Rhythmic? No, not really. More exciting if the musician could somehow anticipate this fundamentally unpredictable event? Absolutely.

It’s a reference.

In Aristotelian geography, the coastline is infinitely divisible.

That was a separate experiment.

When he gets pulled out, he’ll be fisherman’s Worf.

Acknowledged. Launching Starfleet standard hat distribution holoprogram.

You arrive without traveling, see all without looking, and do all without doing. You get a nifty flute souvenir. The ship explodes. Score: 0/100. Thank you for participating in the Kobay-ouchie Maru.

It speaks only in disposable cup idioms. It says: “Red Solo, when the beer fell.” Now what do you do?

The alien blood corrodes away the bottom of your cup. Now what do you do?

So now JPEGs can construct Rule 110 in addition to Rule 34. Neat!

The Kobay-ouchie Maru.

They wrote that whole ass article and never stopped to consider that time may be both an illusion (in the sense that it is an emergent rather than a fundamental property of existence) AND necessary for the evolution of life (in the sense that other hypothetical configurations of physical laws which do not feature an emergent arrow of time may not produce life).

In regions of the set of all possible universes where the physical prerequisites of evolution were not present, nobody would be there wondering about why that is. In this region, conditions are right for life to evolve, so somebody is here to ask the question. It’s just the anthropic principle.

And even then, if you look at quantum mechanics through the right lens, its apparent randomness is only an illusion of perspective. If you flip the quantum coin, then with 100% certainty, perfectly deterministically, it will come up heads in one timeline and tails in the other. It’s only because your two future selves can’t interact with each other that they can’t have an argument about what the result “really” was, so one says, “it actually came up heads, and the result was completely random,” and the other says, “it actually came up tails, and the result was completely random.”

Subtitles are a must when she shows up. Lovely person, but objectively difficult to understand, even for a native speaker like me. Hard mode is when she guest stars on a podcast lol.

Of course, you can think of consciousness as analogous to excitation of a field, and, like the electromagnetic field or gravitational field, there is no center, and everything is interconnected. And yet, like every particle is ultimately a wave in disguise, we can still meaningfully talk about individual particles, because some waves do behave that way sometimes.

An individual consciousness is particle-like. As a shorthand for “this relatively independent packet of consciousness which has measurable distinctiveness from other packets and does not freely share perceptions or memories with them,” it’s often more practical just to say “I” instead.

Quantum cryptographically signed memory certificates from my designated reality broker or it didn’t happen.

This is the only absolute truth, for each of us. I may be a brain in a vat being fed false stimuli. I may be in a grand computer simulation. I may be a resident of Plato’s Cave. Everything I believe or guess about the world around me may be an illusion. But I do know that I think, and therefore, in some sense, I am.

Some people have said they didn’t enjoy the second half of the book referenced here, Seveneves. I couldn’t disagree more. It’s a nice balance of setup and payoff, provided you go into it knowing that there’s going to be a huge time skip midway through, so you don’t get too attached to the individual characters.

But you have to understand, to 74 million people, the Fox News Cinematic Universe is reality. There’s regular bullshit, and then there’s bullshit so widely believed that you actually have to study the bullshit, just to be able to predict what its subscribers will do next. Like religion.

Aspirationally, yes.