Prospects for time travel

My lay understanding of the prospects for time travel is basic and out of date. By summarizing here, perhaps I can discover how wrong I am and what interesting aspects I am missing.

( Special relativity: simultaneity, dilation. )

( That the math allows it does not mean we can do it. )

( Black holes aren't much use. )

( Wormholes may help … )

( … but are very far from being available. )

In short, the math may allow time travel, it may even prevent paradoxes, but actually making it happen, in any conventional sense, is multiple dimensions away from being possible by any practical approach. For decades we have spent much money on attempting to construct a stable fusion reactor and that is categorically far easier than anything I mention above.

A large online meeting

Approximately annually, at work we run the occasional large meeting, typically over three days, so that our users, developers and other interested parties can come together, talk to us, learn about how to use our software, tell everyone about how they are using it, we can plan future work, etc. With the pandemic we shifted this to being online via Zoom.

The meeting worked rather well, admittedly better than I had expected. I did miss one part of the previous meetings that I like, the ad-hoc small-group conversations in between sessions. Still, I believe that the effort was well worth it. Further, some mentioned that it is far more possible for them to attend online things, even ordinarily. We got to see and hear from each other and it is good to be able to put faces to the names we see in the support fora subsequently.

There were probably around eighty attendees in the main sessions and maybe around twenty in the workshops I was helping to run. My main jobs there were to check people against the registration list in shuffling them from the waiting room into the meeting and to keep track of questions from the chat to make sure nothing important was missed by the speaker; on lucky occasions I could field them myself.

Participants were worldwide, ranging from Australia through Asia and Europe to the Americas, so sessions were timed accordingly: on Thursday, workshops I helped with included a 11h to 13h one then, later, a repeat of it from 21h to 23h which attracted people from North America. I have taken this coming Monday and Friday off work as part of recovery but I know that some of my colleagues put much more than I into the meeting. I hope that they are sleeping well this weekend.

Electronics reconfigured

Some weeks ago I mentioned replacing the cheap Chinese in-ear headphones that I often use when I work out. The new ones are sounding good. Recently I found them sitting in their cradle getting all excited, with flashing and talking and whatnot. Perhaps that's coincidence, but since then they talk to me in what I suspect is the Chinese of their birthplace, rather than in the English they previously offered for, pairing, power off, etc. Fortunately they still serve fine for my workouts.