A Brief History of Trumpistan

January 21: A coalition of eighteen states led by Texas announce their succession from the United States, forming a new country reviving the name The Confederate States of America, or CSA. The Internet is thrown into a frenzy over whether to call them The Confederacy of Dunces or Trumpistan.

January 22: The CSA issues a correction to say that they meant "secession" all along, but a software bug planted in Google Docs in collaboration with Hugo Chavez auto-carroted it.

Later that day a massive convoy of gun-carrying CSA supporters in pickup trucks adorned with Trump 2020 flags arrives at Fort Sumter. Upon arrival they discover that the fort, which has not been an active military installation since 1947, is only accessible by boat. They mill around in confusion for an hour, fire a few shots in the air for the look of the thing, and return home.

January 23: Mexico announces plans for a wall along its border with Texas. So does New Mexico.

January 24: The United States recognizes the CSA and announces the closure of all Federal facilities in the CSA, including research labs, airports and military bases, decimating the economies of many towns. The Federal government also announces that drivers' licenses or other ID from secessionist states will no longer be accepted for any purposes. Many citizens of the CSA are stranded in Federal states, unable to board a plane, rent a car, or buy alcohol or tobacco. The latter causes widespread panic among the CSA refugees.

January 25: Various Federal states announce that cars with plates from the CSA states are no longer legal on their roads and must be registered in a Federal state. Drivers from West Virginia get pulled over in massive numbers in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Unable to pay the fines, their cars are seized and crushed into scrap metal, in most cases significantly increasing their value.

January 31: The Federal government announces that as of February 1, it will no longer pay Medicare claims from the CSA. There is widespread panic among the citizens as they realize that their new government is completely incapable of providing them with diabetes supplies or Hoverounds. 

February 1: The CSA states meet in constitutional convention at the Austin Convention Center. They meet in the Starbucks as the Center itself is fully booked between an arms and ammo show and a pharmaceutical sales rep convention. Donald Trump is elected Interim President For Life.

February 10: The other six members of the Colorado River Compact announce the expulsion of Utah and plans to build a canal to divert the river around that state. Desperate, the male citizens of Salt Lake City take to the streets in a massive protest. Since this is Utah, it is the most well-behaved, conservatively dressed street protest in the history of the Americas. The women of Salt Lake City fortify the protesters with huge quantities of green Jello.

February 11: Green Jello shortages across Utah drive panicky protesters back into the streets. There is polite rioting and orderly looting of grocery stores. In desperation, many turn to yellow and red Jello.

February 28: CSA citizens begin to notice that no Federal Social Security payments have been received all month. Unable to pay their rent or afford food, white citizens forage for essential supplies, often liberating them from stores without paying, while black people loot.

March 31: After a month of chaos and disorder, Texas asks to rescind its secession. The Federal government accepts it back under strict conditions regarding the fair conduct of elections. 

April (various): One by the one the other CSA states also ask to rejoin the Union. They are all readmitted, except for the Dakotas, which nobody wanted in the first place.

April 30: The CSA is formally disbanded. Donald Trump remains Interim President for Life. 

Turning in my cool card

OK, confession time. This is a list of some of the things and people I never really found funny, even though I may have pretended to like some of them at the time just to be cool with my friends:

• The Goon Show
• Spike Milligan
• Kenny Everett
• Steptoe and Son (Sanford and Son for those of you reading this in American)
• Lord of the Rings
• The Young Ones in general, Rik Mayall in particular
• Absolutely Fabulous (other than Joanna Lumley)
• Ben Elton
• Blackadder, Mr Bean, and frankly most of Rowan Atkinson's output except for a handful of sketches
• Alexei Sayle
• Pretty much the entirety of the 1980s UK alternative comedy scene, come to think of it
• Bill Murray, except Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day
• National Lampoon, especially Chevy Chase
• John Hughes
• John Waters

And just for completeness, I lost patience with David Lynch somewhere around 1990. Great, David: nothing is what it appears to be. What the fuck is it then?
Phuh. Feels good to get that off my conscience.

Why we don't live in a simulated universe

There's an oft-repeated theory that our universe is a simulation -- a computer program (or equivalent) created by some higher form of intelligence. The modern popular form of this claim is generally attributed to philosopher Nick Bostrom, although the basic idea goes back much further.

And the only problem with this idea is that it is completely wrong.

The basic "simulation argument" goes like this: imagine that an intelligent race becomes intelligent enough and powerful enough that they could simulate a universe in a computer. (We already do this ourselves, in a very crude sense, when we create computer models to simulate weather or traffic or any other aspect of the real world.) Our hypothetical aliens are able to build such rich simulations, they actually contain simulated intelligent beings of their own -- and those simulated beings would (somehow) perceive themselves to be conscious.

