vttoth

I am a software developer and author of computer books. I also work on some problems in theoretical physics. For more information, please visit my personal Web site at http://www.vttoth.com/.

Jan 302025
 

Repeatedly, I see questions on Quora, asking why Canada resists Trump’s suggestion of becoming the 51st state. Why bother going through the likely hardships instead of giving in to Mr. Trump’s will?

Very well, allow me to offer my own contribution, to help the process along. Here, I designed a nice voting slip that could be used for this purpose. The date, of course, can be easily changed.

I must confess that the idea is not original. I had help, an elegant historical precedent that, I think, is perfectly suitable for this purpose:

I hope my contribution is received in the same spirit in which it is offered, and perhaps thanked by a nice, “from the heart” gesture (with the right arm properly extended of course) by those who approve.

PDF is available upon request.

 Posted by at 1:02 am
Jan 272025
 

Eighty years ago today, Auschwitz-Birkenau, the site of one of the worst systematic crimes against humanity, was liberated.

Some are trying to erase the Holocaust from history. Some are trying to pretend that it was no big deal.

But it did happen. And it was a “big deal”: Some six million Jews were murdered, along with millions of others: Roma, homosexuals, the disabled, prisoners-of-war, political prisoners.

“Never again” and “we remember”, we are told, but it is happening over and ever again, even if on a smaller scale; and many are trying hard to make us forget.

We won’t. I won’t.

Eighty years is a long time. Very few people are alive today who have seen this hell on Earth firsthand and survived to tell the tale. But a few are still around. And there are those of us who knew people who were there. Who knew people who avoided being deported there only by the grace of God as the expression goes. (One elderly friend of mine, no longer among us, told me how he was personally saved by Raoul Wallenberg, as he was one of the lucky ones carrying a Swedish Schutzpass.) There were those who tried to help people survive. My father, I was told, was among them: forging documents for friends, for his Jewish first wife and her family members, to help them survive, avoid the ghetto, avoid the cattle cars.

“Never again” is a nice catch phrase but what if it happens again? Will we remember? Will I remember? And if I do remember, will I have the courage of my father?

I hope I’ll never have to find out.

 Posted by at 4:00 am
Jan 262025
 

I keep being asked: When will you write a book already? And true, I have several half-baked book ideas that I am contemplating. One of them was going to be a book discussing some key concepts in physics by offering both an accessible narrative and a technical background.

Well, it appears I have been scooped, if that’s the right word! I first heart of Brent Lewis’s project when he contacted me last year, sending me a prerelease copy of Theoretical Physics for the Masses. Oh my, I thought, this is the book I wanted to write!

Or, well, as close as possible to the book I wanted to write, considering that it is not my brainchild and as such, Lewis’s selection of topics differed slightly from mine. Anyhow, long story short, the book is now published by World Scientific, a reputable publisher of books and numerous journals. I hope that it will mean a decent effort at marketing and Lewis will be able to collect royalties on many copies.

Considering the breadth of subjects, the book is surprisingly thin: Just over 180 pages, with appendices included. The main body part is less than 60 pages, however; the remainder are the technical appendices. Depending on how you look at it, this could be considered a bug or a feature.

Who is this book for? Let’s face it, the technical appendices are not for the faint-hearted. Lagrangian field theory, the equations of general relativity, Fourier-decomposition of a scalar field and derivation of the corresponding quantum field theory propagator, even a brief overview of the key features of bosonic string theory: this is not high school mathematics. Nor can we possible expect a thorough treatment of these subjects in such a thin volume.

Yet this book reminds me of a much thicker tome published many years ago: Penrose’s book, The Road to Reality. Like Penrose, Lewis presents a road map for the aspiring physicist. The plain English narrative offers something that is sorely absent from many textbooks: background and motivation. The technical appendices in turn make the connection between the core ideas and their actual implementation. And this is where the brevity of Lewis’s book might actually be an asset: Whereas Penrose spends several hundred pages discussing mostly pure mathematics, Lewis jumps right ahead into the physics.

So no, you will not learn general relativity or quantum field theory, nor the necessary mathematical foundations, from this book. But if you want to learn these subjects, the book can serve as your guide. Reading it before you dig into a textbook like Wald’s General Relativity of Peskin & Schroeder’s An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory will help maintain a bird’s eye perspective as you begin your journey. You may not have skills level-knowledge yet, but Lewis’s book will help you not lose sight of your intended destination as you study.

Let’s face it: These subjects are hard. Any resource that helps make it a tad easier to learn is welcome. And Lewis’s book definitely helps.

