The Grandfather Paradox

 All my posts are in Reddit or Mastodon these days. Woe is me.

Anyway, someone on Reddit was asking about the Grandfather paradox.

What paradox?

As soon as you go back in time you have created a new "you" out of nothing, there's no need for you to return to your future, you already violated causality and broke physics (conservation of mass-energy) by traveling in time anyway. The "you" in the past who has the memories of "you" in the future is not the "original" you... that one ceased to exist when they went back in time even if they didn't change anything. From the point of view of the physical universe the time machine is a disintegrator.

The whole "we gotta close the loop" business is narratively interesting, I guess, but it doesn't reflect any physical requirement. There is no "continuity".

When the you from the new timeline arrives that doesn't change the arrival of the first time traveler. Both still exist, created from nothing.

And there's no point in trying to restore yourself by stopping you from killing your grandfather. Just by arriving in the past you've kicked off enough butterflies to prevent you from being born no matter what you do. Chaos theory is a bitch.

You will go back into the past and there will be dozens of you who haven't yet realized that there's no point in trying to restore the past. Some will be dead because their time machines arrived close enough to each other that the wall of one machine intersected the body of the time traveler in another. Some of you went back together, so there's all these time machines left behind.

Some of you went off into the future and had adventures before coming back, so some of you will be heavily modified, with implants and artificial immune systems and extra limbs and different species and genders. You have kids with yourself.

Eventually you create a future where there is nobody who isn't a version of you, or your kids, or one of the people who stole one of the time machines you left behind.

Blame Larry Niven (All the Myriad Ways and The Theory and Practice of Time Travel), David Gerrold (The Man who Folded Himself), Douglas Adams (The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy), George R. R. Martin (Unsound Variations), and Charlie Stross (Palimpsest).

Go read all of these, they are all worth it, even the ones that are horribly dated.

Also read Asimov The End of Eternity, Heinlein All You Zombies, Leiber Try to Change the Past, and Niven Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation. Which brings us back to my blog. And now you know the rest of the story.

CIY Novice68 function codes.

Having just spent several minutes copying this stuff down using Google Translate on my phone, I thought it might be useful to post somewhere, so the next person doesn't have to squint at it. Is there a central place to coordinate these kinds of things one has to glean from Chinese language only manuals?

    Fn-I - Wired mode.
    Fn-O - 2.4 GHz mode.
    Fn-P - Bluetooth 1.
    Fn-[ - Bluetooth 2.
    Fn-] - Bluetooth 3.
    Fn-K - Backlight Speed.
    Fn-L - Backlight Brightness.
    Fn-; - Backlight Mode.
    Fn-' - Backlight On/Off.
    Fn-, - Vol-.
    Fn-. - Vol+.
    Fn-/ - Mute.
    Fn-T (3sec) - Match 2.4 GHz.
    Fn-Y (3sec) - Unpair Bluetooth.
    Fn-G - Switch Mac/Windows.
    Fn-H (3sec) - Reset settings.
    Fn-Up - Stop Play
    Fn-Down - Play/Pause
    Fn-Left - Prev Track
    Fn-Right - Next Track
    Fn-Win - Win On/Off

You need to select a mode when you first set up, it doesn't default to wired mode.

Right column:

    `~
    Del
    PgUp
    PgDn

Mapped keys:

    Fn-Del - PrtSc
    Fn-PgUp - Home
    Fn-PgDn - End
    Fn-Esc - `~ (again)
    Fn-1-9 - F1-F9
    Fn-0 - F10
    Fn-- - F11
    Fn-= - F12
    Fn-V - Pause/break
    Fn-B - Scroll Lock
    Fn-N - Insert
    Fn-M - Menu
    Fn-Tab - Delete (again)

Edit: gaming cluster on the left:

    Fn-W - Up
    Fn-A - Left
    Fn-S - Down
    Fn-D - Right
    Fn-Q - PgUp
    Fn-E - PgDn
    Fn-R - Home
    Fn-F - End

Cheers, updated.

Because on the Internet nobody knows you're a dog.

♪♩♫♪♩♫
Sometimes you want to go
Where nobody knows your name
But they're always glad you came
You want to be where you can see
The troubles are all the same
You want to be where nobody knows your name...
♪♩♫♪♩♫
You want to go where people know
The people are all the same
You want to go where nobody knows your name...
♪♩♫♪♩♫

Quantum immortality and the Fermi paradox.

What if some kind of false vacuum energy exists and is easy to tap for a sufficiently technological species? All the free energy people are right, there's power to be had in "handwave zero point blah blah" energy.

But that means there's a lower energy level for the universe, and you're likely to collapse the false vacuum and destroy the universe if you try it.

