Random Thread ~Usagi-Chan ☮ Tūsurī~

[Shoujo Q]

The related video is even cooler!



My boyfriend is into Gundam and we’ve been bonding over it lately so this was really cool to see.

[Celedam]

All the talk about forum tenures makes this rather timely...

https://xkcd.com/2363/

[Zunu]

Coincidentally, I was literally finishing reading an xkcd post when I decided to surf* over to this board.

*since we're doing 2000 and all.

[erilaz]

Seriously I thought it was just a name you made up (like "Zunu"), not a real word (like, er, Zunu). Don't know why I never looked it up before.

I have a copy of Amos David Zubrow's 1978 Stanford M.A. thesis on the subject, Concerning the Interpretation of ProtoNorse erilaR in Runic Inscriptions, on my runology shelf. When I saw it in the bookstore, I had to buy it, because it had my name on it!

Re erilaz vs. erilaR: One finds both transcriptions of the runes in the scholarly literature. The latter transcription shows that word-final Proto-Germanic *z was developing toward Old Norse r (as in *đaǥaz > *đaǥaR > dagr 'day') but had not yet merged with original Germanic r. In case anyone was wondering.

[erilaz]

I bought this Japanese phone card on eBay because I liked the artwork, but I have no idea what it's about. The three crazily stylized kanji were completely illegible to me, so I asked a Japanese friend, a professor at Keio University, for help. She didn't get much further, but she thought (and I agree) that the kanji on the right might be 館, the kan of Budōkan, bijutsukan, hakubutsukan, etc.

Something that just occurred to me: Could the kanji on the left possibly be 侍 (samurai)?

A couple of other points: The harp has the same shape as the small symbol at the top of the card, whatever that may signify. I can read the number 49 in the lower right corner.

Any thoughts?

[CaptainBerryzGiraffe]

I'll be here 7 years in december!

[boinsie]

As of about two hours ago, I've been a JPLOP member for 13 years!

Wow. I feel... ways about this.

[Zunu]

I have a copy of *******'s thesis on the subject, Concerning the Interpretation of ******* in Runic Inscriptions, on my runology shelf.

I'm pretty sure fantasy writer Terry Goodkind had the eponymous character of his "Wizard's First Rule" series use a variation of this exact sentence template in at least three different volumes.
The author just passed away; some of his later stuff got a little too formulaic or transparently Objectivist for my taste, but I enjoyed his series in my younger days; may he rest in peace.

[Celedam]

So apparently someone has mathematically proven that paradox-free time travel is possible…

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-09/uoq-yp092320.php
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6382/aba4bc

The takeaway seems to be that no matter what you might do to disrupt an event in the past, subsequent events will realign themselves to continue in the same direction and maintain causality. You still have freedom of choice, and your choices can have localized effects, but that's it. The river of time keeps flowing.

I don't know how I feel about this. It certainly puts a new spin on the old debate about determinism versus free will — to wit, if no single person can have more than a localized effect, then does it actually matter whether that person has free will?

[Zunu]

The takeaway seems to be that no matter what you do to change events in the past, those events will realign themselves to continue in the same direction and maintain causality.

"Will realign" is, I think, too strong. From my vague impression of reading the non-mathy parts of the paper in question, what I think they're claiming is that if you go back in time and try to kill gramps, there's a series of dynamical processes, however improbable, for you to exercise your free will and commit the murder, and yet for the present to still exist unchanged. That series of dynamical processes might be that your grandfather's cells spontaneously un-decompose and he mysteriously comes back to life (and also that everybody somehow forgets that he died in the first place!) The point is that they have shown there exists SOME path back to your starting conditions. A "closed time-like curve" can in theory be shown to exist on paper. Not that the path has any likelihood of ever happening in a thermodynamic sense, or that it must or shall inevitably happen. Merely that its existence is compatible with reality.

We've known for a very long time that dynamic processes are generally time reversible. An single atom moves from point A to point B. It can just as easily move from point B to point A. What stops eggs from unbreaking and ice cubes from unmelting is the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, which is really more of a probabilistic principle than a law. But in theory those unlikely events could happen. Similarly any action that you undertake by going to the past ought to, in theory be able to be undone by a series of finite interactions. What they've done in this paper is basically prove that that is the case.