(1.21.2025) Articulation is not the most important thing.

(1.21.2025) One odd thing about nineteenth century French wallpaper is how colorful it could be

(1.21.2025) You will take the flag and throw it onto the ledge, and take the ledge and turn it inside out. And then scoop the water out from underneath your feet, and curl your toes to make spaces for the ripples to pass beneath, and move your fingers back, press them against your sides, open up your core against the locked boxes on the shoreline. Don't wear the shirts ...

... who is unable to create a box with your own thinking, a box which describes itself and a paper which describes its own body. A delicious beautiful body, a body of coiled steel, a charged, idealistic shape of planes and circuits, which wrap and tangle with the lives of the rich and the beautiful, the beautiful faces which have more than beautiful smiles, which are able to go beyond the current spaces in which people live and define a new kind of hierarchy within which I live alone. VIsitors are allowed but only with the bell. Only with the chime, entrance and deference to the sky ...

... the ferocious and not entirely sanitized burn could somehow go into the boxes of arithmetical thinking, without attestation or tuning. The transformation of a large and wide object into a thin and forceable shape. The sharpening of a mind on a stone which is turned inwards. The focus on a subject which is truly hard.

(12.17.2024) Rocks rock

(12.17.2024) The first handbook for Scoutmasters, published in 1912, promised that new boy members would be instinctively interested in their first outdoor troop meeting becaguse they “are yearning to know their world. To unlock the mysteries of nature and to know their relationship to them.” The author, though, cut short any suggestion that the purpose for Scouts’ discovery of nature’s mysteries might be spiritual growth, “They must learn to recognize the forces and the laws of operation which underlie the manifestations of nature. Their wonder and interest must not be satisfied with the mystery and romance of it all but their ability to use and master these forces must be impressed upon them. This mastery will give knowledge and power for later life-work.”

(12.14.2024) Description moves nothing. Once you accept that, you are free to work!

(12.11.2024) I have a lot of creative work from this semester, although as usual much of it is not what I expected it to be. Overall my favorite classes were Information Theory in Language and Narrative Nonfiction. Here is a list:

• There is something strange going on with model surprisal and reading times, that is to say a missing link . Basically everything I'm putting into my Information Theory in Language paper relates to this in some way:

  ˀ Consider the garden path sentence, "the new doctor offered the operation appeared increasingly likely to succeed in her career". The selectional constraints which "offered" poses on the new doctor, as opposed to the operation, is the primary driver of ambiguity in the sentence: the typicality of the verb with the doctor as subject, as opposed to the operation as object. The respective main and reduced clause frames could be formulated as standalone sentences, and then compared by both humans and language models: for instance, reading times could be measured and surprisal could be calculated for "the new doctor offered the experiment to patients" and "the new doctor offered the experiment succeeded in his career". Then, these ratios could be compared: if there exists high variability of the ratio across different examples sharing a syntactic structure, e.g. the Main Verb/Reduced Relative, it is evidence that reading times are affected by the selectional constraints of the verb, irrespective of the underlying syntactic structure.

• I did develop a context visualization app for language model feature descriptions, which has a lot of room for improvement


• I wanted to develop a node editor for OverpassQL queries that I haven't gotten around to


• Made some posters, not much art though. Closest would be the inktober sketches below


• Made a poster for the semester's Curry'd Function
• Around 5,000 words of somewhat fantastical narrative nonfiction pitches, some of those I will put here when I clean them up (?)
• Idea. do syntactic templates reveal linearly approximable contexts? This would basically be a followup from my summer research, between this paper and this one

This semester was probably the first one in which I have set hard word limits for myself, and found my writing enriched by it.

(11.27.2024) One of my commonly reoccurring thoughts is how much effort you need to put into speaking in order to be understood. My linguistics professor is extremely cautious about using effort as a distinguishing factor between utterances. So, I'm not sure if this is a universal feeling.

(11.12.2024) My instincts for self-sufficiency are spreading me too thin. My "thoroughness". When I heard myself described this way I immediately thought of the many times I've penciled in a shape completely black, because that's the failsafe for iteration.

(11.5.2024) I love design. What I meant by this is unfortunately not related to user experience. But I still love it.

