It's been a few days, so I decided that I really should write something before it moves too low on my list of priorities. I have a whole list of things to write about, but I'm not in the mood for any of them right now, so I decided to go for a little history lesson instead.
In the Indo-European family tree, the current living primary subfamilies are Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, and Paleo-Balkanic. While there has been (and probably still is) debate as to where these sit on the family tree relative to each other, things seem to have settled on that order in terms of brancing off recency (so Italic splitting from Celtic most recently, Italic+Celtic brancing off from Germanic 2nd most recently, etc).
Of particular interest here is the close relation between Italic and Celtic. Italic contains Old Latin and its descendents, as well as a few other extinct branches. Celtic contains Irish and Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, and Breton, as well as several extinct branches, the most relevant here being Gaulish.
The close relation between the two branches is particularly well supported. Not just by the methods of Historical Linguistics, either—historical records from the Romans note that Gaulish was rather easy to interpret for themselves.
There was a strong Greek presence on the Italian Penninsula in the centuries leading up to Rome's expansion. They never took full control of it, but their influence spread all throughout. This included local cultures, of course.
Most people know that there were similarities between the Greek and Roman cultures. Most, I suspect, if they think any further about it at all, assume it's just coincidence, and most of the rest assume it's entirely a result of common descent.
Of course, now that you know about Magna Graecia (you're welcome btw(you still have to say your welcome if you already knew because I retroactively caused you to learn about it in the past no I have no proof of this don't ask)), you can probably guess as to the most major factor. Mind you, Rome was never controlled by the Greeks, but it was never far from Greek influence, either.
So, one could say the Romans were essentially just Hellenized Celts :)
Recently, I've noticed a growing trend of people insisting that language is confirmed to be not unique to humans in the animal kingdom. I'll refrain from speculating on the driving factor for this, but it is incorrect.
For some portion of this group, it is simply conflation or imprecision of terms. They refer to communication between animals in general as language, which is a very specific (and versatile) form of communication, not actually believing that they communicate in the same way humans do.
Others point to a study on a given animal's communication demonstrating that it contains a feature traditionally thought of as being unique to human language (usually syntax). Their error is in thinking that said rare feature is sufficient for the capabilities of language.
So, if it's all a result of a mistaken definition of language, then how is language actually defined? It seems like one of those things that ends up being impossible to provide a precise definition for at first glance, but, as it turns out, there is. Hockett's design features are a set of features a communication system must have to be considered a language. It is unambiguous and testable (and, spoiler alert: none of the animal communication systems people claim are language have been shown to have all of them).
...However, I'm personally not totally satisfied with it. For example, take Transitoriness: under this, writing isn't considered a form of language. Or Prevarication: if humanity was somehow modified to be unable to lie, with all else being unchanged, would you really say that we wouldn't be communicating with language anymore? Point being, there is a reasonable critique to be made about it being overly restrictive.
To be clear, none of the criteria are entirely arbitrary—several of the features that are clearly central to how language works are also not found outside of humans, in fact. Still, I'd prefer a definition of language based on what it can communicate (namely, basically anything you can imagine), rather than focusing on the how.
Coming up with a complete definition seems like a lot of work, so in its place, here's a test that can be applied to a given communication system that only language can pass:
Demonstrate that the idea of "I was on top of that hill. I am now at the bottom." can be rendered in your communication system.
Here's why this is a good test: Firstly, the idea itself is really simple, only requiring the ability to interpret the environment and remember things, things with anything with a brain larger than a peanut should be able to do[Citation Needed]. Secondly, it's specific enough that it basically requires the ability to compose symbols in an infinitely extensible way. Thirdly, the ability to communicate such at all implies the communication system is featured enough to communicate a large number of other things as well.
To end things off, my point here isn't that it's impossible that there are any other animals that have language (in fact, I think there is a good chance that some species of cetacean, particularly orcas and pilot whales, do have language), but rather that there is zero evidence for such so far, despite what some people seem to believe.
Well, now that the renovations to the site are complete, I suppose I should talk on what I've been doing. Actually, I'll first document the experience updating the site after not touching it for the past two years.
