i don't think they understand the gravity of the situation...

 scientists are searching for dark data and dark communications because otherwise, in their current thinking, the internet does not make sense - they'd like to think it is expanding at a certain rate of acceleration because of the big bang, but the observed rate and early phases of the internet do not add up - there must be missing masses of information, and communication that were unaccounted for.

but in the entropic theory, all we need to propose is more or less randomness in the extrema of the distribution. and this is observed empirically often - as Professor Pratchett noted here - this is also known in folk theories - some people are inordinately lucky, while others seem to encounter Murphy's Law far more often than you would reasonably expect. This it seems the internet is slightly more organised, where it is structured, than expected, and slightly more random, where it is truly random, than you might think.

This very weak effect has an influence over time and space as the Internet grows, and gradually, this comes to dominate over the stronger, but shorter range forces of data cohesion.

Thus, we can replace the search for the dark interweb with a simple theory of luck.

This may also apply to cosmology, although I suspect respectable physicists will shy away from the idea, because it might undermine their funding chances.

Tavernas/restaurants of Paleochora, aug/sep 2022

my criteria are (roughly evenly applied):

a) food b) location c) price d) service

 

1. The Little Angel - quiet corner - food (a very special moussaka this time, with some interesting herbs in) - 

excellent prices - went again. had lamb kleftiko still very good!

2. Christos - great service, super reliable food, view, and very good value - great dorade, for example, also classics like lamb in oven with lemon potatoes, goat tsigoridis etc

3= El Greco - food italian (pizza, pasta) all reliable -- upstairs area is great with amazing view - pricing good, 

3=.Olaya - new kid on the block - asian fusion - excellent starters (prawns & rolls etc), good service, mains a bit big (or in one case small) but good flavour - decent pricing, good service

3=  Third Eye - a matter of taste - deserts will probably suit all - I like it - had a very good sweet potato ragaile (fruit!), some don't - usually people could steer away from heavier vegan dishes (bean burger) will find plenty to like - service ace - interestingly, only has "posh" retsina instead of usual mass produced stuff - also nice house wine

3= Methexis - very busy, but we went a second time, and got a very classy meal for a surprisingly good price, so went right up in my estimation (95 euro for 7 people including starters and wine!)

4.  Marias - always great smiles, and solid, reliable, and super affordable - mostly greek taverna standards

5= Pantelis  - shame they reduced their menu, but still very nice quieter location, and decent food/price 

6 Oriental bay - reliable, affordable - now it is more open, less mosquitoes - decent view....music too loud:-

7. Castro - some good ideas and good greek wine list - a bit pricey...views amazing - plus cocktail bar up stairs very decent

Note, these are ALL worth going to:-) most on google maps (you may want to learn to read greek)

https://www.google.com/maps/@35.2307032,23.6810057,17z

pricing depending on if you have starters & main and wine, somewhere in 20-35 euro per person roughly

Things I still miss in Paleochora

1/ The Pelican

2/ the open air Sinema where we saw the Flintstones (starts with them driving to an open air cinema) and the Athens Olympics ceremonies!

3/ the Sea Urchins

time, ladies and gentlemen, please.

 Time travel works. In fact, it is remarkably common. However, 

it doesn't do what everyone thought it did.

The ubiquitous mistake was to assume that time is another dimension

(I blame Einstein and Dr Who); that you could move in that dimension

in the same way that you could move in space, left, right, up, down, forwards, backwards, past, 

and future. Of course this was nonsense, and many scientists had a field day pointing out that just because you could write Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism in four vector, relativistic invariant form, that didn't mean much to anyone on the top of the clapham omnibus stuck in bad traffic. Nor did any of them get a Fields medal for saying so.

So how does time travel really work?

Essentially, it is time that travels, not you. Think of time as collection of instants (temporal quanta). 

Each of those instants can be experienced in many orders, including repetitions.

However, instants are unique (the "no cloning" theorem of quantum time theory applies), 

so how do the repetitions occur to time? They don't. Time travels from one place in the sequence to another.

Thing of those moments when a smell "transports" you to another time - perhaps the smell of a plant (even Thyme) reminds you completely of all the other times that you were in the presence of that resonant experience. That isn't what happens. What is actually occurring is that those other "times" are traveling to you. and then back again. You just tick along as usual, thinking the world is made of some

endless reel of film unrolling from the past to the future, holding your delusional beliefs that somebody may build a machine that lets you skip back to some earlier stage of the reel, or unroll it so you can jump forward to some as yet unlived experience.

Of course, once this was understood, and indeed, comprehended by the great unwashed public, there was an outcry. Just as Copernicus took us out from the centre of the universe,

and Darwin's theory of evolution took us out of the pinnacle of the pyramid of species, and Relativity cast doubt amongst moral absolutists, and quantum bought us more doubt all the disinformation programs the kremlin could ever muster, Natoshi Sakamoto's brief theory of time has "bought to an end" 

causal ordering.

Time is a Pack of Cards continually being shuffled by someone or something. The rules of shuffling are as yet unclear, although certain patterns appear to be emerging, certainly not unconnected with the

the widely accepted Quantum Smell syndrome.

However, for many aspects of human life, time is running out.

How shall the law accommodate such a world, where moments are no longer unique, or organised into more than an illusory sequence of action and consequence?

Of course, for many in the metaverse, this has been understood "for some time". Shortcuts, why, even back in text only MUDs and MOOs, had been commonplace, both in between rooms, but also between events. |Be kind, rewind", had to be generalised as a piece of advice, to prevent excessive trauma for new entrants into virtual worlds. Now, it seems, there was no difference between the virtual and the real.

Not that we are living in a simulation, of course - that was a consequence of the computational complexity inherent in the Sakamoto model. We could appear to choose to leave that space, and move to the metaverse - this was not a contradiction, since anything built by meta was of necessity, of lower complexity than the Sakamoto universe, and therefore could be fit within, multiple times, if necessary.

"What next?" I hear you cry. That, I reply, is the wrong question.

The thruppeny ha'penny estate

 between the third estate (the commoners) and their kids is inheritance. One thing I've seen in recent years  is the amount of stuff accumulated in a person's life that is of precious little use to their descendants. Piles and piles of paperwork - receipts for stuff long since binned - and lots of old appliances or even content (VHS videos, CD recordings etc etc). But more distressing is books. Some people have entire collections or libraries of wonderful  works. The task of sorting through these is daunting. Not just because they don't have much monetary worth, but because they represent experience and knowledge that one's parents may have acquired over years, and one had not appreciated. Indeed, looking through such libraries, one realises that they have probably been curated (lousy genre stuff binned, just the tasty SF and 'Tec works, but also factual stuff that might give one a mind map of where the ma or da's headspace was at, man. But it would take too long. And when one inherits this mathom.  one is also already half way through one's own life time of reading.

Is there a way to make life easier for one's (usually grown up) kids by pre-sorting the library and adding an FAQ and maybe notes (readme, read this first, don't read this til you have witnessed death, this book will not change your life/wife/knife, but it will make me laugh...etc)

How would one know if the experiment had worked?

The man in the invisible mask

 The Man in the Invisible Mask

King Boris was caught in a quandary - he was afflicted with the very rare 

condition known as the Marrmight syndrome: half of his citizens thought he was marvellous, and 

women would swoon at his feet, and men, some of them married to those women, would make 

him gifts of land and gold on top of that; the other half would stretch there eyes, and grin and grin and try to bear it, but inside were a cauldron of soup made from leather boots and mustard.

The usual way to cope with this, his physicians assured him, was for bearers of this unfortunate affliction to wear a mask. Masks were worn quite often in the land, although they were going out of fashion - the designs to date  did not sit well alongside the ornate hats and collars favoured by the King's most ardent courtiers.

The king challenged the great couturiers across the land to come up with a solution that would please all the people, all the time. The prize would be untold fame and at least a knighthood.

Maskateers from everywhere came forward with a myriad of the  most incredible designs anyone had ever seen. Entire diamond mines were emptied, and it was rumoured, some foreign countries stripped of all of their rarest earths.

The king sat in his newly decorated court for one every day receiving the designs, and 

tried them on, surrounded by his adoring courtiers and wives and flunkies. Each mask would bring forth cries of wonderment and astonishment, but in the end, nothing would satisfy the hat and collar brigade sufficiently to pass muster.

