Science... Again?

In response to Acoustics Research is Insufficient by Jeff Dening on the flute forums:

My day job is tangential to research, and I appreciate the effort you've gone into trying to explain this so that it is easier to understand/appreciate by the community here. Thank you!

I think the central thesis can be summarised as "confusing the map for the territory".

Science provides a guide into the natural world, but as all guides go, they have specific assumptions (implicit and explicit), and are particularly narrow in what they test, and the definitions they use for certain things.

Science never delivers "truth" with the kind of absolute certainty that people yearn, yet they keep trying to make science say something it really doesn't.

Here was where I wanted to say that people with a wrong map will just shrug and then adapt to the territory they observe, but we've heard of people who just blindly follow their GPSr and drive off half-finished bridges, so... 🤷

That said, the stakes are a tad lower in music (bruised egos and busted wallets notwithstanding), but this phenomenon of misinterpretation of what science does and does not say is a real problem elsewhere in society.

The other thing that I would add is that I am certain that there are definitely very good, well-controlled science going on fo the acoustics of flute. However, it is the makers themselves who have that -- after all, to know the behaviour of a change in one of their parameters for their flute means that they can fine-tune and control the quality of their instruments (part of R&D). But good luck trying to get hold of that information -- it _is_ a trade secret after all.

Maybe having an article written by a respected member of the community might make it more palatable for folks to grok things.

To me, this is an actual problem. Science education back in my day had the following progression (from primary all the way to junior college):

1. List of ``scientific'' facts;
2. List of equations primarily centred around Netwonian Physics;
3. Baby's first quantum mechanics theory equations (photoelectric effect);
4. Special relativity (Lorentz factor corrections)(?).

Now, to be fair, I have a strong physics slant because after secondary school, I didn't touch chemistry nor biology as a whole. But even then, the kind of ``science'' that we learnt was still focused on remembering what was the orthodox (or ``right'') model/equation to use to solve the often classical physics-based problems.

Inequalities hardly play a role. Not as ``certain'' as the way regular equations can yield numbers (first time that an infinite number of solutions can appear). Field equations are a no-no---matrix and tensor math was not part of the syllabus.

But more importantly, to keep within what can be effectively ``taught'', the developmental process from one model to the next was not as heavily emphasised as the ability to read a story problem, pick the right set of equations, and run the algebra to the end.

While it looks like this is a sign of ``good'' education (everyone can cite the four kinematics equations [of classical physics]; huzzah!), I think that it is a central reason why we have this misinformation crisis that is still ongoing.

When science does not have the ``and a new model came up because they found that the existing one couldn't explain everything'' part emphasised, there is a tendency for people to doggedly believe that science is infallible, or more precisely, the scientific ``facts'' that they learnt back in school some twenty or more years ago was the most correct, while being unsystematically suspicious of all the ``new'' science that is showing up that contradicted their previous assumptions.

Spoiler alert: almost all new science must contradict some aspect of the previous assumptions as that is how the old models (and facts derived from said models) are shown to be incomplete (i.e. wrong outside of the original circumstances, but are starting to become important), or downright wrong (i.e. replication attempts failed, or when data fraud is detected).

Math education is a little less susceptible to that, because at the junior college level, proofs are introduced into the picture. And I don't mean the ``trigonometric proof'' style of pattern matching and transformation in between equations---I mean using an actual proof technique, like mathematical induction. But it still fails in some way because these things came about really late in the math pedagogy---most people operating in society are probably stuck with secondary school math (i.e. differential calculus) at the very most.

Tangents aside, all that unwavering faith that the science [``fact''] that one knows is troubling---that's not the mentality of someone who understands that science is merely the current best known approximation of reality, and is not the final word the way the Bible is for spiritual matters.

And that's the battlecry: ``Defund the ${scientific-foundation-of-the-week} because ${pet-peeve-of-the-week} contradicts ${older-scientific-"facts"} and is therefore wrong!''

Frankly, this is just one of those days where maybe having a benevolent dictator instead of giving people the voice is felt as the right thing to do.

Damn. The weekend barely started, and I'm already tired as hell.

Till the next update.

Ally

Looking at the world over the past few days, it made me wonder: what counts as an ally?

Traditionally, there are two main ways for establishing an alliance:

1. Shared interests;
2. Shared ethno-cultural history.

As far as I can tell, for the most part of history, that of shared interests was the dominant factor towards how two or more entities declare themselves as allies. It is only after a certain semblence of peace has settled in that the idea of a shared ethno-cultural history become a viable means of establishing an alliance.

The reason why I am bringing this up because we are fast approaching a turning point in modern world history where peace may be more fleeting than anyone is willing to admit. The key reason I think that is leading us down this path is a confluence of two occurrences: that of the rise of ``leaders'' who think that they can exploit the complacence and lethargy derived from seeing nearly fifty plus years of peace to amass ever-greater amounts of [political] power, and the general malaise that comes from a population where the majority's biggest concerns aren't necessarily about bread-and-butter issues, but on when they can get their next luxury kick fix.

