I was going to say “No, Helen likes the delivery man” – thinking back to Dave’s interview for Narbon Labs, when she said “Tell me you’re the alfalfa delivery man.” But then I went back and checked, and the alfalfa delivery man was indeed one of the men Artie listed as his crushes.
Re: awgiedawgie: It’s the little things that stick in my mind, things like Cousin Bidet and H. T.’s sister. It’ll be the little things that *don’t* stick in my mind that’ll trip me up.
Currently they are both five stories up, wearing the charred remnants of their jackets and pants (Alfa Alfa is turned to Echo Bravo, telling him that she said not to touch that thing yet). Currently they are alive, but once they hit the ground, well, you get the idea.
Funnily enough, Schrodinger’s actual point with the whole “cat in a box” thought experiment was that he was trying to point out how absurd the idea was.
He was basically saying “No, of course the cat isn’t somehow both alive and dead in a state of quantum superposition until observed! That’s ridiculous!”
He argued that reality doesn’t care if we’re observing it, anymore than it cares if a child has the developmental capacity to possess an understanding of object permanence. You don’t somehow both exist and NOT exist when you play peekaboo with a newborn, and a cat can’t somehow be both alive and dead depending on if a particular particle randomly decayed or not, and whether an outside observer has witnessed the results of said hypothetical decay.
At the very least, Schrodinger appears to have been right for physics on all but the very smallest scales, and there are schools of thought with growing support that suggest he may have been right at all scales, and that quantum mechanics’ whole reliance on probabilistic thinking is the product of trying to make sense of incomplete measurements without understanding everything going on.
It is impossible to isolate an object from reality. Observation means having interacted with something. To be clear this interaction must conserve Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, but interactions with most macroscopic system would conserve the principle just fine. All this to say the cat is a fine observer of its lifefulness state.
Old story about Schrodinger. He was driving from Germany to Austria when he was stopped by a boarder guard. The guard searched his car and opened the trunk. Then the guard went around to Schrodinger and said “Do you know you have a dead cat in your trunk?”. Schrodinger replied “No, but I do now.”
I really like that story! It reminds me that, in the course of their work, theoretical physicists delve deeply into everything from the ridiculous to the sublime. Consequently, many possess or have developed a very fine and dry sense of humour. Dr. Hawking comes first to mind, but there are many others.
Another such quantum physics joke has Werner Heisenberg stopped by a traffic cop, who tells him “Did you know you were driving 75 miles per hour?” Heisenberg replies “Why did you tell me that? Now I have no idea where I am.”
And Heisenberg’s original Uncertainty Principle was about errors in and effects of the measurement process. But quantum superpositions have been repeatedly verified experimentally since then. To pick a random example, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-019-0663-9 has a result that cannot be classically explained.
Yes, the measurement problem remains an open question, but it’s entirely a misunderstanding of quantum theory to suggest that it requires a *human* or even *living* observer to collapse the wave function, if such a collapse is necessary; the general concept is that it is interaction with any classical system, such as an object of reasonable size, that leads to decoherence or whatever. A human’s subjective experience of object permanence at the macro level is not proof of a universal law at all scales.
And yes, there’s a size barrier. If there wasn’t, we might have a complete theory of everything and wouldn’t be stuck with relativity at large scales vs quantum mechanics at small scales. But quantum mechanics is definitely true at small enough scales even if there are debates about exactly what’s going on and where the line between the two is.
Check out recent work on the expansion of pilot-wave theory. It explains a shocking amount of quantum mechanics already using classical terms, and there is very real potential for far more.
People keep bandying about the whole “cannot be classically explained” excuse as proof positive, but that’s not how science works. An absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Just because we don’t have a better answer doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist, and it’s fundamentally unscientific to assume that the extant model must be right simply because better ones haven’t been worked out yet. It’s the classic Phlogiston mistake.
“The suffocation of a fire under a glass cover cannot be classically explained, hence there must exist a mysterious essence of combustibility that suffuses all physical materials! It’s the only explanation we have that makes sense, and it has been PROVEN by any number of experiments! This talk of “oxygen” is absurd!”
“An absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
It’s remarkable how many people operate on the mistaken belief that it is possible to prove that something doesn’t exist, simply because there is no evidence that it does.
Nah, Artie is almost never angry. Miffed Science, perhaps.
But seriously, one has to occasionally wonder whose DNA Helen used for Artie’s original human part and how she managed to give him the level of intelligence he has, not to mention the human DNA that was added later. Plus, he did merge with Dave’s DNA that one time. So it’s quite possible that he does have a touch of the Madness.