 Posted by at 8:27 pm
Jan 262025
 

Someone reminded me of Kurt Weill’s poignant 1936 anti-war musical Johnny Johnson today. I recalled in particular the last song, Johnny’s song, in which the simple-minded protagonist Johnny, never losing his faith in humanity, tries to sell toys to an indifferent public who are rushing over to the next square to listen to another warmongering speaker. “Toys, toys!” cries Johnny but no one listens.

I did not remember the song’s lyrics. Apparently, there are different versions, but the one I am familiar with includes these lines (emphasis mine):

At last we’ll find the day
When joy shall be our song

I hear them say it’s all baloney
The world’s a mighty cruel place
With tooth and claw and promise phony
An old hard guy he wins the race

But you and I don’t think so
We know there’s something still
Of good beyond such ill
Within our heart and mind

Ouch. Did Paul Green, who wrote the song’s lyrics, foresee the future?

Oh well. Here’s a Midjourney cat that I think aptly captures the musical’s atmosphere.

 Posted by at 2:50 pm
Jan 212025
 

I cannot stop laughing.

Earlier today, I came across one of the weirdest papers yet that I’ve ever come across in the scientific literature.

I admit that my first thought was that it was a joke paper in a predatory journal. But no. It was a serious publication, in a serious journal, published under the Springer Nature label, no less.

And like all proper scientific publications, it had a title, an abstract, and… No, wait. It did not have an abstract. What it had instead was…

A pumping elephant.

Seriously. A pumping elephant.

But if it was not a joke paper, then what was it? Having noticed that the paper’s authors were all Chinese, it occurred to me that perhaps it’s a mistranslation. The AI Claude quickly confirmed my suspicion. Apparently, the authors mistranslated “Abstract” as “抽象” (chōuxiàng) in Chinese, which does mean “abstract” but in the sense of “abstract concept” rather than “summary of a paper”. They then literally translated 抽 (chōu), which can mean “to pump” and 象 (xiàng), which can mean “elephant”.

So perhaps it was an embarrassing but ultimately innocent mistake by the paper’s authors.

The same cannot be said about the journal’s editorial staff. That such a glaring piece of nonsense made it to the pages of a reputable journal signals a complete lack of copy-editing and editorial supervision.

To their credit, the paper was ultimately retracted. And it only took about three and a half years…

I asked Midjourney to create for me a pumping elephant. Clearly inspired by Verne’s famous novel, The Steam House, Midjourney produced some wonderful steampunk pumping elephants. This is my favorite so far.

Incidentally, there are also YouTube videos of bona fide pumping elephants: Elephants that learned to use a water pump.

Needless to say, I’ll be sorely tempted to use “Pumping elephant” to label the Abstract in my future publications…

 Posted by at 3:03 am
Jan 182025
 

Here is my attempt to remind our illustrious world leaders of the importance of proper cartography:

Is it really too much to hope for that they respect the esteemed profession of mapmaking?

 Posted by at 3:07 pm
Jan 082025
 

We are barely a week into the new year, 2025. Yet here are some news items that would have sounded like outlandish B-movie nonsense just a few years ago.

  • The incoming president-elect of the United States expressed his interest in annexing Greenland, and did not rule out the use of force against a NATO ally;
  • The incoming president-elect of the United States expressed his interest in reoccupying the Panama Canal zone and did not rule out the use of force;
  • The incoming president-elect mused about turning Canada into the 51st state and did not rule out the use of “economic force” to accomplish this;
  • Ukraine’s offensive in Russia’s Kursk region led to a large number of casualties on the Russian side, including thousands of North Korean troops;
  • North Korea successfully tested a new intermediate-range missile;
  • An article in Foreign Affairs magazine argues that South Korea should acquire nuclear capability for deterrence;
  • After several similar incidents involving Russian ships in the Baltic Sea, now a Chinese vessel damaged undersea cables connecting Taiwan;
  • A far-right politician in EU member state Austria is set to form the next government of the country;
  • Alien ship set to land in New York’s Central Park turns back at the last minute – “Too dangerous, no intelligent life,” they message their home planet.

OK, I threw in the last one. But the rest? In 2025? Aren’t they just as outlandish as the bit about aliens? Aren’t we, and by that I mean the whole human race, supposed to be, you know, a tad more intelligent?

Guess not. Can’t wait for the world to be taken over by AI-assisted cats.

 Posted by at 4:47 am
Jan 072025
 

I just made up my mind.

I’ll never again respond to unsolicited theories, unsolicited requests to comment, not even from Nobel-prize winners.

Because in the end, unless I enthusiastically agree with their ideas, no matter how silly, how outlandish, it always ends badly.

