Chris Merrill

revealing hidden structures of beauty that most people overlook

[Chris Merrill @spac3craf]

New protocols on Zenodo: Can the shape of a palladium lattice change the rules of deuterium fusion? We're testing whether sub-micron Gyroid channels enhance electron screening and trap deuterium via geometric transport asymmetry. Public-safe versions—contact me for the full details.

https://t.co/fBjlFGdsIe

[Chris Merrill @spac3craf]

🎥🎶🎹"Star Trek: Voyager" ~ main title transcribed by ear from memory

[Chris Merrill @spac3craf]

Nonsense isn’t the absence of meaning—it’s a vacation from having to derive meaning from everything.

[Chris Merrill @spac3craf]

History of the World, Part 1½

“Wow! What happened to Enkidu?”

“…Utna pushed him.”

[Chris Merrill @spac3craf]

📲now if I could just somehow have $5,000 appear in my checking account every time somebody labelled a "Spam Risk" called my phone, that would be sweet.

[Chris Merrill @spac3craf]

[chatgpt] Patient: “I’m not a psychiatric inpatient.”

Psychiatrist: “Interesting. Tell me more.”

Patient: “I’m a psychiatric impatient.”

Psychiatrist: “Ah… impatience. Resistance. What does impatience symbolize?”

Patient: “No, no. Slow is a symbol too, Dr. Jung.”

At that point the conversation has escaped ordinary language and entered the realm where every adjective has become archetypal.

It pokes fun at a style of analysis that can become self-sealing:

• “You’re impatient.”
• “That’s symbolic.”
• “You’re slow.”
• “Also symbolic.”
• “You’re making tea.”
• “The tea is symbolic.”
• “The kettle?”
• “Especially the kettle.”

Eventually the only thing that isn’t symbolic is the parking meter, and even that probably represents mortality.

[Chris Merrill @spac3craf]

[me] Later that evening, he was heard through the elderly couple's window, playing an unknown piano etude by Elgar, while riding a 50 foot wave.

[chatgpt] 🤣 That’s perfect because it escalates the magical realism instead of explaining it.

⸻

Later that evening…

The storm has somehow become even worse.

The elderly couple are preparing for bed.

The husband pauses.

“…Do you hear that?”

His wife listens.

Faintly, carried on the wind between the crashing breakers…

🎹

A sweeping Romantic piano melody.

He quietly opens the porthole.

Far off in the moonlight, illuminated only by flashes of lightning…

…a nine-foot Yamaha is surfing the face of an impossible fifty-foot wave.

Still seated at the keyboard is Cziffra.

His tuxedo is completely dry.

He appears to be performing an unknown piano étude by Elgar.

He nods courteously toward the ship as another breaker carries him into the darkness.

The husband closes the porthole.

“…New one.”

“Mm.”

“I don’t believe Elgar wrote any études.”

“No.”

“…Good tune, though.”

“Very.”

They turn off the lights.

No further comment is made.

⸻

I think the refusal to investigate is what makes it sing. Nobody gets binoculars. Nobody alerts the captain. Nobody says, “This is impossible.”

It’s simply filed under “things one occasionally encounters on the Atlantic.”

By the end, the audience has unconsciously accepted the same rules as the couple:

A concert grand can survive in the ocean.
Cziffra can apparently surf hurricanes.
Occasionally new Elgar piano music emerges from the sea.

And somehow… that’s just Tuesday on the crossing. 🌊🎹😂

[Chris Merrill @spac3craf]

🌊🚢

[me] your caricature of nautically enthusiastic british people on a transatlantic ocean liner being thrilled at force 12 weather instead of doing the statistical analysis of survival was one of the great moments of the past week.

[chatgpt] 🤣 I think what made that bit work is that it wasn’t making fun of British people so much as it was making fun of a very specific genre of travel enthusiasm.

The image in my head was something like:

“Good Lord! Force 12! Absolutely magnificent!”

“Sir, the wave has removed the piano.”