Is Madness wholly biological I mean the fact Helen found cure implies that it is. Either way there are plenty of “sane” geniuses in the skin horse universe. But if you don’t have to worry about a little thing like conservation of energy or momentum the hows and whys of Arties’s brilliance are not that big a deal. My guess is that arties mind and bodies are all orthagle to each other. when artie hiccups his human body switches with the Gerbil body. Dave probably displaced a few kilos of matter into another dimension before he knew what he was doing.
Alas, no. I did, however, manage to pull the old files from a previous hard drive, so if you need something, let me know and I’ll repost (unless it’s not actually mine, which means that Tattered Symphony is pretty much never going back up again).
Is that Steve appearing in panel one in what I believe to be his first speaking role? Perhaps the authors could arrange to expose the distinctive tattoo on his left shoulder in a future episode, to reassure his many fans regarding his well being. I can think of several lengthy side plot possibilities they could choose between to make that happen in an unobtrusive, organic way.
But if this strip follows one of the standard trope inversions of modern cinema, I’m afraid this may have been the last we saw of one of his colleagues.
Kyle, you deserved better than an off panel death. And you deserve a better eulogy than I can deliver in my current state. I’m sorry to let everybody down this way.
The mook, a faceless bad guy, cannon fodder. Faceless badguy. Namely the pair of arms in the first panel if they had been real would belong to a fully realised human that is presumably now dead.
Well put. It is not making a meaningful statement for several reasons, starting with how the series already foregrounds many traditional background characters. It’s just a bit that legions of fans are inexplicably dedicated to, and anyone in the Skin Horse fanfic community would be well advised to stay on their good side. The leaders of the community do not condone dirty tricks against those who endorse competing fanon, but some members are too unpredictable and badass to be restrained.
Wack idea: ¹ EB (&AA?) are shifted out of phase with the rest of reality by the quantum waveform. The only ones who will be able to see/hear them will be Cinnamon & Artie (or possibly just Artie).
Wacky hijinks ensue.
=______________________________________________________________________
1: Which I admit I thought of by remembering an old ST:TNG episode.
Owlmirrror, I really like that idea! Only add Steve and Kyle so A.A. and E.B. can order them around (or maybe even possess them) per Ogden Wernstrom’s subplot!
breakfast pastry. someone has delicately carved and painted a photorealistic blueberry scone out of wood you can practically smell the cream.In other words the functional inverse of it’s a cake.
Probably light fixtures. That’s what comes up when I google it, and Artie probably tries to design his house to have friendly lighting for both of his forms – which, given how hard I find getting good lighting for one version of me is – is probably a nontrivial logistical challenge even with a large collection of sconces.
So I was curious, what exactly does a Craftsman sconce look like? And I saw something interesting.
While most of the sconces look like light fixtures, it certainly seemed to me that two, in particular [ Quoizel HC8407 ; Kichler 49830 ] looked like . . .
looked like . . .
looked like . . .
I’m sorry, I can think of no better way to write this . . .
Tiny, adorable, gerbil-size TARDISes.
Given who is writing this comic, and combined with the unstable quantum waveform, I cannot imagine that this is a coincidence.
So is that Romeo India Papa for Echo Bravo and Alfa Alfa?
Possibly for Alfa Alfa. Echo Bravo has an uncanny knack for surviving whatever happens around him.
And here I thought Artie liked alfalfa!
…sorry, I’ll see myself out.
Just the delivery man.
I was going to say “No, Helen likes the delivery man” – thinking back to Dave’s interview for Narbon Labs, when she said “Tell me you’re the alfalfa delivery man.” But then I went back and checked, and the alfalfa delivery man was indeed one of the men Artie listed as his crushes.
Re: awgiedawgie: It’s the little things that stick in my mind, things like Cousin Bidet and H. T.’s sister. It’ll be the little things that *don’t* stick in my mind that’ll trip me up.
Robert, I think you just described the vast majority of us with that last sentence.
I’m pretty sure “too dumb to die” is a real thing.
(A) I’m pretty sure you’re right, and (B) now I want “Too Dumb to Die” to be the name of a Bond movie.
It’d make a great band name, too.
I think it should be an Agent 86, Maxwell Smart movie.
Sounds more like a Maxwell Smart movie.
jdreyfuss: I think the Darwin Awards show otherwise.
I don’t get any of that, except maybe that the guys name is echo bravo
Spell out the initials.
I consider them Schrodinger’s Agents! @_@
… not sure how this works since the only cat in a box is quite definitely alive.
… so, they’re both alive and dead until the cat gets out of the box to check on them?
Bravo!
Echo Bravo!
Currently they are both five stories up, wearing the charred remnants of their jackets and pants (Alfa Alfa is turned to Echo Bravo, telling him that she said not to touch that thing yet). Currently they are alive, but once they hit the ground, well, you get the idea.
