Category: Musings

Who Do You Take Seriously?

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

I’ll start this off with two omissions.

Of late we have heard a lot of the orange-drone-voice-man and his quest for Swedish Krona. The body language of his interaction with Vlad the Impaler has been dissected, no doubt for a fee, in various outlets. Not one of them has thought to mention that Putin is a dan grade judoka. Probably none of these body-language experts have been on the mat. If like Putin you are a lifelong judoka you cannot but help assessing where the centre of gravity of people is. This includes during handshakes. Instinctively one adjusts position and weight to see how another responds. A player of with-caddy-cart 18 hole golf has a different mentality to a judoka. Always there is an inkling of what throw one might attempt. A golfer might not anticipate this. Putin might one day step in for an Ipponseionage and bam…Putin will always be a judoka to the core.

Unless I am mistaken the history of the tribes of Israel as per the old-testament speaks of the wrath and retribution of God. There is Divine intervention on a biblical scale. Right now Israel is going biblical on Gaza. Maybe they have checked this out with God and he is on board, maybe not. If he is unhappy with this bellicose vengeance he might have to intervene. I have not heard this aspect discussed. But large scale divine intervention is a part of their religious hagiography. Maybe God is no longer as important as Netanyahu.

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As an old fart in rural Brittany there is no reason why anyone might take me seriously, even were my observations apt and applicable. This is because I am not famous nor am I a big cheese. I do not have thousands of followers on this internet thingy. If you are a nobody, nobody takes you seriously. You have to have a gang, a club, a peer group or be properly institutionalised. It is possible that people who have been in the same institution for several decades might imagine me the lunatic!! Life has a few quirks.

I don’t think that golfer boy is noting a shift in the way the world is. He is a bit too stuck in the past. He does not have a wide encompassing view of humanity as a whole.

As a rule of thumb people give the most credence to people who are relatively close to them physically, their colleagues, who think in a similar manner. They like what they hear back so they take it seriously. Anyone outside can be seen as misguided, an enemy even. Their views and opinions are not taken seriously, they are discounted. Even people who know intellectually about this prejudice cannot resist it. It is a fundamental flaw of group-think and group-mind. Peer “pressure” is way more powerful than we care to acknowledge. The desire to not rock the boat and to comply is endemic.

“Which idiot would dare to put their head above the parapet?”

If anyone did, they would only be taken seriously posthumously and in retrospect. Genius is most often ascribed posthumously and with hindsight. Rarely is it proclaimed in vivo. Everyone knows this and yet repeats history by non-acceptance and in some cases derision.

Things must not be too different in order to be taken seriously!

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The obvious question here is why do unicorns always point to the right?

Some people do not like those who have a different perspective from them, they resist hearing it and in any way assimilating. They just can’t or won’t take divergent views seriously.

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Do people have to see the world in a similar way to you in order for you to take them seriously?

Must everyone think just like you?

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Is it Safe to Write off Dreams?

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

There may be times when we wake up from a nightmare or grimacing with embarrassment from the contents of a dream and in coming to think, “phew, thank God, it was only a dream!!” Yet in the twilight between sleep and “awake” it takes a little while to convince ourselves fully. The dream residue hangs around as we perhaps take breakfast and if we are so inclined, a morning shower. The mind set “it was only a dream” is partially convincing for some and complete for others. The dream echo may last until we get on the Metro train of a morning.

But the funny thing is, you can never un-have a dream. Whether you like it or not the dream has changed you, your consciousness and assimilation of the world. That change may be tiny; it may be huge. But a tiny change, a tiny acorn can become a mighty oak. Things we attempt to sweep under a carpet leave a lump of sorts.

The more rational we imagine ourselves to be the more likely it is that we use the “it was only a dream” explanation and justification. Dreams are for space cadets and rainbow unicorn jockeys after all. They are not real; they have no bearing on waking reality. Bah! Humbug!! In our enlightened AI social media obsessed age dreams have no real place. You can’t make a TikTok out of a dream. You can take a video at Santorini.

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Of course if you are prone to recurring nightmares, they can be tricky to write off with the “it was only a dream” mantra. You may even get stressed about going to bed in case your nightmare returns. Depending upon your point of view, a nightmare means that there is something you need to address in life. It could be a PTSD minefield etched into you being or some other life circumstance than needs attention. Something you are perhaps unwilling to face, to the extent you have nightmares about it.