That of exploitative ``leaders'' amassing power to exact their own will to their own benefit is something that is likely to be talked to death by this point. But the malaise of people---that is something that is unironically new. The echo chambers that made some groups of people think that the highly vocal minority are the majority are the same ones that make the people believe that ``someone'' is out there who are going to ``do the right thing to save them''. Ironically, in the old days where communication channels were less ubiquitous, the grassroots movement was likely to be much stronger, as seen by the sheer mass of the organised movements to protest (both peacefully and violently) against the injustices of the day.

Sure, we still have organised movement now, but the scale and the ferocity aren't as they were before. Perhaps the affluence of the middle class has made that level of society feel like that they have much more to lose should they choose to go against the authoritative figures who are dealing out the injustice; this is more so the case when taking into consideration the near elimination of pseudonymity through nearly twenty years of ``social media''.

Or maybe things haven't gotten to the point where the mob finally acknowledges that they truly have nothing else to lose, and therefore they might as well give 'em hell before their lives are absolutely wrecked.

And perhaps a miracle might happen then.

But what do I know, being the armchair ``analyst'' I am?

------

Today's a break day for me. 2025--02 doesn't have any public holidays, and so I just picked some middle-of-the-month Friday to enact my own kind of break day.

I got back into Minecraft, having updated my long-running single player world to 1.21.4, which has a lot of new things for a ``minor version'' update from the 1.20 series.

To be fair, 1.21.4 had been out for quite a while, and it was only in the recent week that I updated to that version. The main reason is that comment I just made: for a ``minor version'' update, there was just too many new things going on under the hood, to the point that some of my favourite Minecraft mods like Fabulously Optimise, Nautilus3D, and even minihud/malilib are barely keeping up.

It reminds me too much of how the Java version worked out. At some point, the major version was so stagnated while the minor version number was racing on to the point that they just dropped the major version number and rebranded the entire thing by the minor version number, which led to nonsense like J2SE 1.4 that is then followed by J2SE 5.

Minecraft version updates aside, I continued with the reworking of my Nether Hub. The rework involved expanding the size of the Nether Hub to fit all the rail-lines on a single expanded floor, and to re-arrange the rail-lines such that they are pointing closer to the actual direction of the destination as opposed to whatever spaghetti nonsense that I had with the two-storey organically mushed together set up.

One of the things that I was wrestling with was the viability to build ``diagonal rails''. Part of the reason why the current Nether Hub rail system is such a mess is because I didn't have a good way of building ``diagonal rails''.

Well, I finally figured it out.

So, the basic diagonal looks like this:

The blocks are staggered out in a regular 45° angle, and the regular rails will automatically align themselves. My nether rails are lined with glass blocks on the side to prevent getting smacked by ghasts due to line of sight, but I cannot do that in this diagonal set up---the corner will literally clip into the minecart as it is going through and end up losing all speed. Glass panes work well, but they didn't connect ``diagonally'' with the blocks making the floor, so I extended out the floor with iron bars, and then have the glass panes sit on them.

That first diagonal was unpowered---momentum and the powered rail before and after the diagonal was enough to keep the minecart moving. I can't just add powered rails to the diagonal due to one particular quirk of Minecraft rails---the powered ones cannot ``bend'' left or right 90° the way the regular rails do.

For the short distance earlier, it was not a problem. But to have an extended diagonal rail without powered rails is just not a good idea. And there's the whole lighting problem---the regular orthogonal rails just had torches on the walls (appearing left when heading towards the Nether Hub, and appearing on the right otherwise). Glass panes solved the diagonal connection problem, but they cannot accept torches.

But I came up with an idea, and this is how it looked like:

I used a redstone block (I'm lazy) every 8-ish blocks along the orthogonal axis and a powered rail to give that kick. It breaks the 45° to something that is more akin to 44-ish°, but it does allow for a very extended run at a speed higher than the orthogonal (~11 blocks/s vs ~8 blocks/s). In a similar vein, every 8-ish blocks along the orthogonal axis have a lighting block (Jack-o-lanterns in my case), and these are interleaved.

Even when the diagonal rails were running through self-dug tunnels like in the picture, it was still necessary to put up the glass panes to take away potential spawn spots---otherwise the zombie pigmenpiglins will start to spawn, and then walk around, blocking the minecart's movement.

And that's about it. The next part requires a diagonal rail, but there's also a height-level difference---I'm wondering if I can find a way to mix these three-axes changes at once.

Till the next update.

Unbotched(?)

Ah... okay, let's start with the good news: Ma's machine is finally working. The updated bill of parts:

Description	Price
Gigabyte B760M DS3H AX DDR4 + Core i5-14400 (μATX) bundle	SGD 492
Seasonic PRIME GX-650, 650W 80+ Gold	SGD 250
Samsung 990 EVO Plus NVMe M.2 SSD 1TB	SGD 159
Total	SGD 901

In short, I hardly saved any money compared to what I previously spent to build the previous version. What I didn't save in money, I saved in some time with data migration. And the amount stated here didn't take into account the taxi fare, and the additional thumb drive that I had to get for Xubuntu installation because my old ones were broken.

