FeynStructure

Does anyone remember Nexopia? Probably not, unless you were a millennial in western Canada in the mid-2000's. Nexopia was a curious example of a social media platform that, despite being online and globally accessible, nevertheless had tight geographic localization. About 50% of the user base was located in Alberta and British Columbia, with another 30-40% in Canada broadly. I suppose this is because it was founded in Edmonton, and mostly spread by word of mouth back then. Launched in early 2003, it predated MySpace by six months, and Facebook by one year. Despite its head start, it never achieved the same success of those two giants and remained a distinctly Canadian phenomenon. For a handful of years, it was the place to be online for an angsty emo high schooler in Canada's southwest quadrant. Some context here: no one really knew what kind of place this was yet, or how these platforms would come to shape culture. Almost all interaction with the platform occurred at home, on a (probably shared) desktop computer. Internet connections were often still dial-up, and even the broadband of the time wasn't great by modern standards (we thought it was amazing though). Uploading photos was a technical challenge. Phones (at least the cheap ones our parents gave us) didn't typically have cameras yet, mobile internet was little more than a proof of concept, and there was no widely available cloud services, so getting your picture online usually consisted of: 1. Get a dedicated digital camera (not cheap at the time). 2. Figure out how to physically bridge it to the brick on your desktop. Maybe the camera used SD cards, but did your family's computer have a way of reading them? Perhaps there was a cord that came with the camera, but was there a port for it on your computer? Things weren't well standardized back then. Can I find an adapter at RadioShack? What software do I need? What the hell is a driver? Better look it up on Yahoo, hope I don't get any viruses when I download this... 3. If you made it through step 2 and the pictures actually existed in digital form on your computer's hard drive, congratulations. You didn't really understand what you did or how any of the shit you just downloaded to make it happen worked, but you won. Now just upload them to the platform. This will take at least a few minutes per low-resolution photo. 4. Now wait for an actual human employee to manually review your picture for ToS violations and voila! The world can now see a blurry picture of your sick skateboarding skillz. Nexopia was the first social media platform I ever used, and it would be the last for two decades until I reemerged on Primal recently. There was something special and unique about it that could never be replicated by the corporate giants that would soon come to dominate the space. Nexopia in the mid-2000's was a time and place that felt like it largely belonged to one generation of young Canadians who were, together, leaving the innocence of their analog youth behind and leaping into a brave new digital future. We didn't know what we were doing, or where we were going, or that we would someday miss where we came from. We can never return to the innocence of our analog past. The world has changed, as we have changed. I suspect that much of millenial 90's nostalgia is probably just misplaced sadness for the lost innocence of our childhood. But it is, perhaps, a childhood innocence that can no longer truly exist, one that died with our generation. We lived through the final days of a world where a kid could just be a kid: believe in Santa without the ability to ruthlessly fact-check him on Google, say and do stupid things without fear of them being forever immortalized online, experience love and sexuality as a progressively revealed mystery, not a grotesque spectacle of voyeuristic debauchery. We didn't know what we had until it was gone, and now we live in a world where it is difficult for any child to have this experience of youth. We can't return to the innocence of our childhood, nor should we seek to. Once our eyes have been opened to the harsh truths of the world, they cannot be shut. But everyone deserves a period of innocence before these harsh truths are revealed, and to have them revealed incrementally. We can't go back to the world as it was, but we can create homes and families and ways of living that allow kids to just be kids again, in a world that pushes them relentlessly towards jadedness.

Relativity and quantum mechanics get so much of the attention in physics, but thermodynamics will always hold a special place in my heart. You start out with some dudes in the 1800's just trying to increase the efficiency of their steam engines, and if you follow the math far enough down the rabbit hole eventually you end up revealing the reason why time only appears to flow in one direction.

Metal coins, if they must exist (questionable), should not be ferromagnetic. Look, I love iron as much as the next guy. When alloyed with carbon and other elements, it allows for the greatest feats of engineering this world has ever seen. Additionally, it helps ferry oxygen around my body. Very cool. But declaring that a coin that weighs 0.015 lbs, when iron trades at well under a dollar per lb, is worth $2 is fucking ludicrous. The small quantities of other metals present do not impress me.

"There is a real freedom of speech on a job site, which reverberates outward and sustains a wider liberality. You can tell dirty jokes. Where there is real work being done, the order of things isn't quite so fragile." -Matthew Crawford: "Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work" (2009)