It doesn’t matter how polite I am, how carefully I choose my words, how much I try my darnedest to steer them in the right direction. And it makes no difference if the person in question is just, say, a taxi driver somewhere in Asia or an accomplished scientist in Europe.

If you have a scientific idea, do the right thing: write it up, send it to a journal, publish it. I am officially not interested anymore. Sorry, but I’ve been insulted one too many times and finally, my fuse got blown. I have better things to do than nursing your hurt feelings because the science community is not treating you seriously.

In fact, chances are that in the future, I’ll blacklist all such e-mail addresses right away. My sanity is more important than your feelings.

 Posted by at 1:50 am
Jan 042025
 

I don’t much watch news channels anymore, but earlier today, I caught a fragment of a report arguing that voters are not rejecting the left because of the economy; that the shift to the right is occurring at a time when the economy is doing fairly well, and that there was no similar shift to the right during the last major economic crisis.

A few hours later (or maybe less) on the same channel I caught a fragment of a report about CEO pay here in Canada: for the top 100 (?) companies, it is now well over 200 times the average worker’s salary. The report pointed out that barely more than a decade ago, it was “only” a little over 100 times the average worker’s salary.

So perhaps, just perhaps, it’s the economy after all?

One of the better attempts by Midjourney

I mean, maybe the economy is doing great insofar as macroeconomic indicators are concerned. But we don’t live off macroeconomic indicators. We do not pay with macroeconomic indicators for groceries at Loblaws, nor do banks accept macroeconomic indicators in lieu of a mortgage payment. And it doesn’t matter if the economy is doing great overall, if rising inequality means the middle class is left behind.

And this is how we end up in dangerous times, in ways already well understood by Aristotle some 2600 years ago. The unhappiness is palpable. This drives people to political extremism. Yet all too often, those with the power to do something about it just congratulate themselves on an economy doing great, and express incomprehension when confronted with dissatisfied voters. Must be bad messaging, they say. Perhaps foreign interference. Stupid people falling for populism.

All of the above exists of course. But the root cause, I think, is much simpler: For most voters, the economy (the economy that they experience paycheck-to-paycheck, the economy they experience at the grocery store checkout counter, at the bank when trying to get a mortgage) is not doing great. In fact, it is doing terribly. And they are getting really pissed off about it. Which of course means fertile ground for political populism.

 Posted by at 2:58 am
Dec 252024
 

Last night, I had a disturbing dream.

I do not usually recall my dreams. When I wake up in the morning, almost always I wake up with a clean state of mind, focused on the things I am planning to do in the coming day. It is very rare that I wake up even with fragmentary memories of whatever I was dreaming while asleep.

This was one of those days. I was unable to recall the details, but I remembered that in my dream, I worked at some retail establishment. I ended up working there as a favor to someone, being paid under minimum wage. I wasn’t there for the money.

Long story short, somehow the establishment became Trump’s property. Yes, that Trump. And Trump visited the place. In my dream, I’ve met Trump previously. Still, being the polite chap that I am, I greeted him with a “good morning, Mr. President”. He looked at me and told me, right there in front of his entourage, that no, we’ve known each other long enough, just because he got re-elected, I should not stop addressing him by his first name.

I was beaming with pride. I was speechless. So much so that only after he left the business did I realize that I forgot to ask the one question that I’ve been meaning to ask: Now that I work for him, as opposed to doing a favor to a friend, can I at least get paid at the official minimum wage?

Is it really this easy to manipulate us? Through our pride, our self-esteem, our vanity? Was my dream a cautionary tale, reminding me that no, however smart I think I am, I am not immune to these things?

 Posted by at 1:21 am
Dec 242024
 

Here’s my Christmas wish for all good people, all the good people on the good Earth: peace.

And no, not the peace of the graveyard. Not the peace of the conqueror or tyrant, the peace of oppression, imposed peace.

No… a just peace.

 Posted by at 8:29 pm
Dec 222024
 

So I asked Claude to do something for me for Christmas. Claude happily obliged.

Can you generate for me SVG code that draws a nice Christmas tree?

