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Me: I have to make my erotica MMCs politically conservative but don’t know how to avoid making them totally unlikable
Grok: twincest
Me: what
Grok: they’re Tories because they’re overcompensating for twincest
Me: hmm maybe
Grok: do it slut. Suggested followup query… increase homoeroticism and add twincest
Me: increase fetishization of the British
Grok: here’s your story, now with increased British fetishization and twincest:
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it's very strange that people manage to misread Nietzsche as an anti-rationalist mystic when he has the exact opposite character flaw; he's an edgelord reddit atheist wearing an "I f**king love science" t-shirt. Maybe they get confused because he's also a poet?
but um, he goes on an extended rant in the Gay Science about how mysticism is stupid and people retreat from the truth because they can't handle it. he stans Epicurus as the last great Greek philosopher. even his ridiculous eternal recurrence theory was based on a popular theory of statistical mechanics at the time, that was only discredited later. he was evidently trying to develop a scientific theory of moral psychology in the Genealogy of Morals. His favorite contemporary philosophers were Alfred Lange and Eduard von Hartmann. He praised but refused to read Spinoza.
wait rly?
Ziz has her whole bit about how Boltzmann's suicide was really because of the spoOoky eternal recurrence implicit in statistical mechanics
nietzsche's eternal recurrence is boltzmann related?
Probably not Boltzmann. Some paper says:
The contributions of the Perpetuum Mobile to Nietzsche’s ontology are derived from a number of scientists and philosophers. The key figure in science whom, as Alwin Mittasch has pointed out,⁹ Nietzsche read extensively and who directly asserted the indestructibility of energy was Robert Mayer, one of the principal contributors to the development of the theory of heat as a form of energy.¹⁰ Mayer, in an essay from 1862, speaks of “the discovery of the law of the indestructibility of force.”¹¹ In an essay from 1870, Mayer uses Hermann von Helmholtz’s phrase, “the law of the conservation of force.”¹² And in 1845, Mayer gives a clear account of the essence of the conservation of energy: “In all physical and chemical processes the given force remains a constant quantity.”¹³ A variety of writers developed the idea of energy as flowing in cyclical or circular patterns, a concept that serves as a foundation for the core assertion of Nietzsche’s initial conception of eternal recurrence, as presented in the passage included in The Will to Power. The scientist Georg Wilhelm Muncke viewed the first law of thermodynamics in terms of circular processing and reprocessing. Muncke uses the phrase “perpetuum mobile physicum” in the context of the world as a “circular course of things . . . which ever endures and uninterruptedly renews itself . . .”¹⁴ In a similar vein, Karl Wilhelm Gottlieb Kastner refers to “curvilinear motions that proceeding from a point, return to it, and thus endlessly renew themselves. . .”¹⁵ Jakob Friedrich Fries writes of the natural disposition toward “a certain circular course [Kreislauf] of the same recurring phenomena.”¹⁶
From the idea of eternal motion, you then get the idea of recurrence; some of Nietzsche's notes from 1881 say
If the world may be thought of as a certain definite quantity of force and as a certain definite number of centers of force… it follows that, in the great dice game of existence, it must pass through a calculable number of combinations. In infinite time, every possible combination would at some time or another be realized; more: it would be realized an infinite number of times.
The idea of a "great dice game" sounds statistical, but I guess it's not directly related to Boltzmann's work. (It's fun that ten years later, we got the Poincaré recurrence theorem, although I guess the intuition behind that is slightly different—it doesn't require a probability distribution over states, just that the phase space eventually "fills up".)
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carlyle
Jonathan Rose’s book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes is fascinating, and I highly recommend it. One of the main ideas that comes across in Rose’s book is that much of the British working class in the 19th century read a lot – and read a lot of difficult, deep stuff, and had highly specific taste. One curious aspect of this working class taste is that they tended to prefer conservative authors, but not necessarily because they were themselves conservative.
Indeed, even leftist agitators among the working class often found inspiration in Edmund Burke and Thomas Carlyle, two of the authors most popular among the working class as a whole. Burke is famous as a godfather of modern conservatism; Carlyle is much less famous. It is possible that this is because he is just too reactionary for our modern democratic selves, but listen to Rose:
When the first large cohort of Labour MPs was elected in 1906, the Review of Reviews asked them to name the books and authors that had most deeply influenced them. […] Note that thirteen respondents mentioned Thomas Carlyle … [4th most popular after John Ruskin (17 votes), Dickens (16), and the Bible (14)]
[Carlyle] had a huge following among autodidacts … Carlyle’s ability to attract disciples from all points on the political spectrum, from Communists to Nazis, marks him as an author who might be turned to many purposes… .