And here's the clever twist: according to the argument, those simulated beings could become intelligent enough to build their own simulated universes, with simulated intelligent beings of their own, who in turn... Eventually, there would be an enormously large pyramid of simulations-within-simulations. And from a simple probabilistic perspective, it's enormously unlikely that we happen to be in the topmost and only real universe (and sometime in the future will ourselves start simulating universes) rather than one of the vast number of simulations.

And this is completely mistaken.

The problem with the argument is that the universe we find ourselves in is enormously complicated from the point of view of having intelligent beings in it. For a start, you could discard the other one hundred billion galaxies in our observable universe and it wouldn't make any difference to us. So it's enormously more likely that the simulated universe we are in would be much simpler than this one. (How much more likely? Borrowing an argument from Roger Penrose, possibly something of the order of 10 to the power [10 to the power 100] -- a 1 with [10 to the power 100] zeroes after it -- more likely.)

So the simulation argument turns on itself: the exact same argument that leads to the conclusion that we live in a simulation, i.e. that there are many more simulations than real universes, also inevitably leads to the conclusion that this universe isn't simulated, because there would be hugely many more simpler simulations we would be more likely to find ourselves in.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Just a Minute...

The internet at large has already covered a lot of what's wrong with BvS, so rather than repeat what's already been said, I'm going to restrict myself to a couple of major things not much touched upon, specifically: the Act 3 climax is a huge mis-fire; and the post-climax codicil makes no sense whatsoever.

First, the climactic battle with Doomsday. The problem here is: who really cares? Comparisons to The Avengers are inevitable, and in that movie we've had all kinds of foreshadowing and build-up: the Avengers must stop Loki from using the Cube and opening the portal, failing every step along the way, until the emotional climax of Stark laying down his life... In BvS by contrast we get a rock-monster with arbitrary powers and an equally arbitrary weakness, that appears deus ex machina (quite literally) with no motivation nor character of any kind, and that is not set up in any emotionally meaningful way by preceding events or threats. And even ignoring the disconnect from the foregoing story, there's neither a logical reason that the Kryptonian spaceship even has the ability to create a Doomsday nor a narrative reason that Lex chooses to do so (contrast Avengers, where opening a portal is Loki's motivation from the very beginning).

Consequently, here there's no sense whatsoever that we're building towards this apocalyptic battle -- a problem highlighted by the fact that Wonder Woman decides to get involved in the fight for no adequately explored reason. (More generally, Wonder Woman is woefully underdeveloped -- and not in an intriguing, "show me more backstory!" kind of way, but in a frustrating "what does she want? why is she doing that?" way.) In fact, given that Luthor's main plot is all about manipulating Superman and Batman over many months into fighting each other, the whole Doomsday plot line feels like it was left over from an entirely different draft of the script. Having made the Batman v Superman conflict the core of their movie, the writers apparently had no idea what to give them to do once they had resolved that conflict.

Second, the post-battle State funeral. Why? In the Death of Superman comic book source material, this makes perfect sense. In the comics arc, Superman is a long-established hero, known and trusted, even loved; and the world watches as he fights Doomsday all the way across the country for days on end, other heroes falling by the wayside, until finally, battered into exhaustion in full view of friends and news cameras, he sacrifices his life to save the world. Of course the world mourns. But in BvS, (i) Superman is mysterious, distrusted, and even disliked; (ii) Doomsday appears out of nowhere and spends around twenty minutes in Metropolis, hardly enough time for everybody to decide that we've tried everything and the world is going to end unless Superman can stop it (frankly, anybody that was there for Zod is probably thinking "meh, I've seen worse"); and (iii) nobody witnesses Superman's self-sacrifice and death except Batman, Wonder Woman, and Lois Lane... but their word is good enough for the US government to throw a funeral fit for a president.

On reflection, the two best sequences in Dawn of Justice are (i) Batman rescuing Martha Kent, and (ii) Wonder Woman fighting Doomsday. The former is the one fight scene that is most true to the Batman character (I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn it was done entirely by the Second Unit); and the latter the only part of the movie where anybody seems to be having fun. Like Doomsday, Wonder Woman seems to have wandered in from the theater next door where she had been starring in a movie that was a lot more fun than the one I was sitting through.

And so it struck me: DC could in fact have made a far more interesting movie if Superman never appeared at all. Sure, he's out there in the world somewhere, motivating Lex and the others to their actions, but never actually seen. Edit out every scene with Kent or Superman (except maybe Bruce's nightmare sequences), give Wonder Woman some proper background and motivation, and you've probably got a pretty decent movie about how the rest of the world feels about Superman, and how it copes when he doesn't come flying to the rescue.

