We’re just back from our tropical vacation during which my parents stayed at our house to see that the kids got fed and dressed and off to school, and after barely two days we’re going to turn around and take the whole mob to their house for Christmas. They’re saints.
Anyway, a whole bunch of stuff happened while we were away, some of which seems worth commenting on before it completely disappears down the memory hole.
— In the social-media sphere, there was another flurry of “Twitter is Dying,” when the most beloved South African since Arjen Rudd decided to capriciously ban a bunch of stuff. Of course this would happen at a time when I had very limited access to the Internet and couldn’t do anything about it. This has largely blown over, though with a few more permanent departures from the Bird Site, include Ken “Popehat” White, whose essay on leaving I enjoyed, as another Old Person who has been through several rounds of Internet communities.
— In response, I’ve added another alternative to play with, in my copious free time: I’m orzelc on Post.news. That’s in addition to my limited presence on Mastodon. I’ll probably post links to anything substantial I write here on both of those, assuming I remember, but for the moment Twitter is still more useful as a promotion venue than any of the alternatives, so I am continuing there for now.
— While we were at sea, there was a splashy announcement about the latest fusion results from the National Ignition Facility, which brought the usual mix of “This changes everything!” vs. “This is a nothingburger.” from physicists online. I got asked a lot of questions about this on the ship, for the record, so it definitely achieved a good deal of penetration into the public consciousness. My take is that it’s a very impressive result that’s being over-sold a tiny bit; if somebody gets a tokamak running at better than breakeven, I’ll be excited, but I just don’t see any way this method becomes a practical clean-energy technology.
— Also while we were at sea, the Standard Model survived another challege, with the latest analysis from LHCb showing results directly in line with what’s predicted by the current theory of nearly everything, and not anything requiring “new physics” to explain. This was a big disappointment to all the theorists who have generated tons of preprints attempting to explain the previous discrepancy with new particles, and a jolt of schadenfreude for the contrarians who insist it’s all a waste of time. My take remains that I don’t really expect anything dramatic to come out of the current theoretical paradigm, but I don’t have any problem with experimentalists continuing to look for new physics, because what else are they going to do?
— “Dante Shepherd” of the late great webcomic Surviving the World has a new Substack, Survival Mode, and you should probably check it out.
— This reminiscience by Freddie deBoer is a lovely piece of writing.
— The aforementioned Ken White has a nice breakdown of the different things people mean when they talk about “Free Speech” rights. I don’t expect this to catch on widely, because too many people benefit from having these muddled in a lot of the #discourse, but I think he spells out the source of a lot of problems.
— The profile of a rural Georgian who seems like he ought to be a Trump voter but isn’t is very nice, kind of the mirror image of the much-derided “Let’s go to a diner in a flyover state and talk to some racists” pieces that have been a staple of political reportage since 2016. I’m not entirely sure what it accomplishes in the end, though, and definitely not convinced it does what some people I’ve seen citing it say it does.
Anyway, that’s about enough of that. I will need to do some actual work next week, which means I’m likely to feel enough of a need to procrastinate that I may post stuff here. But almost certainly not before Monday, so as it says on the card at the top, our very best wishes for whatever holiday you may choose to ring out the end of 2022 on. Or just, you know, have a lovely weekend.
And to close, here’s a completely ridiculous Christmas song by the Killers that Elton John is 1000% committed to, as is his wont:
(I already used “Fairytale of New York”…)
That’s some stuff. Here’s a button:
And if you feel so moved, the comments will be open: