@pre@boing.world2025-05-27 19:06:58
A wish granting god baby, granting Conrad's wishes in service of the Rani, turns London into a misogynist utopia and The Doctor into a good husband and insurance worker.
Hard to say why misogynists are so keen on the American 50s. Perhaps because it was before blacks had the vote and women could do banking.
And if anyone doubts this ridiculous tale, their table stops working and their family might call the doubt police, so they soon learn not to. All very oppressive and subversive.
Ruby manages to doubt anyway. And all the disabled people who simply never enter into Conrad's mind. Nice touch that. Great scene in the tent city filled with the dispossessed. They don't seem to have actually done anything so far but maybe they'll get more useful in part two.
Conrad is on TV telling a story about a man named Doctor Who.
Giant dinosaur skeletons walk the city, stepping over sky scrapers, and a bone palace towers above the city. Because I guess Conrad wishes for it to be so in order to give the Rani somewhere to live.
The palace is beautiful and Gothic.
But doubt is seeping in. Rogue is back, on the TV in hell, telling the Doctor that tables don't work like that. So he investigates. Gets himself reported to the doubt police who take him and Belinda to the bone palace.
The Rani's split from Miss Flood gives the pair of them a good chemistry. Queen and her maid of honour. Seems like Mrs Flood is likely to be the Rani's downfall. She doesn't like being told to make a sandwich.
A lot of exposition going on, but they at least put a hat on it: "Isn't just exposition, I need you to doubt"
So that's the reason for the strange wishes: To make the doctor have doubts so severe that the reality collapses, and Rani can rescue Omega. Omega is the dude in a Mask from the first 3 doctors episode, who gave the timelords time travel and got trapped in the underworld in the process. Timelords forgot him and never mounted a rescue, but presumably Rani is now hoping he'll bring back Galifrey.
And with London collapsing into the underworld and the doctor falling from the sky, we get the episode break and have to wait until next week.
That's not a cliff hanger, that an already-falling-from-the-cliff hanger.
Poppy really is his daughter he's shouting as he falls. And you know what that means?
🤨🤔
Back in Space Babies, the worst episode of the Nchuti seasons, that space baby asked if he was her parents and he said he wished that he was their parents.
That wish has been granted somehow?
Is this space baby Susan's mother? They have very different skin tones, but that doesn't matter much in a regenerating species.
Never have found out much about The Doctor's child. When he traveled with his granddaughter everyone assumed he'd met his own kid, the grandchild's parent.
But that doesn't have to be true for a time traveler. Maybe he met the granddaughter before he met his own kid, and maybe his own kid was just wished into his family line 60 years later (or billions of years in his timeline I guess).
Pretty fun episode but not sure it makes much sense. Why doesn't the Rani just wish for Omega to be back instead of all this doubt and underworld bollocks?
Last one next week. Super long episode. Hope it's all cleared up. Good chance we'll meet Susan again I think. And maybe see Omega's mask once more.
@arXiv_astrophSR_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-05-29 07:29:41
Falling Threads During Solar Filament Eruptions
Yidian Wu, Rui Liu, Runbin Luo, Wensi Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22020 https://a…
@islamoyankee@mastodon.social2025-05-27 11:20:25
Both Harvard and Columbia are failing to articulate the need and meaning of education, besides economic value. There is no sense of humanity or the humanities or the search for a truths. Both schools are for-profit companies in the minds of their boards, and their presidents reflect that understanding.
From: @…
@lukem@hachyderm.io2025-03-26 09:48:21
Omfg, as much as I have mixed feelings about setting up ecommerce stores of any kind, Freewebstore is another level of nightmare.
Simulated chatbot "conversations" that make onboarding / offboarding annoyingly lengthy. GIVE ME OLD-FASHIONED FORMS GOD DAMMIT.
UX that treats me like a toddler while trying way too hard to upgrade me to a paid plan.
Oh, and of course. AI. AI this, AI that 😓 😡
Never, never, never again.
