Sims follow-up

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A quick follow-up to my (holy crap) 5 year old post ‘Are we The Sims?‘ Some researchers think they can detect flaws in the simulation – if we are indeed in one.

…Savage said, there are signatures of resource constraints in present-day simulations that are likely to exist as well in simulations in the distant future, including the imprint of an underlying lattice if one is used to model the space-time continuum.*

I especially like:

For example, Davoudi suggests that if our universe is a simulation, then those running it could be running other simulations as well, essentially creating other universes parallel to our own.

“Then the question is, ‘Can you communicate with those other universes if they are running on the same platform?’” she said.

A better Skynet – the simulation host becomes a strongly godlike AI when it’s universes start comparing notes.

Khar Bii

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Khar Bii is a televised ovine conformation show/Senegalese Idol/beauty pageant  on the air in (obv) Senegal. I heard about it this morning on NPR and loved it sincerely; I enjoyed Ms. Quist-Arcton’s report (she is always excellent), but I could have done without Inskeep’s mocking tone during the intro and outro. Yes, Steve, livestock are important to a lot of people, even in the developed west! Off to Youtube where a lot of the Khar Bii episodes have been posted. Here’s what’s billed as the finale:

*

Francophones, help me out. I can pick out a bunch of French – mouton is, for example, prominent and I pick out bits of the explanation of toxoplasmosis, but I’m mostly lost. Is it because my French skills are so horrible, or are the presenters speaking a mix of French and Wolof? Or perhaps Dakar-Wolof? I think I heard ‘nyami’.

TIL (things I learned, in internetspeak):

  • How to spell Ofeibia Quist-Arcton’s first name. A lovely name.
  • “Wolof words in English are believed to include yam, from Wolof nyami “to eat food”, nyam in Barbadian English [3] meaning to eat (also compare Seychellois nyanmnyanm, also meaning to eat [4] )” *
  • Concours Culinaire sounds much more inviting that Cook-off.
  • Fufu! Disclosure – I knew about fufu previously. I am loving the notion of a beauty contest where cook-the-contestants is a prominent element.