(10.31.2024) Old, H,obo, Wisdom,---,Jun, ,0,7,,, ,2,0,1,2,,, ,0,1,:,5,1, AM,I, hunted, an, old, two, track, road, at, one, time, and, was, surprised, by, the, number, of, coins, I, found, along, that, road, that, really, appeared, to, go, nowhere,., I, mentioned, it, to, a, man, who, owned, property, near, the, road, and, he, said, that, there, was, a, horse, boarding, stable, for, years, right, by, that, road, and, people, rode, their, horses, up, and, down, it, for, years,., Apparently, bouncing, up, and, down, that, road, on, horses, people, lost, a, lot, of, change, out, of, their, pockets,., I, haven,',t, had, that, kind, of, luck, on, every, road, but, that, one, certainly, did, produce, a, lot, of, coins,.

(10.29.2024) Also before I forget: The global outlook for consumers is improving. Consumers are determined in their resilience to stay ahead, vigilant against further disruption, and intentional about every aspect of their daily spending.

(10.29.2024) The socialexplorer viewer is very well-designed, it uses a visuals to communicate common actions like locating the user, and downloading the map without language. Part of my job at the Brown Library is to revise tutorials for clarity and ease of communication, and as part of that I ended up trying to download little svg icons from the interface to reference in the tutorial. The issue was that they were dynamically rendered -- and it turns out many of them are actually part of a TrueType font linked on the website! I worked with Fontforge for the sonority project, but getting it to work with python was tricky. Anyways, here are some of the outputs

I'm getting some ideas for painting but I don't know the best medium to express these exactly.

(10.27.2024)

(10.22.2024) The thrill of a stopped escalator or an empty hallway is in transgression, not against the clocks of other people but your own. If you can coolly dissect the mechanisms of progress you can transcend them, or at least act them out in full self-consciousness. That is to say, it obviously a terrible guide for living, but it is a truth all on its own.

(10.19.2024) The Changing Fictions of Masculinity: In fact, this is all realism ever was and ever will be: the arming or authorizing of literary elements -- regardless of their ultimate mimetic value -- by what each society calls its truth. And yet we might say that stories, like people, have a way of binding in more than any body, single or corporate, intends.

(10.14.2024) Catena:

(9.30.2024) You got it!

(9.24.2024) I changed my mind I got an idea

(9.23.2024) I am going to be so busy this week. I need an outlet to say things. I don't think Narrative Nonfiction is filling that gap, particularly because I agree my pitches last week weren't great, and I feel the pull of writing for an audience. I'm noticeably better at expressing "thoughts" in writing, but there's a reason I didn't like to do that before. Something to circle back and touch base on

But how did you get my number? And my first pet's name? Who can I blame > The captcha.. And how did you get my zipcode? for the house before I moved away > from my landlord

(9.19.2024) I feel safe swimming around in sealed circles, where my applications of meaning tend to be very clear. This works for my blog, which is a place for me to talk to myself. But wow, sometimes it feels so shallow. I've made the observation before in Screen-based Images, but when you always operate from a place of self-reflection, it's hard to avoid "cashing out" on yourself. If I want to write longer pieces, better put them somewhere else as well.

(9.19.2024) Tender is the Flesh feels like a thought experiment which has frozen over in every direction except gratuitous violence, but there's a passage that describes someone's words as boxes full of blank paper.

(9.19.2024) You can't take loans out on your future creative self, but if you're clever enough you can steal

(9.15.2024) The Splintered Mind says on unity of experience that "our ordinary condition, before rare unifying introspective and reflective actions, involves degrees of partial, imperfect unity, rather than complete unity or complete disunity". But I don't think anyone actually believes in complete unity of experience. Rosenthal talks about the unity of consciousness. I think that more complete unities correspond to greater aesthetic satisfaction, and that there is a notion of periodicity, or wavelength, in the process of this achievement which is as least as definite as emotions are. The methods of accomplishing unity are independent of higher-order thoughts, but thought can guide practice, so that you can actively desire unity and get better at achieving it.

(9.5.2024)

(9.2.2024) The real world is the world without you. Q: Who understands that? And to what degree?

(9.2.2024) Beliefs I will carry through shopping period:

• Ignorance is not something to be proud of
• All advice is useful (for the person its meant for)

(9.2.2024) "A fool is someone who has lost everything but their reason" -- Nietzche

Watching Fire of Love made me realize my tendency to perceive agony in many landscapes. There's no reason for this perception, its plausibly a product of natural selection (which is hardly better than no explanation). From a cultural perspective, it could be a vestige of ascribing moral values to wilderness (as opposed to what?)

