, anti-matter) went with the negative time and space, and the positive energy went with the positive time and space.  Thus, a universe and anti-universe were simultaneously created, each the opposite of the other, maintaining rule zero.  From nothing emerged a total of nothing.  (This can be adapted to creation in a pre-existing infinite space, because negative and positive space are identical.)

What are space and time? What is spacetime?

What are space and time?  What is spacetime?  This is not a joke, nor is it an idle question.  The answer concerns the deepest mysteries and confusions at the heart of physics.

Space and time are fixed references.  We know this is so for two reasons.

• Every measurement ever made of the large scale universe shows it to be flat (Euclidean).
• Special relativity depends upon the Pythagorean theorem, which requires Euclidean geometry to be true.  Experiments show it to be true.
• Every test ever made shows the speed of causation to be finite and fixed.

However, we know spacetime is curved.

• Special relativity describes the curving of space (contraction) and time (dilation).
• General relativity depends upon hyperbolic geometry.  Experiments show it to be true.

How can these two contradictory facts both be true in a universe without contradictions?

Category error.  Imprecise terminology.  They do not, cannot describe the same things.

• Space and time are fixed references.
• What we call spacetime is two separate but interdependent fields - kinetic (space) and potential (time) energy.

Just as the electric and magnetic fields guide and are influenced by the motions of charges (a type of energy), so too do the kinetic and potential fields depend upon each other and the motion of matter (a type of energy).

These are the fundamental laws of the universe:

• Magnetic - Electric = 0
• Kinetic - Potential = 1

Yes, potential energy (time squared) is negative.  That's because time is imaginary.  That's because time is a sort of spin.  Spins are scalars with opposites.  That implies antimatter is matter with opposite time spin.  Which implies that electric charges (opposite scalars) are types of spin which have positive and negative values in comparison to the spin of time.

You only have kinetic energy when you have motion (a vector).  You only have magnetic energy when you have motion (a vector).  Yet you always have electric charge (a scalar) and potential energy (a scalar).

So here we have another pairing:  vector with scalar.  So perhaps we should rewrite our basic equations:

• ||Magnetic|| - Electric = 0
• ||Kinetic|| - Potential = 1

Reminder

 

On the nature of neutrinos

Oh, the things that seem so simple after you've figured out the trick.

Photons are energy in space but not time.

Neutrinos are energy in time but not space.

Mass is a binding of space and time.

Thus, neither neutrinos nor photons have mass, and both travel at the speed of causality.  Photons do not change, because they have no time.  Neutrinos constantly change, because they are little else but time.

Neutrinos carry the weak force.  The weak force governs decay.  Spontaneous decay is entirely caused by time.  That's why they're called half lives - half of the number of particle p will decay in time t.

---

Time is a type of spin.  Anti- particles have opposite spin time.  Electric charge can be thought of as a spin in the same direction as time (arbitrarily plus), or the opposite direction (arbitrarily minus).  Thus, an anti-electron (positron), with negative time, to have a negative charge from its own perspective, must have a positive charge from ours.  Positive time, negative charge.  Negative time, positive charge.

Proof of pilot wave theory

A photon is emitted by an electron shedding energy as it drops to a lower energy orbital around a nucleus.  This photon has a highly specific energy, shown by its wavelength/frequency (these are inverses).  The photon is emitted in a random direction as the electron orbits.  The atom as a whole is also moving, if only through Brownian motion.

Does the frequency of the photon depend on the direction it took compared to the motion of the electron that created it?  No.  Does its frequency depend on the motion of the atom that it originated from?  No.  How do we know?  Lasers work.  The whole point of a laser is to produce a coherent beam of light in one and only one frequency.  And yet, the electrons are moving at ludicrous speed around the nucleus, but there is no massive red or blue shift.  All the photons emitted are of the same wavelength.  Presumably, all photons are emitted in the direction of travel of their parent electron at the time, like how a sling will send a stone in its instantaneous direction of travel when released.

But how do red and blue shift happen?  These are real effects, easily measured.

The only way for red and blue shift to happen is for the guiding waves to build up or stretch out.  No individual photon shifts its own frequency, but motion in a certain direction will bunch up the waves in that direction while stretching out the waves behind it.  This stretching and compaction we see as red and blue shift, because the waves themselves add energy to the photons passing through them in the proper direction.