… I believe the term for such a state is quantum superpussition
Ooh… you win two internets today!
My hat is off to you for that one, casimir. Well played.
Funnily enough, Schrodinger’s actual point with the whole “cat in a box” thought experiment was that he was trying to point out how absurd the idea was.
He was basically saying “No, of course the cat isn’t somehow both alive and dead in a state of quantum superposition until observed! That’s ridiculous!”
He argued that reality doesn’t care if we’re observing it, anymore than it cares if a child has the developmental capacity to possess an understanding of object permanence. You don’t somehow both exist and NOT exist when you play peekaboo with a newborn, and a cat can’t somehow be both alive and dead depending on if a particular particle randomly decayed or not, and whether an outside observer has witnessed the results of said hypothetical decay.
At the very least, Schrodinger appears to have been right for physics on all but the very smallest scales, and there are schools of thought with growing support that suggest he may have been right at all scales, and that quantum mechanics’ whole reliance on probabilistic thinking is the product of trying to make sense of incomplete measurements without understanding everything going on.
True, D. Walker, but isn’t this more fun? 😉
It is impossible to isolate an object from reality. Observation means having interacted with something. To be clear this interaction must conserve Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, but interactions with most macroscopic system would conserve the principle just fine. All this to say the cat is a fine observer of its lifefulness state.
Old story about Schrodinger. He was driving from Germany to Austria when he was stopped by a boarder guard. The guard searched his car and opened the trunk. Then the guard went around to Schrodinger and said “Do you know you have a dead cat in your trunk?”. Schrodinger replied “No, but I do now.”
ROFL!
A “boarder” guard is one who enters (comes on board) the car to search it? Or one whom you have to feed?
Except the guard asked him “Did (past tense) you know you have a dead cat in your trunk?”
I really like that story! It reminds me that, in the course of their work, theoretical physicists delve deeply into everything from the ridiculous to the sublime. Consequently, many possess or have developed a very fine and dry sense of humour. Dr. Hawking comes first to mind, but there are many others.
Another such quantum physics joke has Werner Heisenberg stopped by a traffic cop, who tells him “Did you know you were driving 75 miles per hour?” Heisenberg replies “Why did you tell me that? Now I have no idea where I am.”
And Heisenberg’s original Uncertainty Principle was about errors in and effects of the measurement process. But quantum superpositions have been repeatedly verified experimentally since then. To pick a random example, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-019-0663-9 has a result that cannot be classically explained.
Yes, the measurement problem remains an open question, but it’s entirely a misunderstanding of quantum theory to suggest that it requires a *human* or even *living* observer to collapse the wave function, if such a collapse is necessary; the general concept is that it is interaction with any classical system, such as an object of reasonable size, that leads to decoherence or whatever. A human’s subjective experience of object permanence at the macro level is not proof of a universal law at all scales.
And yes, there’s a size barrier. If there wasn’t, we might have a complete theory of everything and wouldn’t be stuck with relativity at large scales vs quantum mechanics at small scales. But quantum mechanics is definitely true at small enough scales even if there are debates about exactly what’s going on and where the line between the two is.
Check out recent work on the expansion of pilot-wave theory. It explains a shocking amount of quantum mechanics already using classical terms, and there is very real potential for far more.
People keep bandying about the whole “cannot be classically explained” excuse as proof positive, but that’s not how science works. An absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Just because we don’t have a better answer doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist, and it’s fundamentally unscientific to assume that the extant model must be right simply because better ones haven’t been worked out yet. It’s the classic Phlogiston mistake.
“The suffocation of a fire under a glass cover cannot be classically explained, hence there must exist a mysterious essence of combustibility that suffuses all physical materials! It’s the only explanation we have that makes sense, and it has been PROVEN by any number of experiments! This talk of “oxygen” is absurd!”
“An absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
It’s remarkable how many people operate on the mistaken belief that it is possible to prove that something doesn’t exist, simply because there is no evidence that it does.
So Artie is a mad scientist created by another mad scientist?
Artie isn’t Mad, just permanently annoyed
Angry Science.
Nah, Artie is almost never angry. Miffed Science, perhaps.
But seriously, one has to occasionally wonder whose DNA Helen used for Artie’s original human part and how she managed to give him the level of intelligence he has, not to mention the human DNA that was added later. Plus, he did merge with Dave’s DNA that one time. So it’s quite possible that he does have a touch of the Madness.
I can still hear the voice of Dr. Gangreen yelling at Igor about the difference between mad science and angry science every episode, though.
