Friday LOL. The Pac-Man hypothesis

[kiaa]

Can't help admitting, those guys can get way too inventive! Especially when they assemble to "engage freely in deep and meaningful discussions"!

Flat-Earthers Explain Why We Don't Fall Off the Edge of Our Planet, and It Involves Pac-Man



By the way, this Pac-Man effect very much reminds me of that theory about a finite Universe, where you can't reach an edge, but rather you come around from the opposite end as soon as you reach a certain extent of departure. Like that old videogame where you command a spaceship and you shoot at alien ships.

Comments

[nairiporter]

Haha! :-)

Because it's nonsense Friday... A ramble.

[johnny9fingers]

It's the level of ingenuity in their madness which I must admit I find impressive.

Even if the whole show is only a simulacrum (as Elon Musk seems to believe) we, the game avatars, still have to find out by what rules our reality operates; however insanity did not appear to be one of those rules until very recently, and even then, that particular insanity is ours and not that of the underlying structure within which we dwell.

Collective hallucinations of meaning often have pseudo-viral means of transmission. This is especially true when disinformation is deliberately added to the system - you swamp the original signal in background noise, or you amplify a disruptive signal until it becomes a bandwidth-stealer. From what I must now consider the "New-Intel" model as recently pioneered with such spectacular successes, these loonies fall into the category of very small potential assets given that they are so unbelievable that the noise they add to any signal is easily discounted or tuned out.

There are many examples in history of collective madness overtaking small communities. (Personally I'd include the Munster Anabaptist rising and various other religious war lunacies in the same category.) The internet has meant that small communities sometimes have a worldwide distribution, even if the numbers involved are small, or even so small as to be statistically insignificant.

New Counter-Intel will have to deal with this distributed-cell structure. Not only will the internet break down bestride national boundaries, the fact of the universal internet itself leads inevitably to universal government. China worked this out and is trying to stop the inevitable with its own custom-built internet - but even China will fail here. No-one realised what a complete game-changer technology was going to be for the polities of the world, right down to the core-structures. My own opinion is that the power structures will evolve first to accommodate language groups; and then, as universal translation becomes better, merge. China are playing a long game here because the languages are so different. But the languages of the shaping of programming are Maths and English, which provides a linguistic discontinuity which will eventually impel change and lead to accommodation.

That's only if we don't blow ourselves up first, or waste the planet, or the meteor hits etc.

(I can't believe I'm so humourless ATM - it's Friday. Thank the gods for Dreamville's quip.)

[mahnmut]

Y SO SRS ZOMG.....

[mikeyxw]

You know there is a name for a 3D geometric shape that is like a 2D disk except that when you go off one side, you re-enter on the other side. The name for this is a "sphere".

[abomvubuso]

Depends if the space encompassed in your area of observation is flat or curved.

[mikeyxw]

Stop right there with your cubed shaped Earth talk.

[abomvubuso]

Somehow this makes me want a whisky. Look what you've done!

[mikeyxw]

That didn't take much.

[johnny9fingers]

Ardbeg day is coming up (June 2nd). There will be the usual special limited edition from the distillery. They allow you two bottles. (I drink one and put the other one away for the kids - they can argue about the bottles when they inherit them.)
I'm not sure if they ship to S.A., but I'm sure you could get them shipped to someone in Europe and pick them up on the next trip over. (That's if you like seriously mad, peaty malts, obvs.)

[mikeyxw]

I had no idea Ardbeg had its own day. This pretty much restores any faith in humanity that I've lost due to the flat earthers.

[johnny9fingers]

It's a small thing, but for folk who love Islay's product... it's an important day. The committee bottlings on Ardbeg day tend to go up in value too, if you can refrain from drinking them. I wish I still had a bottle of Alligator, they go for over £300 now (£70 when I bought them). But sharing it with friends was a pretty good craic. But these days I have to save up for months to be able to afford them. Along with everything else, obvs.

[johnny9fingers]

And then we can get even more interesting with Klein bottles and other possibilities.

I'd guess there is no end to the geometric ingenuity of your average Flat-Earther. Just as long as it isn't a sphere. :)

[asthfghl]

Pretzel, anyone?

[johnny9fingers]

Given Corbyn's problem with Jewish folk maybe comparing anything to Jewish food might be a bit er, pointed.

Oops Corbyn isn't a flat-Earther. He just has the mannerisms of one, and the dress sense. Mind you, he's right about anti-Zionism being conflated with antisemitism.

[essentialsaltes]

Although this is dumb, it is infinitesimally less dumb than it seems. If you live in the world of Asteroid, where you wrap around top/bottom and left/right, this is isomorphic (or whatever in proper math-ese) to a torus, but it is flat in the Euclidean/non-Euclidean space-time curvature sense.

But we do not live in the world of Asteroid.

[kiaa]

As for myself, I live in the world of candy and booze.