What's new?

Nothing. Well, almost nothing.

• I dyed my hair. The color is galled 'ginger'. I'd have called it pumpkin. It actually looks like foul apricots. Say of the day so far 'What happened to your hair?' - 'It's an allergic reaction.' - 'To what?' - 'Stupid questions.' (As one can easily deduce, my conversation partner in this case obviously was not Canadian.)


• Though the plan was this year it would not be necessary to pack my household into boxes and drag them around, I will actually be moving twice before the end of the year. Don't ask. At least I am staying in town.


• My last plant, which suffered significantly during my previous trip, has surprisingly recovered (well, at least half of it), and is so not looking forward to my upcoming trip. This is to warn you that I'll be flying to Europe on Thursday, and be off and away for a while.


• I've found six degrees of freedom.


• I just saw this paper on the arxiv:
  
  Search for Future Influence from L.H.C
  By Holger B. Nielsen, Masao Ninomiya
  
  Abstract: We propose an experiment which consists of pulling a card and use it to decide restrictions on the running of L.H.C. at CERN, such as luminosity, beam energy, or total shut down. The purpose of such an experiment is to look for influence from the future, backward causation. Since L.H.C. shall produce particles of a mathematically new type of fundamental scalars, i.e. the Higgs particles, there is potentially a chance to find hitherto unseen effects such as influence going from future to past, which we suggest in the present paper.
  
  which features the idea that the nature of the Higgs field is such that it attempts to avoid its own production: "When the Higgs particle shall be produced, we shall retest if there could be influence from the future so that, for instance, the potential production of a large number of Higgs particles in a certain time development would cause a pre-arrangement so that the large number of Higgs productions, should be avoided."
  
  Therefore - if this hypothesis is true - the LHC is likely to suffer an accident and has to be shut down. The argument is supported by the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider: "Thus it is really not unrealistic that precisely at the first a large number of Higgs production also our model-expectations that is influence from the future would show up. Very interestingly in this connection is that the S.S.C. in Texas accidentally would have been the first machine to produce Higgs on a large scale. However it were actually stopped after a quarter of the tunnel were built, almost a remarkable piece of bad luck."
  
  The authors therefore propose to give backwards causation an economically less damaging possibility to avoid Higgs production by means of a card game that settles runs for the LHC, and permits for the possibility to shut down completely in a quiet and undesastrous way.
  
  One should take this very seriously: "It must be warned that if our model were true and no such game about restricting strongly L.H.C. were played [...] then a “normal” (seemingly accidental) closure should occur. This could be potentially more damaging than just the loss of L.H.C. itself. Therefore not performing [...] our card game proposal could - if our model were correct - cause considerable danger."
  
  I find this interesting as it gives a completely new spin to postdiction. See, we now can have a theory that disables its own observability by backward causation. So, one can actually post-dict something before it has happened, and then go back into the future. Makes me wonder though why the universe hasn't disabled itself even before nucleosynthesis. Maybe God doesn't playing dice with the universe, but instead card games?
  


• Have a good start into the week!