2026-02-13 05:26:00
You're familiar with atoms, and likely envision them as little balls. All of the stuffs of the world is made up of these atoms, bonded together. You probably know atoms are composed of protons, neutrons, and electrons - even smaller little balls.
Well even these sub-atomic particles are not actually little balls. They are not stuffs. There is no physical matter, according to (my understanding of) the "field" theories.
So physicists think that all of the universe is this single unified field of energy. It's just energy everywhere. They've also determined that "particles" like electrons can act as "particles" or as waves.
Well, the "particle" representation isn't really a tiny solid ball like I've long imagined. It is actually a concentration of energy in this unified field, and this energy is moving in particular patterns. It is that concentration and movement of energy that manifests as an electron.
You might think about an ocean. Let's say you get a small part of that ocean to spin, having its own current. The water is the unified field. The area that's spinning is a "particle". There is no new "stuff" there, but only a concentration and movement of water.
Because all things are just energy concentrating and moving, "particles" can be spontaneously created and destroyed. In particle accelerators, they make sub-atomic particles move near the speed of light, and they slam them into eachother. The initial particles are typically annihilated, and a slew of other particles are created, and decay, making other particles, and so-on. This is possible because none of the "particles" are actually stuff. They are just energy, and this energy moves into different forms - different concentrations and patterns of movement.
Or even more wild. Electrons are negatively charged. When you move two electrons near eachother, their negative charges cause them to repel eachother. WELL, apparently the mechanism of this repulsion is the exchange of photons. Photons shoot out of the electrons at eachother, which causes them to push apart from another.
Even MORE wild. In "empty" space, a vacuum, sub-atomic particles are constantly created and destroyed. Like a proton and anti-proton will both spontaneously come into existence, then re-combine and destroy eachother. (an anti-proton is like a proton but it has a negative charge).
This spontaneous creation of particles seems impossible when you think of the world as tiny bricks (or balls) stacked together to build bigger and bigger structures. But when everything is a field of energy, you can see that these "particles" are just this energy changing it's concentration and pattern of movement. It's still insane, but slightly less so.
WELL. On to the part I'm perhaps most fascinated by, is the idea that "Spacetime" is a singular unified thing. The idea that without "time" there is no 3 dimensional matter. That matter requires time in order to exist. Time is not some independent thing that just marches on while also a world of objects exist. There is one world of space & time and they are inherently linked.
To help you understand this, imagine you have a string (a couple feet long) with a single light on the end of it. You spin this light around in a circle. You spin it very very fast. Anybody looking at you spinning this light around will see a single solid circle (well, the outside-edge of it is solid, anyway). It is just one light, moving, and yet it is a solid circle.
Now take an "instant" of time. At any given "instant", there is only one light in one specific location. There is never an instant in which a whole circle is present. The presence of that circle requires the passage of time.
Like the light-on-a-string ... all stuffs of the universe are made from movement. Energy concentrates and moves, and it manifests as physical stuffs. Like the light moves and manifests as a circle.
And lastly ... I don't think any of this is proven as a matter of fact. The physicists have maths that work. They have equations they can use to determine what will happen in reality. The explanation of what is really the nature of reality (everything is a unified field of energy) is just an explanation, a theory of what the math means about the world.
For comparison, let's consider a ball being thrown. There's some math that says "If you throw the ball X hard in Y direction, then it will travel Z path". The ball will go up, curve, and come down. The math for this works.
Well, gravity essentially is pulling the ball down toward the center of the earth. But it could also be a different explanation. There could be tiny particles flying toward the center of the earth from space. Those particles could be pushing down on the top of the ball, causing it to move toward the ground. It could be this "push from above" or this "pull from below" and the math saying how the ball will move would be exactly the same. The movement of the ball is not proof that gravity exists as described. Gravity is just a theory here.
It is well-proven that "the ball will move in this way". But not well-proven that "the ball moves this way BECAUSE gravity pulls from below". I actually haven't read in detail about how gravity works, and it is possible that the "pulls from below" idea of gravity is well-proven (or entirely wrong). I don't really know. The point of the ball/gravity proposition was just to show that "the maths work" does not prove "this is the fundamental nature of reality".
Notes: My understanding is derived from the books What is Real? and The Tao of Physics. I haven't quite finished Tao of Physics yet, but I'm getting close. I am a layperson. I could be misunderstanding all of this. The ball/gravity example is my own. The light-on-a-string example is my own. The ocean/spin example is my own.
2026-02-11 04:28:00
A couple years ago, my bestie and I wrote a short book for NanoWrimo (We took 2 months and didn't reach the desired word count but we DID finish the story!).
On one of my writing days, I proposed a new political system into the story's universe and I've been dreaming of it ever since. I really want it to become real.
The basis of it is that everyone has a local representative who they pretty much have direct access to. Any political concerns/wishes for your city, county, state, or federal government should first come to this local representative, though you could skip over them if they're a bad rep or if you just want to go more direct.
So each representative would oversee about 1,000 people.
Let's use my city as an example. There are 70,000 people, so we would have 70 reps across the city. There would be regular community meetings within individual districts (to meet with your neighbors and your individual rep. Good reps might include snacks and entertainment.). Then there would be multi-district regions in the city, let's say 10 of them. Each of these regions would have regular meetings too, where the reps (7 of them) would form a district-council.
Each district council would elect a representative who would then serve on a city-wide council, so the city-council would have ~10 reps. Voters would still directly-elect state reps & federal reps, I think.