Is Madness wholly biological I mean the fact Helen found cure implies that it is. Either way there are plenty of “sane” geniuses in the skin horse universe. But if you don’t have to worry about a little thing like conservation of energy or momentum the hows and whys of Arties’s brilliance are not that big a deal. My guess is that arties mind and bodies are all orthagle to each other. when artie hiccups his human body switches with the Gerbil body. Dave probably displaced a few kilos of matter into another dimension before he knew what he was doing.
Nah, he just paid attention whenever Helen blew up something by accident.
Pardon me but I’ve been meaning to ask, did you ever rehost the Liber Licentiae Moeticae? Even the Wayback Machine can’t find all of it.
Alas, no. I did, however, manage to pull the old files from a previous hard drive, so if you need something, let me know and I’ll repost (unless it’s not actually mine, which means that Tattered Symphony is pretty much never going back up again).
I thought unstable quantum waveforms went “Fwaash!”?
Well, they are unstable… who can say what sounds they might make?
I’m unstable, and I almost have to say all the sounds I make! Minus the stompy clappy slappy ones of course ^o^
Well played.
Is that Steve appearing in panel one in what I believe to be his first speaking role? Perhaps the authors could arrange to expose the distinctive tattoo on his left shoulder in a future episode, to reassure his many fans regarding his well being. I can think of several lengthy side plot possibilities they could choose between to make that happen in an unobtrusive, organic way.
But if this strip follows one of the standard trope inversions of modern cinema, I’m afraid this may have been the last we saw of one of his colleagues.
Kyle, you deserved better than an off panel death. And you deserve a better eulogy than I can deliver in my current state. I’m sorry to let everybody down this way.
Clearly I’ve either missed or forgotten something.
The mook, a faceless bad guy, cannon fodder. Faceless badguy. Namely the pair of arms in the first panel if they had been real would belong to a fully realised human that is presumably now dead.
Well put. It is not making a meaningful statement for several reasons, starting with how the series already foregrounds many traditional background characters. It’s just a bit that legions of fans are inexplicably dedicated to, and anyone in the Skin Horse fanfic community would be well advised to stay on their good side. The leaders of the community do not condone dirty tricks against those who endorse competing fanon, but some members are too unpredictable and badass to be restrained.
Whoever is carrying the cat-and-gerbil box in Panel 1 is the one that survives.
Wack idea: ¹ EB (&AA?) are shifted out of phase with the rest of reality by the quantum waveform. The only ones who will be able to see/hear them will be Cinnamon & Artie (or possibly just Artie).
Wacky hijinks ensue.
=______________________________________________________________________
1: Which I admit I thought of by remembering an old ST:TNG episode.
And here I was thinking of SG-1
Owlmirrror, I really like that idea! Only add Steve and Kyle so A.A. and E.B. can order them around (or maybe even possess them) per Ogden Wernstrom’s subplot!
there go two of the bravest moron’s I’ve ever met.
There’s a fine line between bravery and stupidity, and those two have crossed it.
The tilt of Artie’s ears as he ducks behind the cat’s tail is the Cutest Thing Ever!
By “sconces,” does Artie mean light fixtures or military fortifications?
breakfast pastry. someone has delicately carved and painted a photorealistic blueberry scone out of wood you can practically smell the cream.In other words the functional inverse of it’s a cake.
I didn’t see the ‘c’ and now I look silly.
Neither did I, at first, but I caught it before I posted anything.
I had to read it three times before I saw it
Though I have to admit, I like the idea of a craftsman scones collection
Probably light fixtures. That’s what comes up when I google it, and Artie probably tries to design his house to have friendly lighting for both of his forms – which, given how hard I find getting good lighting for one version of me is – is probably a nontrivial logistical challenge even with a large collection of sconces.
If they hadn’t been light fixtures, I would’a thought Artie might keep them on the buffet.
Y’never know… he might have anyway.
Human!Artie is rubbing off on Gerbil!Artie in ways I’m not certain I agree with. Gerbil!Artie knew that his arrogance was adorable, what happened?
Well, he’s been a teacher for a few years now. That has a way of changing a person.
Gah! Not exclamation point notation again!
Learned a new word today. I like it
That’s what happens when you look asconse at Artie’s creations.
So I was curious, what exactly does a Craftsman sconce look like? And I saw something interesting.
While most of the sconces look like light fixtures, it certainly seemed to me that two, in particular [ Quoizel HC8407 ; Kichler 49830 ] looked like . . .
looked like . . .
looked like . . .
I’m sorry, I can think of no better way to write this . . .
Tiny, adorable, gerbil-size TARDISes.
Given who is writing this comic, and combined with the unstable quantum waveform, I cannot imagine that this is a coincidence.