Whatever its causes are, it definitely goes beyond both the purely aesthetic and purely geographic. The natural is not separable from the self.

(8.12.2024) Andrei Karpathy

"RLHF is a kind of way to benefit from this gap of 'easiness' of human supervision...
... getting actual rewards (i.e. the equivalent of win the game) is really difficult in the open-ended problem solving tasks... how do you give an objective reward for summarizing an article? Or answering a slightly ambiguous question about some pip install issue? Or telling a joke? Or re-writing some Java code to Python? ".

well-formed sentences < RLHF supervised operations < unsupervised operations < language

(8.12.2024) Cuando se necesita recordar palabras a aprender una lengua 😢😢😢

(8.8.2024) And here it is.

(8.7.2024) I "need" (P3) to make a list of things to do in COS for next year's REU students. This is my note so I don't forget

(8.7.2024)

d [Spoilers] Hunger (2023) is centered around two characters: one is Auy, a young female cook who runs her family noodle shop. The other is the European-looking Chef Paul and his famous catering service known as "Hunger". It is set in contemporary Thailand. Many of the comments made reflect the aspirations and fears of young adults there and elsewhere: Auy's stability in running the family business against the inability to pursue into any other career, nepotism at large firms denying promotions, the insubstantial nature of wealth as it is created virtually, through online content creation or cryptocurrency empires.

This film goes beyond the flagrantly satirical elements of "The Menu" to provide a much more human look at the relationship between a chef and his clients. It might not be more realistic, but it resonated with me on more levels. It raised questions about what a dream is, how hard it is to hold fulfillment and desire at once, and how happiness viewed from this perspective is empty: how "wish-fulfillment" is necessarily an outside diagnosis and not a true description. This made me think more about what has been called my "obsession with technology". I've felt that my desire has been to find perspectives which are the most true to form, but this is very easily the most *intuitive* perspective instead of the most *true*. The difference between a sport and a game how strong something is at its core: the delineations of a sport provides a stable foundation for strategy whereas a game is built around and between those strategies. I'm not going to think too much about this anymore but something something incremental developments enable gamification true technology is a leveler.

Anyways. In the final catering scene, Chef Paul and Auy are brought together to compete on three intersecting areas of culinary skill, authenticity, and self-image: Auy crafts a narrative, not around her as a woman breaking barriers in a male-dominated industry but around familial love and understanding through food. Chef Paul then brutalizes this narrative by serving hundreds of identical bowls of hot water, and giving a one and a half sentence speech on "common humanity". The crowd flocks from one to the next, unable to distinguish heartfelt messages from cynically delivered platitudes.

The final words of Tone to Auy ("Isn't *this*$^1$ what *you*$^2$ hungered for?") could be interpreted as a very traditional kind of mockery$^1$, very cynical and self-defeating. But Tone has been a supporter of Auy throughout the film: he wants her to succeed and believes that she wants to. That tinges the scene with the sadness of misunderstanding$^2$. If Tos provides Auy the ability to become a viral sensation, Tone provides Auy with the ability to differentiate sensation from reality, a baseline which forces her to reevaluate her priorities. She realizes that Chef Paul cannot possibly be serving his clients out of love: they will always be the objects of affection, capable of endless absorption of love, time, and skill, and polite (monetary) reciprocation. Instead of continuing to work towards understanding, she chooses to return to her family business.

The pace of the ending music is unsettling, and it does not indicate a traditional happy ending as many believe. Nothing has been resolved: popularity and tradition are still at odds. She cannot cook for her community without drawing attention, attention which will change her and her clientele. Aun knows this, and believes even her efforts to restore her family kitchen will inevitably involve compromise and division.

(8.4.2024)

(8.4.2024) Halfway through Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, also trying to get through Children of Dune. The exposition and continual political scheming is really getting on my nerves.

(8.4.2024) I often mistake kindness for true understanding and true understanding for kindness

(7.26.2024)

(7.20.2024)
Richard Sennett, Humanism

"In conformity with thy free judgement, in whose hands I have placed thee, thou art confined by no bounds, and thou wilt fix limits of nature for thyself" - Pico della Mirandola

"Voice" is both a personal and a social issue. To hold fragmentary experiences together in time requires the capacity to step back from the power of each event to hurt or disorien. Sheer surrender to the moment weakens one's voice. the capcity to stand in and out of a situation at the same time is a practical strategy for survival.

Where life narratives in which difference has been experienced on informal, open-ended, and cooperative terms become what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz once called "thick descriptions", the narrator is conveying a more complex, and engaging, social reality.