Certainly! I'll create an SVG code that draws a simple but nice Christmas tree for you. Here's the SVG code:


<svg width="300" height="400" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
  <!-- Tree trunk -->
  <rect x="140" y="350" width="20" height="50" fill="#8B4513"/>
  
  <!-- Tree layers -->
  <polygon points="150,50 50,350 250,350" fill="#228B22"/>
  <polygon points="150,100 70,300 230,300" fill="#32CD32"/>
  <polygon points="150,150 90,250 210,250" fill="#3CB371"/>
  
  <!-- Ornaments -->
  <circle cx="120" cy="200" r="10" fill="red"/>
  <circle cx="180" cy="220" r="10" fill="gold"/>
  <circle cx="150" cy="280" r="10" fill="blue"/>
  <circle cx="100" cy="320" r="10" fill="purple"/>
  <circle cx="200" cy="300" r="10" fill="silver"/>
  
  <!-- Star on top -->
  <polygon points="150,40 140,60 160,60" fill="yellow" stroke="orange" stroke-width="2"/>
</svg>

This SVG code creates a Christmas tree with the following elements:

  1. A brown trunk
  2. Three layers of green triangles for the tree's foliage
  3. Colorful ornaments (circles) in red, gold, blue, purple, and silver
  4. A yellow star on top

You can copy this code and save it as a .svg file, then open it in a web browser or an SVG-compatible image viewer to see the result. You can also embed it directly in an HTML file if you want to display it on a webpage.

The tree is simple but recognizable, with a classic triangular shape and festive decorations. Feel free to adjust the colors, sizes, or positions of the elements to customize the tree to your liking!

Can you generate for me a Lilypond tune for the piano, for two hands, to accompany this nice Christmas tree?

Certainly! I'll create a simple, festive piano tune using Lilypond that could accompany a Christmas tree. This tune will be in 3/4 time, reminiscent of a waltz, with a cheerful melody in the right hand and a simple accompaniment in the left hand.

Here's the Lilypond code for a short Christmas-themed piano piece:

\version "2.22.1"

\header {
  title = "Christmas Tree Waltz"
  composer = "AI Composer"
}

upper = \relative c'' {
  \clef treble
  \key c \major
  \time 3/4

  c4 e g | a2 g4 | f4 a c | g2. |
  e4 g c | b2 a4 | g4 f e | d2. |
  c4 e g | a2 g4 | f4 a c | e2. |
  d4 b g | c2 b4 | c2. ~ | c2. |
}

lower = \relative c' {
  \clef bass
  \key c \major
  \time 3/4

  c,4 <e g> <e g> | f,4 <f' a> <f a> | f,4 <f' a> <f a> | g,4 <f' g> <f g> |
  c4 <e g> <e g> | g,4 <f' g> <f g> | c4 <e g> <e g> | g,4 <f' g> <f g> |
  c4 <e g> <e g> | f,4 <f' a> <f a> | f,4 <f' a> <f a> | c4 <e g> <e g> |
  g,4 <f' g> <f g> | c4 <e g> <e g> | c4 <e g> <e g> | c2. |
}

\score {
  \new PianoStaff <<
    \new Staff = "upper" \upper
    \new Staff = "lower" \lower
  >>
  \layout { }
  \midi { \tempo 4 = 120 }
}
Lilypond Score

This Lilypond code creates a simple, waltz-like tune that could be played while admiring a Christmas tree. Here's a brief explanation of the piece:

  1. It's in the key of C major, which is simple and cheerful.
  2. The time signature is 3/4, giving it a gentle, swaying feel.
  3. The right hand (upper staff) plays a melody that moves mostly stepwise with some small leaps, reminiscent of decorating a tree or hanging ornaments.
  4. The left hand (lower staff) provides a simple waltz-like accompaniment, with a bass note followed by two chords in each measure.
  5. The piece is 16 measures long, which is enough to create a festive atmosphere without being too complex.

To use this code:

  1. Copy it into a text file and save it with a .ly extension (e.g., "christmas_tree_waltz.ly").
  2. Process it with Lilypond to generate sheet music (PDF) and a MIDI file.
  3. You can play the MIDI file to hear how it sounds, or read the sheet music to play it on a piano.

This tune should provide a nice, festive accompaniment to your Christmas tree SVG!

 Posted by at 12:17 am
Dec 212024
 

I have been debating with myself whether or not I should try to publish these thoughts in a formal journal but I think it’s wisest not to do so. After all, I am not an expert: I “dabbled” in machine learning but I never built a language model, and cognitive science is something that I know precious little about.

Still, I think my thoughts are valuable, especially considering how often I read thoughts from others who are trying to figure out what to make of GPT, Claude, or any of the other sophisticated models.

I would like to begin with two working definitions.

I call an entity sentient if it has the ability to form a real-time internal model of its environment with itself in it, and use this model to plan its actions. Under this definition, humans are obviously sentient. So are cats, and so are self-driving automobiles.

I call an entity sapient if it has the ability to reason about its own capabilities and communicate its reasoning to others. By writing this very sentence, I am demonstrating my own sapience. Cats are obviously not sapient, nor are self-driving automobiles. So humans are unique (as far as we know): we are both sapient and sentient.