Where do these waves come from?  The object moving.  It's made of particles, each of which of moving in space, most (the vast majority, really) of which have electromagnetic properties.  Thus, a build up of energy in the direction of motion, with a corresponding decrease in the opposite direction.  Both the EM field and spacetime exhibit this behavior.

Two objects moving in the same direction would have compression and elongation exactly cancelling each other out.  An object approaching another would have an excess of compression, thus blue shift.  Two objects receding from each other would have an excess of stretching, thus red shift.

Aside - I sincerely admire the profound relationship between the EM field and spacetime.

    Electric energy - Magnetic energy = 0

    Kinetic energy (space^2) - Potential energy (time^2) = 1

How to update file types in Linux Mint

I have spent the last few hours trying various things to update the .odin file type associations in Linux Mint.  Here is what I found that actually worked.

Open /usr/share/mime/packages as root.

Create a new file called your-file-type.xml.  The one I created is: x-odin.xml
(The "x-" follows an established pattern for programming source code.)

Inside this file, have text similar to the following, but with your information replacing the bits in color:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<mime-info xmlns="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info">

  <mime-type type="text/x-odin">

    <comment>Odin source file</comment>

    <generic-icon name="OdinO"/>

    <glob pattern="*.odin"/>

  </mime-type>

</mime-info>

The "glob pattern" line is where you associate the file extension.  "*.odin" means any file ending with ".odin".

Place various sized versions of the icon you want to use in the various size folders in: /usr/share/icons/theme-name/mimetypes.  In my case, that's /usr/share/icons/Mint-Y/mimetypes.  Make sure the icons are all named the same as the whatever you use in the generic-icon-name line above.  .png files seem to work well, but make sure you create a large one, and then scale it down to the various sizes (16, 24, 32, 48, 64, 128 pixels).

Once you've done all that, open a terminal in the /usr/share/mime/packages folder and type (replace x-odin with your file name):

    sudo xdg-mime install --mode system x-odin.xml

    sudo update-mime-database /usr/share/mime

Once the system has finished updating, behold your newly associated file type with its lovely, hand-crafted icon.  Now, all you have to do is associate the file type with a program to open it.  That's done by right clicking on an appropriate file, selecting "open with", "other application", choosing the proper application, and then clicking on "set as default".

That's all you have to do.  Why is it this convoluted?  I'm guessing historical reasons, as in they made it up as they went along.  Simple is much, much more difficult to achieve than complex.

Space-X did it!

Just a few minutes ago, millions of people watched Space-X launch Starship, recover the booster with 'Mechazilla', take Starship up to orbit, then drop it back down for a soft landing in the water precisely on target.

They did it.  The crazy geniuses actually did it.

Remember this day.

The four types of programming languages

There are four types of programming languages.  I'm not talking about the religious differences between object oriented, procedural, and functional languages.  I'm talking about something more fundamental - syntactic structure.  The vast majority of computer languages (excepting esoteric or very primitive ones) fall into the four camps of ALGOL, LISP, APL, and Forth/Joy.  These differ based on how you read and understand the code.

Note:  Examples are not necessarily valid code in these languages.

ALGOL:  Left to right (left or right associative based on what makes sense, usually), prefix (except infix operators like '+' and '*'), inside out.  These are the procedural languages most programmers are familiar with.

    command(arg1)
    command(arg1, arg2)
    command(arg1, arg2, arg3)
    command-a(arg1a, command-b(arg1b, arg2b), arg3a)
    add(1, 2 * 3)
    if (3 > 2) then {print("true")} else {print("false")}

LISP:  Left to right (no associativity), prefix (always), inside out.

    (command arg1)
    (command arg1 arg2)
    (command arg1 arg2 arg3)
    (command-a arg1a (command-b arg1b arg2b) arg3a)
    (add 1 (* 2 3))
    (if (> 3 2) (print "true") (print "false"))

    

APL:  Left to right (right associative), prefix or infix, inside out.  It's easier to read right to left.

    command1 arg1
    arg1 command1 arg2
    there are no 3 or more argument commands in APL
    arg1a command-a arg1b command-b arg2b
    1 add 2 x 3            this is the same as 1 add (2 x 3)
    3 > 2 ⍳ ⎕  ← "true" ⋄ "false"            I got this from an AI prompt.  APL is weird.

