It's about jumping in the lake and climbing a mountain
Welcome back. The site is back up, so it should be smooth sailing from here.
It's been a while. How are you?
I went to a talk at CERN about effective scientific communication in a world of fake news and misinformation, and it reminded me of one reason I made this site.
In the talk, they highlighted stuff like the anti-vaccination movement and flat-earthers and tried to come to terms with how ideas like these can exist and spread in a world where we have so much direct proof to their contrary.
The environments where discussions on these topics are based are highly polarized. On social media, and even traditional news media, people subscribe to content based on things that they like, and things that they like are aligned with their views, their ideas, their thoughts.
When someone expresses something into an environment like this, their expression is echoed, amplified, and reaffirmed.
When someone says that vaccinations cause autism to a room of people who believe that vaccinations cause autism, it's no wonder they come away more confident, committed, and in their minds, with more proof than before.
Humans have a tendency to prefer reassuring lies over inconvenient truths, and in the battle between evidence and emotion, emotion tends to win.
I think that it's important to remain, or to try to remain aware of our biases, and to be critical, keeping in mind that we live in a world of filter bubbles and echo chambers.
If you're interested in this, you would probably like this video ⇨ FILTER BUBBLES AND ECHO CHAMBERS
In other news, we finally jumped in the lake.
After swimming, we went for a walk up the hill. It's possible that this is the most terrible spot on earth.
Sometimes I wonder, how did I end up in such a dreadful place?
A place that I knew was in Geneva is Lord Byron's house, the Villa Diodati. He lived there, and wrote there, and it's where Mary Shelley stayed for a summer starting in May.
I didn't know where exactly this was in Geneva, but now I do since we stumbled upon it by accident on Friday afternoon.
Inspired by Lake Geneva on a stormy night ( ⟵ click that), this is where Mary Shelly started writing Frankenstein.
We went hiking in the Juras
Last Sunday we went for a hike in the Jura Mountains in France, right outside of Geneva, and right next to CERN.
We hiked to the second highest peak (by only 2 meters) in this section of the mountains, near Crêt de la Neige.
We started in Spring.
But it quickly got colder.
And colder.
And colder.
Until it was just straight up winter.
You may notice that I'm wearing shorts. Quite frankly I was not expecting winter to come in the way that it did.
At the top (in the clouds), it was freezing. We could only stay for a few minutes before it became too painful. The cross at the top was carried up by two guys in the 1800s.
We met some Swedish guys on the way up who also work at CERN, so that's who took the picture, if you were wondering.
We got to the top of the mountain, but the biggest feat was that we got to the top of the mountain in the AM.
As we descended, we realized that we could see Annecy, France, along with the entirety of Lake Geneva, all the way to Montreux. Annecy was covered in a previous post, so if you don't remember what it looks like, you can go back a few pages.
We also realized that Alex (not me, Greek Alex) can not say "bear" in English. We spent probably 10 minutes saying back and forth: "bear" "buuueear" "no, bear" "beeear" "no, bear" "brear" 🤦.
He taught us some Greek words too.
We practically ran down the mountain. Not because we were in a hurry, it was just more fun that way.
It also snowed while we were up there, but I don't have any pictures.
I'm also doing work, I swear.
I've pretty much finished up testing the concatenation method that I'm attempting to implement. I've extended the algorithm that I wrote from a 2 port waveguides to 3 and 1 port waveguides as well. It also now can handle an arbitrary number of modes, which is important.
So mostly it's just a lot of matrix algebra and coding.
I made some cool animations for my presentations to demonstrate how various wave-port modes scatter in different shaped waveguides.
I now have a dosimeter, a helmet with a light on it, and steel-toed shoes, which means I'm very close to going into the tunnels (Verns).
I'm going to be making a new page on this site dedicated to projects that I have done, so if you find this S-matrix concatenation project interesting, be sure to check it out after I've made it.
What happens when we die?
The ones that love us will miss us.