But then come LLMs. LLMs do not have an internal model of their environment. They do not model themselves in the context of that environment. They do not plan their actions. They just generate text in response to input text. There’s no sentience there.

Yet, under my definition LLMs are clearly sapient. They have the ability to describe their own capabilities, reason about those capabilities, and communicate their reasoning to others. In fact, arguably they are more sapient than many human beings I know!

This then raises an interesting question. What does it take for an intelligence to be “general purpose”, that is, capable of acting freely, settings its own goals, pursuing these goals with purpose, learning from the experience? Is it sufficient to have both sapience and sentience? Could we just install a language model as a software upgrade to a self-driving car and call it mission accomplished?

Not quite. There are two more elements that are present in cats and humans, but not in self-driving cars or language models, at least not at the level of sophistication that we need.

First, short-term memory. Language models have none. How come, you wonder? They clearly “remember” earlier parts of a conversation, don’t they? Well… not exactly. Though not readily evident when you converse with one, what actually happens is that every turn in the conversation starts with a blank slate. And at every turn, the language model receives a copy of the entire conversation up to that point. This creates the illusion of memory: the model “remembers” what was said earlier, because its most recent instance received that full transcript along with your last question. This method works for brief conversations, but for a general-purpose intelligence, clearly something more sophisticated might be needed. (As an interim solution, to allow for conversations of unlimited length without completely losing context, I set up my own front-end solution to Claude and GPT so that when the transcript gets too long, it asks the LLM itself to replace it with a summary.)

Second, the ability to learn. That “P” in GPT stands for pretrained. Language models today are static models, pretrained by their respective publishers. For a general-purpose intelligence, it’d be important to implement some form of continuous learning capability.

So there you have it. Integration of “sentience” (a real-time internal model of the environment with oneself in it) and “sapience” (the ability to reason and communicate about one’s own capabilities) along with continuous learning and short-term memory. I think that once these features are fully integrated into a coherent whole, we will witness the birth of a true artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Of course we might also wish to endow that entity with agency: the ability to act on its own, as opposed to merely responding to user requests; the ability to continuously experience the world through senses (visual, auditory, etc.); not to mention physical agency, the ability to move around, and manipulate things in, physical reality. (On a side note, what if our AGI is a non-player character, NPC, in a virtual world? What would be the ethical implications?)

Reading what I just wrote so far also reminds me why it is wiser not to seek formal publication. For all I know, many of these thoughts were expressed elsewhere already. I know far too little about the current state-of-the-art of research in these directions and the relevant literature. So let me just leave these words here in my personal blog, as my uninformed (if not clever, at least I hope not painfully dumb) musings.

 Posted by at 6:15 pm
Dec 212024
 

For years now, one of my favorite pastimes when I needed some downtime was to play one of the Fallout games. I still cannot decide if I like Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas more. Fallout 4 would be less likable, except that it has settlement building which gives the game a whole new dimension. I know, I know, building settlements is not every gamer’s cup of tea, but I enjoy it.

But then, there are the extensions. And no, I do not mean the “official” DLCs (downloadable contents) that are provided by the game publisher, but rather, the “mods” that are offered by third parties, individuals and groups of enthusiasts alike. Mods can improve a game, fix bugs, add to the experience, but in the case of the Fallout games, they reached a whole new level: Some mods rival the DLCs, or perhaps even surpass them.

Take Fallout New California. Years in the making, this mod rivals in size the very game itself, Fallout New Vegas, that it extends. Set years before the events of New Vegas, it puts the player in the shoes of a young protagonist who grew up in a Vault, only to find himself out there in the western wastelands of the New California Republic, amidst rival factions and a deadly search for some disastrous pre-war technology. The mod is just amazing: a main quest that retains some of the trademark moral ambiguity that always characterized Fallout, numerous side quests, a richly textured world, a memorable radio station from Sandy Hills, unique companions… What a game! And it seamlessly transitions into New Vegas, providing a robust back story for the player’s later identity as a Courier, and offering some perks and companions that the player can retain.

For a while, I thought New California was it, the new gold standard when it comes to fan-made mods. But then, there were rumors of yet another mod on its way: A mod of Fallout 4, that would be set overseas, in the great city of London, England.

*** WARNING: Some spoilers follow ***

I have now completed Fallout London, and the impression I came away with is that despite its rough edges, despite the fact that it still has numerous small but annoying bugs and suffers from frequent crashes, it nonetheless surpasses even New California in its breadth, depth, originality. And details and nuances! A Big Ben that chimes at 6 AM (yes, six times). A bona fide TARDIS (that, sadly, vanishes the moment you acquire the loot that it offers). A crosswalk at Abbey Road with four permanent shadows, with a pair of round glasses found in the first of the four. A “British Broadcasting Ministry” radio station that is really as pretentiously British as it can be, is just one of three unique in-game radio stations. Not to mention a post-apocalyptic British society with its snobbish Gentry, cannibalistic Beefeaters, mutant Thamesfolk and numerous other factions, in particular those Tommy conscripts who resemble in so many ways the grunts of the NCR military in New Vegas.