Forth / Joy:  Left to right (usually no associativity), postfix (usually, unless it's immediate, which looks like prefix or infix).

    arg1 command
    arg1 arg2 command
    arg1 arg2 arg3 command
    arg1a arg1b arg2b command-b arg3a command-a
    2 3 * 1 add
    Forth:  3 2 > if "true" print else "false" print then
    Joy:  3 2 > ["true" print] ["false" print] ifte

The ALGOL (procedural) family of languages make regular use of syntactic sugar to make reading the code easier.  The annoying-to-learn syntax is what makes it more readable, and programmers spend much more time reading code than writing it.  That's part of why they have mostly conquered the programming world, despite the niche technical superiority of the other language styles.  

What is woo-hoo?

Scientific woo-hoo is the propagation of nonsense.  It is the belief in magic, draped in the robes of science.  The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics has done more harm to science than even the global warming cash and power grab.

Woo-hoo is the belief that particles don't have properties until a scientist measures them.  They really believe this, because they have been carefully trained, for generations, to not think.  (Don't believe me?  Look up the history of rogue waves in the ocean.  Despite sailors knowing about them for millennia, they "didn't exist" until scientists finally documented one hitting an oil platform in 1995.)

Woo-hoo is the belief that math is more real than reality, that models are more important than observation, that the map really is the territory, that doctrine is more important than thought.

Woo-hoo is the belief that a particle in a superposition is actually in multiple states and multiple places at the same time.

Woo-hoo is the belief that in a double split experiment, a single photon splits itself into multiple existences, some traveling slower than the speed of light while others travel faster, so it can interfere with itself along the way to the detector.

Woo-hoo is the belief that entangled particles don't have properties until a scientist measures one of them, then the other instantaneously becomes something as well.  This is the belief that if you flip a coin and see heads on top, the bottom suddenly and magically becomes tails.  The belief that if you take a pair of shoes, randomly place them in separate boxes, and mail one box to China, that box will suddenly and magically contain a left shoe the instant you open the other box and find it contains the right shoe.

Woo-hoo is the ongoing experiments to see if a particle quantum tunneling through a barrier teleports or moves faster than light.  The reality is so much more simple.  The particle tunneling its way out of a barrier does so because at that random instant, the barrier isn't there.  A tunnel momentarily opens up through sheer Brownian chance.  The particles and fields comprising the barrier have randomly moved and changed in such a way that the barrier is no longer a barrier at that particular time and place.  If you shake a box of ping pong balls long enough, while looking through a pair of holes on opposite sides of the box, there will eventually come a moment when you can see clearly through the box because all the balls are randomly not in the way.

Woo-hoo is believing that black holes really are singularities of infinite density, with alternate universes inside them.

Woo-hoo is actually believing the 'many worlds' hypothesis is in any way scientific.

Woo-hoo is the uncritical belief that Bell's theorem disproves local realism, despite Bell's inequality being obviously based on a strawman argument.  (Bell "proves" that triangle waves are not identical to sine waves, that straight lines are not curves.  The fact that nobody ever suggested they were somehow seldom gets mentioned, and those who do quickly lose their jobs and voices in the industry.  Pour encourager les autres.)

Woo-hoo is the unquestioning belief that the expansion rate of the universe randomly changes over time, never asking how or why.  So many questions left unasked - how would the rate change everywhere, evenly, at the same time?  If this is a real effect, and I am by no means assured it is (there are a lot of adjustments made to observational data), then it is the most definite proof of the existence of God I have ever seen.

Woo-hoo is strangling science through magical thinking.

Spacetime, again

I dislike repeating myself. However, the contradictions at the heart of modern physics annoy me even more.  I despise all the self propagating woo-hoo and lack of thought.

The basic principles of spacetime: 

1) There is no such thing as negative (anti) energy. Some forms of energy are opposites, but all are energy.

2) Proper time is potential energy. (This is well modeled in particles as imaginary spin. Anti-particles have the opposite spin.) 

3) The energy density at every point is a constant. (upper limit = Planck, lower limit = 0) 

4) Spacetime is the field governing motion. (Particle motion is a perpetual, localized wave. This creates blue and red shift all by itself.) Note that none of these simple principles violate observations. 