If you are lucky your dreams may offer you guidance and insights for life. If you are a know-it-all arrogant person, you may squander these with the “it was only a dream” mantra. Dreams can warn you about traps you are rationalising yourself into, they can offer a left sided view aside your insistent justifications.

But if you are of the “phew, I got away with that” mentality you are very likely to discount and write off any advice given in dreams. You are so cunning and clever.

In general most people have a good idea when the need to address some problem or other in life. They know in their hearts. They may lack courage. Their minds may provide an entire Excel spreadsheet of excuses why they do not have to face whatever it is. So they will put it off and put it off and put it off. They may, in this manner, precipitate a crisis of considerable magnitude. They may hope that they never need to face “it” and pray for the fairy Godmother. They may indulge in magical thinking.

I have no idea what you might be dreaming. You could be dreaming a dream in which I am.  In that dream there may be some “advice” for you on what to do. For example if you are fated to meet me, then I might be a recurrent theme in your dreams. If you wish to follow that fate as opposed to stymy it then it might be wise to try to engineer a meeting. If you wish to avoid me you could keep doing than and see if I eventually stop appearing in your dreams or nightmares. If I disappear from your dreams, you could conclude that it is safe to write off dreams in which I appear.

The thing about dreams and dreaming is that there are rarely binary. Dreams are nuanced and partially ephemeral.

I have had hundreds of dreams. Some of which I have been able to act upon meanigfully. There are many for which I am in no position to do anything about. All I can do is note them. I never discount them, but I can’t do anything. It is not my call, my play.

If your dreamer wants to get through to you and you discount what it presents in dreams, it can start to offer omens and dreaming symbols in real life. If for example you have a car crash in real life, then your state of awareness your assimilation of the world and its circumstances needs to and will have an abrupt halt, a forced change of direction. This is a waking dream.

Of course you could ignore it and use the “it was only a dream” mantra and deny your hand in whatever happenstance has occurred.

Did you know that the reason ostriches stick their head in the sand is to better help them to dream?

From my point of view it is generally unwise to chant the “it was only a dream” mantra. Some dreams are relatively safe not to devote too much attention to; others require immediate consideration and action.

Recurring dreams are a subset of dreams that must not be ignored.

Inside My Head

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

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At the moment we are re-watching Wednesday who is currently at Nevermore, the gates of which owe design credit to the “arbeit macht frei” of Auschwitz.

I’ll wager that as these things are measured, I would not count as a “normie”. Some might imagine that my mind is a scatter of machine gun synapses. When in fact it is generally very calm and very tranquil. From time to time the wife gives me a weird look when I answer an obscure question on “University Challenge”.

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What is normal to me, may be a bit weird to others. I am aware of this and have observational “evidence” to back it up. I may appear morbid but am in fact simply nowhere near as dramatic about death and things corporeal as most. I am not easily fazed. I am not a “poor me” attention seeking drama queen.

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The simple question is,

“How can I interact with others whilst being fully myself without freaking them out?”

The ancillary question is,

“Is that even impossible?”

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In the past I have tried and failed at fitting in. Experience suggests that I am just too odd. I am not interested in the same things.

I got well fed up with the need for chameleon…

People find it hard to believe that someone with my {ancient, more than half a Giga second} background is not after something, that I am not pursuing an agenda of sorts. They find the entire concept of abandon to flow an anathema. Because of the way they live, they only see their own motivations reflected in their mis-perceptions of me and my circumstance.

My mind is not full of cunning plans and self-promotion.

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Today we prepared some firewood for when I am incapacitated in autumn. I bought a new splitting axe. Tomorrow I will power wash the guano off from under the swallow nest. The second brood has fledged.

Unless I am actively thinking about scribbling here, my mind is quiet bucolic and at rest.

This “at rest” is extremely hard for normal people to imagine, because they live with a relative cacophony, inside their heads…

Most people would be very bored to live inside my head as it by default is…

Quantum Computing – $1 Billion in Patent Applications

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

If you search Espacenet using the key words “Quantum Computing” it returns 155,000 results!!  Clearly, I have not read them all this afternoon. At a very low legal fee of ~ $6,500 per patent that is ~one billion dollars’ worth of fees for the patent attorney community.

Alice, Bob and the Cat have served them well. They have made a quantum leap in income. Would you like some dinner?

