Ratio

Ratio Tile wakes up happy. Ratio Tile is happy for several reasons:

1. He is lying in bed with Jorge’s arms around him and this tends to make him happy

2. The solution to the pseudo-refractive paradox just came to him in a dream and solving physical puzzles always makes him happy

3. There’s a Governing Board meeting today and while those are sometimes boring this one is likely to involve some very fun discussion of the massively fucked-up data from Nice Try and discussing new data always makes him happy, especially when it’s data that can’t be easily explained in a soul coherence framework

Ratio Tile is now wondering whether he can pick up his laptop without waking Jorge up. Ratio notes that now that the pseudo-refractive paradox has been solved he has no puzzle to think about and so it will be pretty boring just lying there even with Jorge’s arms around him. Ratio can lie there with Jorge’s arms around him pretty much indefinitely when Jorge is awake because awake Jorge is a source of many wonderful sorts of sensory input. But Ratio has long since accepted the fact that without continually varying sensory input he will need a puzzle or he will become bored.

Ratio is both often happy and easily bored, and the tension between these things tends to end up determining whether any given person likes Ratio or not. Jorge, for instance, takes the boredom problem as a challenge and has become a virtuoso of boredom-solving. Jorge takes great pleasure in this.

The foregoing rule only applies if you’re not a scientist. If you are a scientist, you probably hate Ratio, because he’s pretty much unbearably obnoxious in any kind of scientific discussion. Ratio is aware of this and is not so much proud of it as neutrally accepting. Like many scientists, Ratio is not so good with the subtleties of social decorum, and Ratio’s long since decided that trying to compensate for his particular brand of social incompetence would simply complicate things and possibly worsen them. He is a force to be taken or left, warts and all. And, thankfully for him, no one in the tiny Pneuma Science community is going to choose the “leave” side of that fork when he’s demonstrably the most productive person in the whole community except for (fucking) Cept himself.

Anyway, Ratio’s managed to disentangle himself from Jorge’s arms without even producing so much as a mumble, and has gotten his laptop in his lap and his headphones on. Today’s soundtrack is going to be Mike Oldfield’s Amarok. Ratio listens pretty much exclusively to long-form prog rock and the like, which is the only kind of music that un-bores him in the same way that puzzles unbore him; finding newly biting ways to mock him for this has been one of Jorge’s favorite hobbies since they met. Ratio finds this boring, and he’s not sure Jorge’s quite picked up on that, which given Jorge is pretty surprising, and Ratio’s not sure whether to feel proud or ashamed of outfoxing Jorge in the make-Ratio-unbored chase. It is a strange game, the one they play.

Ratio gets to his email inbox just as Oldfield gets beyond his choppy introductory bursts and into a nicely hypnotic repetitive space. Ratio’s inbox looks like this:

[quantum-comp list] digest for 3/29/20xx

[pneum-engines list] digest for 3/29/20xx

Cecelia R. new notes on the axiom 3 stuff (good shit imo)

[pneum-alt-theory list] digest for 3/29/20xx

[hn-data-mining list] digest for 3/29/20xx

[pneum-category-th list] digest for 3/29/20xx

MeowEllipse Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Theoretical Output of Class 3 Matter Extruder in Expanded StarChild Universe

MeowEllipse StarChild Universe Wiki news for 3/29/20xx

Cecelia R. is it just me or does this paper make no fucking sense (nbd peruse at leisure)

[mid-field-limit list] digest for 3/29/20xx

Traveller652 Re: typology and generative language for guitar solos -- ideas?

Jorge S. Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: dude

Hermes C. Theory for Nice Try

And right there Ratio stops reading and cringes and clicks. The email is (fucking) Cept being his usual terse self, because he knows everyone knows it’s implied that anyone who comes to the meeting without reading and understanding the attached document is in big trouble. The meeting is in two hours, by the way.

Oldfield’s just started doing something particularly groovy and it gives Ratio the strength of will to plunge into the document itself, which is pretty much what he expected. In Cept’s blustery prose style, his introduction informs the reader that the time course of the Boltzman field during Maria’s struggle with Nice Try is explicable within a soul coherence framework, given an intuitive set of assumptions including blah blah blah blah

The soul coherence axioms are Cept’s baby and he now maintains his attachment to them with a perverse determination that at times seems almost sexual. Five years ago Cept was saying that fields as powerful as Nice Try’s were theoretically impossible. Now that they’ve been observed Cept has started to exploit tiny ambiguities in the original statements of the axioms to “show” that the original axioms still agree with observed data. It’s an interesting game, in a way, and the old fuck’s very, very good at it.

The problem is that Cept’s methods are entirely ad hoc. His theory for Nice Try consists of a bunch of noodling around within the soul coherence framework that he never would have done if Nice Try had never been observed. He isn’t doing science.

Unfortunately, there is no alternative to soul coherence theory. There are theoretical games, incredibly beautiful and fulfilling theoretical games full of incredibly non-boring puzzles, that Ratio and his friend Cecelia have been playing for years, which keep yielding tantalizing insights. Like last night’s resolution to the pseudo-refractive paradox. (Try to explain that one elegantly, Cept.) But no consistently usable, unified theory. Cept’s ad hoc bullshit isn’t especially predictive, which is a very bad thing if you’re living in a dome surrounded by heteropneums that want to eat your souls for breakfast, but the Ratio/Cecelia “theories” so far can’t even generate ad hoc explanations consistently.

Jorge is saying something and Ratio can tell that spending this morning with Jorge would be even less boring than spending it with Cept and co. and he’s trying to figure how to tell Jorge that the only thing he has time to do in the next two hours is look for weak points in the old fuck’s reasoning. And maybe eat breakfast. A shower is probably out of the question.