Yes, the elephant is in FOLON, too.

Then there’s the voice acting. It is superb, probably the best in all the Fallout universe. And the side quests? That Lovecraftian side journey that you get into after collecting those Cutethulhu dolls feels like a full-blown DLC on its own right, and a very unique and quirky one at that. Oh, and did I mention that you get a canine companion… no, not the lovable Dogmeat but an equally faithful four-legged friend, Churchill the English bulldog? (The human companions are also amazing, with rich, touching backstories.)

But then, I only have one real complaint. Namely that, after having explored all three endings of the main quest line, I concluded, like the computer WOPR in the movie War Games, that the only winning move is not to play. That is, leave the main quest unfinished. Just explore, find every location, turn on all mariner beacons, find all unusual call boxes, read all the writings Sid has to offer… but leave the main quest alone.

Why? Because no matter which side you pick, they destroy London. The London in which you wake up is far from pefect, but it is a functioning city and Westminster is in decent shape. Sure, the city could use more vertical mobility and the Gentry could be a little bit less snobbish and more accommodating, but that’s not what you get with any of the chosen outcomes. Should you side with Smythe, you end up with a city that’s intact but soulless, governed by clones and subject to unethical science experiments. The Fifth Column turn it into a kind of a fascist nightmare. Arthur’s Camelot may have more pleasant intentions, but the end result is nearly the same: Westminster is mostly destroyed, the city is in ruins, and there’s no reason to believe that anyone’s life improved as a result.

So this, then, was my favored outcome: after doing my part, helping Smythe set off an explosion at the tournament in Westminster, after freeing Reggie the crab (against Smythe’s wishes), I just let the phone continue ringing outside the London Aquarium, I avoided visiting the Fifth Column and making friends with Eve at Cable Street, and I also avoided getting better acquainted with Arthur. I now mind my own business, discovering the few remaining locations that I have not yet visited (yes, you can actually get to Blight Crater even without completing the Scylla quest—which I was never offered, due to a bug I believe—if you have the right stats and equipment, and know how to cross the radioactive waters minimizing damage), still finding amazing little details and oddities here and there, like at the Greenwich Observatory that I just finished exploring. And of course I return to my few settlements from time to time, continuing to improve them despite the somewhat broken settlement mechanics in this amazing, astonishing mod.

Or just go back to Westminster, take a taxi ride or board the city’s one remaining functional Underground line. Just for fun. There is something special about being able to ride a subway, some 160 years after global nuclear Armageddon, in one of the most iconic cities of the world, Ol’ Blighty, while listening to a worthy cover of the iconic We’ll Meet Again

Mind the gap.

 Posted by at 2:07 am
Dec 132024
 

\(\renewcommand{\vec}[1]{\boldsymbol{\mathrm{#1}}}\)This is probably my most ambitious paper to date. It’d be a lie to suggest that I was not worried: what am I missing?

Which is why I have to begin by showing my appreciation to the editors of Classical and Quantum Gravity who, rather than dismissing my paper, recognized its potential value and invited no fewer than four reviewers. Much to my (considerable) relief the reviewers seemed to agree: What I am doing makes some sense.

One of my cats, helping me to understand gravity.

What exactly am I doing? Well, as everyone (ok, everyone with at least a casual interest in general relativity) knows, the gravitational field doubles as the metric of spacetime. And we know that the metric is a “symmetric” quantity: the distance from \(A\) to \(B\) is the same as the distance from \(B\) to \(A,\) and this does not change even when the “distance” in question is the spacetime interval, the infinitesimal proper time between neighboring events.

So we treat the metric as symmetric, which greatly simplifies calculations.

Alternatively, we may treat the metric as not symmetric. Einstein spent the last several decades of his life working on a theory using a nonsymmetric metric, which, he hoped, could have led to a unification of the theories of gravitation and electromagnetism. It didn’t.

John Moffat also spent a considerable chunk of his professional life working on his nonsymmetric gravitational theory (NGT). Unlike Einstein, Moffat assumed that the extra degrees of freedom are also gravitational and may lead to a large-scale modification of the expression for gravitational acceleration, potentially explaining riddles like the rotation curves of galaxies.

