Archive for February, 2012

Oh My God! ‘A 40-year-old puzzle of superstring theory solved by supercomputer’

The High-Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Japan released this press release back in December. I can’t believe this slipped by me until just now — it’s hard to overstate what a big deal this is and I’m a bit surprised I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere, even considering the deathly pathetic state of mainstream science coverage.

So here’s the scoop. Basically, as far as physics is concerned, we don’t know wtf our universe is made of or how it got here. We’re groping around in the dark trying to understand the shape and character of matter and energy. We have the big corner puzzle pieces and a handful of inside pieces, but no picture has yet emerged and the pieces we do have don’t fit together.

Superstring theory posits that everything that exists is composed of infinitesimally small “strings.” Actually they’re more like “tubes” but that’s another matter. Anyway, superstrings are so small there’s probably no way anyone could ever observe them directly. In fact they’re so small they can’t even be observed indirectly. No one has ever been able to know if they exist, or even if they can exist. They’ve been entirely a mathematical construct.

Regardless of this, superstrings are utterly compelling. According to the math, they should exhibit properties that would fill in all the gaps in the physics puzzle. All the gaps. Superstring theory is also known as “the theory of everything” for this reason.

The math, however, has always had a particularly difficult and head-cracking problem: in order for superstrings to exist, there would have to be nine spatial dimensions. That’s six spatial dimensions in addition to the width, depth, and height we all know and love. Clearly our universe comprises three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension. So if superstrings are real, where are these other dimensions? You can’t have one without the other. No extra dimensions, no superstrings.

Up until now, no one’s been able to program a running model to simulate superstring behavior in our universe because the math is just too complex. But at KEK they finally did it! It took 90.3 teraflops, but they did it. And you know what happened?

They found the missing six dimensions!

According to the model, in the moments after the Big Bang, space did indeed expand in nine directions. But when hyperinflationary expansion set it, only three of those dimensions expanded and the rest collapsed, or something, I don’t think they’ve sorted that part out yet. But the point is, we now have a working model of our universe that includes nine spatial dimensions.

This research is the biggest confirmation of superstring theory ever and it will be very hard indeed to falsify. In fact, short of uncovering some sort of cheating, I can’t see a way it could be done. The math simply is what it is.

Our human relationship to the cosmos is changed forever because of this. Our scientific mythos will shortly be entering rewrite stage and in 10-20 years no one will question superstring theory any more than we now question Earth’s orbit around Sol. The universe will not be a cracked and fractured piecemeal mystery, but a unified if incomplete mystery. This is absolutely huge. There would be no more discrete point-like objects in the universe, but rather a continuum of strings that vibrate at various frequencies, producing the shapes and properties of matter. The repercussions for our collective cognition are obvious and adaptively significant.

They found the missing six dimensions. Wow.

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Planetary Alignment This Weekend

From Wired:

The moon, Venus, and Jupiter — the three brightest objects in the night sky — will be putting on a dazzling celestial show shortly after sunset both Feb. 25 and 26, coming together in a tight triangle. With any luck, you might also spot tiny Mercury down near the horizon just as the sun goes down.

People all over the world can check out the performance just by stepping outside and looking westward. If snowstorms or general chilliness drive you inside, you can always watch the spectacular event live on the Slooh Space Camera feed, starting both nights at 6:30 p.m. PST.

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Extrication Update

I have a few minutes so I thought I’d share a bit of progress I’ve made the past couple of days.

I’ve decided I don’t like the term “drop-out.” I don’t feel like I’m dropping out of anything. For the time being I’m going with “extrication” because it has connotations of disentangling myself from wreckage.

Time: Need To Pass Along A Couple Clients

I’m unloading a couple of my web design clients that are causing me too much stress. They’re not bad clients, I’m just overextended and tired of being afraid of my business in-box. So if you’re a good web designer with lots of WP, LAMP, CSS, H5 & a little jQuery/AJAX under your belt, send me a note — paula at mythodrome dot net — and possibly I can pass you a couple hundred bux of work per month. Or if you know someone, let me know that too. I need to find a replacement designer quick.

Money

Without these clients, it looks like with some juggling I’ll be able to get my expenses down to about 1/3 my remaining income. I feel pretty stupid for not doing this math sooner but oh well — everybody has to start somewhere right? Anyway, so today I cancelled my cable TV. I also went to a really cool butcher shop down on California and set up a deal to get scrap meat for Zeke. Each Monday I’ll pick up 15 lbs of scrap meat for about $12 – $15.

