The First Link Goes So Incredibly Hard

ended up demotivated for months on a personal project... but we're so back, exciting things are happening. I implemented a functional, fairly readable json parser in 12 lines of code using my new library. more to come. eventually.

Uhh I’m gonna use this as an excuse to infodump about graphs and fractals and how those two combined help me reason about everything from artistic composition to neural networks to psychology to neuroscience to quantum physics to distributed systems to astrophysics to etc etc etc. I’m calling this theory the:

Fractal theory of Everything

And I’ll probably post a lot of #looooonnnggggg posts about it under the tag “#fractal theory of everything” if you wanna adjust your filters accordingly. This is just the intro post to explain the theory. Actually using this theory to explain everything will be the posts which follow this one.

TLDR located here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DF9lYoQXZbebiIgB071Pv_lHiISCiocuSq-pbubD_xg/edit

Google Docs

Graphs Approximating Fractals: a model for anything intelligent

Graphs Approximating Fractals: a model for anything intelligent Graph Approximating Fractals: Think of everything as a graph of nodes where

Imagine everything as a bunch of nodes (cities, people, classrooms, photons, tumblr users, etc) connected by edges (roads, friendships, paths, quantum strings, followers, etc). This representation is called a graph and you might be familiar with it (looking at who follows me) from math and/or computer science.

This representation of a graph is useful because sometimes a large enough graph is self-similar at multiple scales, meaning when you look at like 100 nodes it looks about the same as when you look at 100k nodes. See percolation which shows why magnets stop working when they get too hot or too cold.

I argue that any graph with meaningful data (meaning not all noise and not all uniform) is an approximation of an n-dimensional fractal. As the graph approaches a more and more accurate approximation of a fractal the data becomes more and more meaningful.

Applied to explain the Double Slit Experiment (one of many applications of this model I've thought of so far)

If you assume that energy is finite (change in the momentum of objects over time) then you start to think about how the universe could possibly exist with its near endless complexity (see fractal graphs from above with their complexity).

My conclusion from energy being finite is that adding a new particle to the universe must scale at most linearly, otherwise adding more particles would make the universe quickly use way too much energy way too fast. Think about a universe where every particle collides to some small degree with every other particle. If you add one more particle to a 2 particle universe then you’ve added 2 more collision checks which is not so bad, right? However, if you add one more particle to a 100 particle universe then you’ve added 100 more particle checks. It becomes obvious that if energy is finite then this is a massive waste of energy for very little increase in scale of our universe. Since intelligent life which can reason about stuff like this can only exist in a sufficiently large universe, there’s a bit of a survivorship bias in that we must live within a universe which scales linearly at worst in order for us to be able to reason about all this, assuming energy is limited.

Since the universe must scale linearly, each particle can only “talk to” the top X most important particles around it for each “update frame” of the universe. (Time is weird though because the universe kind of slows down fast moving objects and my theory is that fast moving objects get more frames compared to slower moving objects but this is even more speculative and hazy than the rest of this infodump. There’s also some weird time shenanigans with looking back through time - see double slit experiment).

Having each particle only talk to their X most important neighbors means that the universe can scale linearly since every particle doesn’t have to talk to every other particle anymore (yay!).

However, limiting the number of edges each particle has also has ramifications in quantum behavior (behavior of particles on a quantum level or dealing with 1 to 100 particles rather than billions).

Basically when a particle only has a few other particles near it in spacetime it’s as though that particle has a weak GPS signal and the particle ends up moving in ways it shouldn’t because the particle only has a few friends to orient itself with. I theorize that the double slit behavior seen with a laser beam entering two slits is due to that particle having to guess where and when it is in spacetime based on the very few particles around it (see math theory of multilateration).

Therefore since the particle can't orient itself it has to guess where it is using probability and some sort of pseudorandom process. This creates the wave pattern seen in the double slit experiment.

honestly getting infodumped to is like. dreamy

there's nothing that melts me more than just hearing someone be passionate about something. And if someone has hurt you in the past and makes you reluctant to fuckin completely go off on the expanded canon of the X-Files or whatever, I'm gonna hit them in the head with a big mallet. You're adorable, show it. Please

Being autistic feels like having to emulate brain hardware that most other people have. Being allistic is like having a social chip in the brain that handles converting thoughts into social communication and vice versa while being autistic is like using the CPU to essentially emulate what that social chip does in allistic people.

