54 Comments
Feb 1, 2023·edited Feb 1, 2023

I understood none of that, beyond the first few paragraphs, but enjoyed it immensely. Highly amusing!

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"Watts cool about the HAMM..."

Crying with laughter. Love it. Matthew, you are helping keep me sane in these crazy times.

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Hahahahaha “I wanted to make this last point absolutely clear because it quickly hits home that even a primate as advanced as Yuval Noah Harari isn't likely to craft a Shakespeare play no matter how many times we run a simulation, not matter how fast he waves his hands (within known physical limits).” You win the prize for surprising me (especially given the topic) with a morning laugh so forceful, I just spit my coffee ALL over the front of my crisp, clean baby pink blouse! So worth it. Thank you!

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"unlikelihood that the SHA256 encryption algorithm used in Bitcoin will ever be brute force hacked"

Among the infosec boffins in my orbit there have always been arguments about vulnerabilities but this is the one point where they all agree & joke that's why keylogging was invented! :~)

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Mathew’s got jokes! This was highly entertaining. The math made me go Quasar wut-wut (incidently, the name of my friend’s band: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oAYqCzPix4&t=269s ) but I got it on a monkey level.

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Can we give Harari the job of checking all these manuscripts to distract him from his globalist tendency? Perhaps he can invite his WEF friends along too. It shouldn’t be difficult to convince Schwab that universe >> globe.

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Feb 1, 2023Liked by Mathew Crawford

I opened this just 90 minutes after waking, with trepidation. After all- it definitively mentioned Maths ,and I know I struggle ( inadequate strength of verbiage) with math...

Only to find feces flinging monkeys and Pluto. I laughed, and dove in.

I love light-hearted Mathew monologs. Thank you for this.

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Off topic:

I attempted and failed to write a program to write the words to pronounce large numbers. I wanted to know which number was the one that took the longest time to pronounce it. This is a brute-force attack at the problem, that is overkill and would not work. I didn't know at the time the expression "brute force" and the word "ineffable" (=unpronounceable.)

I was 13 and I used a pentium 133 MHz with splendorous 16 MB of memory and a 800 MB hard disk. Borland Turbo Pascal was the environment I had and 4,294,967,295 was the largest integer in that system, which is a small number.

These days one can get a fine approximation to 2**511-1 like 6.7039039649713e+153 in less than one second. Probably, the memory needed to calculate the full expansion of that number requires more than 16MB. Kids today don't know what it's like to format a floppy disk to make space in the hard drive. Sniff.

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It would seem to me that the first problem with the “infinite monkey theorem” is the origin of a semantic domain to give the manuscripts meaning. But I digress...

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Feb 1, 2023Liked by Mathew Crawford

> For a moment, I'll leave alone the possibility that Shakespeare wasn't the true playwright, or that the monkeys are staff writers at the Washington Post.

Very good made me laugh. Thank you!

> Large numbers quickly become hard for most people to comprehend, so I wanted to make this last point absolutely clear because it quickly hits home that even a primate as advanced as Yuval Noah Harari isn't likely to craft a Shakespeare play no matter how many times we run a simulation, not matter how fast he waves his hands (within known physical limits).

I must have a twisted sense of humor. I laughed so hard my eyes are watering. Then I laughed through the rest of the substack. I don't pretend to understand the math. But I am convinced that there is more to creating a series of characters randomly that are equivalent to Shakespeare's works. Much more.

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I have to say you made me chuckle with this entertaining read. I thing during Harrari's computations some monkey matter entered his brain, and the poor sap doesn't know it. In all his computations he's forgetting one absolute...God is in control.

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I was reading about Yuval Noah Harari today -

"For thousands of years, we have gained the power to control the world outside us but not to control the world inside. You could stop a river from flowing, but you could not stop your body from becoming old. You could kill mosquitoes, but you could not kill annoying thoughts buzzing inside your head."

He sounds totally messed up, fixated on power and lacking in the humanity of Shakespeare. He needs to leave us and the goddamn rivers alone.

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At one time in my life I would have exercised the mental discipline to follow the maths all the way through. Now, though, like some others, I stopped when my understanding ran out after the first few paragraphs. It’s wonderful that you and others think about these things. Math, yes, is very beautiful.

It’s strange, I think, that we can all agree that the likelihood of somewhat intelligent monkeys coming up with a Shakespeare play by random typing is, effectively, zero. Yet so many folks persistently believe that non-living, non-sentient particles of stuff somehow over time coalesced into the amazingly beautiful and beyond-our-understanding complex universe. Somehow, by a random process, without outside Intelligence setting anything up or creating the process.

Math is indeed truly beautiful.

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But you’re telling me there IS a chance. :)

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What’s going on with you and these headaches, Mathew?

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I don't understand what your point is with this article but I do know the difference between sales talk about transmission speeds which are irrelevant to the quickness the computer works at and remain irrelevant no matter how many times it is repeated. Throughput speeds are the true measurement of how fast data is transferred and buffering needlessly is the major throughput drag affecting data transfer. Is anyone besides me seeing no improvement in computer performance and starting to get the feeling that all the talk about quantum computing being forward progress is a bunch of hooey? Kind of like 5g being touted as so fast when in reality it cannot pass through anything solid without being cranked up to deadly power output ranges. Speaking of deadly output ranges I have to wonder if the FCC is now only policing ham operators and avoiding their supposed job of monitoring all power outputs of transmitters? I have seen nothing from them regarding the EMF controversy in any media which leads me to believe they fell off the face of the Earth and no one noticed. Perhaps they were paid to "disappear" from public view. My 2 cents worth of comment for today.

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