Blog

Details

Published: 14 November 2021

Hits: 6931

Novblog 2021

Remembrance Day. In the UK, on this eleventh day of the eleventh month we traditionally stand for two minutes silence at the eleventh hour, to remember those fallen in war. This began after WW1, ‘The war to end all wars’, which somehow ushered in a century of wars instead. It seems also a time to reflect on future conflicts that now seem inevitable.

COP26 has predictably ended with universal agreement that Something Must Be Done, but that nobody needs to oblige themselves to do anything they really don’t want to.

I'm getting the feeling that, historically, COP26 will mark the beginning of serious universal appreciation of the problems but that insufficient action will follow until the problems worsen and the costs of inaction by the big players start to hideously outweigh the costs of radical action even in the short term. That seems normal for Homo Sapiens. 

Our species suffers from the morality paradox. Telling others what to do and then not doing it yourself usually proves the best course of action.

I think we can now confidently make three predictions about the coming decades; global temperatures will rise well past 2⁰C, human-made catastrophes and wars will multiply hugely in frequency, and by mid to late century, world human population will have decreased markedly from current levels. Mind the cull.

As I listened to the results of COP26, a friend put on an old prophetic 1969 King Crimson track.

Cat's foot iron claw

Neuro-surgeons scream for more

At paranoia's poison door.

Twenty first century schizoid man.

Blood rack barbed wire

Politicians' funeral pyre

Innocents raped with napalm fire

Twenty first century schizoid man.

Death seed blind man's greed

Poets' starving children bleed

Nothing he's got he really needs

Twenty first century schizoid man.

Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser Ansible?

Perhaps worth a try, the Elder Gods may well maintain Cosmic Indifferentism, but some lesser aliens might reply.

See here  https://www.specularium.org/3d-time/item/338-delayed-choice-quantum-eraser-ansible

Distraction Hobbies.

Lithonian Space Navy.

The shipyards of Lithonia have closed for the winter along with our holiday lodge but working in them has provided  a stimulating distraction from reading and writing during the social isolations and lockdowns of covid.

An arms race with surrounding planetary civilisations has led to the development and deployment of new classes of Lithonian warship.

Herewith the LSN Flagship Draconia and two escorting SMVs, stealth missile vessels.

The Draconia has a standard silicate hull hewn from the rocks of the metal poor beach world of Lithonia and it carries an array of long and short range weaponry forged from scavenged coat hooks, dismantled electric razors, metal scraps, and vape accessories.

The SMVs have tougher hulls selected from huge unworked slabs of seaworn vesicated basalt and they rely on speed, stealth, and rock armour to close with opposing vessels.

I can foresee a sprawling boardgame evolving out of all this in the fullness of time, it will probably require a fair area of the beach to lay it all out on.

I used to make ships from plastic kits over half a century ago but always found it more interesting to discard the instructions and create something new. Now I eschew plastic altogether and take inspiration from whatever more durable junk comes to hand and eye. Having enjoyed the first one, I figured that I may as well start on my second childhood early.

Herewith the fleet so far.

Details

Published: 25 October 2021

Hits: 6965

Octblog 2021

COPOUT 26

The make or break Climate Conference in Glasgow looms, and there seem few grounds for optimism because it looks set to avoid the underlying issues.

I just sat through an edition of the BBCs Question Time and in response to the question ‘The Environment or The Economy?’ all the assembled politicos predictably said ‘Both’ and then proceeded to fantasise about how we could all both eat our cake and have it. This probably reflects the attitude of most humans currently.

Unfortunately, the science and the maths say something completely different. Business as usual cannot continue for much longer. None of the technical fixes we currently tinker with or theorise about will make much difference, the economy and the environment will both decline for many generations to come now. They will do so because since WW2 everything has gone exponential in population, consumption, production, pollution, and environmental damage, and we have already overshot the limits of the resources that this planet can provide and the damage it can absorb whilst sustaining us.

Progress has failed. Analysts of ‘progress’ in terms of wellbeing and life satisfaction generally conclude that developed countries achieved a maximum of wellbeing and life satisfaction sometime in the 1970s. Since then, economic growth has begun to erode general wellbeing and life satisfaction.

Global economic activity cannot grow or even continue without provoking the environmental changes that will undermine it and cause a gradual or catastrophic decline.

Humanity has a choice. It can either choose an acceptable level of degrowth, or it can choose to see what level of degrowth becomes forced upon it by inaction.

Involuntary degrowth could easily mean returning to Dark Age or Neolithic level economies and civilisations after resource conflicts, mass migrations, and social order collapses have devastated industrial societies, and the four horsemen of apocalyptic War, Famine, Pestilence, and Megadeath have done their work.

Voluntary degrowth to a sustainable level might just prove achievable if humanity collectively aimed for something like the 1970s and preserved some but not all the technical innovations made since then. This would of course involve levelling the developing world up to that. We should for example, keep the internet as a valuable communication and information resource, but scrap social media entirely.

Imagine a world in which everyone has the basics but where long distance travel and trade have become a rarity, the burning of fossil fuels has become illegal along with private transport, a local rather than a globalised world, where very little except information moves between continents, a world in which people lead simpler material lives but work less and have richer social and cultural lives.

Interview with a Wizard.

The first series of thirteen Blumberg-Carroll email interviews came to over eighty thousand words, enough for a book.

We seem to have pioneered the literary equivalent of a late night chat show series, except that here the interviewer and the interviewee have each had at least whole day to think about each of the 365 questions, so expect some penetrating questions and provocative answers. Lionel Snell has graciously offered to write a preface.

Covid.

I wonder what casualty allowance the UK government has given itself for its current policy of relaxing Covid restrictions and precautions and relying entirely on vaccination. Scientific opinion and the political opposition have turned against it.

As the new wave of infections and deaths rises here, it does seem surprising that the government and the media do not give greater publicity to the percentage of the unvaccinated amongst the newly hospitalised and dead.

Lastly, leaf fall from the deciduous trees around here seems oddly delayed this year, and look who seems to enjoy the unseasonable climate:-

I may have done them a favour; Greece may well become too hot for their kind in years to come.

Details

Published: 23 September 2021

Hits: 7368

Septblog 2021

Esoteric Horticulture.

At Chateaux Chaos the Autumnal Mandrakes have sprouted surprisingly early, before autumn equinox, with Circe already a foot into the sky and Boris and Igor just getting started. This year they will have an experimental outdoor season, note the slug repellent copper wire around their new home. Let us hope that the increasingly unpredictable climate does not bring any early frosts.

Magical Book.

The world’s most illustrious academic historian of the esoteric arts has prepared a splendid preface for the forthcoming Classic Edition of ‘Liber Null and Psychonaut’, the book that initiated an epic paradigm change in magical thought. Since its first publication this book has attracted both aggressive dismissal and laudatory recommendation. A new paradigm will always make some people very angry and other people ecstatic. Weiser’s Classic Edition which includes some new material, will appear sometime next year.

Holidays.

Retirement from most of the more time demanding business activities has led to a life of concentric holidays and research sabbaticals with frequent sojourns in remote Wales where  a lot of wildlife still thrives. Herewith an adder sunning itself on some concrete. Some bright spark decided that this area would provide adders with an excellent habitat and released a few hundred captive bred specimens some decades ago, now we have thousands of them here. Shoes now seem essential in the dunes, but on the upside, they do bite dogs that people don’t keep on leads.

Herewith also a friendly cricket. Until recently I could always hear their high pitched chirping at night. This year my youngest daughter, a professional ecologist, told me that they were making their customary racket, but I could barely hear them. Oddly, I found this a greater portent of mortality than my need for reading glasses, something may soon disappear from my universe forever as my faculties fade. I seem to have just eaten a pot of dog ice cream having mistaken the picture on the carton for a polar bear. I may have only few decades more to discover the remaining secrets of the universe and the quantum realm presents bizarre difficulties akin to juggling spaghetti whilst blindfolded in a hailstorm.

