Concrete science
A science YouTuber made an entertaining informative video “Explaining concrete while getting buried in it,” and found that he would rise out of the concrete slurry. Which prompted this carefully-researched anecdote:
skierpage
9:39 “I did not expect to be able to, like, float in concrete.”
I remember an early whack job I did for the DeCavalcante family. Big Nose Tony was so afraid of drowning as we filled the half barrel with concrete that we poured it up to his waist just to mess with him. But the extra concrete stayed liquid and increased the buoyancy forces on him, so he was able to wriggle out of it after two goons tossed him off the Carteret fishing pier. Fortunately Tony didn’t take it out on me, he knew it was just business, but legend has it he personally fed the goons into a garbage truck. That’s why we call them concrete overshoes, not concrete waders – a little goes a long way.
I used different concrete mixes for burying people on remote park service lands vs. a dockside nap with the fishes. Clinker is overrated, quick setting is the key. I’m writing this from prison.
Theory of everything
Egotistical near-genius Stephen Wolfram (who went to my college and I ran into a few times thereafter!) endlessly pushes his Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine and his increasingly esoteric grand unified theories that the universe is a cellular automaton and/or a computational exploration of group theory (huh??). He has been plugging his Wolfram language plug-in for ChatGPT, and someone commented and I responded:
Szabolcs Szekacs
I love how Stephen went exponential from explaining how ChatGPT develops a model to the computational structure of the universe behind what we can perceive in our physical world.
skierpage
“What will you be wanting for dinner, Dr. Wolfram?”
“From my principle of computational irreducibility, it necessarily follows that our brains are structures that can only perceive a subset of the ruliad graph theory underlying all computable realities, which would make predicting my future dietary wants impossible with the computational resources available in this universe; however my Wolfram language is close to generating a proof that neural firing is congruent with a cellular automata of sufficient complexity as explained in my book A New Kind of Science. So… fish and chips please.”
33 40 upvotes, maybe one of my highest ever. (I turn off notifications for likes and upvotes, life is too short.)
Your latest on concrete is hilarious. I think you should expand on it and/or submit it somewhere else