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Back when I was working on my (never completed) dissertation, I would sometimes call up televangelists’ hotlines and talk about my research. It was pretty amusing how they would initially try to steer the conversation to the God stuff but then give up as I kept relentlessly returning to my subject. Eventually they were reduced to “uh huh … uh huh” but they couldn’t just hang up on me because they weren’t allowed to. I actually worked through some problems this way.
In programming, this is called ‘Rubber Duck Debugging.’
The televangelists, in this case, were the rubber duck.
Weird screenplay showerthought: Guy’s dinner plans fall through, decides to have a couple brandys at the bar and drunkenly responds to a spam email which turns out to be legit, responds to even more, every single spam email is legit, and ends up traveling the world in order to help a cabal of disenfranchised Nigerian princes recover 28 billion dollars from a Pakistani street gang full of tech-savvy hackers with samurai swords and really fast street bikes. Obviously starring Nicolas Cage
If you email this to mr Cage there’s a 50/50 chance he’ll go for it. 100% chance if it ends up in his spam folder but he somehow still comes across it.
Cage will 100% do it if the money is right.
I would legitimately love to see this. Sounds like a bit of a Forest Gump vibe, and your choice of Nicolas Cage feels perfect for this role.
I’m bored at work so here’s a sequel and yes I want to see something like this happen lol:
Nic Cage is relaxing on a beach, gets a call from the top dog Nigerian Prince (Samuel L Jackson), apparently the Pakistani street gang is back and they’re aiming for a huge ransomware attack on the US Treasury in order to steal all the gold from Fort Knox.
Only North Korea has hackers skilled enough to decrypt such powerful ransomware, but in order to earn Kim Jong Un’s trust, he needs to acquire a wheel of the world’s most aged parmesan.
It’s in that artic vault full of seeds (“I suppose if you’re repopulating the Earth’s flora you’re gonna need a snack”). They spoof the IP at the seed storage so the Pakistani street gang thinks they finally found the gates to Fort Knox and opens it, at which point they discover that the street gang is actually Google (hence having all the Nigerian prince emails hitting the spam folder after Google robbed them).
Kim Jong Un gets the cheese, North Korean hackers decrypt all the US money, all of it, because it’s apparently one big file in plaintext (Samuel L Jackson: cackles and says “I’ve heard some shit in my day but you’re the dumbest motherfuckers I’ve ever met” Cage: “You’re just now realizing this?”).
This concept has legs, let’s get this thing green lit!
I work on quantum systems coupled to noisy environments (noisy as in causing random fluctuations). Atoms coupled to a light field are my specialty. Anyway, I just got invited by a predatory journal in the field of acoustics, vibrations and noise?!
Hey, noise is noise. What color is yours, white, pink or blue?
I describe the atoms using a so called Lindblad master equation. The atoms are kept in this description, but the light field is eliminated using two assumptions:
- The coupling between the two is very weak.
- Correlations between the two decay so fast that this can be considered instantaneous.
The later produces white noise.
That’s cool
In most fields " so fast that’s instantaneous" is pretty fast, but in nuclear and quantum physics that’s a whole new level.
What is the order of magnitude of your " too fast ”? I will invert that to state the bandwidth in Hertz.
Typical transition frequencies between two levels of an atom are 10^15Hz. The coupling between atoms and light is on the order of the decay rate at which photons are transmitted, which sits at around 10^6Hz.
I look forward to your original contribution, “Atomic Noise: Acoustic Vibrations at Nanomolecular Scale.” Reviewer 2 can suck it, 'cause this one’s about to blow up!
I left science a long time ago and recently got such an invitation from a Q3 engineering journal on aerodynamics (I worked on quantum systems as well, hi).
I took 3 books on aerodynamics and wrote a paper citing and compiling the texts; adding some chatgpt noise. Really nothing new, just some intermediate equations. The reference section contains these 3 books and 4 recent papers for the introductory part. I sent it several days ago and am awaiting the review.
I run a small business. People in my spam folder have really high opinions of my business. They all want to invest or something… Mostly harvesting my LinkedIn profile for keywords.
I on the other hand for some reason seem to be in need of “high-quality” (yet very cheap) office chairs, according to my spam emails 🤷♀️
I apparently also need the most comfortable chair ever. Which just makes me think of this C&H https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHKiGl02NmU
Nigerian princes need my help.
Ha, relatable!
