1. Sorry, I was busy to reply, but here's my non-pornographic take :). I think physicists (egged on by popularists) have deliberately mythologized the issues around these topics, usually by citing Feynman,
Einstein, etc. 2. The larval Lagrangian, and its adult action (integral of L.dt) has nothing to do with thermodynamics a priori. It is only a prescription for generating equations from a compact algebraic form.

1. Here is a short weekend thread about the social brain hypothesis, which I have been fortunate to make a small contribution to from the Promise Theory of trust. 2. The Social Brain Hypothesis is the idea that the human neocortex evolved in response to advantages of living in groups and managing social relationships. The evidence for this is quantitative, but it has remains controversial due to ingrained moral and religious philosophy.

1. It's config management time, so here is a thread about configuration languages in IT. Config languages are not unique to IT, they exist in all areas of science and engineering to describe layout or "state". 2. In physics, we talk about bodies and particles at coordinates or trajectories in an arena of space and time (sometimes described as a graph). In IT, for space we have computers, directories, and files or databases. For time we have the UTC clock or we have transaction numbers.

1. Segal's Law: "If you have one clock, you know what time it is. If you have more than one, you're not sure." An eyebrow later, everyone gets this. Yet, in distributed computing, we don't always stop to think what it means for time sensitive operations. 2.Your phone app knows your latest tweets, but if you check a web browser too, you're no longer sure. Probably phones and browsers direct to different servers that are not quite in sync. It might take minutes to see the same up to date content in the browser.

1. This is a thread about Quantum Mechanics and how we interpret it. The way QM is presented bothers me from time to time (at least when I have time to think about it). Indeed, time plays the key role in the whole issue. 2.This is probably no evil conspiracy (unless there is!!), but perhaps people get stuck because of the history, the Bohr doctrine, general stubbornness, or hiding behind mathematics that doesn't hold all the answers. Anyway, here goes.

1. Let's think more about multi-client consistency. Data ledgers are shared transaction logs used as systems of record (monolithic/distributed). IT treats shared data sharing as a technical infrastructure problem, but it's really about scale-dependent behavioural design. (N=46) 2. Ledgers keep track of goods, services, and payments in buying and selling. The approach is used in many other scenarios too. It seems like keeping account should be easy. We've been doing it for millennia. Someone pays, someone delivers, but it's not just data: it's a process.

1. This is the second thread about databases and distributed systems (still a headache for enterprises). Part 2: thinking about data consistency using car parking/rental as an analogy. Replication is used for backups and also to argue in favour of "digital twins". (N=55) 2. Suppose we think of a database roughly as a parking/rental service for data, reading is borrowing and writing is parking. We have short stay parking, long stay parking, valet parking etc. See if this helps us to demystify data "consistency".

1. This is one of several threads about databases and distributed systems, and why these are still a headache for enterprises after so many years. Part 1, basics. N=2^5 2. Everyone thinks they know what a database is. It's a database, right? Nowadays it comes with different storage models: entity relation (SQL), document (JSON), graph, column, etc, with different query languages and APIs too.

Weekend Thread - Promise Theory Intro (PT)
----
1. PT is a general theory about the mechanics of abstract "agents" and their "intended" behaviours, i.e. processes. It was originally proposed as a model for Computer Networks, but has since been applied to many different scenarios. 2. PT defines or explains what is meant by the "intent" of an agent, without reference to human concerns like consciousness or free will, thus avoiding bootstrap issues.

1/2 Back in 2010, I was trying to convince the world that we should invest in knowledge based approaches to operations. I was basically laughed at (even by my own company!). Today there are new tools, but people are still doing an awful job at modelling ..
markburgess.org/blog_km.html 2/2 I built an auto-knowledge map w machine learning and state collection in 2012. (markburgess.org/blog_scaffold.…) A few clients tried to build their own. Now there are new tools but people are still trying to use 90s methods. I'm starting again w new project...it's 2020-something!!

I was discussing something interesting this morning, which is worth a mention:

"Bitcoin is the biggest bank that doesn't have actual money"
"Amazon/Alibaba are the biggest retailers that don't own any products"
"X is the biggest property builder that doesn't build anything" 1/N These are all expressions of virtualization or scaled bounded representations associated with function, in CS terminology. In physics we'd talk about renormalisation or collective phenomena. 2/N

I had the happy occasion to video chat with my friend and collaborator Jan Bergstra @janaldertb today. He is one of the few people I met in the mathematical and scientific disciplines who seems to be completely open to question anything, everything, .. 1/N and find truth in whatever seems to fit the facts without prejudice or contempt. That's an extremely rare quality. Together we developed many of the concepts behind Promise Theory over coffee and dinners walking the towns and dykes of NL, .. 2/N

1. This is a thread about what I've understood so far about @wolframphysics and the PT story in @SmartSpaceTime2. I was pointed to it shortly after the release of online docs a few years back, and saw a lot of promise, but I've not managed to read much about it. 2. I was challenged to watch the lectures w @getjonwithit by @plborrill, which nicely summarises some of the material. The lectures are much easier to follow than the written stuff, thanks to JG's easy style and firm grasp.