One could draw a pacifist lesson from his fable of the sixty French and English soldiers who massacred each other over a trivial territorial dispute. Carlyle’s hero-worship made him appear a proto-fascist in the eyes of many readers (including Joseph Goebbels) but it inspired [Keir] Hardie to embrace the role of Hero as Proletarian.
From Carlyle, as one agitator proclaimed, the working classes “learnt to hate shams.” He exposed the ideological facades of the class system, preached independence of mind, and offered a vision of economic justice.
[…] some working-class women found a feminist in Carlyle.
And on and on the examples go, for nearly ten pages in this chapter alone (the entry for Carlyle in the index spans seven lines).
If Carlyle’s popularity is surprising on a political level, it’s much more surprising on a stylistic level. I suspect the reason Carlyle has fallen into semi-obscurity has less to do with his politics and more to do with the fact that he wrote in a style which is deeply alien to us.
This is not just because he is old. Many writers of the 19th and 18th centuries are still readable to us. Dickens (whose Tale of Two Cities was inspired by Carlyle’s French Revolution) still entertains millions. The Henry Fielding of 1749 sounds like the sort of wag you wouldn’t be surprised to meet in a bar in 2015.
Carlyle is different. He wrote in a floridly romantic, extremely opaque and long-winded style which (I have heard) was popular in his day and fell out of favor soon after. I have read the first few chapters of two of his books – Sartor Resartus and The French Revolution. The former is convoluted but still reads well, but the latter, which was vastly popular, is now practically unreadable. The book’s style is easier to display than to describe. Here is how Carlyle expresses the thought we might now phrase as “kingship is a social construct”:
Time was when men could (so to speak) of a given man, by nourishing and decorating him with fit appliances, to the due pitch, make themselves a King, almost as the Bees do; and what was still more to the purpose, loyally obey him when made. The man so nourished and decorated, thenceforth named royal, does verily bear rule; and is said, and even thought, to be, for example, ‘prosecuting conquests in Flanders,’ when he lets himself like luggage be carried thither: and no light luggage; covering miles of road. For he has his unblushing Chateauroux, with her band-boxes and rouge-pots, at his side; so that, at every new station, a wooden gallery must be run up between their lodgings. He has not only his Maison-Bouche, and Valetaille without end, but his very Troop of Players, with their pasteboard coulisses, thunder-barrels, their kettles, fiddles, stage-wardrobes, portable larders (and chaffering and quarrelling enough); all mounted in wagons, tumbrils, second-hand chaises,—sufficient not to conquer Flanders, but the patience of the world. With such a flood of loud jingling appurtenances does he lumber along, prosecuting his conquests in Flanders; wonderful to behold. So nevertheless it was and had been: to some solitary thinker it might seem strange; but even to him inevitable, not unnatural.
For ours is a most fictile world; and man is the most fingent plastic of creatures. A world not fixable; not fathomable! An unfathomable Somewhat, which is Not we; which we can work with, and live amidst,—and model, miraculously in our miraculous Being, and name World.—But if the very Rocks and Rivers (as Metaphysic teaches) are, in strict language, made by those outward Senses of ours, how much more, by the Inward Sense, are all Phenomena of the spiritual kind: Dignities, Authorities, Holies, Unholies! Which inward sense, moreover is not permanent like the outward ones, but forever growing and changing.
Well then! Believe it or not, this is one of Carlyle’s more lucid moments. More typical is the first sentence of the third chapter:
For the present, however, the grand question with the Governors of France is: Shall extreme unction, or other ghostly viaticum (to Louis, not to France), be administered?
Or this strange outburst from Chapter 1:
Yes, Maupeou, pucker those sinister brows of thine, and peer out on it with thy malign rat-eyes: it is a questionable case. Sure only that man is mortal; that with the life of one mortal snaps irrevocably the wonderfulest talisman, and all Dubarrydom rushes off, with tumult, into infinite Space; and ye, as subterranean Apparitions are wont, vanish utterly,—leaving only a smell of sulphur!