I have taken a non-standard path. I have been home schooled. I have attended public schools, small town and big city, regular and french immersion. I have never graduated high school. I moved out on my own and was financially independent at age 17. I have worked terrible jobs for insulting pay in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Labouring in the freezing cold for bitter old men who reeked of beer and cigarettes at 9 o'clock in the morning. Stinking dish pits; infernal, claustrophobic kitchens. I have stolen food from the restaurants I worked at because I was flat broke four days before payday and too proud to ask for help (but not so proud as to not compromise my ethics). I took the bus for years as a grown adult. I have been threatened, assaulted, and thrown up on during those rides. I have swallowed my pride, kept my head down, and kept working, getting nowhere for years but still surviving. I am not one of those "no regrets" guys. I regret a ton, but I don't dwell on it. I regret most of the coke, but none of the acid. I have attended university and studied physics. Yes, you can just do that, no high school diploma required. Those years expanded my mind in a way that no drug ever could, but left me saddled with much student debt. I never completed my degree. It turns out you have to be pretty goddamn smart to make it in a program like that, and I am half-clever at best. I'd still like to learn tensor calculus and tackle general relativity someday though, when I have a bit more time. I have started a new career as an electrician. First year apprentice at the age of 29. Back to being a nobody for a few years. The kitchen may have been awful, but I was at the top of my game there, and respected. Another reset. It felt like an eternity at the time but looking back it was a flash. First journeyman, then foreman. I feel pride in my work now, bringing electrical power to the people of my city. I am well paid. I have lived an interesting life, and there's plenty more to go. It makes for a good story, and perhaps I am stronger and wiser because of it, but I wouldn't recommend this particular path to anyone. Each of us must become anti-fragile on our own terms.

"Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers—who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government." -Andrew Jackson, 1832

Bitcoin is the only form of money that is Proper. IYKYK

My second clear memory of money is of finding it on the ground. This was a more common experience back when physical cash was the default payment method for small to medium transactions, but it was still rare enough to be an exciting thrill whenever it occurred. The amount in question that I found on this earliest occasion was $2. Not much, but $2 in the early 90's was worth at least double what it is now, and $2 always means more to a little kid than a grown adult. Laying in the grass on the side of the road, I had passed it by on the way to the corner store. In my peripheral vision, the soft brown of the Canadian $2 note didn't attract much attention among the dried maple leaves that littered the ground. I managed to spot it on my way home though, and it made my day. It is odd to consider now though, in the context of the ledger theory of money. In the dollar system, physical banknotes represent little pieces of the ledger that have broken off and started floating around in spacetime, opaque, untraceable until they pass through another surveillance checkpoint within the system. With a commodity money like gold, more or less the entire ledger is opaque. Each person knows only their own balance. A full reserve bank* would know the respective balances of each of their clients. But no one knows the full state of the ledger, anonymously or otherwise. This will always be the case for commodities, and illustrates the farcical nature of the notion of a "market capitalization" of gold. Physical banknotes are thus a curious anachronism, harkening back to commodity money systems of the past in their physicality and bearer nature. They still exist today in 2026 by virtue of our recent past, but I suspect that their days are numbered. If they didn't exist right now, they would never be allowed to be invented. Too opaque, too easy to transact with freely. If the fiat system was all we had, it would be a shame to see them go, but it's a moot point now. They served some kind of purpose within a rotten system, but we're ready to ditch that whole system now so it doesn't matter anyways. * It would be nonsensical to say that a fractional reserve bank** knows the respective balances of each of their clients, since these balances are fraudulent. They are akin to a quantum wave function, in that how much money any one particular person owns is undefined until a measurement is performed: a bank run. ** It should be noted that even fractional reserve banking basically doesn't exist anymore, in the sense of currency partially backed by gold or other valuable commodities. Modern day fiat currencies operate on a system of fictional reserve banking, by which is meant that all "reserves," fractional or otherwise, represent nothing of value and are created at no cost. It is with great irony that we note that, as of this writing, the only currency that claims to be partially backed by gold is the Zimbabwean ZiG, introduced in April of 2024 after the collapse of the Zimbabwean dollar, and which has already lost around 50% of it's purchasing power in less than two years.

My first clear memory of money stems from my days as a paperboy. For those too young to remember, newspapers (literal, physical bundles of paper) were important conduits of information just a couple of decades ago. And to get one to the front door of the majority of houses in the nation posed a problem of logistics. Hiring adults, even at legal minimum wage, would have been prohibitively expensive and besides, they had more complex jobs to do. Thus, an army of boys and girls took up the task through the generations. My sister and I were two such children. The job consisted of delivering newspapers to each subscribers house twice a week, and then collecting payments once a month, in cash. After that we'd calculate and set aside the amount owed to the newspaper company, and then split the remainder 50/50 (we split the houses on our one route). Sometimes we got tips, since "keep the change" was a semi-common practice in the days of cumbersome physical cash, and Christmas time was particularly generous in this regard. The particular memory that sticks in my head is one time when we weren't able to split the cash evenly, so it was decided by our parents that my sister would get a $5 bill and give me $2.50 from her piggy bank. I was very young at the time and couldn't get my head around this. No matter how much they went through it with me, all I could see was that she was getting $5 and I was getting $2.50. I felt cheated. I'm a lot better at math now.

"It’s one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man." -Richard Feynman The fine structure constant (Greek letter α), which governs the strength of interactions in quantum electrodynamics (and whose precise value is one of the fundamental reasons you are able to exist at all), is a derived constant with a value of approximately 1/137. In any system of units. Being a ratio of other fundamental constants (namely: the elementary charge, Planck's constant, the speed of light, and either the permittivity or permeability of free space, depending on how you want to write it), the units on the top and bottom cancel out to resolve in a pure number. It is as yet unclear why it has the value it does, but if it were significantly different in either direction complex matter (and, by extension, you and everything you've ever cared about) would not exist. It is, in that sense, perhaps the most important number there is. 1/137