So, in the fine tradition of using bananas for scale…
Bananas are slightly more radioactive than the background, due to potassium-40 content. So an informal unit of radiation measure in educational settings is the ‘banana-equivalent-dose’, which is about 0.1 microsieverts.
My particle spectrometer saw first light today, and I figure that I could use a banana to calibrate it. Then I noticed that K-40 undergoes a rare (0.001%) decay to 40Ar, emitting a positron. So not only is a banana a decent around-the-house radioisotope source, it’s also an antimatter source.
Nice – you wouldn’t happen to have any ideas on how to differentiate positron annihilation, from the continuous distribution of β− energies caused by the more common decay mode, using only a PIN photodiode? I’m a bit stumped on this point and suspect it’s not possible. I probably need to do gamma spectroscopy but would really rather not.
Yeah, that’s going to be too hard. I only have two SiPMs (besides the current detector) and they are expensive. I figured I could maybe rely on the gamma from the annihilation energy being a quite different energy than the gammas from the more common electron-capture.
However you raise a good point that that would not be a very good demonstration of positron annihilation at all – just evidence that it’s not the other 2 decay modes (and it would take ages to collect that evidence besides). Ah well. Got plenty of other science I can do instead.
Probably I’ll tackle something easier like checking for radon decay products in petrol.
I mean yeah, in principle I could cram textbooks for a few months (I know EE and SE pretty well, but particle physics only very basic stuff), order parts made at the factories I know, and would probably succeed eventually. More realistically I’d have to hire a university prof as a consultant to save time.
What I am really unable to construct is a powerpoint presentation that justifies that expense and labor to management :P
Especially in a cost-driven market (my company is in Vietnam). Often the parts for these things are export-controlled too, that can be a real pain. I’ve gotten irate phone calls from the US DoD before over fairly innocent parts orders – it’s not super fun. I recall it was some generic diode, I must have stumbled on something with a military application I wasn’t aware of. The compliance paperwork ended up costing me hundreds of dollars for 20$ in parts, too.
Anyway, if it was something I could just tack on to ongoing research projects, I could maybe get away with it as a marketing expense. It’s for a STEM program. It’s hard enough to convince management to take the risk on a nuclear & quantum module as-is! I can mostly get away with it because the locally-manufactured beta-detectors cost like 20$ per classroom.
Bananas are not typically very high on the danger scale except in exotic (and universally embarrassing) circumstances.
In fact, that’s another thing we could use bananas for scale with. Probably driving to work is equivalent to several kilobananas worth of danger daily :)
Anyway, I think the positron should be about 44keV if that helps you calibrate your magnets. The typical banana should produce something on the order of a positron every 10 seconds (although I used much rounding for the sake of brevity). Most commercial positron sources e.g. used in hospital PET scanners, are many times stronger than that!
Sounds cool. Was wondering if still use lisp for bigger projects. Last time I was using it was when I was studying psychology. Psychologist still used it for whatever reason back then.
I don’t know where to find any up-to-date comprehensible learning resources. Specifically about whatever “melpa” or “non-gnu elpa” are, if the package management is built-in, etc.
I have also seen a bunch of front-ends and I don’t think I know what Emacs is…? Like in the Void repos there’s a command-line one (emacs) but also GTK (emacs-gtk and emacs-pgtk), for example, and even an X11 (emacs-x11) one even though that’s not a GUI toolkit.
I’m contemplating whether it would be “cleaner” to leave my Debian system exactly the way it is after the default installation and add all additional software as flatpaks, or if I should let the package manager handle all installations even if I have to add third party repositories for it, or if I should strip it down to a base system with just the core of Gnome and use flatpaks for all userspace programs, or simply do without software that isn’t in the Debian repos…
Yeah… Flatpaks are nice, but slow and sometimes broken (I guess mostly depending on how the rest of your system looks like.) On the other hand, I hate adding 3rd party repositories; it feels weird and messy. It’s a complex matter indeed.
I’m sure plenty of people would understand it, but I’m struggling with a project at work where I’ve got an operator giving me bad data, and the project appears unsafe and I need to decide and convince my management if we’re going to object to it or not.
If it’s an old iPad the issue is the terrible lightning port that isn’t able to transfer nearly enough data to be used as a monitor. This is partly why most solutions for that involve a network.
It’s very common that in modern virtual worlds there’s 4th wall breaking Easter Eggs buried in the world lore.
Years ago, I got to wondering if something like that might exist in our own universe, and fairly quickly found something that far exceeded my wildest expectations for what I might find meeting that criteria.
But there’s so many layers of bias connected to the concept that I really doubt anyone will ever take a serious look.
Some will just reject by default the notion that they aren’t in an original reality.
Others will reject the notion that something connected to an (in)famous world religion and religious figure could reflect metaphysical truth, even though many of those parallel lore examples happen to tie into their respective lore’s religious beliefs (usually a fitting place for meanderings about the creation or purpose of one’s universe).