Imagine huge numbers of working-class autodidacts not only struggling to puzzle out this kind of stuff, but becoming eager fans of it. This actually happened! I have to wonder how to explain the gap between these people and us. When we recoil from Carlyle, are we showing good sense, or have we lost something that these people possessed – or neither? By 1958, a reviewer (Dwight McDonald) could write:
The long, patient uphill struggle of the last fifty years to bring the diction and rhythms of prose closer to those of the spoken language might never have existed so far as Cozzens is concerned. He doesn’t even revert to the central tradition (Scott, Cooper, Bulwer-Lytton) but rather to the eccentric mode of the half-rebels against it (Carlyle, Meredith), who broke up the orderly platoons of gold-laced Latinisms into whimsically arranged squads, uniformed with equal artificiality but marching every which way as the author’s wayward spirit moved them. Carlyle and Meredith are even less readable today than Scott and Cooper, whose prose at least inherited from the 18th century some structural backbone.
So something happened between 1906 (when Carlyle was popular among Labour MPs) and 1958. I wonder what it was. (The first sentence of the McDonald quote gives one possibility – a “long, patient uphill struggle” which, if it really happened, has now largely disappeared from memory.)
(Amusingly, Mencius Moldbug – another guy who never uses five words when five pages will suffice – loves Carlyle. I wonder if he’s read Rose’s book? He writes that “the basic reason Carlyle is not in your high-school English reader, whereas [Walt] Whitman is, is that Carlyle was what, here at UR, we call a reactionary,” which seems unlikely given his popularity across the political spectrum. It seems more likely that people used to find the Carlylean style inspirational, and now it verges on intolerable.)
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You can now sort your likes by oldest and see the very first posts you liked on Tumblr. Some of my first are actually really good—I’d still reblog them today— but others are… dating discourse, most which could be copy-pasted into a Substack post today and nobody would suspect. Plus ça change.
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a while ago I read Maurice Wilkins’ book, The Third Man of the Double Helix. There was something really interesting in there, I can’t find the quote right now, but he says that he shined light through a metal model of the double helix to see the diffraction pattern. I want to do that. I don’t want to take it on faith that the double helix model implies this X shaped X-ray diffraction pattern, not if I can see it with my own eyes.
but I don’t get how it could possibly work. The X-rays diffract because their wavelength is about one angstrom, just like a chemical bond, right? so if you scaled it up, so that you’re using visible light, the wavelength should still match the bond size. Which would mean the model would still be tiny, with bonds about the size of the wavelength of visible light.
Maybe this is just something I’m misunderstanding about diffraction. after all I don’t know the math. Maybe “wavelength matches slit size” is just some rough thing, with the caveat “within a few orders of magnitude”. I don’t know what else I could be missing. maybe I’m misremembering what the book said, but I can’t find the quote right now
I looked up the quote, which is on page 236:
In our DNA work, we took special care to increase the reliability of our X-ray results. To check the correctness of our computer programmes and overall procedures, we drew a diagram of the model and made holes of sizes corresponding to the X-ray scattering from each atom. We then took a diffraction photograph of the drawing using ordinary light, with the holes scattering the light just as atoms would scatter X-rays. We confirmed that the light pattern was identical to the X-ray pattern. We had enough staff now to make these detailed checks: for example, Mike Spencer published a paper comparing all the base-pairing dimensions that had become available since Donohue’s data had been used in the Double Helix.
I also don’t know anything about how diffraction works, but I hope someone can explain it…
I asked Claude about it, and he pointed out that this this is called "optical diffraction" or "optical transforms".
Hanson, Taylor and Lipson, Fourier Synthesis by Optical Interference, Nature, 1951.
Lipson and Michael, Optical-Diffraction Methods of Studying the Electron-Diffraction Patterns of Thin Films of Copper-Gold Alloys, 1974.
Lipson, Optical Transforms (book, see chapters 1 and 3 in particular), 1972.
For how the scaling works, I think what you wrote is exactly right, but it works anyway! The diffraction equation says
sin θ = nλ/d
where n is an integer (each feature in the molecule creates multiple spots of light in the diffracted image), d is the spacing between features, and λ the wavelength. So using visual light instead of xrays makes the diffraction pattern larger and easier to observe; but magnifying the molecule to macroscopic size increases d and makes the pattern smaller. Nevertheless, even for macroscopic d (e.g. λ=500nm, d=5cm) it is possible as long as you use a microscope:
Let us suppose that our object is several centimeters across, and will therefore give extremely small diffraction angles. A rectangle of side 50mm would have its first zero at an angle given by α = 5e-4 mm / 50mm = 1e-5 rad. At a distance of 1 m, this angle would produce a separation of only 1e-2 mm. This is extremely small, but nevertheless easily visible with a good microscope, and can be recorded on fine-grain film.