Interacting with HTML in general came back to me surprisingly quickly, thankfully, and learning how to do in-page linking was fairly simple, though creating new ones for each entry was tedious.
The details tag also ended up being simple. Getting text in a summary tag to take a hyperlink seems to be impossible, unfortunately, but, considering the only alternative for collapsible text would have been to use j*vascript, it ended up being a necessary sacrifice.
RSS ended up being less simple, though not by much. Setting up the feed itself wasn't much of a problem, even manually (note: you have to specify time as well as date, I just put 00:00:00 for each one because I don't care that much). What ended up being difficult was setting up the icons on the homepage so that the text didn't wrap around them. The solution I eventually came up with (after an hour of fruitless testing and searching) was to set the height of the div containing them to 0.
Back to the original point... Honestly, nothing off the top of my head. Though that's almost certainly due to me being really bad at answering questions that are too broad than actually having nothing to talk about. So I guess I'll leave off here.
So, it's been a while. Not because I've been particularly busy, mind you, but I had lost motivation completely when it became clear that the people involved were quite fine with the then-new state of affairs.
On that, looking around a bit, it seems like that particular situation is exactly as it was when I left. A shame, but not unexpected. Things don't seem to have taken a turn for the worse outside of that, though, which I suppose is the best one can hope for these days.
So, now that I'm back, I have plans that I'd like to talk about.
Firstly, given my supreme lack of confidence in Neocities leadership, as well as general concerns of preservation, I'll be mirroring this site on NekoWeb in the near future. To facilitate this, as well as minor refactoring for portability, I will be hiding (not removing) most things related to the whole Neocities algorithm thing. As it is, it's just clogging things up, and it would be a little silly to have it when people might be viewing the site on an entirely different host, no?
Secondly, I'm going to see about getting an RSS feed set up. I don't expect I'm going to exactly have a consistent update schedule, so that should help anyone who wants to to keep up.
Thirdly, I'll be refactoring this page a bit. Specifically, I think I'll make entries collapsable and set things up so that they can be linked to.
Fourthly, expect more writing. I do have a lot of things I wan't to write about, after all.
Don't worry about it.
As you may have noticed, I'm back! As for why I stopped, I got distracted by other hobbies, then this site just didn't cross my mind frequently enough to catch me in the mood to write something.
Then I saw someone say something about the Dark Forest Hypothesis, got annoyed, then decided to actually write an idea I had on the backburner.
This one was frustrating. Of my writeups, it wasn't take the longest in terms of time seriously invested into it (that was the AI one by far), I only started writing it a day before publication, but it sure felt like it. The issue wasn't coming up with counterarguments (if anything, it was too easy: I kept getting interrupted by coming up with more), but rather structuring them when writing. Every specific scenario failed in its own special way, making arguments hard to group together, and I quickly had way too many to keep organized in my head.
Ah well, at least a new Ancient Americas video released just as I finished writing it. A much-needed reward, if I do say so myself. This one is about a native Floridian monarchy that subsisted mostly on fish.
Oh, I said I was going to address something I said in point 7 in the preamble, so I guess I'll do that now: since the universe would exist for an infinite time, and every state is possible, it would therefore be possible for the universe to have gone from a fully settled state to a fully untouched state before we arose.
You may recall that, a year or three ago, that there was significant coverage of a major fusion breakthrough. If you don't, the tl;dr is that the National Ignition Facility managed to get a fusion reaction to produce more energy than was required to initiate it*. This was done by, basically, shooting a fuel pellet with powerful lasers so that the outer layer heats up and expands so forcefully that it causes fusion in the interior of the pellet.
You may also remember, in the months following, there was a smattering of criticisms by 'skeptics' (scarequotes will be explained in a moment) writing that this wasn't a very important development after all. Their arguement was that, though the above claim is true, that there was over an order of magnitude energy used to power the system than was produced by the fusion reaction, so it clearly doesn't mean anything in regards to the viability of fusion.