(7.15.2024) Jonathan Frazen: Substantial swatches of my personal history were going dead from within, from my talking about them too often.

(7.12.2024) Read The Sound and the Fury, re-read Dune and Dune Messiah, the Mistborn series (starting with Wax and Wayne and then from the beginning), reading The Canon by Natalie Angier. Also reading Death and Designation among the Asadi by Michael Bishop and the encompassing novel Transfigurations (I was skeptical by the cover but it's really interesting... Avatar x Emerson). I got a copy of Ubik that I'm excited to start once I finish the rest of Dune.

So many ways of living... and we all end up in one of them. The privilege of choice must be understood to be enjoyed.

(6.29.2024) Erin Somers

I was alone after that.

But it was okay because I had my gardening.

No, I didn’t, but I had my tennis.

No, I didn’t, but I had my television.

I had my phone.

(6.27.2024) There is a never-ending conversation we have with advertisements in which you may reply once or twice a year. You are made to consider a peculiar relationship, the one which you have with your toothpaste or your swimsuit or your car brakes, in the captivity of reading or listening. Then you might go to the store (or not) and in a couple months the seasonal reports come in. And then they think, "I shouldn't have put a comma there". That is how a new thing is created, as new as any conversation can be.

(6.23.2024) Hiking turns imposed necessities into real ones.

There is a relationship between difficulty of consumption and the level of understanding you achieve by simply having an open attitude.

(6.15.2024)
I had a dream where you had to shop for "real" words at the grocery store. I was panicking because I was running a script that modeled noun pluralization and realized I would go broke convincing myself a model could figure out the plural of "community".

Get more groceries, get eaten
get more groceries, get eaten
\ldots
wortlhess

\ldots

(6.1.2024) Wow, there is definitely something promising about compositional vector semantics. My current research isn't going in this direction but there are really nice models being built.

(5.22.2024) Updates always take longer than I expect but it's addictive. I could put whatever

I want here and someone will see it (eventually).

(5.22.2024) ***I'm just going to throw some more stuff here and then come back to fix it later yep definitely***

(5.14.2024) I don't want to be well-rounded. I want to be a fishhook.

(5.1.2024) I want to take a serious writing class in college. My writing has regressed to frantic little notes to myself on my computer and regurgitated logic and ideas for two of my classes. I am proud of my reading lately, been finding some really great books and articles. And I am proud of several projects from this semester and last, some of which I will try to post here.

You can tell a lot about someone from the examples they give.

There are certainly words that I overuse but only in a broadly descriptive manner. Again, no intentional cameoflage.

You really see things differently when you draw them. And why does that matter? Because you are on top of the information food chain.

Keep trying to challenge yourself.

I lack patience but make up for it with fantastical daydreams of empty formless worlds analogical reasoning.

Locked in a never-ending catacomb of hallways and shuttered classrooms, able to catch the sky from the corners of your eye. Becoming acutely attuned to the presence of food. I could sit and watch the ceiling of BioMed for an entire day.

"You really like suspense". I really like it. I love forcing sensations on my readers. Haha.

The more something I make relates to my own self, the less I like it. The more something is unintelligible within my own idiolect, the, less I like it. Which doesn't keep me from feeling a sense of identification, so maybe it's all about ownership (for brief periods of time). But we are all on a timeshare.

The stakes of language are as high as you want them to be.

For the longest time I thought my artwork wouldn't survive without a caption, because the context mattered so much. I think that speaks to my fear of losing the complete attention of strangers.

So much of college comes down to reading (better) and writing (better). Again, really hard to say what that means exactly.

The way words are distributed is really interesting. I've got this notion in my head that they've replaced people except in the settings where people really care about conversations, which may make talking a lot less interesting. Words are a proof something was done, and at the highest level we care a lot about sending those signals. But there's a difference between billboards and toothpaste labels because the billboards are actually meant for reading, whereas toothpaste are more forced compliance.

This is no place for moralizing!

Yeah, I still think there's a right way to live.

So much is being done to for me every day.

(4.15.2024) It is not the place but its invocation that we can learn to enjoy

(4.14.2024) I accidentally uploaded a 12 mb png below, only heard about it when my bandwidth limit hit 75gb for the month. Sorry!!! It's jpeg now.

(4.6.2024) Is outer space objectively cool?

(3.31.2024) New names for my 4th semester classes. credit Steven Pinker for the last two.