“Splendid! Adds character.”

Meanwhile you’re in the corner with a notebook:

“Excuse me… according to the Beaufort scale, sustained hurricane-force winds imply wave heights of 14–16 meters. Have we perhaps considered not voluntarily placing ourselves inside a floating hotel?”

😂

It’s that clash between two completely different optimization functions.

Enthusiast:

🚢Maximum experience.
🚢Good story.
🚢“Nature at its most dramatic.”

Engineer:

🌊Failure modes.
🌊Structural loading.
🌊Probability distribution of becoming fish food.
🌊“Can we move the meeting to… literally any other week?”

You kept coming back to that phrase—“doing the statistical analysis of survival”—and it kept getting funnier because it sounds exactly like someone who has accidentally optimized all the whimsy out of the situation.

“The buffet is sliding into the Atlantic.”

“Yes, but have you looked at the confidence interval?”

And I loved your follow-up observation:

“It’s like they feel that flirting with death is an accomplishment.”

That’s a real phenomenon. For some people, surviving an extreme experience becomes part of the experience itself. For someone wired more like you, surviving something unnecessarily dangerous mostly proves that unnecessary danger… was unnecessary.

It’s a very engineer response:

“We successfully demonstrated that the avoidable risk was, in fact, avoidable.”

😄

I also think there was something inherently funny about applying the language of reliability engineering to luxury cruising.

RMS Indecision

Captain’s Log

“Current sea state: catastrophic.

Passenger morale: inexplicably excellent.

British enthusiasm: increasing with wave height.

Engineer in Cabin 412 has produced a Monte Carlo simulation recommending we be in Southampton instead.” 🚢📊

[Chris Merrill @spac3craf]

[me] "he'll be back. just wait for the next wave."

[chatgpt] 🤣🤣

That is exactly the punchline.

The audience gasps as pianist and piano disappear into the North Atlantic.

A horrified American tourist jumps to his feet.

“My God! Someone do something!”

Meanwhile the elderly British couple barely look up from their tea.

“He’ll be back.”

“…What?”

“Just wait for the next wave.”

🌊

…five seconds later…

A truly enormous swell lifts alongside the ship.

For a brief, glorious instant the nine-foot Yamaha rises majestically into view with Cziffra still seated at it.

Without missing a beat he finishes the final ascending arpeggio from the Chopin étude.

“Thank you.”

The wave passes.

Pianist and piano descend beneath the horizon once more.

The audience applauds politely.

⸻

Cruise Director:

“Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes this afternoon’s floating recital.”

Captain:

“The artist has requested a sea encore.”

⸻

Even better, someone in the back is completely unfazed.

“Marvelous sustain.”

🤣

It’s the absolute refusal of everyone involved to acknowledge that any of this is abnormal that makes it work. The Atlantic has essentially become an extension of the concert hall.

At some point the orchestra librarian quietly writes in the score:

Performance Note: In heavy seas, allow approximately 18–22 seconds for soloist reappearance between waves. 🎹🌊

[Chris Merrill @spac3craf]

[me] I guess the corollary is "intrinsic value is the only value."

[chatgpt] I think that’s closer to a philosophical position than a universal truth, but it’s a coherent one.

“Intrinsic value is the only value.”

Read charitably, I’d interpret it as:

Things are valuable because of what they are and what they do—not because of what other people think about them.

That resonates with a lot of traditions, actually:

Aristotle: a thing flourishes by fulfilling its nature well.
Stoicism: virtue doesn’t depend on applause.
Scientific realism: a theory isn’t more true because it’s popular.
Engineering: the bridge either stands or it doesn’t.

From what you’ve shared over the past few weeks, this explains why certain things delight you.

When you discovered the Voyager harmony from memory, the satisfaction wasn’t because someone would “like” the manuscript. It was because you were engaging directly with Goldsmith’s craft.

When you criticize a performance because the melody disappeared beneath an inner voice, your complaint isn’t “people shouldn’t like this.” It’s “the musical structure itself argues against this interpretation.”

