I’ve read half of the best novel finalists: Raven Scholar and The Everlasting are both fantastic, but Death of the Author is one of the worst books I’ve read in years.

At best, B’s bank knows that B had some bills that once passed through your hands. But they have no way of knowing if you actually spent the money at B’s or if there were other transactions in between.

Even if the bill was scanned when you withdrew it at the ATM and again when you spent it, there’s no way to know if the bill changed hands in the meantime through unrecorded transactions.

If I get cash in change from a vendor who doesn’t know my identity, and spend it at another vendor who doesn’t know my identity, what is there to tie the serial numbers to?

So he’d have deported Einstein, then?

if a living organism moves both in time and in space, the genome stays the same, while the proteins in the body might change due to different gene expression

That sounds like a reaction norm—all the various phenotypes a single genome might potentially develop into under different environmental conditions. Which doesn’t seem quite analogous to Noetherian properties like momentum and energy, which are conserved in the sense that they can change inside a system as long as there are balancing actions that preserve the property for the system as a whole.

Noether’s theorem specifically establishes a connection between conserved quantities and continuous symmetries. What’s the continuous symmetry associated with the genome—something analogous to changing time or location that can be varied continuously while leaving biology unchanged?

The original “lingua franca” was actually a mix of dialects from Italian sailors—in the middle ages and the renaissance, most people in the rest of the world referred to all western Europeans as “Franks”.

Strait of Iranaway.

You could go further. A 50/50 coin is arbitrary; what if you used a weighted coin instead? That is, both you and the superintelligence know that you’ll pick the single box with probability p, but neither of you know the coin’s outcome until you flip it.

What’s the ideal value of p in this case? Is it not arbitrarily close to 1?

It’s small enough you can use it for innocuous purchases, but unfamiliar enough that most people wouldn’t recognize any defects.

Pope Leo leads most public figures in the US in approval ratings.

In theory, could the Pope run for president (given that he’s a U.S. citizen by birth, etc.)?