Finally, one day, two curious looking gentlemen from some far away land arrived bearing an intricate box, within which was another box, and inside that, yet another until, eventually, there was the mask holder.

"Let us fit this on you, your majesty" said Pushtin.

As he did so, his brother, Surkov, explained that the many layers 

represented the many facets of the King's personalities, and

that these would allow the people to see the kind of king they preferred amongst 

all the possibilities, which is why the King and his court were charmed and, indeed, full-heartedly fell for this mask as one.

"We must have a Maskdom day" cried King Boris, "where I shall lead a parade across the capital city and artists far and wide will render pictures of us in our finery 

for all in the land to see. There is nothing more to fear!".

And so it was that only a week later, the whole court in all their finery set off on there very best e-scooters, in a huge cavalcade travelling from the Palace of Westminster to the Palace of Buckminster and back several times, with huge crowds gathered along the wide paths of green park.

Near the end of the day, as the King was growing tired, despite the tides of adulation

pouring upon him, when things were starting to get a bit quieter, a small child, perhaps 10 years old, turned to her mother and said, quite loudly as children do when uninhibited by the careworn ways of the world "but Mum, look - he isn't wearing a mask at all - there's nothing on his face whatsoever.".

For a moment you could hear a pin drop, and then the cry spread across the crowds, and across the land. The King was finally unmasked.

drone of silence

 say we don't want to be overheard? go on, say it...

ok, so we could go to a sound proof room. or we could get everyone around us to wear noise cancelling headphones (good luck with that). or we could design a noise cancelling drone.

we'd put our phones on the table in front of us, and run an app that transmits the sound from all the phones' mikes to the drone, which then computes the audio  signal that is being propagated from our table, and (using a phase array speaker system) transmits the reverse phase of that.

it has to e on the drone because a) that's hip, cool, fashionable and fun and b) you can't run it on the phone or the people you are talking to across the table wont hear you either.

you heard it here first. or maybe you didn't.

efficacy is rather annoying as a metric for a vaccine during a pandemic that lasts years...

 the various vaccines now being deployed across the world to cope with the pandemic are typically accepted by medical regulators when their Phase III trials deliver an efficacy of over 50%.

What that means, as far as I can tell, is that for the duration of the trial, out of the 2 groups, one given a placebo, the other the vaccine, the fraction of people that did not get infected in the latter group compared to the former. so if there's no infection in the vaccinated group, then it is 100%. if there were 100 people infected in the placebo  group, and only 50 in the vaccinated group, its 50%.

But that efficacy is firstly only  binary (did or did not get infected), and only for the period of the trials (e.g. at the end of the trial of say 3 months) - but the pandemic is ongoing for much longer than the phase III trial. and the outcome isn't "got infected or not" - people can get infected but be asymptomatic, or mildly ill, or die, whether  vaccinated or not. And the disease changes over time too.

So you have two things varying over time - the level of immunity (not just binary) and the level of infectiousness of the current main variant(s) of the disease.

A true binary outcome metric would be "At the end of normal life expectancy, how many people vaccinated compared to those given a placebo, are still alive"

Other measures might be concerned with the severity of disease, short of fatality at some time period after vaccination, Some sort of half life (like radioactivity) maybe?

And those are the selfish or singular metrics - the other thing a vaccine might do is reduce infectiousness (both for people that don't get the disease but cary, and for people that get it more mildly - obviously people that die find it hard to infect others),

Of course, the reason to care about efficacy is to have something fairly simple to evaluate fairly quickly, to then let medical regulators make a decision about if a vaccine is worth adopting or not.

But in the long run, it would be useful to express some other measure, concerned with the reduction in excess mortality over the length of the pandemic.

And of course some quantification of the reduction in incidence of severe versions of the illness ('long covid").

Of course, explaining these more complicated descriptions/metrics would tie up lots of science/stats popularisers for months and years....but it might help reduce the sort of headlines we see where someone says "efficacy of vaccine X on variant V is only 10% so it is useless" or "it doesn't work on old people", when in at least two recent examples, the said vaccine reduced mortality to zero, which as far as this writer is concerned, is a rather important positive result, even if said "efficacy" was near zero. 

Making something not scary seems good to me.