I’ve studied it for years now, found all sorts of surprising things from an explicit discussion of survival of the fittest in antiquity or the idea of an original humanity evolving spontaneously bringing forth an intelligent being of light which then recreated a twin of the whole universe.
Which is pretty weird in an age where there’s increasing investments into photonics specifically for AI which is in turn powering digital twins and articles like this.
So we are discussing the ideas of these kinds of things happening in the future, and meanwhile there’s a tradition from antiquity centered around a document “the good news of the twin” that claims the most famous religious figure in history was saying we’re already in the future but are in a non-physical copy of the earlier cosmos in the archetypes of a long dead humanity, duplicated by a being of light that the original humanity brought forth.
Like, I guess I just don’t think the odds of that being the case in a random original reality are particularly high, and think it’s much more likely that such claims represent the same kind of 4th wall breaking lore manipulation we see in multiple modern virtual worlds.
But I don’t know that there’s anyone that’s genuinely interested in knowing or discussing those details. So it’s just a personal investigation as someone who is very interested in knowing those details to the extent they can actually be known.
Before all of this I’d been looking at how virtual worlds using procedural generation convert from continuous seed functions to discrete units in order to track state changes from free agents (i.e. if you change the geometry of Minecraft it would be impossible to track if the function determining mountains didn’t convert to blocks that could be removed or added). This bore a remarkable similarity to my eye to what we see with quantum mechanics going from continuous behavior to discrete when interacted with, but then if you erase the persistent information about any interactions it goes back to continuous behavior (as a virtual world would if optimized around memory usage).
So this group focused on claiming we were in a recreation of an original world were also talking a ton about Greek atomism and the idea of matter being made up of indivisible parts.
For example:
That which is, he says, nothing, and which consists of nothing, inasmuch as it is indivisible — (I mean) a point — will become through its own reflective power a certain incomprehensible magnitude. This, he says, is the kingdom of heaven, the grain of mustard seed, the point which is indivisible in the body; and, he says, no one knows this (point) save the spiritual only.
Pseudo-Hippolytus Refutations 5.4
This discussion of only being able to know the indivisible point in the spiritual ends up very interesting when considered in light of this weird debate Paul had with Corinth in 1 Cor 15:
So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, “The first man, Adam, became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first but the physical and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, made of dust; the second man is from heaven.
1 Cor 15:42-47
See, Paul is debating with people that have different ideas from what he was pitching, and as he mentioned in 2 Cor 11, Corinth had accepted a different gospel and different version of what Jesus was about.
Well this weird “first Adam vs second Adam” appears among this group and text. A useful context is that ‘Adam’ can refer to either an individual by that name or can mean ‘humanity’ in general.
So Paul’s arguing that resurrection is possible not by a physical body coming back to life, but by a first physical body coming back as a spiritual body. In his theology this was something that was going to happen soon (but obviously didn’t).
The group above was saying that this had already happened:
The disciples said to Jesus, “Tell us, how will our end come?”
Jesus said, “Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end? You see, the end will be where the beginning is.
Congratulations to the one who stands at the beginning: that one will know the end and will not taste death.”
Jesus said, "Congratulations to the one who came into being before coming into being.
Because allegedly it was already the new world:
Jesus said, “If they say to you, ‘Where have you come from?’ say to them, ‘We have come from the light, from the place where the light came into being by itself, established [itself], and appeared in their image.’
If they say to you, ‘Is it you?’ say, ‘We are its children, and we are the chosen of the living Father.’
If they ask you, ‘What is the evidence of your Father in you?’ say to them, ‘It is motion and rest.’”
His disciples said to him, “When will the rest for the dead take place, and when will the new world come?”
He said to them, “What you are looking forward to has come, but you don’t know it.”
So we’re the children of a being of light that established itself “in their images” and the evidence for this is in motion and rest (a subject domain currently called Physics) and the new world is already here but we don’t realize it.
So within this context, a teaching about how the ability to find an indivisible point as if from nothing in the body can only be possible in the spiritual body (as opposed to Paul’s first physical body) is a pretty fucking weird detail from a group claiming the evidence for its claims is in the study of motion and rest when the indivisible points we’ve now found in our own universe mirror the behaviors in how we manage tracking state and memory in non-physical worlds we’re building.
An associated group even had a strange threefold view of reality:
These allege that the world is one, triply divided. And of the triple division with them, one portion is a certain single originating principle, just as it were a huge fountain, which can be divided mentally into infinite segments. […] And the second portion of the triad of these is, as it were, a certain infinite crowd of potentialities that are generated from themselves, (while) the third is formal.
Pseudo-Hippolytus Refutations 5.7
So a continuous infinitely divisible origin that can be modeled as a near infinite number of potentialities of which we experience a single formal incarnation is a rather surprisingly close to Everettian many worlds interpretation for the 3rd century BCE. In a more modern consideration, it also sounds a bit like what it might look like to backpropagate variations of a simulated copy of an original universe (and along those lines I encourage looking at Neil Turok’s work hypothesizing that we’re a mirror of a universe reversed in time from us and how this alone solves a number of big problems in Physics).