Quantum Chess?

During discussions of the concept of dimensions with my interviewer/biographer, the following analogy or thought experiment emerged to illustrate the possibilities of multiple time dimensions.  

The record of a game of chess provides its temporal dimension, it shows what happened over time. It does not show the moves not taken. However, we could have multiple timelines in which alternatives moves occur. A player unable to decide between two moves can elect to make both of them by replacing a single piece by two smaller shadow pieces in different positions with the provisos that whenever one of the shadow pieces interacts with an opposing piece, the other shadow piece becomes removed, and a player moving one of the shadow pieces must also move the other corresponding one as well. Otherwise, all the usual rules of chess apply.

Now here comes the really strange bit: -

Afterwards, we could write a single timeline move sequence to describe the whole game that does not include the shadow pieces that became removed! However, an expert would probably notice something very odd about some of the moves chosen when looking at the record afterwards. Such a Quantum-Chess analogy can in principle explain many of the mysteries of quantum mechanics and magic. What may have happened, and what could happen, can affect what does seem, to us, to have actually happened. ‘Imaginary’ phenomena can have very real effects.

Afterthought – simply sawing each piece of a chess set down the middle and numbering the two halves the same provides an easy way of preparing a quantum chess set. The two halves of each piece begin the game on the same square.

Details

Published: 15 August 2021

Hits: 7634

Augblog 2021

Dragon seen in Wales. I met a representative of the dragon races in the dunes near our retreat in remotest Wales. She said that despite having to work on smaller scales and less ambitious projects than in the Mesozoic Era, she remained confident that her kind would regain world domination after hearing our IPCC report on anthropogenic global warming. Another forty gigatons of carbon dioxide per annum for a few decades more should do the trick nicely, she continued. Its not so much the seemingly minor average temperature increases but the resulting exponential increases in extreme weather events that will render your civilisations unviable as your agriculture collapses and you start to massacre each other wholesale. All this will give dragonkind splendid new opportunities, she cheerfully concluded.

Afghanistan. I went through it on the Hippy trail back in the late seventies. It seems a mistake to classify it as a nation for it consists of tribalized territories that no central authority or external power has ever really controlled. Due to western medicine its population has mushroomed far beyond the agricultural carrying capacity that the bone dry and often freezing territory offers, and cultural and religious attitudes inhibit the adoption of industrial or post industrial development. It has valuable mineral resources however, as the Chinese have noticed. A descent into dark ages barbarism and theocracy with Kalashnikovs now seems inevitable. A Taliban dictatorship seems unlikely to build a nation, more likely a fragmentation back to tribal rivalries will occur. The Brits, The Ruskies, and the Yanks all failed there. The Chinese may eventually become tempted to go in hard for the strategic minerals and they won’t shy away from eradicating the culture and as much of the population as that requires.

Lithonian flotilla. Beach detritus, DIY leftovers, and vape accessories continue to provide resources for the growing Lithonian space fleet. Note the inclusion of the Retro-Dreadnaught  in this flotilla. Due to occasional relativistic navigation errors, vessels dispatched on weeklong voyages sometimes come back hundreds of years later, and the Lithonian fleet consists of vessels from many eras.

Microcosm, Psi, and Macrocosm.

The quest for a sub-quantum geometry that can explain quantum physics with gravity, and psi and their relationship to hyperspherical cosmology continues here; -

https://www.specularium.org/3d-time

At present it consists mainly of a list of qualitative ingredients for a potential description. These include Cramer’s Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Physics, my Three Dimensional Time hypothesis, Wolff’s Wave Structure of Matter, and some higher dimensional geometry.

Fitting that lot together and rendering it quantitative certainly presents a challenge, may Azathoth modulate my neurones.