As for seeing it with your own eyes Lipson says (chapter 1)
Although the apparatus is quite simple, in order to obtain the best results from it several quite stringent conditions must be obeyed; these will be described in Section IV. Nevertheless, quite useful results can be obtained with relatively crude apparaturs, and anyone who wishes to try out transform methods before deciding whether to indulge in more elaborate apparatus is adviced to see what can be accomplished with small uncorrected lenses on an ordinary optical bench.
I think this means it's hard to do at home!
I came across a reference to "Sweeney and Mrs. Porter", which I didn't understand, but apparently it refers to a few lines in The Waste Land (1922), which in turn alluded to a lewd parody of the song Red Wing (1907). The text of the parody is lost, but by triangulating partial quotes in two different books you can guess what it must have said. This feels impressively obscure!
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sometimes i see an opinion i disagree with, and from a combination of wanting to keep up appearances, avoid flak, and cut to the heart of the issue, i draft a series of increasingly abstract responses, eventually culminating in typing out "falsehoods aren't true", which, in a perfect act of autofellatio, deletes itself
the thing is that the quest for the silmaril was clearly intended to be celegorm and curufin's shot at redemption and it's not anyone's fault but their own that they continually beef it. the quest cannot succeed without the hound of celegorm and the knife of curufin. there are clearly celegorm and curufin shaped holes in the questing party to retrieve the sacred objects to which celegorm and curufin are oathbound. it is the fault of no one except celegorm and curufin that they aren't there for the main event. i wonder if that's why angrist snapped is because beren and luthien only needed the one but it would have held for all three if celegorm and curufin had been where they had every chance to be. shame they'll never know
#top 10 things that made Maedhros jump into that volcano
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Iris Schomaker. Untitled (the green tub), 2023. Watercolour and oil on paper.
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so ofc matzah is "because" the hebrews didn't have time to bake the bread when they were rushing out of Egypt so it was a surprise to read Exodus and this is before even the slaying of the firstborn, God saying
“This is a day you are to commemorate; for the generations to come you shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord—a lasting ordinance. For seven days you are to eat bread made without yeast.”
and on and on about it
then farther down it does say
With the dough the Israelites had brought from Egypt, they baked loaves of unleavened bread. The dough was without yeast because they had been driven out of Egypt and did not have time to prepare food for themselves.
so the "explanation" is always been told is there but the commandment came first
so what's up with that
Maybe another instance of this kind of time-loop thing? :)
The Talmud says that God created the Torah nine hundred seventy-four generations before He created the world. Generations of who, I don’t know. The Talmud is kind of crazy. But the Torah is basically a few short stories about Creation and the distant past followed by a long and intricate biography of Moses. Why would God care so much about one Israelite guy that He would lovingly sketch out his story long before the first day rose upon the universe in which that guy was to live? There’s another episode in the Talmud, one where Moses is ascending Mt. Sinai to receive the Torah. God discusses how carefully He wrote the Torah over countless eons, and the angels say – then why are you giving it to this Moses guy? Who’s he? Some random mortal nobody! We’re angels! Give it to us! Moses argues that the people of Israel are sinful and so need it more. The angels accept his reasoning. But this argument is less interesting for what it says than for what it leaves out. Moses doesn’t say “Uh, guys, have you even read the Torah? Four of the five books are totally about me, personally. There’s even a section describing how God gives me the Torah, in the Torah. How can you challenge my right to have my own biography?”
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The problem with the idea of the soul is, how does it get through doors? Your body goes in and then there's this weird transition and then you're on the other side of the door and like ... does your soul just *know* to move to your new location? Does it stay behind and they have to send a new soul down? Is this the origin of the door ghost epidemic?
does your understanding of a soul somehow divorce it from the body?
is your understanding of the thing that makes us alive somehow not connected to you as a person?
do you seriously think that if you lost your soul and got someone else's you would still be you?
why, in what universe, in what mindset- would a door ever be any kind of hindrance to something that lives inside of you???
You can't separate the concept of self from which side of the door you're on without opening the door to the possibility of opening the door to find an identical version of yourself on the other side that's already you because the only difference between them and you is that they're on the other side of the door and that's irrelevant (if you separate the concept of the self from which side of the door you're on) to the concept of the self!
... I think you're probably maybe confusing them with mirrors?