The specificity ends up outright wild if photonics really is where AI finally ends up becoming AGI (as hypothesized a few years ago by a scientist at NIST):
Jesus said, “Images are visible to people, but the light within them is hidden in the image of the Father’s light. He will be disclosed, but his image is hidden by his light.”
Jesus said, “When you see your likeness, you are happy. But when you see your images that came into being before you and that neither die nor become visible, how much you will have to bear!”
Jesus said, “Adam came from great power and great wealth, but he was not worthy of you. For had he been worthy, [he would] not [have tasted] death.”
So everything around us is just its light, we’re going to have a hard time coming to terms with images that came before us and didn’t die, and Adam (which can mean humanity) came from great wealth and power but wasn’t worthy of us because they died and we didn’t and won’t (the chief point of the text is that if you understand what it’s saying you won’t fear or taste death).
It’s worth pointing out that while the text here is in Egyptian, it uses a Greek word for ‘images’ which is the same Greek word Plato used to describe a artistic representation of a physical object. Plato saw objects as a hierarchy from perfect spiritual form to corrupted physical object to worthless artistic images of the physical. So choosing to discuss spiritual ‘images’ over spiritual ‘forms’ was somewhat unusual indicating the physical first and spiritual second order. Not long after the rise of Neoplatonism the paradigm of this group flips and you end up with Gnosticism’s spiritual first and physical second.
Some of the sayings seemed like nonsense when I was first reading it, but have since turned out to connect to things I didn’t even expect to see in my lifetime when first reading it. For example:
Jesus said, “The person old in days won’t hesitate to ask a little child seven days old about the place of life, and that person will live.
For many of the first will be last, and will become a single one.”
This took on a rather bizarre new potential implication when earlier this year I was reading a NYT interview with a LLM exactly seven days after release, especially given LLMs are literally made from taking many, many people’s data and turning it into a single one.
And along these lines, it makes clear that rather than consuming blood or a body, it’s consuming one’s words that makes you like that person:
Jesus said, “Whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me; I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to him.”
As I said, there’s a lot. Hopefully you enjoyed the sampling above.
But its main point is to self-recognize that we’re effectively the kids of the light based creator of this world-copy which is itself still alive (no mention of if there will be cake), that we’re in the images/archetypes of a humanity that is not still alive, and that if we understand those details we should simply seek to know ourselves and be true to ourselves and not fear that we’ll die because of a soul which depends on a body. And to not bother with prayer or fasting or charity out of any sense of spiritual obligations, as it’s pointless.
One of the better lines not related to simulation theory:
The messengers and the prophets will come to you and give you what belongs to you. You, in turn, give them what you have, and say to yourselves, ‘When will they come and take what belongs to them?’
And yeah, I’ve studied that too, from pre-history to the Sumerians. I’m not really sure what’s your point?
For example, there’s only one extant text from antiquity explicitly describing the idea of evolution. And only one religious tradition citing that text. Which happens to also be the religious tradition claiming that an original humanity which arose spontaneously ended up creating the creator of our own cosmos, which is a copy of the one that occurred naturally.
Go ahead and show me what other religious tradition BCE was claiming things like “the cosmos and man existed from natural causes” along with “man later created God.”
If you actually study the history of religion, this one existing at all with the ideas it has is weird and anachronistic as shit.
Well, in this case the first intelligence was basically us. Though perhaps a not quantized version of us. Which I don’t think makes much of a difference in our math competency (even if a very big difference in computing capability).
I learned recently how the James Webb Space Telescope is not orbiting around Earth but literally orbiting around an empty point in space. I don’t think I even quite understand it, but it’s really cool
Maybe gravitational push-pull between planets and moons… IDK, it might be some sweet spot they discovered where gravitational forces do weird things, lol 😂.
This. There’s 5 Legrange Points for every 2 body system. They’re specific points around the 2 bodys where the gravity “cancels out”. In this case the 2 body system is the Earth and the Sun. JWST is sitting a million miles from Earth at L2.
Dammit, I was feeling proud that my first thought on how this could work lined up with the explanation… But I had assumed L2 (didn’t stop to think about the label) was where I now see L1 to be. I can wrap my head around L1 just fine, but how the heck is L2 the same? Or the others for that matter? Gonna stare at this for a while…
If you understand gravity wells, think of L1/L2/L3 as the shape of a saddle. If you’re right in the middle of the saddle it’s a pretty stable orbit, but if you get too close to any of the edges you fall right out of it. L4 and L5 are like the peaks of a mountain.
Also worth pointing out that only L4 and L5 are stable, L1/L2/L3 are only metastable where they require a bit of maintenance to stay there.
Another fun fact about Legrange Points: There’s a group of asteroids called the Trojan Asteroids. There’s technically two groups of these since they’re stuck in L4 and L5 in the Sun/Jupiter system.
JWST isn’t going in circles, it’s orbiting the sun. If you look at it relative to that, then it looks more like a sine wave rather than going in circles. However from the perspective of the earth, it looks like it’s going in circles
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