Though this is true—over 400MJ input vs ~3MJ output—things become interesting when you look at the energy usage breakdown. In particular, the vast majority of that energy was being used to drive the laser, which had ~2MJ of energy. That seems like a really low energy efficiency for a laser, does it not? As far as I can tell, the inefficiency in the NIF's lasers is a result of a combination of having been designed and built decades ago and the need to vary the laser's properties for experimentation.
In contrast, modern laser designs can have an efficiency of over 50%, and 30% efficiency would be perfectly reasonable to acheive even accounting for constraints needed for a commercial fusion reactor. That would be 6MJ input to 3MJ output: still not breakeven, but not as absurdly far away as certain people say.
And it isn't like this avenue of fusion research is exactly exhausted, either. Indeed, there are several ways to increase output energy more than input. One is to increase the laser's energy: since, as of now, most of the fuel in a given pellet is unspent, increasing input energy into the pellet increases the proportion of the pellet undergoing fusion, rapidly increasing the yield (actually, the NIF seems to think that the increase in energy would be more than proportional; 3MJ laser to 30MJ fusion reaction). Another way, of course, is to increase pellet size.
*Actually, they did this in 2014. The NIF uses an indirect drive method, which means that the laser is pumped into a small chamber that captures and reradiates the laser light into the pellet. The amount of energy that actually reaches the pellet is on the order of 10s of kJ. My understanding is that a direct drive method (literally shining the laser directly onto the target) wasn't feasible when the project was concieved. Of course, it should be noted that a commercial reactor would very likely be using a direct drive method, which represents another massive efficiency gain.
A hypothesis for how viruses evolved:
At some point, there was a cellular organism that had evolved a unique form of parasitism. It would latch onto another cell, inject a copy of its DNA (and probably some other things to help support the process) into the target, then move on. The target, having had its genes replaced, would morph into the same species as the parasite.
As time goes on, innovations are made to this strategy. Chief among them is the creation of 'spores' that could carry out this process away from its progenitor cell. Since now only spores needed to be created for genetic propogation, rather than a whole cell, genetic propogation became decoupled from species propogation.
From here, propogation accelerates. An evolutionary 'race to the bottom' in terms of genome size occurs, as well as a massive adaptive radiation to occupy a whole world of previously unheld niches. Since these new species are so much more efficent as genetic parasites, the strategy used by their progenitors is no longer viable, hence why we don't see any such strategy in use today (alternatively, it could be that such a strategy inevitably undergoes such a race to the bottom very soon after emerging).
Of course, actually testing this hypothesis is basically impossible, since viruses mutate so quickly that phylogenies are difficult to establish at the best of times.
I notice that a lot of people reject the idea of major technological progress happening in the future. Specifically, they tend to reject disruptive technological progress; these same people won't object to the idea of high end telescopes getting better or transistors getting smaller, for example (up until the point that the improvement inherently implies a disruptive technology, of course).
Addressing some of the more common themes argued from this perspective:
As for why they are like this? Well, it is usually ideological in nature, with a side of general resistance to change. After all, it's a lot easier to reject something (that hasn't even already been done, mind you) as impossible than to accept it and reanalze your worldview in light of such.
This is a demonstration of how an apparently complex object can actually have a low Kolmogorov complexity.
For those unaware, an object's Kolmogorov complexity is the size of the smallest program needed to generate that object, and is thus the most compression that object can undergo before losing information.
Take a cellular automaton that exhibits explosive growth, let's say it's rule B1357/S2357 for this scenario, take a small starting pattern in an unbounded universe, and run it for, say, 10 trillion generations. The resulting pattern would require a significant fraction of the world's total digital storage to be stored, even when subjected to contemporary compression algorithms.
This object has a very high apparent complexity: it doesn't look completely random, but it's close (note: randomness is a sign of high complexity precisely because there are fewer underlying, simpler patterns). And yet its Kolmogorov complexity is much lower than its apparent complexity; it's just the size of the smallest program that runs a certain pattern in B1357/S2357 for 10 trillion generations, which is probably smaller than 10^24 bits (a rough estimate of the size of this object uncompressed).
It would be very easy for me to go from here and write about how computation is able to produce unbounded complexity, and what that and the previous text imply about the nature of emergence, but I won't do so for now.