There are no contradictions, no infinities, no singularities. Black holes are not singularities, they are hollow shells of maximal (Planck) energy density surrounding an area of zero potential energy.  Space is flat (Euclidean), (proper) time is imaginary, spacetime is hyperbolic (because when you square an imaginary number, you get a negative real number).

The contradictions at the heart of physics

Modern physics is broken because physicists have been carefully taught to not think.  I mean this quite literally.  "Shut up and calculate" is the prevailing model of the universe!

Let us take something simple - the uncertainty of knowledge.  Okay, maybe it's not that simple.  But it should be.  Quantum physics states quite plainly that all information is locally hidden until a measurement is made.  It actually goes further to say the information doesn't exist until the measurement is made, but that's a separate idiocy for another time.  Quantum physics also states that, due to Bell's inequality, local hidden information is impossible.  The vast majority of physicists take both of these propositions to heart without any critical reflection whatsoever.  Thus, they internalize contradictions as part of their formal training.

Please forgive my repeated rant here against Bell's inequality.  In his papers, Bell carefully sets up a straw man argument, then knocks it down.  Thus, using his paper as proof, you can make the most outlandish claims - that entangled particle pairs cannot contain hidden information (even as the information must be hidden due to the probabilistic nature of the quantum wavefront), that the particle pairs communicate instantaneously over great distances when you finally do measure them, and that there is no such thing as local realism.  These claims are only possible due to the nonsensical nature of Bell's inequality.

What is the problem with bell's paper and its famous inequality?  What is the inequality?  In summary, Bell showed that sawtooth waves are not identical to sine waves.  Shocking, I know.  Where do the sawtooth waves come from?  He made them up with mathematical sleight of hand.  There has never been the slightest indication that any particle acts in any way like a sawtooth wave.  And yet that's what Bell uses to claim that entangled particles must communicate instantaneously, and that there is no such thing as local realism.  I'm quite serious.  Go read the paper yourself, and marvel at the hubris used to create the straw man sawtooth particle.  Then cry that it has been taken very, very seriously indeed by generations of scientists.

Bell's original paper (pdf)

By the way, I'm not the first to notice this.  Some scientists have complained about it since just a few years after the paper was published.  However, these men seem to share similar fates in having their funding mysteriously cut off after announcing that the emperor has no clothes.  And those who spend tens of millions of dollars proving the tautology (waves act like waves) win Nobel prizes, thus reinforcing the power of "woo-hoo" politics in modern physics.  Shut up and calculate!

Closures

In programming, a closure seems to be this mystical thing.  There are endless reams of research and obscurely technical explanations of what a closure is and how they work.  I hate, loathe and despise needless complexity.

A closure is a function to be used later, which uses some of the data currently available, packaged together.  Enclosed, if you will.

So, in Listack terms, if you have a data stack, and a function to be used later that depends on the current state of some of the data, you package together the data with the function for later use.  This is a closure of the function over the data.  So, if you have a function that will depend on two data objects, you write:

        rest_of_stack data1 data2 \.func 3 .enlist >block  

which produces:

        {data1 data2 .func}

When the later time finally arrives, you simply invoke the closure.

        rest_of_stack {data1 data2 .func} .eval

We could even make a procedure to create closures.  Note that most of the procedure is purely for error handling.

    def: "make_closure" [Seq, Int]

    {    # will make a closure over n data items and one sequence

        dup < o     # the closure can't contain fewer than no data items

        iff {

            drop drop 

            "Closures may not have a negative number of arguments" .set_err

            exit

        }

        dup > (depth - 3)     # must have enough items on the stack

        iff {

            drop drop 

            "Stack not deep enough for number of closure arguments" .set_err

            exit

        }

        1 .+  .enlist >block        # the actual closure: {d1 d2 d3 ... dn seq}          

    }

    def: "make_closure" [Block, Int]

    {    # could also be:    \.eval swap 1 .+ .make_closure

        swap >seq swap .make_closure

    }    # could have used dip instead

    def: "make_closure" [Word, Int]

    {    # a b \func .dip --> a func b

        \>seq .dip .make_closure

    }    # could have just repeated the original definition, but where's the fun in that?

 

Don't Roll a One!