@pre@boing.world2025-05-20 17:37:11
Finally, with a hundred thousand dead, two thirds of the buildings bombed, all the hospitals and infrastructure destroyed, more than a million people on the verge of starvation, and Israel's leadership even more openly bragging about their intent to ethnically cleanse the area, it's gone on "too long".
Well done Lammy and Starmer. You finally noticed eh?
So trade deal talks are off, and weapons export licenses are... Well. We'll see. "Always Under Review" they say.
And the main reason for the slight and tiny change in emphasis? Mostly Trump. They are following Trump. They feel easier criticizing Israel's genocide now Trump looks easier with it.
#ukpol #gaza #israel
@arXiv_qfinPM_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-05-20 12:29:18
This https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.10914 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_qfi…
@arXiv_physicsaccph_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-05-27 07:42:50
Electron and positron channeling and photon emission processes in boron doped periodically bent diamond
Andrei V. Korol, Andrey V. Solov'yov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20037
@simon_jf@mastodon.scot2025-03-10 20:53:22
Took Friday and today off, and went up to the highlands. Walked with my wife and dog all the way from Boat of Garten to Aviemore and back one of the days! Didn’t check emails, and didn’t check Teams. In fact, deleted both from my phone, and deleted they shall stay. Feeling a lot less burnt out.
@pre@boing.world2025-05-16 11:08:14
I read "Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It" by Christof Koch.
Interesting book which spends like 8 or 9 chapters detailing all the experiments which prove beyond much doubt that consciousness, and self awareness, is a thing done by a brain.
It describes how perception is a construction of a description, has a chapter called "computational mind"
And then spends the last two chapters describing why he thinks the mind can't be computed, because drugs have made him think experience is some kind of magic associated with highly interconnected causal structures.
Apparently, he thinks, once things become interconnected enough they become able to cause things independently of the physics running those connections.
Which is crazy, obviously. There's nothing causal in direct connections between neurons that isn't equally causal in modeled connections between virtual neurons.
All his evidence in the book from neural MRI scans to the effects of psychedelic drugs and symptoms of strokes and disease point to the brain simulating a virtual reality which is the basis of perception.
That simulated world in which we live is full of colour and shape and sounds and emotions and millions of mental constructs that are built to be correlated by the senses with the outside world, but are not equal to the world itself. We live in a dream constructed to correlate with reality.
But then instead of taking the next step: That consciousness itself is a property of a simulated being inside that mental model of the universe, a property which the brain simulates and applies to the virtual self that's doing the experiencing inside that model, he jumps towards some magic implying pan-psychism or that sufficiently interconnected networks become causally self-complete for some reason nobody can fathom.
Sure, colour and shape and emotions are all made up by the brain but experience can't be! For some reason.
You see in truth dualism is false, in that there is no spirit realm in which ghosts animate the matter of the body somehow.
Yet also, dualism is true, in that there is a simulated mental reality which we live in, computed by the brain in which all perception and experience are created, which is related-to but separate-from the unfolding complicated dance of energy that is the universe our bodies interact with.
People take some DMT trip, and the model of the universe emulated by their brain collapses and breaks. Their virtual simulated self inside their mind has these experiences of being one with the universe or the experience of feeling dead yet conscious or whatever, and these hippies think that the broken down simulated experience is real and reflects how consciousness is more fundamental than the atoms that make up the neurons in their brain.
Instead of realizing it shows them that their experienced universe is a simulacrum, they think they get a more direct experience of reality somehow. A consciousness more pure than any mere base atom.
"Then I am myself the world" is a great title. Everything you ever experience is created and simulated in your brain like a dream, the whole universe is inside your head. Even the fact of experience itself.
But that isn't the conclusion Koch reaches somehow, he just jumps from describing the evidence that this is so straight into ascribing super-causal magic consciousness to particular arrangements of atoms that integrated information theory suggest have high correlation, and thinks therefore conciousness is itself the entire universe.
Ah well, fun book. I like arguing in my head with authors that are wrong.
#reading #books #consciousness #thenIAmMyselfTheWorld