Probabilities aren't very useful if you don't have a familiarity with the domain the probabilty is describing. To illustrate what I mean here, I'll give a few examples.
Consider a mechanism that is an integral part of some larger machine. Say that it is expected to last 50,000 cycles, and that you want to display the probability of it failing.
One way of doing such would be to give the probability of it failing on any given cycle. In this scenario you will notice that the majority of the probability space (0.01 to 1) describes the part failing, on average, within 100 cycles; outcomes within even an order of magnitude of what's expected are concentrated on 1 extremum of the probability space.
Another way could be to give the probability of failure in 5 billion cycles. Same problem, just on the other extremum. The obvious solution is to give the failure probability in 50k cycles, but that misses the point: for any given probability space, the extrema will be more 'concentrated' than the bulk of the space.
And it can get much worse if the given probability doesn't directly match with the quantity information is desired about, as this opens the opportunity for a range of probabilities to correlate with outcomes in unexpected ways. Here's an example to help build intuition.
When browsing the internet, I will often open a new tab if I see something interesting while I'm busy to look at later, and closing them when I do. If it just so happens that I don't get around to doing so? Well, the tab stays open; I am a tab hoarder. This, of course, is the superior way to browse the internet: you can open up multiple lines of research, investigation, etc without abandoning all of the rest, you learn to prioritize or else face insurmoutable clutter, you build up a record of your interests over time... you get the point.
Nonetheless, over time, the tabs tend to build up. I've been building up this current tab backlog for 4-5 years now. Needless to say, it would be a good idea to go through and clear some of those out, which I have been doing for the past day or so. I just finished my first pass, where I closed tabs that I had lost interest in, I had already browsed at one point elsewhere, or were subject to link rot. A few observations:
In regards to the Bouba/Kiki effect (for those unfamiliar) , I think it has more to do with how the brain processes information in general than anything specific to language processing.
Long, pointy objects tend to make sharp, higher-pitched sounds (think of two knives sliding together) and round, blobby objects tend to make soft, lower pitched sounds (think of a pillow hitting the floor). These match how 'kiki' and 'bouba' respectively sound. At least in English, there is another sensory correspondance: the word 'kiki' has more spokes and less rounded edges, while 'bouba' has less spokes and more rounded edges.
To me, it seems like this effect is a natural consequence of how the brain works: it draws on past experiences to guess at the properties of the drawings, notices similarities between certain aspects of those experiences and the words, and matches based on that.
Also, my best minesweeper time is now 92.
Something terrible has happened: I've started to play minesweeper. This is bad because I got carpel tunnel the last time I did that (also, it's eating into my already limited pool of productivity). My best time is 110 btw
I had a list of things I wanted to write about here that I put together during my impromptu hiatus, but I accidentally deleted it. This isn't so bad, since I still have a few ideas and can throw another one together in about an hour, but it's nonetheless a setback.
And, to close this post off, a point of frustration: a lot of websites today automatically replace emoticons with emojis. If I'd wanted to use an emoji, I'd've used an emoji; please don't force it on me. Fortunately, it can be bypassed by inserting a zero-width (somewhat easily typed by pressing Alt + + 2 0 0 b, input using your keyboard's numpad when possible) space in the middle of the emoticon.
Hello! I'm not dead!
Sorry for not updating for a while, but I have been doing things. I'll detail those below.
First, and the biggest one: I've decided to start learning Japanese. I've low-key wanted to do this for a while, but hadn't seriously considered actually doing so until recently. At this point, I can read basic sentences with common words unassisted (slowly) and more complex sentences with software assistance (a lot more slowly). I will be doing a writeup on my learning experience once I become more proficient.
And... that's about it. Yeah, learning a language has been a time investment, but not so much of one that it's taken up my free time (though I'd probably be learning a lot faster if I were spending that sort of time on it); I'm only spending 1.5 to 2 hours per day on it (honestly closer to half an hour these days since I haven't replaced the old excercises I have finished yet). I vaguely remember resolving to improve my typing speed at around the same time, but that evidently fell through quickly. I was doing stuff with Multistate INT CA, too, but that was very much an on-and-off sort of thing, and I haven't done anything with it since December anyways.