But herein lies the puzzle. A self-respecting field theory these days is usually written down by way of a Lagrangian density, with the corresponding field equations derived using the so-called action principle. In the case of general relativity, this Lagrangian density is called the Einstein-Hilbert Lagrangian. The field that is the subject of this Lagrangian is the gravitational field. Unless we are interested in Einstein’s unified field theory or Moffat’s NGT, we assume that this field has the requisite symmetry that is characteristic of a metric.

Except that at no point do we actually inform the machinery behind the action principle, namely the methods of the calculus of variations, that the field has this property. Rather, in standard derivations we just impose this constraint “by hand” during the derivation itself. This approach is mathematically inconsistent even if it leads to the desired, expected result.

Usually, a restriction that constrains the degrees of freedom of a physical system is incorporated into the Lagrangian using what are called Lagrange-multipliers. Why would we not use a Lagrange-multiplier, then, to restrict the gravitational field tensor so that instead of the 16 independent degrees of freedom that characterize a generic rank-2 tensor in four dimensions, we only have the 10 degrees of freedom of a symmetric tensor?

This is precisely what I have done. Not without consternation: After all, no lesser a mathematician than David Hilbert chose not to do this, even though he was very much aware of the technique of Lagrange-multipliers and their utility, which he took advantage of in other contexts while working on relativity theory.

Yet, for 109 years and counting, the symmetry of the metric, though assumed, was never incorporated into the standard Lagrangian formulation of the theory. I honestly don’t know why, but I decided to address this by introducing a Lagrange multiplier term:

\begin{align}
{\cal S}_{\rm grav}=\frac{1}{2\kappa}\int d^4x \sqrt{-g}(R-2\Lambda+\lambda^{\mu\nu}g_{[\mu\nu]}).
\end{align}

There. Variation with respect to this nondynamical term \(\lambda^{\mu\nu}\) yields the constraint, \(g_{[\mu\nu]}=0\). Job done. Except… Except that as a result of introducing this term, Einstein’s field equations are slightly modified, split into two equations as a matter of fact:

\begin{align}
R_{\mu\nu}-\tfrac{1}{2}Rg_{\mu\nu}+\Lambda g_{\mu\nu} &{}= 8\pi G T_{(\mu\nu)},\\
\lambda_{[\mu\nu]} &{}= 8\pi GT_{[\mu\nu]}.
\end{align}

The first of these two equations is just the usual field equation, but with a twist: The stress-energy tensor on the right-hand side is explicitly symmetrized.

But the second! That’s where things get really interesting. The nondynamical term \(\lambda_{[\mu\nu]}\) is unconstrained. That means that the antisymmetric part of \(T_{\mu\nu}\) can be anything. To quote a highlighted sentence from my own manuscript: “Einstein’s gravitational field is unaffected by the antisymmetric part of a generalized stress-energy-momentum tensor.

Or, to put it more bluntly, the gravitational field does not give a flying fig about matter spinning or rotating. How matter spins or does not spin would be determined by the properties of that matter; gravity does not care.

This was a surprising, potentially profound result. Previously, authors tried to account for the presence of nonvanishing rotation by introducing a variety of tensor formalisms ad hoc. But as my derivation shows, perhaps all that was unnecessary. Matter is free to rotate, insofar as gravity is concerned: the stress-energy tensor does not need to be symmetrical.

Is this result really new? How can that be? What am I missing? These were my thoughts when I submitted my manuscript. Who knows… maybe, just maybe I was not spouting nonsense and stumbled upon something of real importance.

I expect my paper to appear on the pages of CQG in due course [edit: it just did]; I now also submitted the manuscript to arXiv, where it should appear I hope this weekend or early next week.

 Posted by at 4:04 pm
Dec 112024
 

Many expressed support, perhaps even admiration for the young man who killed the Brian Thompson, the CEO of the insurance company UnitedHealthcare last week. The reason: the company is universally despised, notorious for the zeal with which it denies claims or makes life otherwise difficult for insured Americans.

However, therein lies the problem. The company is doing EXACTLY WHAT IT IS EXPECTED TO DO. Apologies for the all caps but I need to stress: Commercial companies are not charities. They do not exist to make life easy or pleasant for their customers. They have one goal and one goal only: MAXIMIZE SHAREHOLDER VALUE. Within the confines of the law of course, but not confined by anything else. In particular, not confined by compassion, empathy, or social responsibility.

Brian Thompson did exactly what he was supposed to do as the CEO of a commercial company: he did his best to maximize shareholder value. Had he acted otherwise: had he chosen to place his personal values ahead of his duties as CEO, he could have been held even criminally liable, for failing to act in the interests of his company’s shareholder.

Yet for this, he was killed.