Quantum entanglement does not work like that

Whenever the topic of quantum entanglement -- which Einstein decried as "spooky action at a distance" -- comes up in online conversation, somebody will always ask whether this phenomenon can be used for instantaneous communication. And this is a very reasonable question because although the answer is definitively No, it's far from intuitively obvious why this is so, not least because it depends on details of quantum behavior usually omitted from non-technical explanations -- details that are critical to understanding the phenomenon.

I originally wrote the explanation below in response to a post on Gizmodo. Several people said it was helpful, so I decided to preserve it online for when the question inevitably comes up again.

The Very, Very Short Version

Entanglement allows you to infer what result somebody else's experiment will get; but it doesn't allow you to influence what result they will get.

The long version:

First, entangle your electrons

Suppose you “entangle” two electrons (there are lots of ways to do this; we'll take it as given). What this means is that they are paired in such a way that certain of their properties are reflections of each other. (In technical language we would say they have a "shared state".) In particular, we are interested in the so-called "spin". So you send me one electron and keep the other. Now you measure yours to see if it's spin is pointed up or down; if you find yours is up, you’ll know that if I do the same experiment, mine is pointed down; and vice versa. (The entangled electrons are always opposite, like two sides of a coin). 

Importantly, you won’t know whether you’ll get up or down until you do the experiment -- it’s a coin toss. The only way to tell which is the Up electron and which is the Down, by definition, is to do the measurement. 

Anyway: so far, so normal. Up to this point, it's really no more surprising than if you had split a coin down the middle and sent one half to me. It's no surprise that if you kept the heads side, I got the tails side.

But note the really important part here: I can't use this to send you a signal. The typical misunderstanding at this point is to think that since the electrons are always opposite, if I somehow force my electron into the Up position before measuring, yours will instantaneously be in the Down position, and from there with enough entangled electrons I can easily construct a binary code. And the simple fact is, entanglement does not work like that. Although the electrons are opposite to begin with, anything I do to change the state of my electron does not change the state of yours; instead it just breaks the entanglement. I can no more flip your electron by flipping mine than I can turn your half of the coin from heads to tails.

Let's get spooky

But now it gets quantum. Unlike a coin, there are lots of ways you can measure spin: in fact you can choose any axis you want to measure it along. You don’t have to measure whether your electron is pointing up or down like this: |. You could measure whether it is pointing left or right, like this --. Or along any in-between axis, like / or \. 

Now here's the critical part: electron spin is quantized. This means that whatever axis you measure spin on, the answer will always be precisely "+1" or "-1" units of spin (using the units that physicists typically choose), regardless of what state you thought the electron was previously in; in other words, either clockwise or counterclockwise. Yes, even if you think your equipment only generates up and down electrons, if you choose to measure it on the left-right axis, its spin will definitely be measured as either one unit of left or right spin. Oh, and of course if I measure mine on the same axis, it is pointing the other way. Or you could measure it on any orientation in between, and if I measure it on the same orientation, I get the opposite.

There is no analogy in the macroscopic world for this behavior that I can think of. If you had, say, a spinning basketball and you measured it's spin as "+1" in the up/down axis, it's spin on the left/right axis would be 0, and its spin in the / or \ directions would be somewhere between 0 and 1. This is a crucial difference between the quantum world and the familiar classical world.

One of the things this tells us is that, unlike basketballs and other classical objects, electrons don't have a definite spin until you measure it (and even then, that spin is only good until you measure it again on a different axis).

It gets worse (or maybe better)

Now, we’re not done. Up to now we've always measured our electrons on the same axis. It gets even spookier if you and I choose to measure our electrons along different orientations. 

Suppose you measure on the | axis and, say, get Up; but I choose to measure on the -- axis. Now two things I said above seem to be in conflict: 

• entangled spins are always opposite, so mine must be Down; but 
• if I measure left/right I must get precisely left or right. 

So what happens? Well, in fact I get left or right, and with an equal chance of each. It’s as if my electron was pointing Down after your experiment, and randomly chose which of left or right to flip to when I measured it.

Notice, by the way, that when I do my measurement, nothing now happens to your electron. If you were to subsequently measure your electron on the -- axis, your result would be completely random. The moment you measured your electron the first time, the entanglement was over. So no amount of cleverness with repeated measurements will let me send a signal either.

The really hard part

Now I do something even more interesting: instead of measuring --, I set my equipment at an angle to yours, lets say at /. If we think of a clock face with Up/Down at 12 o’clock / 6 o’clock, I set mine at 1 o’clock / 7 o’clock. Now what happens? 

