henke on 21/11/2020 at 19:06
Time for me to enter the great 'Was The Devil All The Time Good Or Bad?' debate of page 211.
It was pretty good.
Gray on 21/11/2020 at 20:31
I was getting increasingly annoyed with all the promos for (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boys_(2019_TV_series)) The Boys, thinking it has to be shit with all that advertising, but I eventually gave up and gave it a go. I found it surprisingly good, and watched both seasons in about 3 days. And then even the after-shows where they discuss what just happened. One thing that still annoys me however is how nobody ever mentioned Watchmen.
Oh yeah, I also watched (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen_(TV_series)) Watchmen a couple of months earlier, which made me re-watch the movie again for the umpteenth time. If my book was in this country, I'd re-read that too. Quite pleased with how in some ways the TV series was closer to the book than the movie was. As far as spin-offs go, it could have gone so wrong in so many ways, but to me it didn't, it added new interesting stuff.
demagogue on 22/11/2020 at 16:08
Sean Carroll's (
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrxfgDEc2NxZJcWcrxH3jyjUUrJlnoyzX) Biggest Ideas of the Universe vlog series is I think the best thing I've ever watched to really understand reality and all of that, I mean in relative terms, better than anything else I could have watched in the same time-frame, but not like learning the actual complicated math of it yet, which is crazy hard.
It's interesting, as it went on, I started forming my own interpretation of quantum mechanics and everything, and it kept getting solidified over time. At this moment, I'm pretty sure we never actually left the singularity before the Big Bang. We're still all pretty much hanging out there in the singularity, every particle in the universe is a vibrating string, and they're all sitting on top of each other in one place. It's the only way I can really grok the otherwise non-locality of QM, where two entangled particles can be light years apart and still "influence" each other.
If you want a mental image, well, let me back up because I skipped a few steps and jumped straight to the punchline. What you start with is, instead of spreading the particle out in a "superposition" smeared through space, the normal image you get in QM tutorials and interpretations, in my version you have the actual particle, it's just the one string, but (what we call) space is "smushed" into it, so it only looks to us, living in the fabric of it, like it's smeared out in space. It's basically the same thing (smearing particle out & smushing space in = the same thing) just flipping the perspective of the "particle" and "wave".
It's like if you had a ring on a sheet, then grabbed the sheet through the center and pulled it through. The ring is always in one place, but for people living "in the sheet" it looks like the ring is in a superposition in a growing wave rippling out. Then when you make a measurement, the ring is cut and whips around to one point to start growing out again, what we call a collapse of the wave function at one point in the fabric. That said, I like to actually call it a sinkhole because it's a handier expression.
But that image is really more of a gateway drug to where I think that's going, which is that what we think is space is really more like priority rules. Particles that take less time & energy to interact with each other (less "action") we call "close" to each other, and if they take more time and energy they're "far" apart. (Cf. the principle of least action is the straightest line in spacetime between two particles.) I mean they're all on top of each other, but only interacting with each other based on that priority rule. It just turns out, the rule is going to look like that sinkhole image, except instead of actual space sinking down the hole, it's just "priority to interact" that's sinking, i.e., we say a string-ring is "moving" in "space" getting "closer" to another ring knit into the fabric, but it's just getting "closer to interacting" with that that other ring each click of time (e.g., by eating up some series of interaction-bars in the way each click). But our experience is to spread that prioritization out in "spatial dimensions". And when they say the universe is expanding since the Big Bang, in this picture, the only thing "expanding" is the number of actions it takes for two particles to interact with each other, whereas before it'd have taken less. It looks to us like expanding space, but nope, we're still all in the primordial singularity, in a zero dimensional universe looking out ourselves. Kind of mindbending, to say the least.
By the way, this isn't anything that this podcast covers. This is just my own interpretation as I was watching it. It's just the vanilla quantum theory scientists actually use where nobody knows what's going on, but the math works. But if I had all the time in the world, I think it'd be cool to try to work my interpretation out into an actual system. I feel like there's something to it. It's the first time I've ever had a mental picture of QM, a particle smeared out on the boundary of a wave, that ever made sense to me.