(Sidebar: If you have dogs, you can save a ton of money and feed your fuzzy kids way better nutrition by switching them to a raw meat diet. Here’s the Wikipedia page about it. I feed Zeke the prey model, or as close to it as I can get.)

I’m also in the process of quitting smoking. It’s shocking and nauseating how much money I’ve been wasting on cigarettes. I have about 4 weeks to go in the quitting process, and after that I’ll have another significant (cignificant?) chunk of change to squirrel away. My big hurdle is going to be Verizon. I’m locked into a two-year data contract which I need to break, but it costs a few hundred dollars to do that. So I’m still looking into my options there.

My first immediate goal is to collect $1000 to sit on for when I get booted out of my squat. I have to set up a proper cash flow spreadsheet so I can see when exactly I will accomplish that, but I’m going to shoot for three months. I’ll be damn proud of myself if I can save $1000 in three months, on <$12,000 per year.

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Work Hibernation

Okay — after taking last week off I’m seriously behind on work. I need to code like it’s 1995. Longer-form articles will be light for a couple weeks, but even when I’m crazy insane busy, I still usually manage to update my G+ account. My running commentary is here, and my reading list is here. You shouldn’t have to set up a G+ account just to read but if you want to comment I think you’ll have to.

I went on a little funk-fuzz-thrash spree over there recently, so pardon all the vids. I don’t normally do that sort of thing but hey.

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Bits & Pieces From Ran’s Stay

Update 02.21.2012 5:30ish PM — Dude you are way a neat freak. Fly your freak flag with dust-free gusto!

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So Ran was here for a few days this week, it was a kick-back and easy visit. He’s a lot less dour than I anticipated. I had a lot of fun bullshitting with him about everything from bigfoot to manga porn. He really does make an apple pie every single day and eats most of it himself because — get this — he needs to keep his weight up. Pffffft.

I learned a few things from Ran while he was here:

  • How to fix my garbage disposal. Yay! Thanks man!
  • The Virgo definition of “slob” roughly correlates to the Aries definition of “borderline neat-freak neurotic”
  • Trader Joe’s has the best dumpsters
  • How to play Scrabble, and how to strategize the game
  • Traffic jams suck far worse than I remembered. Maybe they’ve actually gotten worse since the 1990s. It’s no wonder people get out of their cars and walk up and down the highway shooting other motorists. Absolutely nothing is worth doing that twice a day, every day, for 40 years in a row.

One of the more important things I learned was not something new, but something which I’d forgotten. My lifestyle in Portland was so different than it’s been since I came back, and in particular my diet… I used to detox-fast periodically while I was there, I made much of my own allergen-free food and got pretty good at it, and it’s possible to do without spending a small fortune. Or a large fortune for that matter. I’ve gotten away from that for ten years now. Ran’s ultra-healthy road food really brought all this back. Nutrient-dense food that’s free of industrial nasties has a certain quality about it that’s hard to pinpoint but unmistakeable, and while it takes a bit of getting used to after being accustomed to industrial food, I can almost hear my blood cells thanking me in audible English. I didn’t have a single stomach issue this week — after having two of the worst gall bladder attacks I’ve ever had in my life within the past month, and in spite of the fact that we were eating wheat every day which I never ever do. The fog in my brain was even starting to lift a bit. I definitely need to get back to that. When the weather gets warmer I am going to do a springtime detox-fast for the first time since about Y2K. I am very much looking forward to it.

The big takeaway though was just being away from work and going analog for a few days, while sharing a bit of mental environment with someone who never got sucked into the middle class grind. I’ve been stuck on the fringe of the middle class grind since I quit my last full-time “career” job back in Y2K, always struggling with this or that, never quite realizing the reason for my struggle is because I’ve got one foot planted in money-world and one foot planted in freedom-world. I have the worst of both and the best of neither. Since I was 20 years old I’ve known exactly what I want to do and how I want to live. I didn’t realize how close I am to these very old goals until Ran observed that among the various good folks he’s stayed with, I’m pretty far out in the margin. Not sure I would have known that without an outsider’s eye.

So, from here getting myself extricated from money-world tentacles is little more than a matter of planning and discipline to stick with the plan, working on my health, and getting creatively resourceful. I’m excited and motivated.

Addendum

Ran’s stay here at my semi-squat worked out so well that I’m considering opening up that bedroom to other dropout minded passers-through. I definitely do not want a long-term roommate, so that is out of the question. However, I really enjoyed having a generally like-minded person here to hang and banter with for a short time. If you’re near or passing through Pittsburgh and would be interested in visiting me in the abandoned house for a couple-few days sometime around April-ish, let me know in the comments and I’ll email you back.

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