I have been doing a bit more more recently, though. I finally resolved to start documenting a worldbuilding project I've been tossing around in my head for the past few years (don't expect anything to be published here on this for a while). I was also inspired by a certain video to make a base-2(ish) notation system that I actually finished, which I will be producing a writeup for so long as I can be bothered to make the supporting visualizations to help explain why what I did for it is so neat.
I do think I will be updating a bit more frequently from now on, so you can look forward to that (don't get your hopes up).
Sorry for not updating recently. I haven't been active because my life has become a bit more busy recently and I haven't thought of much to write about.
I decided to do this update now because I had a dream last night about updating here. When I checked in today, I also noticed that the site has had almost 100 visits, so it's a good time to post regardless. Consider this post a commemoration of such.
I also noticed that I acquired my first two followers in the interim. If they're reading this: Hello! Thank you for being interested enough in what I have to say to follow. I haven't checked your pages yet, but I'll definitely do so soon.
I just noticed that a twitter account that I really enjoy was recently reinstated after months.
They post about several things, but I am following him mainly for his in-depth discussions on Mesoamerican history. He has posted quite a bit on the subject over the years; I'd highly recommend scrolling through his account for that. He also contributes to the Ancient Americas youtube channel.
I had already been falling off of twitter by that point (albeit I never had used it overly much in the first place), but his account being banned was the nail in the coffin for me in that regard. Even though he is back now, I probably still won't be using twitter as much as I had been.
I came up with an experiment for Machine Learning a few years ago, but never bothered putting it anywhere. Since I can't think of anythink else to quickly write about at the moment, I'll document it here.
The experiment goes as such:
Start with 2 neural nets. The first one takes an image and outputs n characters of text. The second one takes that text and a large set of images, one of which will be the same image as was given to the first one, and outputs an index. The goal is that the index output by the 2nd neural net always match the image provided to the first.
Repeat this for several values of n. When this is done, analyze the text output by the 1st neural net for each one and try to find any structure.
Since I have neither the experience nor the resources to conduct this experiment myself, it will be up to someone else to conduct this experiment.
This got longer than I expected, so I made it into its own writeup.
I saw this page when surfing neocities recently and was hit by a blast of nostalgia.
You see, I had encountered the flamingchickens LTE (the first of its kind, and by far the most popular, though that's a relative term in this case) in a random google search (something along the lines of 'the world's longest webpage') in the early 2010s (zero chance you could ever stumble upon something like it today with google) using the 3DS web browser. Having started using the internet not too many years before, some time after the death of the personal webpage in terms of influence, I hadn't seen anything quite like it before, so it stuck in my mind.
As for what it was: An LTE was a long-winded, stream-of-thought type of blog done by the flamingchickens webmaster and others in her friend group. And that's all it would've been, but apparently others had encountered it rather recently and decided to do their own take on the idea.
"Yeah yeah," you may be saying, "But is it, in fact, the Longest Text Ever™ (which we will define here as the largest amount of coherent text on a single webpage)?" Well, no. The whole thing comes in at just over 38k words, which is a lot, but you will occasionally run into longer chapters (which are almost universally displayed on a single webpage) in fanfics and webnovels, at the very least.
ミツバチ
I recently found a video and was reminded just how much I hate it when people try to specify a pronounciation without using the IPA. Please, please use it if you don't want to make people (specifically me) die inside reading it.
My own experience learning the IPA was as follows:
Go do this. Seriously, you don't know what you've been missing out on.
I made a new page! It's been about a month since I last updated this website (I was busy with a project for one of my other hobbies; here for those curious), so I figured I may as well make up for the lack of progress a bit.
This page is for entries that are more casual and/or too small for their own writup.
In the interim, I found out that a certain element on the main page displays slightly differently on a different OS. Somewhat concerning, but I have no clue how to go about fixing that, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I've also found that different fonts are rendered slightly differently between different browsers. For example, I tried using Times New Roman on this page: it looked really nice on Firefox, but not so much on Chrome. I should probably investigate how to detect the browser a visitor is using...
Enjoy the sunset.