Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Diary: exercise bike + many-worlds (MWI) + Game of Thrones + Lee Child

Breakfast: a bowl of mixed nuts, sliced banana, a small satsuma, dunked with tablespoons of natural yoghurt. No cereal today due to a 1kg weight excess (71 kg this morning).

This morning: my replacement exercise bike arrived from Germany. Spent an hour putting it together - you seldom get a second chance to assemble an exercise bike but it does go faster. Shredded the large cardboard box for recycling while bagging up the polystyrene blocks.

The bike works.

Lunch: a tin of mulligatawny soup followed by Clare's home-made pizza topping on naan bread (very nice!). I finish up with an apple and a square of that 90% cocoa chocolate which, perhaps because of its bitterness, is rather attractive.

Afternoon: I hoover polystyrene & cardboard litter from this morning's assembly.

I try to continue my reading of "The Emergent Multiverse" - I had not fallen off a cliff on chapter 3, where David Wallace does the math, but I can't concentrate on the later probability discussion today.




I read 'West Hunter' instead, and discover a promising SF book I haven't read. I order: "Rainbow's End" by Vernor Vinge.



I also dip into the current-final volume of ASOIAF: "A Dance With Dragons: Part 2 After The Feast".



Dinner is predicted to be Minced Beef En Croûte and peas. We are still avoiding 'greens' and at Waitrose tomorrow we'll be shopping for substitutes. Our list so far: squash, sweet potato, vegetable samosas, mushroom ravioli, baked beans (small, low sugar) and anything similar which comes to mind as we scan the shelves.

No trips out today, except down the drive to put the recycling out. Like yesterday, it's been raining all day and the clouds loom thick and dark.

This evening I'll continue reading to Clare. It's Lee Child's "Killing Floor" (originally recommended by my brother) and we're still in the county jail, mixing it with the gangs. Gritty.



---

No-one thinks that EM drive works.

A shame.

2 comments:

  1. I encountered that EM Drive online a few weeks ago, but I was surprised to see it in the Tuesday Times almost full page. There are shades of Cold Fusion and Rotating Disks here ...

    I am expecting that the Wallace book (with it probability discussions ) may be a bit of a slog. I recently read a Deutsch 1991 paper which is as dramatic at is sometimes billed (ie not "Normal Science"): it is on CTCs. I think that Wallace will get to that topic too.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Luboš has a good pop at MWI today at his blog, http://motls.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/stupidity-of-pop-science-consensus.html. I think his substantive points (such as discrete branching vs. continuum probabilities) are answered by Wallace.

      At some point I'd like to spell out clearly just what happens when 'branches' 'split', according to Wallace's book. Have to finish it first!

      MWI looks better if your conceptual point of departure is the entire Hilbert space of the universe, rather than our familiar macroscopically observed spacetime.

      Delete

Comments are moderated. Keep it polite and no gratuitous links to your business website - we're not a billboard here.