• Inducting over One or Many of Infinite Airless Worlds
• Introduction to Heavy Machinery
• Human Signal Processing
• Inverse Optics in Practice
• Inverse Optics in Theory

(3.31.2024) A thousand words in a single image; How many images in a single word?

(3.22.2024) Wouldn't it be terrible if you understood it all immediately? No dialogue, only a receiver?

(3.19.2024) phonology is cool

(3.10.2024)
Watched [sic] yesterday, by Melissa Gibson and performed by Something on the Green. The ambitions in sic are very different from conventional ambition, but they still suffer from the same limitations. Frank is training to become an auctioneer; Theo is composing songs for a theme park ride. Babette is writing a history book about outbursts of anger. I really like Frank's character.

auctioneering brings to mind the detached, clinical sounds of the airport intercom, the weatherman, social roles that are all transitory or relational. They carry information which is of no particular importance except to their audience. Through a singular focus on the subjects, they make no claims on masculine or feminine identity, or the presence of a speaker. To train as an auctioneer, Frank repeats tongue twisters over and over. He isolates language as a gender-neutral force, phonetic constraints overriding purposeful language.

(...)

(2.28.2024)

(2.23.2024) Starter packs are modeling visual languages with formal grammar.

(2.22.2024) How much of it is studying nature? What is natural?

(2.17.2024) I was once given the remarkable opportunity to

(2.17.2024) it's like ,um,
a relationship that swings itself
like a baptism, a vision
or like getting hit by a car

(2.17.2024) I speak English!

(2.13.2024) You are always on top of the information food chain.

(2.13.2024) I understand myself to be incapable of repetition, drawing wider and wider circles around a core that knows itself only from the outside looking in. What has been interesting has been filling gaps, gaps which make glue seem an integral part of being, never mind it is actually something completely different.

(2.5.2024) (New Yorker) we rehearse a limited openness so that we can feel the solidity of our own private selves.

(2.1.2024) On this blog I will not use language to confuse people, or to make it hard to understand my thoughts. I will use language to 1. maintain a distinct identity, and to 2. enable myself to talk freely about things that matter to me.

(2.1.2024) Something I miss from lynnwood, more than the satisfaction of discovering & reaching landmarks, is finding parts of the world that are inequivocably mine.

(2.1.2024) Running is a signal!

(1.31.2024) we try hard to make things easy/boring but it's like cupping your hands around a faucet

(1.31.2024)
P: Take for example, dark chocolate and milk chocolate. If you ask children --
pauses
P: Which would you say children like more?
C: (in unison) ... Milk Chocolate
P: Right, okay. And then adults, they've been influenced in some way by culture and mass media, to change their tastes--
pauses
P: Which one would you say adults are expected to like?
C: (bashfully) ... Dark Chocolate

(1.31.2024) This regional science fair NOAA 3rd Place Pulse of the Planet winner is still working on the same things :)

(1.30.2024) There are theories that help you think and theories that hurt.

(1.25.2024) When will all of your problems ever be solved? You know what the answer is.

(1.25.2024) The best defense of why we study little things: Both big and little things exist. We can make rules about big things, but those rules need to be EXPLICIT as to how they affect the little things we can observe. Otherwise they don't mean much at all. This is not a diminishment.

(12.2.2023) Are you happy with the
words which you've written?
And those boxes you've drawn --
they don't make a house

(11.21.2023) I love to see the word "famous" used offhandedly about things I know nothing about.

(11.21.2023) Pushing analogies to their limits.

(11.19.2023)
The purpose of satire: to force someone to assert a version of their beliefs that even to them seems absurd.

(11.16.2023)
Q: When is the sum greater than its parts?

A: When the seams are unforeseen.
A: When something is stolen.
A: When something is hidden.

(11.7.2023) The plan: Practice! Practice more! Practice even more! How brutally empty the mind might be.

(10.30.2023) Nobody's going to give you the interesting problems you want to work on: nobody knows how to make space for you because they've never seen your work. Asking the right questions is half the fun: answering them can only be the closure.

(10.23.2023) Time management isn't () management because everyone values time the same*. Its antithesis is something unequivocably bad. When you're searching for something lost it's an objectively weighted cost; you could be a disorganized person but not care much, or be organized and care a lot. If you've 1. lost something and 2. decided to look for it, you've made the judgement that your time is worth searching for it. Same idea as prison or proportional fines.