Harvester on 26/11/2020 at 22:04
Yeah so I got one year of Apple TV+ for free when I bought an iPad a few months ago. Can't complain because it's free but normally I wouldn't have done it. The movies Greyhound with Tom Hanks and Sofia Coppola's On the Rocks were decent, but only that. Maybe Foundation will be a good show, who knows. A friend of mine says that Tehran is fun to watch, maybe I'll try it later. But all in all Netflix and Amazon Prime offer more bang for your buck.
But The Morning Show with Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, Billy Crudup and Steve Carrell, now that's good. This is a relevant, topical, well-written show that I'm enjoying very much. I have three episodes to go and I hope the second season will come through in time. The acting is excellent, production values are top notch (just be prepared for everyone using Apple products as could be expected), the New York environments are beautiful but most of all it's just a very well-written show with characters that are more than just two-dimensional caricatures. Witherspoon's character is the one most people will root for, but most of the other characters are far from black-and-white terrible or saintlike, which I appreciate. I find myself postponing judgment all the time (especially on Aniston's character), which I like more than the characters being either highly virtuous or obvious villains. Carrell's character has done objectively bad shit but even then they show his human side.
The only thing that feels fake here are the segments of the actual titular The Morning Show tv program, because it's a heavily scripted fluff news show by design, where a lot of the plot is actually about Witherspoon trying to make the show's content more meaningful. Add one of the show's former hosts (Carrell) being caught up in a me-too scandal to that, and it makes for compelling watching.
The best drama series I've seen lately has been I May Destroy You but this is a close second.
Harvester on 27/11/2020 at 23:09
Watched the last three episodes of The Morning Show. I was spellbound the whole way.
This show and I May Destroy You made me more sensitive to me-too and women's issues in general (and I May Destroy you also did that for sexual and racial minority issues). I always took stories about Weinstein and Spacey and all those people seriously, but The Morning Show showed me how such power dynamics might work in practice and how that affects the people involved. What also gets me is that these insanely talented, extroverted people that make more money than I ever will and have all these qualities and talents that I will never have, can still be so incredibly self-centered, amoral and opportunistic and just lacking moral fiber. Shouldn't come as a surprise but to see it displayed on the screen like that, that made an impact on me. Gets me wondering what I would do in their situation, and I know I've done some stuff I'm not proud of in my life, so I'm not saying I could never do what these people did and frankly I'm glad I don't possess that kind of power.
But as a working environment compared to all the glamor of The Morning Show, I prefer the relatively blue-collar mid-sized IT company I work at and the kind of people that work there. I wouldn't be able to handle all the huge egos, interpersonal politics and back-stabbing that goes on in that show's production environment.
SubJeff on 28/11/2020 at 12:31
You seen Bombshell? Or Mrs America? Worth it for further perspectives on this.
Harvester on 28/11/2020 at 13:52
I’ve seen Bombshell, it was also illuminating in that respect indeed. John Lithgow was massively sleazy in it, gave me the willies, especially because it’s based on real events.
icemann on 28/11/2020 at 15:33
5 episodes now into season 2 of the Mandalorian. Solid excellent 10/10 stuff. Seeing Michael Biehn on screen again for the first time in a long time was great. Plus Grand Admiral Thrawn from the extended universe + video games is now cannon which is just awesome :). Plus the appearance of a particular character from the cartoon series. Love this show.
SubJeff on 29/11/2020 at 00:35
Yeah, it's really good. This episode was solid. I haven't bothered with any of the other SW bs over the years, other then the films (which are all dreadful apart from R1 and, surprisingly, Solo) so all that stuff goes over my head. I don't need it though. Hicks was cool to see, yes.
Gray on 29/11/2020 at 03:39
Last week I started watching (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tick_(2016_TV_series)) The Tick. I found it surprisingly entertaining. I somewhat like Peter Serafinowicz, but the main reason I gave it a go was because I used to watch (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tick_(2001_TV_series)) The Tick with Patrick Warburton. At first I was a bit disappointed with the new show, but once I got into it, I think it might actually be the better of the two. It would be fun though to see Warburton do the lead in the new show instead, just for his over-the-top cluelessness.
