B. Catling - "Hollow"

Amazing story, again taking place in the Lowlands, with Dutch names and references, in a sort of fantastic medieval time.

An Oracle in a monastery.  A band of thieves delivering a new one...

Lastly, there had been Scriven, who proved to be a grievous mistake. He had come highly recommended for his skill as a tracker and a bowman. Follett had taken him without suspecting that he was an avid practitioner of the worst form of blasphemy that the old warrior could image, and one that he would never tolerate in his company. But nobody saw Scriven's demise coming, especially the man himself. Better that such errors are exposed early before they run inward and slyly contaminate the pack. Scriven had been found spying on the other men and making written copies of their confessional Steepings. He had been caught listening and scribing Follett's own gnarled words. Pearlbinder grabbed him and held him against a tree by his long hair. He pushed his sharp knife against the man's jugular vein, allowing just enough space for his larynx to work and for him to attempt to talk his way out of his fate. He was midway through when Follett unsheathed his lance and pushed three feet of it through Scriven's abdomen. Written words had condemned Follett before. Words written by others that he could not read. Ink keys that had locked him in a Spanish cell for three years. He had always distrusted written words, and now he despised them.

So Follett explained. "Writing is the shame of man. It dilutes the guts of meaning. If thou be not man enough to hold great learning and the saying of events in your memory, then thou should not attempt to keep them imprisoned. The world weas turned by scrolls and books. The making of those brikcs of paper even contaminated the tower of language itself, making it less than a woodpile or an old maid's collection of rags. Words are power, and writing is only a pissed shadow."

Sam Woodward - "The terror of reality was the true horror for H P Lovecraft"

https://aeon.co/essays/the-terror-of-reality-was-the-true-horror-for-h-p-lovecraft

 

[opening paragraph of 'The Call of Chtulhu']

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

As an absolute determinist, Lovecraft's metaphysics describes an infinite universe in eternal predetermined motion: 'each human act,' he wrote, 'can be no less than the inevitable result of every antecedent and circumambient condition in an eternal cosmos.' This left no room for teleology, the notion that the universe is moving towards some pre-ordained goal, or that humans and other species are evolving for some purpose. His determinism was accompanied by a strict materialism that, in line with the views of many of his contemporaries, made the immaterial - the soul and spirit - inconceivable. These views shaped the nightmarish figures in his tales, which are not apparitions or spectres, the 'supernatural beings of conventional horror writing, but materially real horrors that only appear supernatural because of humanity's inability to comprehend their true nature.

Through a belief in the impossible, Lovecraft thought we might 'acquire a certain flush of triumphant emancipation comparable in its comforting power to the opiate dreams of religion'. But that would happen only if we had, he believed, 'the illusory sensation that some law of the ruthless cosmos has been - or could be - invalidated or defeated'. In that sense, the illusory depictions of nature contravened in weird fiction tales provide some respite, even if only aesthetic, from the rigid and unerring clockwork of the mechanistic and predetermined universe.

Gwern Branwen - "Feynman's Maze-Running Story"

 https://gwern.net/maze 

But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before.

The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and, still the rats could tell.

He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.

Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-Number-1 experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers the clues that the rat is really using—not what you think it’s using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running.

I looked into the subsequent history of this research. The subsequent experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or being very careful. They just went right on running rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn’t discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic of Cargo Cult Science.

Jim Baggott - "Quantum dialectics (How Soviet communist philosophy shaped postwar quantum theory)"

https://aeon.co/essays/how-soviet-communist-philosophy-shaped-postwar-quantum-theory

As the founders of the theory argued about what it meant, the views of the Danish physicist Niels Bohr began to dominate. He concluded that we have no choice but to describe our experiments and their results using seemingly contradictory, but nevertheless complementary, concepts of waves and particles borrowed from classical (pre-quantum) physics. This is Bohr's principle of "complementarity". He argued that there is no contradiction because, in the context of the quantum world, our use of these concepts is purely symbolic. We reach for whicever descsription - waves or particles - best serves the situation at hand, and we should not take the theory too literally. It has no meaning beyond its ability to connect our experiences of the quantum world as they are projected to us by the classical instruments we use to study it.

Bohr emphasised that complementarity did not deny the existence of an objective quantum reality lying beneath the phenomena. But it did deny that we can discover anything meaningful about this. Alas, despite his strenuous efforts to exercise care in his use of language, Bohr could be notoriously vague and more than occassionally incomprehensible. Pronouncements were delivered in tortured "Borish". It is said of his last recorded lecture that it took a team of linguists a week to discover the language he was speaking.

Complementatiry also fell foul of the principal political ideologies that, in different ways, dominated human affairs from the early 1930s, through the Second World War, to the Cold War that followed. Both Bohr and Einstein were of Jewish descent and, to Nazi ideologues, complementarity and relativity theory were poisonous Jewish abstractions, at odds with the nationalistic programme of Deutsche Physik, or 'Aryan physics'. But the proponents of Deutsche Physik failed to secure the backing of the Nazi leadership, and any threat to complementarity from Nazi ideology disappeared with the war's ending. Much more enduring were the objections of Soviet communist philosophers who argued that complementarity was at odds with the official Marxist doctrine of 'dialectical materialism'.

Complementarity looked just like the kind of positivist gibberish that Lenin had sought to annihilate. A reality accessible only in the form of quantum probabilities did not suit the needs of the official philosophy of Soviet communists. It appeared to undermine orthodox materialism. Nevertheless, an influential group of Soviet physicists, including Vladimir Fock, Lev Landau, Igor Tamm and Matvei Bronstein, promoted Bohr's views and for a time represented the 'Russian branch' of Bohr's school. This was not without some risk. Communist Party philosophers sought their dismissal, to no avail, largely because they could not agree on the issues amongst themselves.

Inside Out 2

Enjoyable, but can't compare to the first

The Silent Sea

Korean scifi series about "lunar water"

so many plotholes and weird stuff, would not recommend.

Fallout (series)

real solid. 

hope s2 will be just as good

great how they show separate POVs and it all coming together; solid writing