The Mandelbear's Musings

Not too bad a week, I guess. Anxiety and depression, mostly about US politics. The plague doesn't worry me nearly as much -- I can do something about it.

I'm sitting here on Whidbey Island, but I'm virtually at FK-No and the Filk Hall of Fame inductions. The new inductees are Juliana McCorrison, Rob Wynne, and Blind Lemming Chiffon. It was followed by an unexpected chance for the earlier inductees to sing one song. I sang "Ship of Stone". (It was between that and "The River"; I realized later that "Stuff that Dreams are Made Of" would also have been very appropriate.) So this is kind of a s4s post too.

Zoom has its problems, but it's a hell of a lot better than not going to a filk con. I'll take it.

One disadvantage of zoom is that it seems extraordinarily difficult for me to compose a post while listening to filk. This may be due in part to the fact that there aren't any breaks. I'll take it anyway.

Somewhere on the borderland between computer science and music, there was an article in Quanta about Donald Knuth. Including a link to his Fantasia Apocalyptica, which is a massive organ piece based on the Book of Revelations; much of it derived from the numerology therein. That went along with MIP*=RE, a proof that somehow cascades through physics and math, by proving that the set of things computable using a quantum computer that takes advantage of entanglement is identical to the set of things that can be computed. The fact that some things are not computable (e.g. the Halting Problem) turns out rather surprisingly to disprove some conjectures in both physics and math.

Lots of links and a few quotes down in the notes.

( Notes & links, as usual )