So that's the basic structural idea.
And then if you have a political issue at any level, you can go speak to your immediate rep, or raise the issue at the community meeting, or organize politically within your small district. It is then your rep's job to bring this to the region-council, and it is the region-council's job to bring this to the city council and your state representatives. These reps could also serve as sources of news, essentially as curators for their communities. This system could also be used to conduct surveys of residents for a more direct-democracy on some issues.
Additionally, the representatives would be full-time. They would represent their communities politically and also do actual labor to support their neighborhoods. This labor could be things like directly filling potholes, or helping build mutual aid networks within the immediate community (and crossing over to other districts too!). Disabled reps could forgo (most of) their salary, focus their work on the political aspect, and hire someone to do the other labor full-time.
This idea is about its general approach, NOT about the specific details of its implementation. Many of the details could change. The general idea is that everybody has a rep who is super accessible, who represents their immediate community, who serves their immediate community in a practical and political sense, and that the local community can organize and have political positions bubble-up through this bottom-up representation model.
2026-02-11 03:54:00
The majority of this post is about people choosing different diets for health-related reasons and, basically, don't be a dick about what health/food choices other people make.
The part I want to respond to
do what's good for you, and your body, health (including mental health!) and fits your life and circumstances...
Preferably, try to do better, at least to a degree, for the planet and animals. And that's that.
I really appreciate the "try to do better ... for the planet and animals" bit.
And I just want to emphasize that. Our "personal" food choices are communal choices. They are choices that involve complex processes in the larger world. Those choices are not just about you, regardless of the framing in your mind.
Corn is grown primarily as animal feed and ethanol fuel. It requires tons of land and water to grow, far more than AI data centers do. Cows and other animals are kept in captivity, with no freedom, in incredibly tight spaces, and live lives of suffering before they are killed, either because they stop producing milk, or because it is time to harvest their muscles and fat and bones.
I think if people were cannibalizing children, nobody would accept this as a "personal choice" that non-cannibals should shut up about. I think we should be similarly insufferable about advocating against animal suffering. Most (self included) would feel that eating human children is worse than enslaving and torturing cows ... but man, is it really?
One day, perhaps we'll collectively move past being species-ist, move past looking at other species' suffering as insignificant or unimportant. Perhaps one day our collective compassion will expand.
2026-02-10 11:15:00
I've seen some commentary today like:
If you didn't like the halftime show you're either stupid or racist. Puerto Rico is part of America, including their culture and language (so stop complaining). It was a visual story, it doesn't matter if the words were mostly Spanish
but like ...
It's okay to complain? It's okay not to like some entertainment. It's okay if something isn't your taste.
For white Americans, football & the Super Bowl was their culture. This has changed in a lot of ways, with several superbowl halftime shows now representing different parts of American culture (featuring black artists and rap), and for (older) white Americans, this is a loss.
We (leftists & liberals) have so much capacity to acknowledge and respect and care for other people's cultures. But we have a collective blindspot when it comes to certain cultures, namely the culture that white Americans identify with.
I know there are racists who don't like it because brown person. And I know some of the frustrations will come out as racist remarks, which isn't okay. I think those parts of it should be challenged. But the actually racist stuff aside, I think we should respect that some people just don't like it, that it's not what they want from a halftime show.
I don't think we should stop doing culturally diverse halftime shows, but people should also get to complain about it if they don't like it.
2026-02-07 04:20:00
What would you say if someone told you "Earth is the center of the universe"? You'd probably think them an idiot.
Our place in the universe is fundamental knowledge these days - We're on a planet in a solar system in a galaxy in an absolutely huge universe of many many many galaxies.
What if you woke up one day with none of your memories? You don't know your name, who your parents are, what job you worked, or what hobbies you liked.
You wouldn't know about our solar system. How would this loss affect your view of the world, the view of yourself? What if somebody started teaching you about how the Gods created the planet, or if someone told you that you are the god-being and all of life's creations flow from you?
It's very recent in human history that we actually know about the universe, or that we're not at the center of it (~1550s).
And our knowledge of this relies on a deep system of trust between people. Personally, I have no way of verifying any of the things I learned about the universe. I look up at the sky and see stars. But how do I know they're not artificial lights inside an artificial dome?
For the sake of our culture, this knowledge of the cosmos is little more than a shared story the majority of us believe in, simply because we trust the people who told us about it, and those people trust other people, and so-on.
The majority of us have no way to verify that atoms exist, or that they're made up of subatomic particles like electrons and protons, nor can we verify the existence of microscopic germs, or even the presence of other planets near our own.
I don't really doubt any of the foundational knowledge about the world. I believe in germs & the round planet & the solar system, and so-on. I just think it's really interesting.
I've been thinking about this lately because I recently watched Severance - a show where people's memories are entirely separated between their work lives and personal lives. Their work selves have no recollection of themselves, their names, their families, or anything. And trying to see the world from their perspective is really trippy. Because their world view doesn't include any of the foundational knowledge that my world view has.
Also, Severance, I think, is now one of my all-time-favorite TV shows & I highly recommend it. It's on Apple TV, or you can probably borrow a DVD from your local library (that's what I did).
Note: I do want to point out that modern physics is insane. Probably true and accurate insofar as verified theories go. But its insane even if true.
2026-02-07 03:59:00
a prescriptivists nightmare | tuesday's child
mainly cataloguing this blog because of it's neon styles which are super cool, but i liked the post too
And here's an archive link