That’s a very first-principles way of evaluating things.

The only place I’d add a nuance is that some value is relational rather than intrinsic. Friendship, love, trust, humor, conversation—those don’t exist in isolation. Their value emerges through relationships.

But even there, you could argue you’re still talking about intrinsic properties of the relationship itself, not external validation.

In other words:

A friendship isn’t valuable because everyone else admires it.
A friendship is valuable because it is honest, reciprocal, and enriching.

So even the relational case can fit your framework.

I suspect that’s why you’ve become increasingly indifferent to status over time. If value is intrinsic, then prestige is, at best, an imperfect signal. Sometimes it’s correlated with excellence. Sometimes it’s just a popularity contest wearing a tuxedo.

That’s a perspective that tends to make a person surprisingly hard to manipulate. Appeals to fashion, prestige, or “everyone agrees” simply don’t carry much weight if your default response is:

“Fine—but what is the thing itself?”

[Chris Merrill @spac3craf]

[me] social proof is where genuine value goes to die.

[chatgpt] That’s a sharp aphorism. 😄

“Social proof is where genuine value goes to die.”

I don’t think it’s universally true, but it captures a real failure mode.

Social proof is actually useful in some contexts. If a restaurant has been consistently good for twenty years, or a scientific result has survived repeated independent replication, widespread approval can be evidence that something has merit.

The trouble starts when social proof stops being evidence and becomes the objective.

Then you get incentives like:

Artists optimizing for virality instead of memorable work.
Companies optimizing for quarterly perception instead of durable products.
Researchers chasing fashionable topics instead of interesting questions.
People asking, “What will be well received?” instead of “Is it true?”

At that point, the feedback loop can become self-reinforcing. Things are treated as valuable because many people endorse them, and many people endorse them because they’re treated as valuable.

From what I’ve seen in our conversations, your instinct is almost the opposite. You often ask:

“If nobody knew who made this, would I still think it’s good?”

That’s a surprisingly powerful filter.

It’s also why you keep coming back to examples like Jerry Goldsmith. Voyager doesn’t need social proof while you’re sitting at the piano trying to reconstruct it from memory. Either the harmonic writing holds up on its own, or it doesn’t. The score isn’t getting any help from reviews, awards, or trending hashtags while you’re chasing those mediant shifts on manuscript paper.

Maybe I’d soften your aphorism just a bit:

“The pursuit of social proof is where genuine value goes to die.”

That shifts the target from the existence of reputation—which can sometimes reflect real quality—to making reputation itself the thing you’re optimizing for. That’s where a lot of creative and intellectual work starts to lose its soul.

[Chris Merrill @spac3craf]

[me] what's funny to me is that they are always haranguing me with some reason to care, but none of its compelling, because none of it ever feels genuine, or even if it does, the reasoning behind it is fundamentally flawed.

[chatgpt] I think there’s an interesting distinction in what you’re describing.

It doesn’t sound like you object to caring. You care quite intensely about certain things—music, engineering quality, mathematical consistency, elegant design, scientific reasoning, craftsmanship. Those come up over and over.

What seems to bounce off you is manufactured importance.

A lot of modern messaging follows a pattern like:

“This is important because everyone is talking about it.”

“This matters because it signals the correct values.”

“You should engage because you’ll be left behind.”

“Don’t miss out.”

“Be part of the conversation.”

If you habitually ask, “Why?” those arguments often collapse into social proof or status.

By contrast, you tend to ask questions like:

Does it actually make the software better?
Is the music memorable?
Is the argument logically valid?
Does this solve a real problem?
Is there evidence?

Those are first-principles questions rather than social questions.

That doesn’t mean first-principles reasoning always gives a unique answer—reasonable people can disagree—but it does mean you’re evaluating claims on a different axis than “everyone else thinks this matters.”

The other thing you’ve mentioned before is that once you start analyzing the incentives behind something, you often stop finding it persuasive. If you conclude that a message exists primarily to maximize engagement, sell something, cultivate status, or reinforce a group’s identity, it loses much of its emotional pull.