What I find is that when your result is Up (12), I’ll get 7 most of the time and 1 some of the time (the exact proportions can be predicted, and have been demonstrated experimentally literally billions of times). And if your result was Down (6), I get the opposite results; mostly 1, some 7. Somehow, my electron “knows” what axis you measured along and what result you got -- even though the orientation was not fixed at the beginning before the electrons separated. In fact, even the orientations of our measurements can be chosen long after the electrons have separated, yet the entanglement still occurs. 

So maybe there's something here that can be used to communicate? Maybe you can send a signal with the way you choose the axis you measure on, since that influences the distribution of my measurements on a different axis? 

Unfortunately, no. And the reason is this:

Remember that when you measure on your end, you always get a random result, either up or down. You can’t force your electron to Up, and thereby influence my distribution; you can only discover whether it is Up or Down (and then infer what I am seeing). You can choose the axis you measure on, but not the outcome you get. (You can't even "separate out" the Up electrons from the Down: the only way to know which is which is to measure them, which destroys the entanglement.) And since you are getting 12 or 6 at random, to me it looks like I'm getting 7 or 1 at random too.

One last throw of the dice?

So perhaps there is one last loophole. If being entangled affects the measurements I get, maybe there is some way I can tell whether our electrons are still entangled? Since entanglement breaking is also instantaneous, maybe that in itself can be used to send a message? But no. Even while our electrons are still entangled, your stream of results looks completely random to you. Similarly on the other end, whatever I measure looks completely random to me: 1 or 7, 7 or 1, with no pattern. It’s only when we bring our results together that we see that whenever you got 12 I was more likely to get 7, and whenever you got 6 I was more likely to get 1, thereby proving that our electrons were entangled.

This is what physicists mean when they say our results are correlated, and the degree of correlation (as mentioned above) is precisely predictable, and has been tested in the lab. But it's only by bringing our results together that we see the correlation -- in isolation, each of us appears to get a random series of results. And bringing our results together to compare requires conventional slower than light communication.

(By the way, this is the basis of quantum cryptography, but that's a long story for another time.)

So in summary...

A lot of the confusion here comes from non-technical explanations being loose in their language when they say that one electron "influences" the other. This is true in the sense explained above -- the result I measure is linked at a distance (yes OK, Albert, "spookily") to the result you measure. But it's not true in the sense that you could change your electron and instantaneously cause a change in my electron. Any change you make to your electron in an attempt to change mine simply breaks the entanglement, and our results are no longer connected in any way.

Experimental theology: religious football

Somewhere between one third and one half of Americans believe that God / Jesus cares enough about the outcome of sports contests to intervene, typically in favor of those who pray most fervently. I propose to put this belief to the test with the new game of Religious Football.

The game is very simple. It is played on a conventional American football field with a standard ball. The game begins with the ball at midfield on a tee, and two teams of eleven prayers line up on opposite sides of the field, five yards from the 50 yard line. Each team prays as hard as it can for the ball to move towards the opponents' end zone. Prayers can be spoken or silent, according to each team's ecclesiastical tradition.

If a team manages to pray the ball across the line, they score a point, the ball is re-centered, and the process begins again. After 60 minutes, the game ends and the team with the most points win.

This is a game where the "twelfth man" is exceptionally important. Supporters are allowed, even encouraged, to pray along with their team to help move the ball. (Conversely, the 13th man will be hung from the goalposts at half time).

There are a few other rules and penalties, to maintain order. The major ones include:

• Offsides: The players must maintain five yards from the ball at all times, so if one team's prayers cause the ball to move, it can advance and the other team must retreat. Approaching closer than that incurs a five yard penalty.
• Illegal touching: touching the ball in any way, or causing it to move with anything other than the power of prayer, is a ten yard penalty. 
• Out of bounds: any reference to an opponent's mother, sister, or other female relative is completely out of bounds and will be penalized ten yards.
• Roughing the pastor: any contact with the opponent's spiritual leader on the sidelines results in a 15 yard penalty. 

 I propose that we launch this game in Texas where, I'm told, both Jesus and football are popular.

I Hate Birthdays

The thing I hate most about birthdays in the Web era is the absurdly insincere birthday greetings in email and on FB from corporations that happen to have my birthday in their database. What am I supposed to think about "good wishes" that don't emanate from any actual person? At best, it's an attempt to co-opt the natural human reaction of reciprocity; at worst, it's a crude sales pitch (who doesn't want a new weed trimmer on their birthday, right?).

If I wanted to read meaningless, empty, formulaic wishes that don't genuinely emanate from any real person with real feelings, I would go stand and stare in front of the birthday card rack at Hallmark for an hour.

 At least, that's what I used to do before the restraining order.