(10.18.2023) I've been busy but feeling very on top of things recently. It's a combination of knowing what problems not to waste time on, and sticking through hard things I know how to do. Speaking of which, I am itching to work on some kind of technical dev project. I need to put my foot in my mouth I mean pedal to the pedal I mean.

(9.28.2023) Roughly: many people have goals, but also expectations. The expectations may be very different from their goal, but critically they do not differ in intent. For example, neuroscience is about discovering the secrets of consciousness; it is also about sticking probes in mice brains. I am happy when my expectations are forced to change; that is, when something I look at is not what I think it is. I believe art is about changing expectations. I think that goals are more environmentally dependent than expectation.

(9.28.2023) A good deal of learning is in the teacher conceptualizing themselves as a student and probing for weak and impoverished forms. An effective teacher needs a lot of input, and the ability to improvisationally prompt the student.

(9.25.2023) Skipping stones is fun because you get to defy gravity.
the order you do your homework in :: mise-in-place :: driving + commute preferred over commute + drive
the assurance that you did not waste time

(9.15.2023)
Modernity is the condition a society reaches when life is no longer conceived as cyclical.
your thought is part of my thought -- even as mine defines itself in opposition to yours.
It's an unchristenable night ..
phonetics:semantics :: color:composition.

(9.11.2023) Silverman Abstract Algebra preliminary: for every x, there exists y: "your opponent hands you a value of x and you need to find a winning value of y"
vs
there exists y for every x: "you choose a y, and that y needs to win regardless of the x your opponent chooses"

(9.10.2023) We can trace the positive connotations of "slay" from the semantics of the earlier phrase, "killed it". There are other areas where recycling of slang fragments (might) be at play, most recently "cooking" as an action verb from "cooking something up"; most commonly used as "s/he's cooking". I think that the recycling phenomenon is in general motivated by the desire to seem "one step ahead": that someone both understands what "killed it" or "cooking something up" means, and that they reject it for a shorter, snappier version that makes sense only in that original context.

(9.9.2023) Nick Hilton ... and in a depression era, the moonshot of celebrity is even more gravitational than before. Look at the 1930s, when the Western economic climate was miserable, but the screens were littered with stars. Clark Cable, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Bette Davis, Katherine Hepburn, Judy Garland. Economic instability does not engender realism — it adds value to dreams.

(9.8.2023) The Metaphysical Club: We think that we know in order to do; Dewey taught that doing is why there is knowing.

(9.6.2023) First day of shopping period made me realize I am much less set than I thought I was, which is a good thing. Very tiring though.

Reading The Metaphysical Club. It is a close depiction of American intellectualism after the Civil War and how liberal ideals came to America. It covers abolitionist and unionist struggle in the North, polygenism, Darwinism, the formation of the AAAS, Charles Eliot and Harvard, the foundation of the social sciences, the Howland Will forgery, Emerson, the Vermont Transcendentalists, Romanticism etc. I really like the horizontal history perspective.

The part about Samuel Coleridge turning inward and examining his source of faith reminds me of Schopenhauer, both are obsessed with the idea of unity.

(9.2.2023)

(8.24.2023) Back to school! Sorry for not being online recently. Recently read the Dunwich Horror, Play it as it Lays, the Oryx and Crake trilogy (which I told myself I would review as being very reminiscent of Boston, and OMSIian).

I spent most of this summer working for Northshore Utility District as a seasonal utility worker.

(7.27.2023) If you could wake up each day as someone else, how many lives would you live until you were satisfied with the one you got?

(6.20.2023) Finished moving golf from AWS to DigitalOcean!

(6.7.2023) The Nevada National Security Site, J.B. Crawford

There is a problem: nuclear detonations are a hostile environment for precision instruments. This is the central challenge of underground testing. In atmospheric testing, instruments can be located far enough away from ground zero to survive the detonation (we will see an example of this later). For underground tests, the radius of destruction is relatively small, but it contains far too much soil and rock for remote instruments to be useful. Instead, most of the measurements must be taken from the same shaft as the device.

To resolve this conundrum, engineers had to dance very closely with the destruction. It is simply the nature of underground nuclear testing that the measurement instruments will be destroyed almost instantly. They must collect their data and report it before the blast reaches them. Every underground test was a remarkable race: as the blast propagated through the canister, each instrument produced a signal which traveled through cables to safety just ahead of the advancing shockwave. Cables were turned to vapor just behind the messages they carried.

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