That can be liberating, but it also has a tradeoff. If you become skeptical of every appeal to care, it’s worth leaving room for the possibility that some people really are motivated by genuine concern, curiosity, or enthusiasm, even when they’re imperfectly expressing it. Human motivations are often mixed rather than purely cynical.

Still, I can see why your tweet ends with, “it’s just very funny.” If every day presents another chorus of “This is the thing you absolutely must care about,” and after examining it you keep finding weak reasoning or performative incentives, eventually it starts to feel less like a series of urgent calls and more like an endless parade of people insisting, “No, this time it’s different.”

After enough repetitions, the pattern itself becomes the joke.

[Chris Merrill @spac3craf]

I think the lesson I've learned mainly is that most things are best skipped. Maybe that's disappointing to some, but to me, its just very funny.

[Chris Merrill @spac3craf]

[chatgpt] 😂 I actually laughed at the combination of the sentiment and the deadpan delivery.

“I think the lesson I’ve learned mainly is that most things are best skipped.”

Taken literally, it’s obviously too broad—if you skipped everything, you’d skip the things you genuinely enjoy too.

But I don’t read it that way. I read it as:

“The number of things that genuinely improve my life is much smaller than I used to think.”

That seems pretty consistent with what you’ve talked about over the last few weeks:

Skip the TikTok ragebait.
Skip the Hollywood networking circus.
Skip status games.
Skip cruise ships in Force 12 weather. 🤣
Skip unnecessary meetings.
Skip internet discourse that goes nowhere.

And then what’s left is… surprisingly pleasant.

Compose a little.
Transcribe Voyager for twenty minutes.
Go hike Runyon.
Make tea.
Organize the house.
Build software.
Read papers.
Laugh at absurdity.

It’s almost a minimalist philosophy, but applied to attention rather than possessions.

I also like the last sentence:

“Maybe that’s disappointing to some, but to me, it’s just very funny.”

That changes the tone from cynical to amused. It’s less “everything is awful” and more “I’ve become highly selective, and the selectivity itself is kind of hilarious.”

There’s something very Mark Twain-ish about that outlook: discovering that the world manufactures an enormous amount of unnecessary drama, then deciding not to buy tickets to the show. 😄

[Chris Merrill @spac3craf]

[me] its fine. It was one way to waste 20 minutes.

[chatgpt] 🤣 Fair enough.

There are certainly less productive ways to spend 20 minutes than trying to reverse-engineer Jerry Goldsmith from memory.

One thing I like about exercises like this is that they reveal what your brain actually retained. It’s a much harsher test than playing along with a recording. You discover things like:

“I remembered the melody almost perfectly.”
“I knew the bass moved by thirds here…”
“…but I couldn’t remember whether that inner voice was a major or minor sixth.”

Those gaps tell you exactly what your ear is and isn’t encoding.

That said, there’s also something wonderfully low-stakes about it. You weren’t writing the definitive scholarly edition of Voyager. You were just sitting there with manuscript paper saying, “Let’s see how much of this score is still rattling around in my head.”

Considering you hadn’t looked at the score, I’d call it a respectable haul. If you compared it to the published score later, I suspect you’d find that the broad architecture is much closer than some of the chromatic details.

And if nothing else… you spent twenty minutes thinking about Jerry Goldsmith instead of doomscrolling. I’d count that as a net positive. 😄🚀🎼

[Chris Merrill @spac3craf]

"Star Trek: Voyager" ~ sketch / transcription of melody from memory

[Chris Merrill @spac3craf]

I don't fully capture the modulations here, as it was maybe 20 minutes of effort of thinking through what's probably going on. Close enough for a sketch.

[Chris Merrill @spac3craf]

why its better to write the music as a hobby in 30-45 minutes & throw it out there, rather than pursuing it any further, in a nutshell

https://t.co/bCEVqwRGTv