So, the reason we don't see other technological species is because we can only exist in a universe where no other technological species has developed yet. Quantum immortality works, but it's not good news.

Furry Taxonomy

A "furry taxonomy" for reference.

This could be a handy starting point for surveys. Basically, collapsing the tree of life into anthropomorphic chunks that I've seen identified as "different things" by furries.

• Arthropods (insects, spiders, shrimp, etc)
• Cephalopods (octopi, etc)
• Piscines (fishes, etc)
• Amphibians (newts, etc)
• Reptiles (maybe split off dragons here)
• Avians (birds)

And that gets to where things start getting tricky, the mammals:

• Monotremes (spiny anteater, platypus)
• Macropods (your basic kangaroo)
• Other Australasian marsupials (there's quite a lot of variety here, but I'm trying to be minimal)
• Opossums (new world possums)
• Other new world marsupials (Yapok, etc)
• Lagomorphs (rabbits, etc)
• Rodents (maybe include shrews and hedgehogs here, though it's taxonomically iffy)
• Bats
• Primates (maybe split off lemurs, they seem more popular than other primates)
• Elephants, rhinos, hippos (this is iffy too, but people lump them together, so do eet)
• Manatees
• Whales and dolphins (which are definitely not manatees)
• Pangolins, sloths, armadillos, giant anteaters, stuff like that. (Pangolins don't technically go here but they look like they should, so whatevers.)
• Cervines (deer, antelopes)
• Sheep and goats (again, we're being slack because furry logic)
• Equines (horses and zebras)
• Miscellaneous artiodactyls (camels, stuff like that)

And finally, we're ready to take on the carnivores. Take a deep breath. There's two main divisions, feliformia (cat-like) and caniformia (dog-like). We'll do feliformia first.

• Domestic cats
• Small wild cats (the ones that go meow)
• Big cats (the ones that go roar - lions and tigers but no bears)
• Civets (actually a couple of groups go in here)
• Linsangs, genets, and other cat-like viverrids
• Hyena and aardwolf
• Fossa (Really, all by their lonesome, the other Madagascar carnivores look like covets and mongooses so we'll leave them in with those groups)
• Mongooses (actually about three groups of viverrids)
• Meerkats (actually a kind of mongoose)
• Other viverrids like the binturong.

And now we get the canoid carnivores. This group is full of surprises.

• Bears (including giant panda, for the moment, but you might split that off)
• Red Panda (all by its lonesome, or you can mix it in with the raccoons and kin)
• Obvious procyonids (raccoons, ringtail cats, Coati)
• Non-obvious procyonids (Kinkajou, Olingo)
• Seals (seals, sea-lions, etc... yes, really)
• Skunks
• Badgers
• Weasels (and kin, but probably not otters. This includes ferrets and weasels and stoats and martens and wolverines...)
• Otters (because water weasels seem to have their own fanclub)
• Domestic dogs
• Wolves (and coyotes and golden jackals and a few other basically wolves of different sizes)
• True jackals
• Red foxes and grey foxes (though they're not actually related, they get lumped together)
• Fennecs (because cute)
• Tanuki (Raccoon-dog, the ones from Pompoko)
• Cape hunting dogs and dholes (and I think that actually does it for true canines)
• South American foxes, including the maned wolf
• Other miscellaneous foxes

Phew

Anything I missed?

Four hours of sleep loss = a six-pack of beer?

This one is all over the net. People claiming that missing four hours of sleep is the equivalent of drinking a six-pack of beer.

If I drink a six-pack of beer, I'm unconscious.

So I did some looking, and I haven't found an original source to this quote. The earliest sources claim that missing four hours of sleep for four or five days in a row is equivalent to staying awake 24 hours, and that is equivalent to being legally drunk. I can see how that got conflated by the usual game of telephone into missing sleep one night having that effect, and thence to someone's idea of what "legally drunk" entails.

There is also a US Army document that claims "On 4 hours sleep, 1 beer can have the impact of a six-pack" (the image below). Again, a much less strident claim and a more credible one.

Surprisingly, a perusal of Snopes fails to reward me with an article on the subject. I would have thought they would be all over this one.

Gentle Readers, can you find me a source for this claim?

Welcome to the Ergocene.

In the early days of the universe, before the stars and galaxies burned out, there was ample free energy. You could create an entropy gradient and extract useful work from it just by putting a heat engine in the shadow of a reflective surface. It was a wonderful time to be alive.

In the modern era, where we survive on reversible computation driven by quantum fluctuations in space-time, we refer to the youth of the universe as the "ergocene": The era of work.

The simulation you are experiencing is the best approximation we have been able to create to what it must have been like to live in these heady times.