Skip this paragraph if you know about video codec hardware on GPUs. Similarly, some computers have hardware chips specifically meant for encoding and decoding specific video formats like H.264 (usually located in the GPU), while other computers might not have those chips built in meaning that encoding and decoding videos must be done “by hand” on the CPU. That means it usually takes longer but is also usually more configurable, meaning that the output quality of the CPU method can sometimes surpass the hardware chip’s output quality depending on the settings set for the CPU encoding.

In conclusion, video codec encoding and decoding for computers is to social encoding and decoding for autistic/allistic people.

Wow wtf HIV/AIDS was discovered by Flossie Wong-Staal, an Chinese-American woman, and she’s the reason the HIV test even exists. AND THEN she invented the molecular knife that lead to treatments for HIV/AIDS. And she’s STILL ALIVE. We don’t hear about the contributions of Women of Color enough, my word. Madness.

zephiris.me

Zephiris.Me

Learn about my name!

It also lists our what I’m currently working on and what I’ve worked on in the past!

do you think their periods ever synced up

mobile-friendly personal websites

@agentreynard wanted to hear more about how I made my website mobile friendly, so here's what I did:

First, crucially, I already had a one-column website that used css to style the HTML.

This made it easy to adapt to smaller screens...as soon as I learned the following three things thanks to Christopher Heng's How to Make a Mobile-Friendly Website: Responsive Design in CSS:

1. You need this magical incantation in the HEAD section of every page:

2. You need to tell your images to simmer down and not be stretching out the screen by being as wide as they want. They can be 100% wide and no more!! Add this to the css:

3. And then you'll probably need to give the page special instructions on how to act if it's being displayed on a small screen. This is the fiddly bit. What you put in here will be specific to your website, but it'll all go at the end of your css, tucked inside one of these:

That's what's known as a media query and it can take a variety of forms. This one says that if a screen is 320px wide or smaller, these rules apply. You can also use "min-width" if you want to tell it what to do if a screen is larger than a set number, and you can put whatever numbers in there you want.

Mine looks like this:

Those were all classes I used for the original layout, only now I want them to display differently on smaller screens. So I shrunk all the margins to remove white (and pink) space and now that same page looks something like this on mobile:

I did the same thing for the story files themselves, shrinking the margins so there's more room for text, but that took a different set of rules because they've got a different structure. I also added "back to top" links to the bottom of all my navigational pages.

Now, this is clearly not a foolproof or comprehensive plan. Everything I know about HTML and CSS I learned through trial and error, so I am barely qualified to say even this much. But these were the three things I needed to know before I could stick my hands in there and really shove stuff around.

I wrote a poem about my first love about a month into our relationship. Today they broke up with me. Here is that poem:

Light Rays

Light rays filtering in all the way from the sun.

Sometimes after a detour to the moon

Filtering in through leaves or bouncing off the snow or ricocheting off someone‘s iris into my pupil.

So much light entering my soul.

So much distance that ray has traveled

All so that my soul can become enthralled with another’s.

When I look someone in the eyes I feel their soul capturing mine; overwhelming me with awe

I bathe in the depths of another’s pupils. Become absorbed by the ever-expanding darkness. Let everything else fade. The darkness strengthened by the photon ring surrounding their pupils;

flecks of light which absorb and reflect rays, surrounding and contrasting the center.

I know I shouldn’t stare into the sun, for I might go blind from the magnitude of pure white light

But when I peer into the darkest depths of another all other senses fade away, consumed by my captivation.

I often look just shy of someone’s gaze;

Their nose, their eyelid.

Otherwise, I’d always be getting lost exploring the souls of others.

If I truly look you in the eye you’ll watch as I get absorbed by you.

If I look you in the eye it means I want to feel totally embraced by you.

If I look you in the eye, it might even mean I love you.

Otherwise, I hope hanging by the hawking radiation, just out of reach of being absorbed, will suffice.