That sun is just glorious, I wish I could pull off Earth’s SS21 colour palette.
My body clock’s gone all over the place. I had the last week ‘off’ and has all sorts of plans but instead I completely crashed out and just couldn’t do anything that involved responsibility. I managed to get through about half of Disco Elysium, do a bunch of DIY and cycling and came out the other end just feeling guilty because capitalism has made me its bitch. Anyway, it’s a short one today because as usual the few hours I put out each morning to read, write and think get filled by administration as surely as nature abhors a vacuum. Most of my actual job just involves copying information from one document to another or reorganising or reorientation information to give it meaning to whoever it’s for. There’s a lot of this that goes on everyday and then I get to the end of the day and can’t think of a single thing that’s been achieved and then the guilt returns.
I suppose design is kind of information manipulation anyway. And guilt is basically a kind of high polluting fossil fuel. Anyway, I was buoyed this week by getting real deep on the results from the G-2 (that’s G minus 2, not G dash 2) experiment and the chatter around it. I may have told you this before but at school I was best at maths, physics and history and really enjoyed them but then the education system gradually beat any joy or wonder out of them by turning them into exams and all the cool, attractive people went to art school and since I didn’t have many friends except those weirdos, I followed. That’s why I bang on about history and maths so much I suppose.
Anyway, the G-2 experiment was trying to confirm a result from twenty years ago when the g-factor on muons was found to be higher than that standard model predicts. We’re talking higher by only a tiny fraction at the eight decimal place here but significant enough to be more than a statistical anomaly but not quite a discovery. G-factor is like the amount of wobble on a spinning top; as a muon spins in an electromagnetic field, the spin is titled slightly by other forces like gravity as well as the quantum foam (the particles constantly popping in and out of existence all the time). Muons are theorised to have a g-factor of 2 from gravity and then a tiny bit more to account for the quantum foam. Folks had figured that with the pretty comprehensive map of particles through the standard model that this should be cut and dry at 2.0023318362… but these folks at Fermilab have confirmed last week it’s higher at 2.0023318412… They’re going to run a bunch more tests obviously but lots of the physics people are getting bleary-eyed about ‘new physics.’ Most everything else predicted through the standard model has turned out to be bang on the money so this result indicates either a fault in the experiment (approximately 1:40,000-100,000 chance), something wrong with standard model, or extra physics that has yet to be theorised. Here’s some of my favourite YouTube channels on it: Sixty Symbols and Physics Girl.
It’s also worth noting the insane journey the G-2 went on to get to Fermilab – The Big Move.
Short Stuff
- There should be a list of things that claim to be AI and aren’t AI, similar to this X Does not Exist site for GAN’s. I’ve been collecting them for my own entertainment but it feels like a lot of work to build a public repository of things that aren’t AI. Anyway, here’s another that Utah spend $20m on.
- Some mea culpa on NFT’s here. I know I wrote about this the other week, but the ‘you don’t get it, you’re looking at wrong’ doesn’t change what it actually is and how it’s instantiated. Ruth Catlow at Furtherfield has also written a little push back on the anti-NFT sentiment. Furtherfield have been the leaders in critical blockchain stuff, at least in the UK for a long time and have put in years of great work so their voice is super important here and definitely holds a lot of (if not the most) weight. However, again, lambasting media for doing media and capital for doing capital doesn’t actually change what the thing is. I’m not retreading this but remember how the inventors of the Internet talked about freedom, new forms of organisation and equity of information and instead we got Google and Facebook? I think for those who are interested and engaged in the nuance of the argument (and are despairing of the humiliating gold rush) this is a useful discussion but does it actually reach the hedge fund bros and IP trolls who are making the money?
- I mean this goes back to my issue with critical culture doing more to alienate the people it should be trying to affect than actually introducing new ideas. If the interest of the mainstream is ‘how can I make money as quickly as possible’ then you have to use that impetus as your lever for change rather than insisting that people are wrong about their priorities (getting rich). People don’t like being told they’re wrong.
Alright, love you very much. Oh me oh my I just want to sleep.