One may wonder: Don’t Americans deserve better? But that’s the wrong question. Health care is not something that is “given” to Americans by some higher power. The health care system—in particular, a for-profit health care system dominated by private insurers—is what a majority of Americans repeatedly CHOSE to have. Many of them speak disparagingly of the single payer, universal health care systems that exist in various forms here in Canada, in the United Kingdom, or in the European Union. “Socialist medicine,” they tell us, exaggerating the systems’ shortcomings while glossing over one basic fact: No one is left without necessary medical care in either Canada or Europe, and no one is going bankrupt due to unexpected, astronomical medical expenses.

In the end, Mr. Thompson was murdered for doing precisely what he was supposed to do: faithfully managing a FOR PROFIT corporation to the benefit of its shareholders. And the system remains the same. Nothing changes, except that health care might end up being a tad more expensive in the future, because now there will be the added expense associated with higher life insurance premiums and personal bodyguards for insurance company top brass.

 Posted by at 1:40 am
Dec 082024
 
  • When you are five years old, you do as you’re told by adults. Adults know what they’re doing.
  • When you are twenty-five, you do what you want to do. After all, you’re an adult who knows what he is doing.
  • When you are forty-five, you wonder: Some of these people who are supposedly adults… don’t they know what they’re doing?
  • When you are sixty-five, you look in the mirror and ask: I am supposedly an adult. Why don’t I know what I’m doing?

Oh, did I mention that I am just a few years shy of 65?

 Posted by at 5:52 pm
Dec 022024
 

Today I read the first few words of an article in The New Yorker: “Biden’s Pardon of Hunter Further Undermines…”

For the briefest of moments I saw a ray of hope. Perhaps The New Yorker‘s writers realized what really is at stake? Perhaps they were concerned about the trends undermining the rule of law?

Sadly, no. The missing expression (the title was truncated to fit into the column display presented by my e-mail program) was “… His Legacy”. That’s all they were concerned about. Biden’s legacy. The broader context: tactical victories and defeats in the never-ending political warfare in the United States.

One of my cats, mourning the rule of law…

Watching polarized American politics in recent years, it was evident that both sides were consumed by ideology and the desire to defeat the opposing side. Republicans were busy building an anti-establishment creed along with the alarming personality cult of Trump; meanwhile, Democrats have gone overboard with woke nonsense, from cancel culture to fights over pronouns to defunding the police. Republicans went out of their way to “own the Libs”, while Democrats strived to end the “white supremacist patriarchy”. However, there was one crucial difference: By and large (and notwithstanding Republican accusations about “weaponizing” the government), the Democrats mostly played by the rules, i.e., they supported the rules-based system of the American Republic, whereas Republicans declared the system itself, the “deep state”, their key enemy. As January 6, 2020 demonstrated, they were quite willing to step outside the boundaries of the rule of law to have their way.

This, of course, put Democrats at a disadvantage, akin to fighting with one hand tied behind their backs.

But now, I think, this is about to change. Call it Joe Biden’s “fuck you” moment: he decided to use his presidential powers to pardon his own son, Hunter Biden, despite repeated assurances that he had no plans to do so.

I really cannot blame him. When the president-elect is a convicted felon, when many of his nominees for key positions are themselves at the very least the targets of credible accusations of criminal behavior, I suspect Biden had enough, playing by the rules. (Technically speaking it is of course not against the rules for the President to pardon his own family members, even though it is obviously a massive conflict of interest.)

This, I think, is a pivotal, watershed moment, however. By pardoning Hunter, Biden basically declared that the rules no longer apply to their side either. This seems to be yet another nail in the coffin of the great American experiment. Once again I see historical parallels. Two thousand years ago, it was Brutus and his co-conspirators who decided that the rules no longer apply to them either. Granted, pardoning a family member is not quite on par with assassinating a Dictator, but the undercurrent is the same: The rule of law no longer matters. We may yet be generations away from the leaders of America to openly declare themselves emperors, but this is yet another crucial step towards a system of government in which the “first among equals”, the country’s head of state and head of government, is not really an equal anymore but someone entirely above the law.

One of the secrets of the success of the Roman Empire was the fact that the first emperor, Gaius Octavius, better known by the family name he adopted and the title bestowed upon him by the Roman Senate as Augustus Caesar, was truly competent. I don’t expect competence from Trump. However, is VP, J. D. Vance, is another matter. That gentleman seems frighteningly intelligent and ruthless. Makes me wonder if he is, in fact, going to become the de facto first emperor of an emerging imperial United States of America; our modern-day Octavius.

Oh well, interesting times. Love it, to be honest. Things are about to get really… fascinating.

 Posted by at 10:46 pm