So, what went wrong?

I think that m.2 slot with the ``thermal guard'' is borked. In a previous post, I talked about how I broke the NVMe drive that held the operating system of the previous machine. This time, I was smart enough to remove the stickers and what not before slotting it in. It all worked, that is, until I assembled it back together and put it into its stand.

In which case it did not work.

That was back in 2025-01-24, the same day I bought the new SSD.

Due to Chinese New Year nonsense, the machine had to be put away during the visitation season, and it is only today that I could bring myself to do something about it. I tried turning it on as is, hoping that it settled long enough to self-fix---no luck. I reopened everything up, and switched out the SSD to the other m.2 slot without the ``thermal guard'', and what do you know, the fucking thing worked.

Hallelujah!

There's one other oddity left though---the machine can handle cold boots. But throw in a reboot, and it gets stuck in POST.

Why is it so, I haven't the foggiest clue, and am honestly tired af to deal with that shit. I'm just happy that Ma's got a machine back where she can use to watch her streaming video, where the whole privacy situation is more controlled than the household ``smart TV''.

------

Grim Dawn has had quite a big mechanics update---there is a new innate ability to dash in the direction of facing via a key press (defaults to the spacebar with the keyboard+mouse control scheme), and the mana/health potions have been replaced with spells that have time-out instead.

Oh, and they have a new expansion planned too.

I just want to point out that Grim Dawn has been around since 2016, and they are probably rivalling Terraria (2011), and Minecraft (2011) for ``labour of love'' status.

The funny thing about Grim Dawn is that each time after the first playthrough that I look at Path of Exile or more recently at the early access of Path of Exile 2 and wonder if I want to get onto that bandwagon, I just turn back to Grim Dawn instead.

Now, prior to this, my guilty pleasure was Torchlight II. According to Steam, the last time I played it was back in 2018. I suppose I did play the crap out of the game, even buying it for folks too. No idea why I stopped---am going to load it up again to give it a go.

------

Well, apart from that, I must add that I have been having fun with Eirian-VI. Some important points that I learnt:

1. Colour mode works only for native e-book formats (the one I used was .mobi);
2. Comics purchased from Amazon that refused to be installable on the grayscale Kindles could be downloaded to the Colorsoft;
3. PDFs, when converted by Calibre directly to .mobi, look like shit unless each page is rasterised;
4. Use pdfcrop, then use -sDevice=pdfimage24 in Ghostscript before converting to .mobi via Calibre yields the best viewing result (metadata is still shit).

So with all these in mind, do I recommend the Kindle Colorsoft?

Sure, why not? The fast refresh rate, and generally improved responses are always a plus, as is the high resolution that is available. Colour availability is a bonus, and for the most part, shouldn't really be an issue. Most people do not follow my predilection of using PDFs for readables---they tend to use EPUB, and rely heavily on the Kindle ecosystem (i.e. using ``Send to Kindle'' to do the necessary conversions as opposed to man-handling stuff with Calibre). So for them, they are less likely to face the kind of issues that I am.

And that's about it for now. Till the next update.

Edit: So I found out why I stopped playing Torchlight II---I literally ran out of things to do. The gameplay was fun for its time, but eventually the strategic depth was just insufficient to sustain more than the 315+hrs that I had put in across the 4 different classes. Grim Dawn will have nearly 45 different classes that come from pairwise combinations of soon-to-be 10 masteries, and then there's the whole sub-field of Devotion.

Eirian-VI is Here!

Eirian-VI has arrived.

After about two weeks, my Kindle Colorsoft has finally made its way to SIN city, as have all the other things that I had purchased on either amazon.com or amazon.sg.

And lemme tell you, Eirian-VI is gorgeous.

So, using SCP Series 4 volume 1 as a sample, you can tell that the colours are there, and are fairly soft/subtle. While most people complain (and also have pictures!) about how the Colorsoft was ``blue-er'' than previous black and white Kindles, you can tell that it isn't so in this case---that's because I can tune the ``warmth'' slider to make it as red as I want to. To be fair, this is at warmth level 3 on colour level standard (as opposed to vivid), compared against to zero warmth change in Eirian-V.

Do I have complaints? Just one---colour is only available on ``native'' Kindle file types, which in this case is Mobi. I only realised it when I tried loading up a PDF that is scanned (and with colours), and it showed only the regular monochrome set up.

Is that a deal breaker? Not really... I am completely fine with reading most of my material in black and white anyway, and thanks to Calibre, conversion of the PDF to Mobi is but a click or two away.

Not ideal, but a perfectly serviceable solution.

That yellow line thing that many are complaining about? I do not see it, so it's fine.

And that's a wrap for now. Till the next update.