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Reason suggests that it is not possible to come up with 155,000 totally original ideas and concepts beyond the state of the art. There must be redundancy and perhaps overly zealous patent agents have awarded their national home grown talent with a facile grant. Some of these applications cannot be worth the paper they are written upon.

Never mind the quality measure the tonnage. No wonder there is a forestry problem…

I have long speculated that the whole intellectual property (IP) / patent arena is due for a big clean out / dose of salts. It is overblown and over stuffed. The inventive steps are often really trivial,  and not “quantum leaps” in understanding.

To generate new IP against the petabyte background already filed might be tricky. When I last looked, I thought many so called unique ideas were very derivative and the inventive step even obvious to me as a non-expert pikey in his shed.

Sooner or later there is going to be some big blow out tests in court. Or you can have a Samsung – Apple  –   “we’ll sell you ours if you sell us yours” swapsies.

Were I an investor looking at that very basic survey of landscape I would not be champing at the bit (excuse the pun).

Following the Quantum Thread…

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

As is so often the case the whole world gets to hear about what is going on in the USA. The world, the internet, has a USA based centre of gravity and America likes to tart its wares. The endless self-promotion urge originates there. PR and hype have their home, therein. Understated is not a word in common parlance, not even sotto voce.

As someone who has probably read more patents than is good for them, who has even worked through in detail to understand dozens, it is something of a hobby.

“Old fart in his shed reads patents.”

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Speichergasse 6 Bern

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We have heard a lot about the big American tech companies and their quantum computing (QC) efforts. It is a piss on the street corner type of approach to mark territory. When I last looked in detail at the patent landscape ~2017-8 there were a lot of US patent applications on QC whereas the Chinese were then focussing on quantum communication and key distribution. There were a lot of Chinese applications.

Clearly quantum cryptography is the killer app for quantum computing.

First pass shows that the Chinese are now releasing press notes on their QC chip technologies, there are a few rumblings in Moscow. There are efforts elsewhere like Singapore and South Korea. An issue remains, quantum talent, and for Russia quantum brain drain has been mooted. The USA may worry about training would be Chinese quantum talent.

As mentioned earlier in the blog, I am due to be incapacitated in winter. So I might need somethings to keep me busy.

I wonder has there been any genuine quantum leap innovation since 2017?

What is left of the patent lifetimes?

Is it worth another scooby?

Alice & Bob – Quantum Jobs

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Prompted by the answer to a question on University Challenge, I typed Alice and Bob into the font of paid for promotion previously known as a search engine. The Mecca of product placed wisdom came up with a French quantum start up called Alice and Bob. They have received 100 million series B funding. They also have a fairly extensive job vacancy list. It was a tad French and probably not overly attractive internationally except for those fond of Alice in Paris Francophiles. French job descriptions can be as rigid as a rigid thing. They do not travel well.

Maybe there is a general shortage of quantum savvy job applicants….

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It occurred to me that the Quantum hype has been drowned out by the deafening AI roar. Maybe it has gone submarine like AUKUS.

That Luddite Herr Trump has been threatening the Harvard intellectual property (IP) portfolio. What a great way to ensure the death of US inventiveness and technological superiority, discourage invention and application for patents unless they are handled by MAGA lawyers, toadies and sycophants!! Already the incentive to NOT have an idea whilst at a university is high, because contractually the university owns your IP. Best stifle ideas until you are a free thinker…

Sometimes holes can be difficult to get out of. That can include ways of thinking and playbooks.

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It looks like Herr Trump is going to try again to leverage Ukraine into accepting a fait accompli agreed with Vlad the Impaler in Alaska. This forceful manipulation is an old Trump play. If he keeps alienating people, he may find himself in a hole like increasingly Billy-no-mates Israel. Trump does not understand that “friend” has a different meaning in KGB speak.

Oh look another groundhog…where did that come from….

What is the first rule when you find yourself in a hole?

Human beings can be pig-headed and stubborn. Inventive people do not share the same deal or no deal mentality as realtors. They are easily discouraged and disincentivised. One day the straw goes on the camel’s back, one too many.

Sometimes that tired old play book simply does not work. Thinking the same way that gets you into a problem cannot help to get you out of it.

There is no point in trying to explain this to someone who is vehemently adamant that they know best. Advice is as unwelcome as a dose of antibiotic resistant syphilis.