Introducing the new gonzo role playing system, "Don't roll a one!" (DROne)

Seriously, that's the rule. Players roll a die type (d4-d20) based on their PC's attributes, class, and level. When they want to do something, they roll the appropriate die. If it's not a one, they succeed. The PC is good at most things, but has some skill they are comically terrible at. When attempting that, any roll except a one fails. Mooks flip a coin, pass (2) / fail (1).

Because there is always a need for comedy (like Drunken Master or Kung Fu Hustle), there is an alternate PC - the Plague Carrier. The plague carrier fails on any roll except a one. Except for the one skill the PC is comically good at. When attempting that, the Plague Carrier succeeds at any roll except a one.

Opposed rolls are won by the highest roll, unless everybody fails. A tie is won by the highest die type, or the side who initiated the action. Help actions have everybody roll, take the highest, and add one for each other person helping - but if anybody fails, they all fail.

I stopped caring 20 years ago this month

I was an Army Counterintelligence NCO. My team did CI/HUMINT in Iraq way back when. At the end of the year, our replacements showed up. They were National Guard linguists (not Arabic) who had been involuntarily reclassified to CI and given a three week crash course. Three of them, that is. The fourth team member, their driver, was a mechanic. Sounds great, yes? The mechanic had no security clearance. Every mission, every meeting, was at least Secret. See the problem here?

And then, on our first joint mission outside the wire (an easy one), their team lead totally freaked out and drew his pistol on me. I was a lot faster with my rifle, and talked him down. Oh, and they openly disdained our/their interpreter. Being a classified unit, our ‘terp was an American, with a Top Secret clearance. (He asked if we could take him back home with us. Unfortunately, he was on a separate contract.) That’s the quality of people we left as our replacements. (History - different time and place, had a US citizen 'terp stolen from us by an SF unit, then abandoned in-country the next day when they didn't need him any more. That guy walked over 50 miles back to the base on his own.)

What really broke me was the day a US convoy was ambushed on the highway outside the base. We could hear the shooting and explosions, and see the dust cloud raised. When I ran into the operations center to see if they knew, the officer in charge said they were listening to it on the radio, isn’t it great? I asked when they were going to send out the quick reaction force to help. He looked totally confused, and asked why would they do that? When I explained in small words that the primary purpose of the unit and the base was to support and protect friendly convoys transiting that highway, the response was, “We can’t do that. Somebody might get hurt!”

I broke that day, rather than than start shooting officers, because I had a family to take care of, and they wouldn’t appreciate me being the subject of a “60 Minutes” special report.  So I simply stopped caring.  A couple weeks later, I pissed off the base commander enough he PNG'd (Persona Non Grata) me off his base.  I spent months, as a senior NCO, with nothing to do but be a spare body on missions outside the wire.  The team sergeants were ordered to ignore me.  The best of them didn't of course.  They came to me quietly for advice.  The worst actually did ignore me, and blew mission after mission due to their incompetence.

But I no longer cared, so that was okay.  None of what we did really mattered in the long run, anyways.  There was never any attempt to actually pacify Iraq, because that's not what the politicians wanted.

And then the unintelligible (and I mean that) Nigerian lieutenant (who came to the USA by way of Russia and France), whom somebody thought would be a good idea to make a counterintelligence officer, started sexually harassing our (happily married) female NCO.  We also found out he was physically abusing detainees.  As we gathered and documented the evidence against him, one of his junior enlisted buddies (yet another bad thing) found out and snitched.  So he accused all three team leaders, the best NCOs in that platoon, of EO violations.  Of course our company commander believed a fellow officer, no matter how unintelligible, over mere enlisted pukes.  So he sent those three Staff Sergeants back home early for courts-martial.

And then the Battalion sent me home with the first wave to return.  That gave me two weeks to save those NCOs.  Since we got home the night of Christmas Eve (Thanks, Ed!), I had the space between Christmas and New Years Day to testify to the Court officers.  (It was really handy that the Court was only a few yards from our office.)  I put it all in writing, along with the written and signed reports (which the captain thought had all been destroyed) I had squirreled away.  My testimony matched the three NCO's exactly, and they were quietly released, all charges dropped, and discharged with full back (forward?) pay "for the good of the service".

The idiotic (and I mean that) lieutenant never made captain, and the captain, who already had orders for reassignment and promotion to major, had a damning letter placed in his file.  It's not great, but it wasn't nothing.

And they wondered why I resigned my non-commission.