Some people are obsessed at the notion of a “corporate” solution when none exists. They may get all their ducks in line to present someone with a fait accompli sure that such a thing is irresistible. Even so-called intelligent people like professors can think like this. They can seek within group consensus oblivious that people outside the Olympian Ivory Towers do not think like them. This may not occur.

It is quackers.

People often talk with the monkey and ignore the organ grinder completely…

Anyway…

Has AI killed off the notion of quantum computation?

Where will they put all the server farms?

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Is this what our future looks like?

Granny Was a Gwrach…

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

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Gwrach y Rhibyn

The legend of the cyhyraeth is sometimes conflated with tales of the Gwrach-y-Rhibyn or Hag of the Mist, a monstrous Welsh spirit in the shape of a hideously ugly woman – a Welsh saying, to describe a woman without good looks, goes, “Y mae mor salw â Gwrach y Rhibyn” (she is as ugly as the Gwrach y Rhibyn) – with a harpy-like appearance: unkempt hair and wizened, withered arms with leathery wings, long black teeth and pale corpse-like features. She approaches the window of the person about to die by night and calls their name, or travels invisibly beside them and utters her cry when they approach a stream or crossroads, and is sometimes depicted as washing her hands there. Most often the Gwrach y Rhibyn will wail and shriek “Fy ngŵr, fy ngŵr!” (My husband! My husband!) or “Fy mhlentyn, fy mhlentyn bach!” (My child! My little child!), though sometimes she will assume a male’s voice and cry “Fy ngwraig! Fy ngwraig!” (My wife! My wife!).

If it is death that is coming, the name of the one doomed to die is supposed to be heard in her “shrill tenor”. Often invisible, she can sometimes be seen at a crossroad or a stream when the mist rises.

Some speculation has been asserted that this apparition may have once been a water deity, or an aspect of the Welsh goddess Dôn. She is the wife of Afagddu, the despised son of Ceridwen and Tegid Foel, in some retellings of the Taliesin myth.

From Wikipedia

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If I were to show you the autocorrelation traces of two femtosecond laser pulses on an expensive oscilloscope in a dark laser lab it us unlikely that you would be thinking of the witch, the hag of the mist, Gwrach-y-Rhibyn. The two things do not correlate for most.

A part of my maternal family hails from Snowdonia, the foot of Snowdon,  in North Wales and the family legend has it that at least one of my maternal relatives, a granny of sorts, was a Gwrach, a witch, perhaps a seeress. In that context then there is a chance that I inherited the bloodline and hence the “gift” so to speak. As such it was entirely natural {and perhaps inevitable} that I would be interested in shamanism and shamanic ritual.

Of course in terms of someone able to write Fortan programs to calculate Franck Condon factors for anharmonic oscillator molecular vibronic photon excitations that seems far-fetched.

Contextually the vice versa might apply. Why would a shaman piss about with fancy lasers and science?

In Brittany there remains an interest in {and perhaps practice of} witchcraft. This is no way freaks me out. It is possible the practises here were sourced in the Welsh diaspora arriving. They are of similar roots.

I’ll speculate that a blog post like this would not enhance my promotion prospects were I still institutionalised in science academia.

I have always loved the mist and the fog. I nearly died on The Old Man of Coniston once. I was alone and following crows up a trail in the snow deep into the fog, alone on the mountain. It was exciting. Luckily before I got completely lost in the otherworld, I turned back. I have had much similar fun on Kinder Scout in dense fog. There is something womb-like and enveloping.

Of a still and misty night, when the full moon is partially veiled and you heard a voice at your window calling your name, what would you do.

Could you take secure refuge in the omniscience of your infallible reason?

Or would your blood run cold?

Coincidence is Logical – Except When it Isn’t

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There is a certain type of person who prefers to ascribe coincidence, or random happenstance to events rather than accept any unproven {hypothetical} causal links. It would take a multiplicity of “coincidental” occurrence before they would deem significant corelation of happenstance sufficient to justify either causal linkage or even causality itself.

If the statistics to the contrary started to build up, they would resist dropping the logical conclusion of coincidence for quite a while.

Because of this they would never believe in karma. Even were it to slap them around the chops with a large wet pollack.

Say for discursive example you were covertly reading this blog and perhaps making some cunning plans which in some way pertained to me. You then noted that I posted “We’re only making plans for Nigel” here. The first port of call would be that this was entirely coincidental. You might start a tad, nevertheless. It is logically impossible for someone in another country to know that you were discussing or chatting about them. The occult ability of “seeing” belongs only to fictional characters like “Wednesday Addams”. At a stretch you might go so far as to think I had made some lucky intuitional guess which by fluke of timing matched circumstance. No way would you, as a rational scientist, accept that seeing is possible and that I am capable thereof.

People therefore write off many things because their confirmation bias says that they cannot or should not be possible. Anecdotal evidence of not boarding a plane because of  bad vibe and it subsequently crashing and burning, remains anecdotal and conversational perhaps to be found on “The Daily Mail”. The life of those prone to ascribing things near always to coincidence is a bit boring and chances are that they miss a great deal. They should steer well clear of roulette, statistics says so.

There are however many things for which coincidence and random happenstance are poor explanations. But logic is very limited and as it is currently formulated fails to encompass many things without far-fetched hypotheses like dark energy and dark matter.

“Show me a can of dark matter!!”

There is a part of society which believes in karma and synchronicity. Were you forever looking for these things then chances are you will find them. You could argue that belief in synchronicity is a self-fulfilling prophecy because of confirmation bias. Similarly if you were fond of the notion of seeing, ANY thing, any event, no matter how small could provide you with proof of efficacy. You could comb the opus of Nostradamus or the Revelation of Saint John and find clear {and incontrovertible} evidence of fulfilment of prophecy. It might not occur to you that you are kidding yourself.

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So where is reality?

Is it that coincidence is logical except when it isn’t?

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The Book of Revelation, also known as the Book of the Apocalypse or the Apocalypse of John, is the final book of the New Testament, and therefore the final book of the Christian Bible. Written in Greek, its title is derived from the first word of the text, apocalypse (Koine Greek: ἀποκάλυψις, romanized: apokálypsis), which means “revelation” or “unveiling”. The Book of Revelation is the only apocalyptic book in the New Testament canon and occupies a central place in Christian eschatology.

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The Appalling Silence – and you did nothing…

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Over the last few years humanity has faced a number of challenges and on the whole has been found badly wanting.

If anyone imagines that the American financed mass killing of people and near complete obliteration of Gaza is just and proportional they are deluded and their moral compass is well and truly fucked. What do you do when a so-called ally oversteps the mark? It is easy to collude and remain silent, to kowtow for scraps from the dinner table of the debt ridden US economy. The West’s inaction and response to the events in Gaza has not been its finest hour. The precedent has been set by the extensive US vengeance for having been caught napping at 9/11 just like the Japanese got nuked for Pearl Harbour.

The world we live in has changed for the worse in the last two decades. As climate change kicks in and disasters proliferate the me-first approach to global problems will not cut it. Maybe when Mar-a-Lago starts to swim people might listen.

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At the moment humanity is very short-term. The attention span of a fruit fly with ADHD prevails. There is reaction, knee-jerk and people are fearful of opinion. People are shit scared to say boo to a goose. They will do just about anything to get “likes”.

What results is a mind numbing mediocrity of compliance and conformity with “they” in which ever flavour. Humanity is very risk averse and lacks moral fibre. Its backbone is dissolved into jelly.

The damming verdict of the generations to come might be,

“You suspected all along, your predictions were valid AND you did nothing, fuck all, sweet fanny Adams. Really?”

This then will be known as the age of human chinless petty self-centred indifference.

Inaction today, avoidance, stores problems for tomorrow. The ruling “elites” have made it very clear to the millions of Muslims in their country where they, the entitled elite, stand. The evidence is incontrovertible and will be long remembered. They know upon which side the bread appears to be buttered on.

From time to time when we watch the news a sad tear comes to eye. Humanity, an oxymoron, is only very selectively humane.

Did not the apartheid and genocide of the last century teach us anything? Apparently not…

Ever since the British invented concentration camps they have been rolled out again and again. If we are very cynical, we might call them a “safe zone” rather than a “killing field”. It sounds more humane; cleaner, we could even use fabric softener to take away the stench.

There are none so blind as those who do not want to see, who refuse to see.

I am not sure what it might take for people to wake up and actually do something. After all we can Netflix and Uber Eats ourselves into type 2 diabetes, which is less risky than sticking our necks out.

I am genuinely sad at the pathetic Western response to events in Gaza. But it is a sign of the times, the prevailing me-first don’t rock the boat mentality.

Opression always has in its hateful enactment the seeds of its own ultimate downfall.

That is a fundamental law of the universe. The universe has a longer attention span.